"English is the sacred language of the Witches." (Stephen Warlowe)
Every word's a story.
The vocabulary of modern Wicca, like the religion itself, is late and composite.
Wicca < Old English wicca, “magic-worker [male]” That the word retains its Anglo-Saxon form and has been both redefined and re-pronounced (OE pronunciation: witch-ah) shows that this is a modern, not a continuous, usage.
Athame < Med. French atamer, “to cut”
Skyclad < Loan-translation (19th c.) of Sanskrit digambara, "dressed in air"
Coven < Latin
Sabbat < Latin < Hebrew. Murray's frolicsome s'esbattre derivation is non-historical. The term is a wholesale and hostile borrowing from Jewish vocabulary; compare yet another Trial Era name for the witch-meeting, the “synagogue of Satan.”
These two last are both clearly "words from without." What, one wonders, would be our "words from within"?
If what has come to be called Witchcraft were indeed derived from an ongoing indigenous tradition—say from the theedish (tribal) religion of the Anglo-Saxon Hwicce, as maverick archaeologist Stephen Yeates proposes—then one would expect, instead, to find a native vocabulary.
So, say that there were witches of our sort during Anglo-Saxon times: what would they have called things? The creative act of re-imagining ourselves into the past is, I would contend, a necessary and logical extension of imagining ourselves into the future. (Our novelists have been doing it for years.) What, as speakers of English, would our native word-hoard (vocabulary) for our native Craft be? The question is, in my opinion, well worth the asking.
During the Anglo-Saxon period, lords both earthly and heavenly were called dryhten, because they were leaders of the dryht. These terms fit quite neatly with the Early Modern notion of the “devil” and his coven. Had these concepts been active categories at the time of the Hwiccan kingdom, as likely as not, they would have been described using the same terms that one would apply to any leader—human or divine—and to his companions. And if those terms had continued in use to our time, we would today (as some of us still do) refer to them as the Drighten (rhymes with “tighten”) and his dright.
The Theodish (Anglo-Saxon heathen) movement has done much pioneering work along these linguistic lines, but has too often been content to canonize Old English as the language of liturgy without asking, If this word had survived in continuous use in English, what would we say today?
Had Harald won at Hastings, might we not today call a solstice a sunstead? A custom a thew? A tribe a thede? Might we not call the sabbat (as they did in Swedish) a witch-thing? How much the richer are we for having these words at our disposal? For wrighting for ourselves a native vocabulary? For thinking in Witch?
What, after all, is witchery without audacious imagining?
Swa wiccan tæcað, wrote Halitgar in his 9th c. Penitential, “Thus teach the witches.”