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Zombies shamble. Werewolves howl. Witches cackle.

I'm not sure just when witches first began to cackle. Personally, I suspect the cackling witch to be a fairly recent development, perhaps even as late as the “Twentieth” Century. It may even be that we owe our cackling—as with so much else—to the Great Green-Faced Mother of Us All, the immortal St. Margaret Hamilton.

Still, whenever it is that we first began to cackle, we've made the sound our own. You hear “cackle” and you think “witch.” It's pretty delightful to have a verb of one's own.

It was not always thus. “Cackle” is an old word—all the Germanic languages have some version of it—denoting (probably imitatively) the sound made by a hen when she lays an egg.

The ancestors were astute observers of the world around them. If you've ever actually heard a hen cackle, you know what a distinctive sound it is: shrill, brittle, with a note of triumph to it.

The underlying metaphor here, then, is witch : hen. This actually makes a good deal of mythological sense. The sacred bird of the God of Witches is the—well, let me be coy here and say “rooster.” A cock's head figures on the coinage of the Dobunni, the Keltic tribe ancestral to the Anglo-Saxon Hwicce, the original Tribe of Witches. Witches, so they say, are hens to the Devil's cock, cows to the Devil's bull.

Oh, those earthy ancestors.

The voice was unmistakably that of Discworld's Nanny Ogg, in full Impart mode to a junior colleague.

Of all things, she was talking about the show Bewitched.

“Terrible programme, full of inaccuracies,” she said. “That's why we had to have it canceled.”

So it was the witches themselves that got Bewitched canceled?

“Of course it was,” says Nanny. “Not that I had anything against it myself, mind you.”

She takes a pull from her hip flask.

“As a matter of fact, it even confirmed several of my favorite biases,” she says proudly.

Och, it's the hairy armpit of Winter.

Here in the North, Winter has a cold armpit. The lakes and streams are all frozen, and who wants to strip off in this cold anyway? Get wet and face hypothermia.

Even for those of us fortunate enough to live with central heat and hot running water (and thank Goddess for them both), bathe or shower too frequently and—in our Winter Desert air—you'll shred your own dry hide with the itching.

That's why the gods gave us saunas.

The sweats that I've attended at festivals have all been structured along Native American—in fact, Lakota—lines. There's a reason for this.

The sweat is a Circumpolar tradition. When those very first ancestral Americans entered this continent, they brought their sweat traditions along with them. Time was, pretty much every Indigenous People here had their own.

 Caput apri defero,

cum ingenti priapo.

The Yule-analogous holiday of Terry Pratchett's Discworld is, of course, Hogswatch.

And the—really, what else can one call him?—patronal god of Hogswatch is, of course, the Hogfather.

Like the wild boar that he originally was, the Hogfather (of the BBC series, anyway) wears tusks.

In Norse, one might say: Hogfather = Frey. Tusk-Frey, one might kenningly call him.

One Pagan lists her favorite "witchy" movies, a transwoman discusses her complicated relationship with Ranma 1/2, and the late Terry Pratchett's legacy is discussed. It's Airy Monday, our weekly take on magic and religion in popular culture. All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!

Robert Cochrane (1931-1966), father of the contemporary Old Craft movement, was wont to say that the true name of the witch goddess is Fate (Cochrane 25). Yet he writes to Joseph Wilson in 1966 that the “prime duty of the Wise” is to “overcome fate” (Cochrane 23).

What is one to make of this?

Permit me to draw on the traditional vocabulary of the Elder Witcheries and to reframe the discussion in terms of “Wyrd.” Wyrd was anciently seen both as a goddess and as the inherent pattern of things: what Is, the sum total of everything that has happened until now, and the cumulative momentum towards the future inherent in that pattern. In the most abstract sense, one could say that the witches' goddess is Being, as the witches' god is Duration: in effect, Mother Nature and Father Time.

Where I come from, we call it Witchcraft.

Where I come from, we call it Voodoo.

Voodoo? Isn't that all dead people, and sticking pins in dolls?

Witchcraft? Isn't that all dancing around without your drawers on, and sticking pins in dolls?

Hmm. I see what you mean.