On Question-and-Answer web sites like Quora I see so many questions about witches, wizards and witchcraft that I think one could classify them as Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), and to save a lot of typing I thought I’d write a kind of generic answer here, and simply provide a link to it.
For example, when I opened Quora just now, the first question that popped up was:
What do you call a male witch?
others that I have recently answered are:
Does witch only refer to a woman or can it be used for a man?
Are wizards more powerful than witches? How can you compare them?
And my response to that one is:
Perhaps those answers between them cover most of the Frequently Asked Questions on the topic of witches and wizards that I have seen on Quora, but there are other things that seem to be missed, either in the questions, or in the answers that have been given.
The thing that is often missed is cultural context.
For many Western people, a significant part of the cultural context is fiction.
In the Harry Potter stories, for example, “wizards” are male and “witches” are female. and in that context they have certain characteristics,. When people familiar with that context encounter the terms “witch” or “wizard” in a different context, they are likely to get confused, hence the kind of questions I’ve referred to above.
J.R.R. Tolkien had wizards in his books The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but their role was very different from that of wizards in the Harry Potter stories. Other fictional stories feature witches, and their characteristics, roles and powers are whatever the author chooses to give them.
The same applies to computer games. A programmer can have characters called “witches” and “wizards” and “mages” and “warlocks” and can give them powers and characteristics that apply to that game and no other.
Such powers and characteristics, which are constant in one game or novel, are “parameters”. Parameters are values that are constant in the case considered, but may vary in other cases. So in computer game A a witch may have a “power” of 10 and a wizard a “power” of 8, but in game B the “power” parameter could have different values, say 5 for witches and 10 for wizards, The parameters of a witch or wizard in the Harry Potter books differ from those of witches and wizards in Tolkien’s books, and so on.
The same applies in real life.
The parameters of a witch in one culture are different from those of a witch in another culture. When people ask or answer such questions on sites like Quora they are often thinking only of the parameters of witches, wizards, mages and warlocks in their own culture, but the Internet is global, and so the person reading an answer might be thinking of entirely different parameters from those of the person who wrote the answer..
My context is southern Africa, and most of the people I know who think about witches at all fear them as people of malicious intent who are trying to harm them. I know some people who seriously fear that they have been bewitched. In many African pagan cultures the witch is the quintessential symbol of evil, as the devil is in most Christian cultures.
This is sometimes extremely annoying to postmodern neopagans in Europe or North America who like to self-identify as witches, and tend to channel old-fashioned colonial cultural imperialism in insisting that their definition is the only one, which the rest of the world must accept willy-nilly. But perhaps a case can be made for some cultural relativism here, and trying to think beyond one particular culture. So perhaps people reading this could add some cultural variety in the comments.
For more on this topic see:
- Christian responses to witchcraft and sorcery
- Witchcraft: African and European
- Christian understandings of paganism and witchcraft