“You didn't cast a circle.”

I'm talking with a guest after our Samhain ritual at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. His observation raises interesting procedural—not to mention theological—questions. When you hold a ritual at a holy place, do you really need to cast a circle first?

“We're on an island,” I remind him.

Witches don't always cast circles.

Back when, we didn't need to.

In his 1973 study 'Le nom celtique du canton en Gaule et en Grande-Bretagne,' P. Quentel discusses the Gaulish root *cant- (=Welsh can, Breton can, kant, Irish cét), which means, interestingly, both “territory”, “edge”, and “circle.”

“The notion of 'circle' is linked with that of 'territory'” he writes, “because territory is generally conceived of as a circle” (cited in Rivet 298; translation mine).

Think of that next time you cast a circle.

(Writing on tribal sanctuaries, Ken Dowden makes much the same observation in his indispensable 2000 European Paganism: The Realities of Cult from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, adding that, like Tara in Ireland, the tribal capital is perceived as the heart of the tribe's territory from which all the rest out-radiates, whether or not it is actually geographically central.)

Back in old tribal days, Witches—they called us the Hwicce then—had a tribal territory of our own, in the Cotswolds and Severn basin of what is now England.

Every time we cast a circle, we reestablish that territory, the Kingdom—and sometimes Queendom—of the Witches.

Maybe someday Witches will have a territory of our own again.

(Just maybe it will be here in the Driftless Area of North America's Paleolithic Plateau, though—as of yet, anyway—we make no specific land claims.)

Meanwhile, we cast our circles.

Well, except when we don't.

Ken Dowden, European Paganism: The Realities of Cult from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2000)

A. L. F. Rivet and Colin Smith, The Place-Names of Roman Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)