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A Saga of the Latter-Day Hwicce

Here's the conceit: that modern-day witches derive (at some remove or other) "off of" the old Hwicce tribe (and kingdom) of Anglo-Saxon days. Historical or not, be it admitted, it does make one fine story.

Welcome to the life of a full-time witch and amateur linguist.

Some time back, I'd riffed, along these lines, off of the first line of Beowulf:

Hwaet, wé Seax-Hwicca in [something, begins with S]-dagum...

Lo, we Knife-Witches in [something, begins with S]-days...

I knew that the word that I couldn't remember had to begin with S, because it needed to alliterate with seax: that's how ancient Germanic poetry works, by initial rhyme. But what that word was, I couldn't remember.

(Why “Knife-Witches”? Well, the context required a weapon—“Lo, we Spear-Danes” is how Beowulf begins—and modern witches are preeminently a People of the Knife, which we generally call “athame.” Of course, the old Hwicce were a People of the Knife as well; their kinfolk the Saxons were named precisely for their characteristic knife, the seax. It's also an hommage of sorts to the original Anglo-Saxon witchery of modern times, Uncle Bucky's Seax-Wicca.)*

Seeking the phrase, I search my computer files.

Nada.

Fine. I search my on-line posts on the topic, certain that I've used the phrase as a tantalizing epigraph somewhere or other.

Gornisht.

In increasing desperation, I pick up my little black sketchbook and scan entries on the left-hand side, working (in proper witchly fashion) backwards in time, from the most recent back to the beginning of the volume.

(The left-hand side is where I jot phrases and seed ideas; the right is for longer and more developed thoughts.)

Af klum.

Grinding my teeth, I reverse, scanning entries on the right-hand pages, working from the beginning. It's a slow and difficult process; I keep getting distracted by memorable phrases and ideas that I'd like to expand on.

Finally, about 20 pages in, I give up. “I'm turning in,” I think. “I'll keep going in the morning.”

At that very moment I find what I'm looking for, there at the bottom of the page.

Hwaet, wé Seax-Hwicca in síð-dagum...

Lo, we Knife-Witches in these latter days...

Sometimes the gods speak through meaningful coincidence.

But wait: there's more.

If you intentionally kill someone, are you legally responsible for their death?

If you intend to kill someone, but get caught before you succeed, do you still bear legal responsibility?

Is it possible to kill someone with magic?

If you intentionally kill someone with magic, are you legally responsible for their death?

If you intend to kill someone with magic, but get caught before you succeed, do you still bear legal responsibility?

If you've answered “yes” to all these questions, you're down with witch trials, right?

Dear Boss Warlock,

I'm cooking up my first batch of flying ointment, but I'm having a really difficult time finding the human fat that I need for the recipe.

I'm not into human sacrifice, and I'm afraid I just don't have the stamina for grave robbing these days.

Not to mention: how do I reconcile this with 'An it harm none'?

Stymied in Sturgis

Dear Sty,

Grave robbing? Human sacrifice? Seriously, Sty, how 1980s.

(Oh, we were earnest in those days.)

In Which Miss Bunny Finally Gets Her Witch-Name

All my cats down the years have come to me with other names: out-names, you could call them, names for everyday.

Though sometimes it's taken a while, they've all got proper witch-names eventually.

I acquired Miss Bunny (AKA the Bun, Bun-bun, the Bunster, Bunny Butt, and—of course—Bad Bunny) just after Lunasa last year. Being a Manx cat with a stumpy little tail, the name fit well enough, but—from the beginning—it struck me as a prose name, a name-from-without.

“Well,” I thought, “the inner name will come.” The first lesson of Witchery is patience.

To reach the new place, sometimes you have to get out of Dodge first. In the course of a recent road trip, it occurred to me: A Manx cat needs a Manx name.

(Closely related to Irish, Manx is—was—the Celtic language formerly spoken in the Isle of Man.)

Presto!

Bonnag is the Manx name for a kind of sweet tea loaf. It's the Isle of Witches calque of bannock, the pan-Celtic griddle-bread.

And thereby hangs a tale: a stumpy bunny tail, presumably.

Bannock is an old and interesting word. (Every word's a story.) In the Anglian dialect of the Hwicce, the original Anglo-Saxon tribe of Witches, it was bannuc: one of Old English's rare handful of Celtic loan-words. (The Scots Gaelic version is bonnach.) This, in turn, derives ultimately from Latin panis, “bread.” There must be a story here, too—it's hard to believe that Britons didn't make bread until learning how from the Red Crests—but that's another tale for another day.

I have seen twilight at mid-afternoon.

I have gazed into the face of Totality.

I have beheld the Black Sun.

By many traditional peoples around the world, eclipses are accounted unchancy and ill-omened events.

(Why not? Seeing them can strike you blind.)

Unsurprisingly, witches see matters differently.

What do witches make of eclipses?

Sabaean archpriest Federico de Arechaga (Ordun), while not himself of the tribe of Witches, certainly knew how to think like one.

He was wont to refer to weddings—all weddings: male-male, female-female, male-female (in this he was far ahead of his time)—as “eclipses.”

For witches, eclipses—those of both Sun and Moon—are considered Great Rites, hieroi gamoi, alchemical weddings of Moon and Sun.

As local priestess Hillary Pell put it, “The Union of the Gods renews the world.”

They bode, we say, coming change.

From Pittsburgh, we drove 72 miles north to Pymatuning.

Swollen with eclipse-pilgrims, the trip—an hour and a half in the going—took four and a half hours in the coming-back.

For three unforgettable hours, differences were laid aside. Rightist, leftist, centrist; Republican, Democrat, Independent; Trumpist, Bidenist, None-of-the-Above-ist: as the great Marriage of the Gods, in all its cosmic glory, unfolded before us, we, too, were one.

4, 2, 3, 7.

That's how you offer the lamp to a Hindu god.

Puja, also known as arati, is the major Hindu rite of temple service, in which various items—water, incense, fire, a flower (read: water, air, fire, earth) are presented to the deity indwelling the murti (statue), and then consumed by the worshiper herself.

(There's an entire theology encoded in this ritual, but I'll leave you to suss that for yourself.)

Each item is circled in the air—sunwise, of course—before the deity a certain number of times. That's where the numbers cited above come in.

• Four small circles to the god's feet.
• Two small circles to the god's navel.
• Three small circles to the god's face.
• Seven large circles around the god's entire body.

Why, I asked my friend, head pujari at the local ISCKON center, those particular numbers to those particular parts of the god?

My friend didn't know. He had, in fact, asked the same question of his teacher, who likewise did not know. While in altar training, my friend had asked all around. No one in the community seemed to know.

(This isn't really surprising. Sometimes things become so ingrained in a tradition that it simply never occurs to anyone to ask.)

Sometimes it takes an outsider to see to the heart of a given matter. I'm a ritualist myself, of a different, though related, tradition. So here, for what it's worth, is my best guess as to the meanings:

Bright Heart, Bright Mind

or

Pay No Attention to That Cross Between the Antlers

“Saint” Hubert, they call him: patron of hunters.

Check out Albrecht Durer's painting of Hubert's famous vision. What do you see? A man, kneeling to a worshipful Stag, praying.

Pay no attention to that cross between the antlers.

You know the story. Maybe you've lived it yourself.

Good Friday, when all good Christians should be in church, praying. You're not among them. You, you're out in the woods instead, hunting.

Hunting.

What do you find there? The Horned, the worshipful Stag: the Animal God, lord of all humanity.

Hubert, hyge beorht in the old Language of the Witches: “bright heart”, “bright mind.”

That crucifix between the antlers? A mere cloak to hide behind during the Hidden Times, a bringing-in of the Old Ways.