Spellcasting

Have you heard of James Howard Kunstler? He writes a gloomy but fascinating blog called Clusterfuck Nation, the general premise of which is that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. He's also written a book called "The Long Emergency": you can get a pretty good sense of the book and of his style from this excerpt.

Here's a sentence from his most recent blog posting:

The eco-advocate community is still hooked into the Faustian bargain of technology with little consciousness of its diminishing returns, and to some extent have made themselves unwitting tools of the truly clueless and wicked who run business and politics in our land.

No errors in it: I just fastened upon the word "wicked" and wondered where it might have come from, with its slight but delicious air of antiquity. To my shame, I couldn't place the word at all: have a go at it and see if you can before reading on.

I don't make any secret of the fact that I find religion rather silly, and I don't consider any one religion any more ludicrous than any other; they all fall apart under any kind of rational scrutiny. (If religion gives your grandmother strength or peace or hope, then fine, and more power to her for it. I'm not in the habit of going around bad-mouthing people's beliefs, however daft they are. But believing something to be true doesn't make it true.)* There is a religion known as Wicca, about which you may read more here and which may reasonably be called "witchcraft".

And there we have it. "Wicked", "Wicca", and "witch" all have the same root, and it's Indo-European. The root "weik-" gave birth to, through Germanic languages, Old English "wicce"/"wicca" (the first is feminine, the second masculine), which eventually became Middle English "wicche", and that gave us "witch". "Wicche" also led to ME "wikked"--that is to say "witched"--as a synonym for "evil".

Various permutations of consonantal sounds also led "weik-" to generate "guile", as in "beguile". There's also a possibility that the root led to English "victim" through Latin "victima", "sacrificial animal".

* I don't think religions are completely wrong, you understand. Any body of belief that accretes enough premises is bound to get at least a few of them right. The Golden Rule, which is a part of most religions, seems like a pretty good way to run your life: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". The Wiccan version is even better: "So long as it harm no one, do what you will". It sounds like a destructive prescription for unbridled hedonism, but in fact it forces you to think about your every action; I would argue that it's more deeply moral than the simplistic Golden Rule, while still allowing a considerable degree of desirable freedom.