The Witch

Before the left-hand path had a name in the West, its image had a human face: the witch, as her accusers drew her. She was said to know things the priest did not, to go where the village did not go, and to have made an agreement with the adversary. For three centuries that accusation was enough to kill. Today a great many practitioners of the left-hand path call themselves witches, and mean it as a description of what they do.

This page traces the figure from the old words for her, through the cunning folk and the trials, to the modern revival and the witches of the left hand. It names traditions, places, and periods, and no persons.

The Old Words

The English word witch comes from the Old English wicca and wicce, the masculine and feminine forms. Its deeper origin is uncertain. The German Hexe and the English hag both descend from an older word, recorded in Old High German as hagazussa. It is often read as "the one who sits on the hedge," the boundary between the village and the wild, and some scholars take it to mean a being who travels between the two worlds in spirit. The second half of the word is not securely understood, and the reading, though attractive, is not certain.

Other old words describe what such people did rather than what they were. The Old Norse galdr, and its German relative, meant a charm sung or spoken. The spell was something said. The old vocabulary distinguished the charmer who healed with touch and word, the blesser who made a sign over the sick, the reader of dreams, the finder of lost things, and the sorceress who did harm. Only the last was a crime in every century.

The Cunning Folk

Most districts of Europe once had someone to go to: a person who could charm a wart, find a strayed animal, ease a birth, protect a house, or say whether a sick child would live. Historians call them the cunning folk. Most of them were, in their own eyes, good Christians, and their charms invoked the saints. Many charged a modest fee, some made a living by it, and their neighbors relied on them.

The line between the cunning woman and the witch was drawn by others, often after the fact. A charm that worked was a gift. The same charm, after a quarrel and a dead cow, was evidence. The left-hand path has inherited a lesson from this history that it does not always remember: the same act can be named a gift or a crime depending on who is telling the story, and the person who does it rarely gets to decide.

The Night Riders

German and Alpine folklore remembers female figures who ride at night in the dead of winter: Holda, who keeps the spinning and punishes the lazy, and Perchta, who leads a procession of spirits through the Twelve Nights after midwinter. Roman-era inscriptions from the Rhineland honor a goddess whom some scholars connect with Holda, though the connection is a conjecture. These figures are not witches, but folklore placed the witches in their train, and the image of women riding through the air at night with a supernatural mistress is far older than the trials.

The trials gave the image a destination. Witches were said to fly to great gatherings, the sabbath, on certain nights of the year, and in German lands the gathering place was the Brocken, the highest peak of the Harz mountains, on the night before the first of May. There the devil appeared as a goat or a man in black, the witches feasted and danced and kissed him, and they renewed their pact. The page Festivals of the Left-Hand Path describes the night as it is kept today.

The sabbath as described is assembled almost entirely from trial records and from the treatises of demonologists, and the confessions that describe it were in most cases produced under torture. There is very little evidence that it was ever held. What the descriptions preserve is what the accusers feared, and that is worth knowing in its own right.

The Trials

The great European witch hunts are often placed in the Middle Ages and blamed on the church's inquisitors. Both are mistakes. The worst persecutions came in the early modern period, from about 1580 to 1630, and the worst of them were in the German lands, where they were conducted for the most part by secular courts and by prince-bishops, not by the church's tribunals of inquiry, which in Spain and Italy were notably skeptical of the charge. A handbook for the prosecution of witches, printed in 1486, supplied the theory. Torture supplied the confessions, and the confessions named further witches.

Estimates of the number executed across Europe run to several tens of thousands, most of them women and many of them poor, old, or alone. On the continent and in Scotland the condemned were usually burned. In England and its American colonies they were hanged.

The trials show something that the left-hand path has had reason to learn more than once. An accusation, when the accuser also controls the questions, produces its own evidence. The same pattern returned in the panic of the 1980s, described on the page Origins of the Left-Hand Path, when investigators searched for networks of ritual criminals and found none.

The Revival

In the early twentieth century a scholar proposed that the witches of the trials had been the last members of an ancient pagan religion, organized in covens of thirteen and devoted to a horned god. Historians have since rejected the theory almost entirely. But it inspired something real. In England in the middle of the century, witchcraft was revived as a religion, usually called Wicca, with covens, a horned god and a goddess, seasonal festivals, ritual nudity, and a moral rule to harm none, later joined by a doctrine that whatever one sends out returns threefold. These are modern teachings, and their adherents increasingly say so.

The revival was followed by other forms. Traditional witchcraft draws on the folk magic and folklore of particular regions and is often darker in tone. Many witches practice alone and borrow from several sources. Green witchcraft works with plants. By the definition used on this site, the revival religion is not a left-hand path: its aim is harmony with nature and with its gods, not the sovereignty of the self. But a large number of witches have taken the craft in the other direction.

The Witch's Devil

In the trial records the witch meets the devil at a crossroads, at the edge of a wood, or in a lonely field. He appears as a man dressed in black, as a goat, or as a dark animal. Some modern traditional witches honor this figure directly, and call him the witch's devil. They do not mean the Satan of the theologians. They mean a power of the wild and of the threshold, met in the places between the village and the forest, older and stranger than any church's account of him. Others identify him with Satan, and others again with the horned god of the revival, or with Pan.

Historians distinguish these figures with care. The modern horned god is largely a construction of the twentieth century, and the devil of the trials is a construction of the demonologists, who themselves fused the folk figure with the adversary of their theology. The witches who honor him tend to answer that he has many names and many faces, and that a figure met at the edge of the wood is not obliged to fit any of the accounts given of him.

Witches of the Left Hand

Witches who place themselves on the left-hand path tend to describe it as a path carved by the individual, without dogma or required rules, and practiced for the most part alone, though some work in covens. Many came to it through dreams or visions of figures they could not yet name, and found the words afterward. Many work with Lilith, with the goddess of the crossroads, or with the witch's devil. Many reject the rule to harm none as a comfort available only to those who have never faced real violence, and some keep the hex as a last resort.

The Order's texts contain no hexes and no curses, and its reasons are set out on the page On Magic. Its rule is simple: no working is directed at another person without that person's informed consent, and a hex kept in reserve is a working of exactly that kind. Witches who have spent years in the craft add an observation of their own. Several report that most of the hostility they meet comes not from the churches but from other practitioners, and that a philosophy of the self, in the wrong hands, becomes an excuse for spite. The hex kept for the worst of enemies is, in their experience, most often aimed at a neighbor on the same path.

A nineteenth-century occultist set out four maxims for the magician, which many witches now repeat: to know, to dare, to will, and to keep silent. The Order would keep the first three as they stand. It would read the fourth as the discretion that protects persons, and never as the secrecy that withholds teaching.

The Reclaimed Feminine

The witch hunts fused women and rebellion in the imagination of Europe. The accusers meant it as a condemnation. The left-hand path has taken the fusion and reversed its value, and four images recur.

• Lilith. The first woman who would not lie beneath, who spoke the secret name and left the garden by her own will. She is the image of sovereignty that will not bargain. See Faces of the Adversary.
• The witch. Knowledge held outside the church and the university, by those who were not supposed to hold it.
• The dark mother. The power of birth and death together, figured in the goddess of the crossroads and in the queens of the underworld.
• The temptress. Desire that refuses to be made respectable.

Women have served as priestesses in many left-hand path groups, and the common belief that the path is a masculine one does not survive a look at who practices it. But reclaiming an image can also reinforce it. Some groups' own literature treats women chiefly as objects of ritual, and the temptress can become a role assigned rather than chosen. A path that holds every self to be sovereign cannot assign anyone a part by sex. Each of these images is open to anyone who wants it, and binding on no one.

Where the Order Stands

The Order is not a witchcraft tradition. It casts no spells, keeps no herbal lore, and has no coven. Its practice overlaps with the witch's in one place above all: the book. The witch's book of spells and the practitioner's record are the same kind of object, a private account of what was done and what came of it, and The Nightside Record asks of the second only what a careful witch already asks of the first.

The Order reads the history of the trials as a lesson about accusation, and about the uses of the word "witch" against people who know things that others do not. Practitioners who call themselves witches belong to the Order on the same terms as everyone else.