Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth
In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.
Where There's a Hedge, There's a Witch
Hedges mark boundaries. Hedges divide this from that.
That's why where there's a hedge, there's a witch.
Wherever there's a distinction, there's a hedge. The world is filled with hedges: the hedge between in and out, the hedge between living and dead, the hedge between day and night.
The mind is filled with hedges: the hedge between black and white, the hedge between here and there, the hedge between us and them.
That's why we need our witches, those unholy straddlers with one foot on either side: participating in both, but wholly belonging to neither.
In a polarized world, people hunker immovably behind their mental hedges.
In this there is great danger to us all.
That's why we need our hags, our haunters-of-the-edges, our goers-between.
That's why we need our witches.
HEDGE, from Old English hecg, from Germanic *hagjô. (i) HAG, perhaps short for Old English hægtesse, witch; (ii) HEX, from Old High German hagzissa, witch. Both (i) and (ii) from Germanic *haga-tusjô. (The exact form of compound is uncertain. The second member -tusjô is perhaps akin to Lithuanian dvasia, ghost, and Middle High German getwas, specter, phantom, and the compound perhaps originally referred to beings that would haunt the hedges that defined the outskirts of the settlement.)
Calvert Watkins, ed., The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, Third Edition (2011). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, p. 37.
For Frebur Moore.
Of course.
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