Santharian Development

Note for Artimidor: As is my wont, here and there in the text I have used italics. To make them easier to integrate, I have marked them in sky blue . Thanks!



Seeker's picture: "A cauldron witch in her kitchen. The ingredients on her shelf suggest that she is cooking no ordinary soup.”

Pointy hat picture: "Among other things, witches know how to converse with ghosts. What the pompion has to do with this only a witch could tell you!"



Have you ever been healed by a song? Have you ever felt that love is a madness, induced by some force outside yourself? Or have you ever found, after a seamstress mended a coat for you, that you were unable to take the dratted thing off? And did the seamstress smile? And did she promise that she would release her spell, if you would just do her a little favour? – Or maybe you once saw a man approach a wailwoman, and he withstood the ghost’s bone-melting cry, and with a curious dance and gesture lifted the curse that had detained the tortured soul within its spectral form?

If you have experienced any of these things, then you have likely received a better introduction to Witchcraft than letters on a piece of parchment will ever be able to impart. Witchcraft is the common name for the magical arts of Santharian witches. The term “witch” itself is derived from the Styrásh verb “ouidshán”, which means “to practice twisted magic” – and although witches themselves carry their name with pride, its origin tells a poignant tale about how they are perceived not only by the elves, but by all Santharian people. Generally, Witchcraft – or Black Magic, as it is known to its many detractors – is understood to be synonymous with dangerous, sinister, harmful sorcery. Witches have been treated with suspicion for as long as history records, since they often live outside of established orders, defy worldly and religious authority, and are loyal to none but fellow-witches (or so people think). After the calamitous War of the Chosen, when the world was weary of both sword-fare and magic, witches were persecuted and suspected of being in cahoots with necromancers intent on bringing forth creatures from the Netherworlds, and with them further deadly strife.

On the other hand, fairy stories and sayings also betray a certain fascination with beautiful witches dancing on mountain tops, with the love potions that they brew, or with the idea that one might ask a witch to let a wart grow on one’s unloved neighbour’s nose. And indeed, the practice of Witchcraft would not flourish quite as well as it does if Santharians did not avail themselves of witches’ services rather more often than they would admit.



This entry is concerned with Santharian witches only. Some reports suggest that Santharian Witchcraft bears a resemblance to the practices of shamans in Northern Sarvonia, but at the present stage of research we are unable to make a confident statement to this effect.

In the Kingdom of Santharia, Witchcraft is practised by both men and women. Most witches are human, but we have personally met some gnomish practitioners of the art, and have even heard stories about hobbit witches. In fact, one of the best spell cooks currently alive is rumoured to live in a smial in the Helmondsshire. (And a spell cook, as you shall soon see, is a type of witch that specializes in enchantments achieved through cooking or brewing.)

Before we proceed to introduce the gentle reader to the philosophy and practice of Witchcraft, it is necessary to make a distinction. For the magical arts of the witches – the focus of our article – are one thing; but what Santharians in their ignorance and superstition may choose to  call  “witchcraft” is quite another. In general, the terms “witchcraft” and “witch” are used to denote any kind of magic, and any kind of magic practitioner, that do not belong to one of the established and respected schools or systems of magic and that are therefore regarded with suspicion. As a scribe working in the Thane’s palace in Marcogg once told us: “If it ain’t Ximax, and if it ain’t Thalambath, and if it ain’t clerics, and if it ain’t elves, why, then for sure it’s foul, and for sure it’s witchery.” More sophisticated individuals might know that druidic magic, weaver magic, and life magic are also quite distinct schools of magical art – but even these knowledgeable ones might well fail to distinguish witches from mere gifted macanti, from shamans, or even from rogue mages. In short, Santharians tend to attach the label “Witchcraft” to any magic that they do not understand and do not have another name for – especially if they are afraid of it or repelled by it. That such confusion has done much harm to the reputation of witches in Santharia is beyond doubt, and it is the humble purpose of this article to try and dispel the ignorance that has clouded the perception of witches for far too long.



Why is there a world, rather than nothing? Why does anything exist at all? – Because Avá the Beautiful dreams it, say the elves. – Because the Twelve Gods, praise be to them, are defending it against Coór the Shadow, say pious humans. – Because if the world didn’t exist, what would we eat, say the hobbits. (According to the philosopher Athiost of Carmalad, the hobbits’ answer is the most profound.)

Witches, for their part, have a different explanation again. The world exists, they say, because  Harash spins it. Harash – that is the Great Spider, the Spinner of the World Web. *Footnote 1* It is a being both male and female, beautiful and ugly, wise as a whale and dumb as a pebble. The witches believe that all the world we see, hear, smell and feel is made of threads woven by Harash. The witches call these threads “dream threads”, because in our everyday lives, we are unable to see these threads themselves, but instead only illusions, “dreams” conjured up by them. This may be a bit complicated to understand, but a simile often used by witches to teach novice witchlings may help to make things clearer.

Consider what happens when you regard a tapestry. If you look from a distance, your eyes behold a picture: they see shapes and colours, and arrange them into objects and animals and people. Yes, if the weaver was skilled, you even believe that you see the figures moving. You think you see a boy running, a bird flying, a tree bending its branches in the wind. It is as if the tapestry were alive. But step closer, and you find that all these images are in fact composed of thousands upon thousands of individual threads of different colours; and that the boy or the bird or the tree that you admired are, in fact, nothing but a deft assemblage of dyed wool. You begin to see beneath the picture; you begin to see how it was done.

And so, the witches say, it is with reality also. In our everyday life, we only see the images, the illusion: the boys, the birds, the trees. But the tapestry itself with its myriads of interwoven threads we do not see. If we want to behold reality, we first need to know how to “step closer” to it; only then can we see “how it was done”. If we could do this; if we managed to see not just the images, but the threads themselves, we could even do a bit of weaving of our own. Not that we could spin new threads – that is Harash’s power alone. But we could rearrange them, make a new weft. In short, if we saw the fabric with which the illusion of reality is constructed, we could create a new illusion, a new image, a new reality. And that is Witchcraft.

By reweaving the tapestry, the witches say, they make a little contribution to helping the dream that is the world to expand: they help to bring new beings into the world (for example, through fertility spells); to bring new stories into the world (a love charm, say, leads to new and often complicated relationships, which make for good stories);  and to bring new emotions into the world (even if ordinary people may judge these emotions to be negative, such as wrath or lust for revenge). New beings, new stories, new feelings – all these are so many new snarls in the dream web, new pictures in the tapestry. And that, in the eyes of witches, justifies them. What grows is good, and what grows in a disorderly way is even better. The more confusing the dream, the more mazy its yarns, the more fun there is to be had.

It is  not  the witches’ belief, by the way, that Harash the World Spider herself weaves the tapestry of the world. Harash merely spins the threads. The interweaving of them, which causes the world to be furnished with people, animals, plants and things, is an entirely chaotic process. Succinctly put, the world is a giant ball of tangled dream threads, and we are the knots in it. We have come about by chance, by the random muddled mess of Harash’s threads, and it is up to us to make something of this chance. Witchcraft, the witches say, is the best way to of doing so.

Sometimes young witchlings ask why Harash’s threads should assemble themselves to make a world such as ours, which features, despite its many unpredictabilities, a considerable amount of regularity. Oftentimes, the reply from older witches is but a shrug and an admonition to be careful only to ask questions that have an answer, lest your mind befuddle itself. Yet wiser witches respond that Caelereth, our world, actually is composed of but a tiny portion of the total number of Harash’s threads. In fact, they say, there is an infinite number of tangled balls of dream threads, and therefore there is an infinite number of worlds, none of which is like the other. Some of these worlds, the witches say, are lifeless. Some consist only of swirling colours, like the winter sky in a Northern night. Others are inhabited solely by fluttersong moths. Then there are worlds that are so beautiful that on seeing one of them, our eyes would immediately go blind. Yet others are so ugly that if we saw them, our hearts would wither and refuse to beat another beat. We are lucky, say the witches, that we live in a world that we can bear to see, because is both beautiful and ugly, just like Harash herself. *Footnote 2*



So how does Witchcraft actually work? How do witches contrive to see the dream threads? How do they “step closer” and inspect the weft of the world, and how are they able to change its structure? More competent authors than ourselves have failed in the task of making Witchcraft intelligible to the minds of non-witches. The single best introduction to the matter is still Archmage Turya Firebane’s “On Ouidch-craft”, written more than 1,500 years ago. Addressing her fellow Ximaxian sages, Turya explains:


In the practice of Witchcraft, ordinary consciousness is suspended, and the witch experiences rapture, trance or ecstasy. The more spectacular variants of these states, such as wild dances and hypnotic chanting, have become predominant in popular perception, and exaggerated tales of naked rituals, orgies and licentiousness abound. Yet your average witch is far more likely to prefer quieter sorts of trance. The key to understanding this is the concept of “craft”.

Every witch knows a craft – an actual handicraft, or art – and it is through its execution that she *Footnote 3* accomplishes her magic. Thus, a witch trained in tapestry may “weave a spell”, a witch good at woodwork may “whittle a spell”, and a witch inclined to poetry may “rhyme a spell”. In this way, depending on the witch’s craft, her work may involve dancing a spell, singing a spell, baking a spell, cooking a spell, sewing a spell, spinning a spell, and so forth.

It is not necessarily the case that the witch, by her craft, produces a magical artefact (although this happens too, as witches may make magically enhanced brews, charms in the form of wooden figurines or embroidered clothes or amulets, or even magical sculptures of stone). But it is always through her craft that the witch “dives into the web of dream-threads”, as the witches put it. The crucial transition from everyday consciousness to trance is accomplished through the craft itself: through the hypnotic effect of repetitive movement (such as in dancing, or in loom weaving), through evocative chanting, or through the “surrender” of the mind to a tricky task.

Once she is in trance, the witch’s concentration is wholly on the invisible fabric of Harash’s tangled web. Witches believe that through losing themselves in this way, they can leave the illusion of reality behind, and can fiddle directly with the weft of the world tapestry: loosening a thread here, reweaving it there, cautiously making the picture yet more intricate, yet more interesting.





So far, a reader educated in Ximaxian magic might think that the witches’ craft is just an alternative road to the goal that Ximaxian magic shares: the manipulation of the invisible energetic essence of the world. Furthermore, the reader might think that the witches’ notion of ‘tapestry’ and ‘threads’ are but simplified expressions of Ximaxian theory with its concepts of  the cár'áll, the oúnia, and their links. Yet there is more to Witchcraft, and this is why the Ximaxian mages’ efforts to integrate the witches’ arts into their conceptual system have so far failed.

The witches say: You are a knot. And so am I. We are all knots. We are knots in Harash’s tangled web, a web that is ever-moving, ever-changing. Each of us consists of thousands upon thousands of threads, some of which are thick and constant, while others are thin and fleeting. We are chaotic entanglements of dream threads, and so is everything else: the animals, the plants, the objects, and the materials. Wherever we go, we carry a long trail of loose threads with us. And that is good, because loose threads allow us to make connections.

Have you ever thought about why you can recall in your mind a place that you have not visited for many years? Why you can sometimes, in lucid moments, remember this place as clearly as if you were there? It is because some of your dream threads are still tied to it. When you were in that place, one of your loose threads tied a knot around some rock or tree or doorpost there. And thus you became a part of the place, and the place became a part of you. This is why you have memories: the thing you recall is still with you, because you are tied to it. And your recollection of a thing is the richer the more of your dream threads are entangled within it.

And have you ever thought about what love is? It is a form of intense entanglement of the dream threads of two people. That is why it hurts so much when someone you love dies. The soul of the deceased, travelling into Queprur’s realm, pulls on your dream threads, to which it is fastened; and thus it tears your dreams apart.

Another form of intense entanglement between two people, by the way, is hatred. Power is another. And fear, another.

Such entanglements – or connections – between people might be weak or strong, fleeting or durable, flimsy or robust. But they may persist over space and time. This is why love can endure even when the lovers have been separated for many years. It is why a bird that migrates hundreds of strals south in the winter always finds the way back to its home forest, and yes, even to the very tree on which it was born. And it is why Witchcraft works.

For witches, when they leave their everyday minds behind and dive into the web of dream-threads, can see these connections, and use them in their art. Say, for example, that a witch has obtained a lock of your hair. This hair, although apparently separated from you, is still connected to you through dream threads. For you cared for this hair once; you washed it and combed it, you looked at it in a mirror. It belonged to you; and because it once did, it still does. Its separation from you is only superficial. Never mind the scissors that cut it off – the connection persists. Now, the witch can use this connection. Taking hold of your lock of hair, she can pull on the threads that tie it to you, and thereby achieve effects that affect you. For example, she might weave this hair into a doll; and pricking this doll with a needle will cause you pain. Or she might spin your hair into a rope and tie the rope to a tree, and thereby draw you to that tree by a force as strong as if she held an actual rope in her hand that was tied to your waist. Or she might use your hair as an ingredient in a mixture she concocts, which will make someone into whose eyes it is dropped fall in love with you. Or she might enclose your hair in an amulet, and speak a charm, so that the amulet will become warm when you are near. In this way, someone wearing this amulet may find you and recognize you even if you are in disguise.



To some extent, a witch’s skills are determined by her craft: the protection spells, magical banishments, and enchanted cloaks of a spell seamstress are a dream apart from the love soups, healing breads and pestilence pellets of the spell cook, or the spirit whispers and summoning rituals of the spell dancer. Also, it is clear that some “witch’s crafts” are more limiting than others. A witch who “embroiders” her spells must have access to a needle and fabric to work her magic, while a “rhyme-crafting” witch is limited only by her poetic imagination. However, the more experienced a witch grows, the less important those limitations become: a skilled spell seamstress may need no more than a few blinks to quickly stitch a pattern into her sleeve and thereby craft a charm.

Witches use five categories to describe the varying levels of ability among their kind. These categories are: the Gifted, the Witchlings, the Spell Crafters, the Dream Bringers, and the Handmaids of Harash. Outsiders that have encountered but one kind of witch, and have prematurely generalized from their experience, have therefore come to rather contradictory conclusions about witches: while some have said that witches are “wicked but weak”, others have called them “powerful and terrible as demons”. The following overview of the five stages of Witchcraft shall, we hope, help to dispel such confusion.

The Gifted. First, there are the Gifted. A Gifted One is a person who was born with a talent for magic, but has not learned to use it. As such, a Gifted One is not a witch, but may become one under the guidance of a teacher, who must herself be a witch. Of course, a Gifted One may instead train to be a different kind of magic practitioner, such as a mage, a druid, or a cleric. Furthermore, many Gifted Ones never develop their talents, but remain dilettantes, whose access to magic is sporadic and haphazard. Some even reject or deny their talent. Others, the so-called macanti, become charlatans who exaggerate their magical powers, and make a living from folk’s credulousness and superstition.

Witchlings (Apprentices). Second, there are the witchlings. A witchling is an apprentice, who is learning from an accomplished witch. Witchlings usually live with their teachers, and help them with everyday chores in exchange for instruction. Witchcraft is always taught this way: from witch to witch. According to the craft of their teacher, witchlings are referred to as “song witchlings”, “needle witchlings”, “cauldron witchlings”, and so on. The witches say that of every thirteen apprentices who start the path to Witchcraft, three will never pass beyond the skill level of a witchling – whether for lack of talent, lack of dedication, bad teaching, or bad luck (such as, say, the death of their teacher before the end of the apprenticeship).

Spell Crafters. Third, there are the spell crafters. These are ordinary witches, whose magic is limited to a small selection of specific spells that they have learned. Witches themselves rarely use the word “spell crafter”, by the way, but refer to the individual witch’s craft instead, calling her a “spell singer”, “spell seamstress”, or “spell cook”, and so on. For nine out of every thirteen witches, spell crafting is the summit of their development. Spell crafters are therefore the most common of all witches, and the mediocrity of their skills has led some sages to conclude that Witchcraft in general is inferior to Ximaxian magic. May our readers make up their own minds about this point, but not before they have read on.

Dream Bringers. Fourth, there are the dream bringers, accomplished witches who are far more powerful than ordinary spell crafters. A dream bringer’s skills are no longer bound by the necessity to adhere to specific spells she has been taught. Instead, she is able to compose her magic freely. Rare is the witch who has the talent, the dedication, and the good fortune that are needed to become a dream bringer; and whoever rises to this level is highly respected among witches. The witches say that of every thirteen witchlings who begin an apprenticeship, only one will become a dream bringer. Like spell crafters, the dream bringers are commonly referred to by terms that are specific to their craft, such as “dream singer”, “dream seamstress”, “dream cook”, and so on.

 Harash’s Handmaids.  Last, we come to the most powerful witches of all, the terrifying Handmaids of Harash. They are the stuff of legend, and you are about as likely to meet one as you are to meet a resonance dragon. Some witches say that a Handmaid of Harash appears only once every seven times seven years. Others say that the true number is closer to once every thirteen times thirteen years. In any case, a Handmaid of Harash is always an influential figure, and if one is around during your lifetime, you will either have heard of her, or have heard of events that she has caused, even if you don’t know that it is she who is at the roots of it all.


The effects of Witchcraft continue to befuddle Ximaxian mages, as they defy the neat classifications and hierarchies that Ximaxianism prefers. For example, relatively undistinguished witches, who would fail at something simple such as conjuring a little wind to drive a fly off (an elementary Ximaxian wind spell), may nonetheless succeed in brewing a magically enhanced potion that temporarily changes the appearance of anyone who drinks it (say, making their skin radiantly beautiful, or increasing the size of their teeth to give them the appearance of a donkey) – an effect that Ximaxians would consider to be an “enchantment” and a “Level 9-spell”, a skill that a Ximaxian can expect to attain only after decades of study.

Many Ximaxians have therefore concluded that witches must have supernatural help, and the theory that witches achieve their results through entering pacts with demons is rather popular even among archmages. Certainly, most mages are proud to distinguish their own profession from the “wild” magic of the witches, and would be greatly offended to be considered in the same category. Yet a few mages have shown interest and genuine curiosity. The archmage Kar-ii Turya Firebane’s treatise “On Ouidch-craft”, for example, presents a dispassionate account of what was known of witches at the time, and a valiant attempt at explaining both the witches’ world view, and the manner in which they achieve their magical effects.



Witches can work magic anywhere they can perform their craft. Obviously, if you want a spell cook to make a healing potion, you had best provide her with a kitchen, a large fireplace, and two dozen shelves full of ingredients suitable for her receipts. At a pinch, however, the spell cook might be able to make do with a campfire, a few herbs, and a drop of saliva that she scrapes off your tongue.

More intriguingly, groups of witches sometimes assemble in remote locations, such as high in the mountains or in forests, in order to combine their magical powers for particularly difficult or demanding spells that one witch on her own could not accomplish. Spell singers and spell dancers, in particular, are known for holding such congregations from time to time. Needless to say, witches are very wary of persecution, and many have withstood torture without revealing their sisters’ and brothers’ secret meeting-places.



Witchcraft has been practised for so long that no tale tells of its beginnings. Historians have speculated that Witchcraft provided some of the many magic weapons that came close to destroying the world during the War of the Chosen (9500-9000 b.S.). Yet even halfway reliable records only begin to appear in the subsequent Era of Consolidation (8500-3400 b.S.).

Ostracism and Persecution: The Era of Consolidation. During the Era of Consolidation, the world was weary of magic, and its use was banned almost everywhere. The term “witchcraft” seems to have originated at that time. In Styrásh, the elven tongue, a “ouídsh” is a charlatan, or someone who practices twisted magic. And it is clear that from the beginning, Witchcraft was thought to be a sinister art practiced by malevolent sorcerers.

Punishments for the crime of Witchcraft were severe. The scant records we possess from this period suggest that every year thousands of people throughout the continent of Sarvonia were burned, drowned, or otherwise executed for using magic. Since at that time no legitimate magical schools for humans existed, it is possible that the words “witch” and “witchcraft” may have been applied to any magic practitioner and any practice of magic, rather than specifically to what we today understand the terms to mean. In general, magic practitioners at that time were always suspected of intending to bring harm, even if (and indeed, especially if) they were apparently using their powers for harmless or even benevolent ends.

Thus, we know of a woman in Serpheloria who in the year 4523 b.S. was drowned for using a charm made from wizardleaf to bring a child back to life from the Black Death. And a document from what in 5511 b.S. was called “Hobbitshire” (today’s Helmondsshire), tells of a gardener who was burned at the stake for “enchanting his vegetables to have unnatural shapes and colours, and for growing corpseberries as big as pompions”.

Witchcraft and Ximaxian Magic. Around the year 2000 b.S., the institutionalization of magic began with the building of what came to be known as the Magical Academy of Ximax. At the time, mages were working hard to gain the trust of kings and common folk, who nonetheless remained suspicious. One way in which the early Ximaxians sought to gain respectability was to distance their own “controlled”, “virtuous”, and “scholarly” magic from the alleged “wild magic” of other magic users. Indeed, it was at this time that mages invented the term “black magic” to draw a firm line between allegedly evil Witchcraft on the one hand, and their own “white, clean” magic on the other.

The First Sarvonian War. In the first millennium b.S., the Ximaxians gained prestige as their art supported the human armies in the three Sarvonian wars against the elves, and also helped to alleviate the suffering brought about by the war. Witches, on the other hand, were routinely blamed for undermining the human war efforts. During the First Sarvonian War (806-729 b.S.), witches were suspected of having dealings with the elves, because they did not participate in the battles. Spontaneous witch-hunts against the supposed “enemy spies in human lands” are said to have cost the lives of thousands of actual or suspected witches.

The Second Sarvonian War and The Night of the Hand. The Second Sarvonian War was even more disastrous for the reputation of witches. This conflict began on the infamous “Night of the Hand” (7th Singing Bird, 550 b.S.), when elven artifacts from the “Grave of the Leaders” of the first Sarvonian War were stolen by unknown thieves, while artifacts of the human heroes remained untouched. Suspicion fell on the elves, and the humans declared war. In 501 b.S., after almost fifty years of bloodshed, the humans surrendered to the elven forces, but were surprised by the elves’ magnanimity in victory, as they demanded no payment of reparations. This spurned rumours that the elves might not have been responsible for the war after all, and people began to put the blame on witches instead. Witches, it was said, had wanted to provoke a new war to distract human rulers from persecuting their own misdeeds. This version of events is still widely believed to this day.

Indeed, the night after the seventh day in the month of Singing Bird, the date of the “Night of the Hand”, now has a firm place in the Santharian calendar. Superstitious folk believe that every year during this night, witches perform rituals that enhance their magical powers, and that they roam towns and villages to look for victims for their malicious machinations. So when the sun sets on the 7th Singing Bird, Santharians lock their doors, close their window shutters, and won't leave their houses until the morning. Many put blossoming branches outside their homes in the belief that the sign of the Tree of Life will fend off witches. The witches themselves, by the way, also tend to stay at home during that night, for they say that on no other day in the year have so many witches been hunted, caught, and slaughtered than at the anniversary of the Night of the Hand.

In any case, by the second half of the first millennium b.S., the term “witchcraft” had become all but synonymous with “evil magic” in most people’s imagination. Thus it comes that an elven sorcerer such as Saban Blackcloack (110-60 b.S.), who brought much destruction over humans, dwarves, and other elves, has come to be known as the “Witchking” in popular parlance, even though there is no evidence to suggest that witches were ever among his followers.

Witchcraft in the Santharian Kingdom. Even in more recent history, and specifically in the Santharian Kingdom, whose founding marks the Year Zero of our calendar, witches have continued to suffer persecution by authorities, as well as pogroms from enraged mobs. Although no Santhran has ever sanctioned a witch-hunt, provincial rulers and town patricians have often found it expedient to blame the witches for all kinds of ill befalling their grand or petty realms. Droughts, plagues, floods, deadly hailstorms, troll attacks, wars, and even holes in a duchy’s treasure chest have been ascribed to the witches’ machinations.

The witches’ situation is not helped by the existence of the so-called witchfinders: men and women who claim expertise in the art of finding and identifying the secretive witches, and of extracting confessions from those suspected of witchery. Most witchfinders are solitary individuals, who travel the land and offer their services to anyone who will pay. Yet some dukes and lesser nobles have raised this occupation to a regular office, and keep a witchfinder at their court, in order to protect their family and their retinue from witches’ interference.

The Moundgraven of Cinnabark Ridge in southern Manthria is said to demand any family who wants to join his own by marriage to undergo a thorough examination by his witchfinder. The skill of this remarkable individual in detecting witches is said to be so great that none of the Moundgraven’s three daughters has yet been able to find a husband, even though the extraordinary beauty of the young gravionesses is beyond doubt, as is their father’s considerable wealth. The witchfinder in question has no wife of his own, by the way, but considers it his professional duty to carry out daily inspections of his protégés’ private chambers lest a witch may have placed an enchantment therein. By virtue of his office, he is therefore the only man, other than their father, who is permitted to spend time in the company of the gravionesses without the presence of a chaperone. We have heard rumours that the pleasures which this privilege affords on the one hand, and the witchfinder’s exactitude in judging the families of the gravionesses’ many suitors on the other, stand in causal relation to one another. Yet the witchfinder assures us that any such insinuations are entirely without foundation, and can only have been circulated by witches, who forever aim to thwart him in his noble work of exposing their foul schemes.

In short, being a witch in Santharia today remains a precarious occupation. In response to the persecution they encounter, witches have become rather secretive – which, while understandable, is liable to reinforce the mistrust against them. Your humble author can only hope that the present article, in conjunction with his report on the witches and their covens, which he intends to submit to the august Compendium soon, will serve to disperse the poison of mutual suspicion, and foster understanding between witches and non-witches in Santharia.


Footnotes

1: Harash’s name derives from the Styrásh word “háh'rásh” (“Utmost Spinner”). Cognizant of this, scholars of magical history have speculated that in an age long gone, the earliest witches learned their magic from elves. By the way, the Tharian word “hag” is descended from the same elvish root, and is of course an insult that few female witches who live long enough fail to encounter.

2: In her seminal work “On Ouidch-craft”  (Ximax, 1st century a.S.), the Archmage Turya Firebane has speculated that the witches’ idea of other worlds besides our own may have been influenced by the beliefs of those most mysterious of magicians, the Old Weavers. These Old Weavers, it is said, collectively left Caelereth around 800 years before Santhros, to enter what they called “The Web”, a world woven entirely of magic. Indeed, when witches gather in their covens and sit around their fire by night, they like to tell one another stories of how their most powerful sisters, the “Handmaids of Harash”, are able to travel to other worlds, just like the Old Weavers did. We have even heard it claim that these dauntless witches visit the Old Weavers in their magic cities, and converse with them, and learn their secrets. Yes, some witches say that the real power of a Harash’s Handmaid lies in the fact that she has overcome death, and that when she leaves this world, it is only to continue her life in another. Since the author of this article has not been lucky enough to meet a Harash’s Handmaid, however, he has not been able to verify these assertions.

3: As we have said, Witchcraft is practised by both males and females. However, since among the witches women outnumber men by a ratio of about three to one, we have decided to use feminine pronouns in this compendium entry whenever we refer to a “generic” witch.

It took me a bit of time, but here it is: the first of two planned submissions about witches. (The second submission would be a "People" entry, describing the witches' place in Santharian society.) Please see The Witches and Witchcraft Discussion (http://www.santharia.com/dev/index.php/topic,14962.msg190920.html#msg190920) for context information.

I'd appreciate comments on the ideas and the form of the text. A thorough uri-check, however, would be premature at this stage, because I might yet make extensive changes to the draft, depending on what you think of it all.

Well, what do  you think?

Ah, great to see this one posted, Shabakuk! :cool: Even if you still plan to adjust/expand it, at least it looks already pretty orderly at the moment :)

Will put checking on that one on my priority list after I've finished my Lich entry, so expect a bunch of comments within the next days!  :thumbup:

“Thirteen needs has a man: food, drink, air; warmth, coolness, shelter; sleep, wakefulness, steadiness; embrace, beauty, wholeness; and silence. And thirteen desires he has: love; sex; friendship; respect; adoration; belief; solitude; invincibility, subservience, dominance; perfection; rules; immortality. These, my sisters, are the hooks. Like fish the men will swallow them and hang at the end of your line. But you must know the right bait.”  Hildula Hauntwell: “To Make Your Loved One Want You: Amorous Enchantment in Seven Times Seven Easy Steps” (Nyermersis, 945 a. S.)

*applauds*

I wonder if my writer shouldn't quote just that passage in her Letters to Her Daughter (aka Important Things every Young Woman Should Know)... so pungent, pertinent, and powerfully precis'ed!

Ok, Shabakuk... A few first comments!

- "era of consolidation" should be written with "Era of Consolidation" - it's a proper name

- "with necromancers intent of bringing forth creatures from the Netherworld" - should perhaps be "intent on", also I'd recommend "Netherworlds" (that's also the name of the entry BTW), because that's the cosmological idea behind the plural: That there's one "good" world (Caelereth), but that the darkness has many faces.

- I see you explicitly mention that the entry deals with "Santharian witches". That could be elaborated a bit if we try for example to derive the word "witches" from, say, a Styrásh word, and the human term then would be a derivation. I could try to construct such a word if you like. Especially because elves use magic in a natural way, a Styrásh term for a similarly "naturally" oriented, yet still quite different "witch magic" (it's maybe a human attempt to copy natural elven magic) would be important to make the distinction. More on the elf/Avá stuff further down!

- "Helmondshire" is actually written "Helmondsshire". The "s" is only there for the purpose to let compendiumists stumble every time into that trap and give me something I can correct :)

- "What a spell cook is..." - recommend quotation marks around "spell cook".

- Ok, I see that you're taking it for granted that witches rely on "Avá's Dream". This is quite atypical, because Avá supposedly is only something the elves believe in, and humans and other races don't accept her at all. I've read the historcial part you've put together so far, and this looks pretty solid mostly, but the main issue for me is to establish where exactly the witches stand in terms of belief between humans and elves etc. The Worldview part is very well written, but it has this as the premise that there's Avá's Dream and the witches accept that and work on it. I guess we need to make that more precise.

The way I could see it is that witches separate themselves from the human beliefs and have more sympathy for elves and Avá, for one because they practise magic in a much more natural way, while human magic is forced, trained, more like physics (e.g. the Ximaxian system) than metaphysics. Maybe that's why witches are renegades in this respect and are more likely to accept an elven point of view, at least to a certain degree.

Maybe all that goes even a step further, because if you look at the concept of the Weavers (see Old Weavers (http://www.santharia.com/magic/old_weavers.htm), Weavers (http://www.santharia.com/magic/weavers.htm), see also Pure/Raw Magic in the entry on Magic (http://www.santharia.com/magic/magic.htm)), then there are many similarities to what you describe here, and connections to elven magic. Witchcraft could be the attempt to try to go into that direction, to go for a more naturally oriented kind of magic, which lies somewhere between elven natural magic and pure/raw magic if you only have the right approach. At least that's how I could imagine where the worldview of the witches is approximately.

Associating the witches directly with Avá could be a bit too much, as it places them in one corner, but if they say, for example: "See, the elves have something going, maybe they're right about Avá!" And: "See: The weavers came to the same conclusions what magic really is, but from an entirely different direction." That would be something different. With that position they would stand between religions (even though they might have a clear tendency towards the elven view), but would be seen as heretics by humans, because they dabble with other Gods and worldviews, standing between them, taking no clear position, hoping that the truth about magic is out there and that nature reveals itself - all that as if worldviews and beliefs are a thing one could simply play with!

Ok, so much basically about the concept/worldview perspective for now to put that into the discussion, as I think this is one of the key points where we can place the witches. What I've read - as always - is great stuff, only the thing with Avá is something where we really need to have a close look to get that right!  :thumbup:

I've read some more of what you have here, Shabakuk (Basic Principles, How witchcraft works), and it's very nicely written and put together, as I already mentioned above. It's only the Avá-thing that really stands out as a bit of a conceptual problem, as it's a bit too exclusively centered around that belief. Making witchcraft a bit more relative to it would work better methinks, especially as witches are pretty much a dispersed folk as far as I see, so there might be very different kinds of witches with different intentions and motivations, and for that reason witchcraft shouldn't lean too much towards a special interpretation/belief of the world. That's the gist of where I'd say some thinking is still necessary. I'd say the tendency towards "Aváism" is ok for the most part, can be used as exemplary quotations and so on, but it puts witches in a specific corner, and that's what we should also try to avoid.

Suggestion perhaps: Witches could maybe "believe" in a certain "twisted image" of Avá, some sort of nature's spirit, which humans e.g. would directly link to Avá as there's the whole Dream-imagery associated with it etc. And elves also wouldn't say that it's Avá they believe in. Avá herself is also a problem, because she's linked to beauty and goodness, and we also don't want to lose the witches' dark side.

Thanks for the comments, Arti - and I understand: leave Avá to the elves! I will respect that, of course.

I like the direction of your ideas for a revision - and thanks for reminding me of the weavers: I had thought of the similarities between weavers and witches ('the web') at one point, but later forgot about it. In general, your comments provide a lot of ideas how to integrate the witches better into established Santharian history and religion.

I have a (very general) idea for how I could make the witches' beliefs less 'elven'. How about this:

The witches believe that life is a dream - but the dream they believe in is not Avá's. Rather, witches belief that everything dreams (people, animals, and even, say, a pebble, or a glass of artwine). You could say that everything has a story of itself. Say, a pebble believes of itself that it is hard. Now, our ordinary senses are able to perceive only that what our own dream allows us to see, and also only that of what other objects' and beings' dreams allow us to see.  
Witchcraft is 'opening' our own dream to understand more than the ordinary portion of other things' (animals', people's) dreams of themselves, in order to be able to understand how a particular dream 'was made'. If a witch knows how a dream was made, she can change it. For example, she could make the pebble believe that it was soft, rather than hard... The witches' metaphor for this could then be the same as in my current text: understanding the tapestry of dreams, and fiddling with the dream-threads.

This is not explained very well, maybe - but hopefully you get my drift. If you think that this idea could work conceptually, I'd try to come up with clearer and more colourful explanations for the entry.

Furthermore: The witches' beliefs could be seen as blasphemous by some, because the witches believe that the Twelvern Gods are also but dreamers, and that there is only a difference of degree, not of kind, between a pebble and a god.

With a terran word, then, the witches' beliefs could be described as pantheistic, and there you'd have the 'closeness to nature' that would fit with the existing 'raw magic' concept, if I understand your comments right?

There might be suspiciouns among human scholars that the witches' belief system is a descendant of the elven belief in Avá, in the sense that it's a human adaptation of the Avá belief? Maybe the first witches were humans that learned magic from elves?

A Styrásh origin of the word "witch", then, would fit well! I'm not sure that 'nature' would be the best root, though - because for elves, the closeness to nature wouldn't be the most distinctive thing about human witches, as far as I can see. I haven't got a better idea at the moment, but will have a think.

Anyway, thanks again for the comments. I'll make the smaller corrections (Helmondsshire etc.) later, when I revise the text as a whole.

What you write is to a great degree what I thought as well, Shabakuk. There are some more precisions necessary, though, I think, to make their role in society between Gods and morality a bit clearer. I try to follow the train of thought here and hopefully come to further conclusions that make some sense... Stay with me...

Yes, I think the word "pantheism" is what works best to describe witches in terran terms indeed. It's like saying: Everything has a "soul", be it human, elf, animal or a simple stone, so there's that divine power, aura, cáráll in everything and its existence is dreaming and weaving, whatever you want to call it. So that's if we try to look at it from a religious angle.

Personally I have my doubts however that witches would actually accept or care for "Gods", be they Avá or the Twelvern ones. Because if they do they'd accept some sort od super-being or driving force behind everything, a defined purpose in a way, the huge field of morality would open. The elves e.g. have that tendency towards harmony as a reflection to the sleep/dream state of Avá, humans probably have a much clearer idea what is right or wrong because they have Gods, who are embodiments of virtues. There's also always the question: Who created it all and for what purpose, and elves and humans have their own answers. Would witches really pose that question? - I'd say a pantheistic view would probably bother less about whether God exists or not, but simply accept that there's that divine spark in everything, and thus is entitled to use its dream-force, and also to bend things at will, because that's how the various existences were made. In ethical terms I'd say witches then wouldn't act immorally, but amorally, they see themselves outside of the sphere of judgement.

Actually, this has a lot of postmodern existentialism now that I think about it... :lol: Let's make a short excursion: Try to see it with the eyes of a philosopher of the 20th century: Albert Camus didn't believe in God and saw life being grounded in the absurd, but now that you actually live you have to make the best out of it and come to moral conclusions which work for you and the society you live in (you're always born in a society, so caring for people around you is important in your own interest). In other words: He was a fighter for human freedom, solidarity and working against nihilism, definitely humanistic all the way through. There's a nice line in the Wikipedia entry: "Only by making the choice to fight an irreversible epidemic [in this case the plague is used as a symbol for the absurd] are people able to create the ever-lacking meaning to a life destined for execution from the moment of its creation."

Ok, now what the heck has all that to do with witches? ;) I'm just trying to shed some light on the perspective of such witches as far as their religious belief and their moral convictions are concerned. If you move away from the Gods you lose their moral authority and have to justify your actions yourself. So you're standing between Camus' humanitarian approach and nihilism. The danger that the loss of moral authority leads to a "I can do whatever I want" mentality is pretty huge. Witches therefore are basically seen as dangerous - no Gods, no moral authorities, they keep away from other people for various reasons, thus they must be bad!  But that's only one view.

The other one is that more positive image that you already sketched to a good deal - the dream angle, also the web/weaver angle, which maybe Hildula or other important witches could mention in their books, pointing at these connections. Witches don't invent the wheel anew, they just do what elves do out of a certain conviction and raw magic users always knew, what gifted ones do instinctively. And that is to use magic as it exists, because everything is auratic, magical, divine in terms of pantheism.

BTW: I think Gods theoretically could exist for a witch, but not in a sense that a God is directly important for the living creature, as a witch wouldn't accept its authority over himself/herself. Which doesn't mean that Gods don't exist, but they'd be just dreamers among dreamers, and other dreamers (like humans) would accept them as their super-dreamers.

Ok, that's a rough outline from the moral/belief perspective. Hope it makes some sense and helps to get the matter further! :cool:

Thanks, Arti! Camus' The Plague and The Myth of Sisyphos are two of my favourite books.

I am not sure that witches are existentialists. But they certainly wouldn't derive their morality from gods, as you say. In general, my idea was that witches would simply not accept the common ways of dividing 'good' from 'evil'. For example, a witch might not necessarily accept that she should side with a human against an orc, just because she is human herself. Or that she should side with a human against a cat. Or even against a tree. She might not accept that adultery is bad. Or that ghosts are unfortunate in not being able to depart from this world. Or that it's bad to lose your possessions (less power and less security might be good for your soul!)...

(As an aside: I think the relationships of humans on earth to their gods can take quite different form, depending on the religion. In a book on Norse Myth, Kevin Crossley-Holland says that there are indications that some vikings suspected that the Æsir (Odin, Thor, and the whole gang) were merely particularly strong and gifted humans who claimed to be gods in order to increase their own power and fame. -- In Greek mythology, as far as I understand, there is little suggestion that the gods are inherently good: they lie, steal, rape, betray one another; they kill out of jealousy or hatred; they are vain, small-minded, vengeful; one of them (Kronos) even ate his children. Certainly, as a human, one had to sacrifice to the gods; but not because they were examples of moral virtue, but because they were superior and one was at their mercy. With the help of a god, one could achieve much. But the gods were quite capricious in whom they granted help, and didn't necessarily help those who were most virtuous (even by the standards of the time). In the Trojan War, some of the gods were on the side of the Greeks, others on the side of the Trojans. And they didn't switch allegiance even when the warriors on their own side behaved badly. Anyway, unless I am misunderstanding something, what was considered 'good' in ancient Greece was not necessarily derived from either the example or the command of a god.)

In any case, I think it's perfectly conceivable that witches would recognize gods without feeling obliged to steer by whatever moral codes other people might associate with these gods. So I agree with the last-but-one paragraph of your last post more than with the third paragraph.

Anyway, I'll think all this over.

Meanwhile, I have two questions:

(1) I did have an idea for a "nature spirit", a "supreme dreamer", by the way (referring to one of your earlier posts). This would be a being both male and female, both sentient and dumb as a pebble, both beautiful and ugly. It would be not a god so much as a personalization of the world itself. Let's call it Hagazussa for now (an old German word, apparently the origin of the more recent term "Hexe" [=witch]). Hagazussa, the witches would believe, weaves the tapestry that is the world. And if this was so, then the metaphors I used in my draft (but applied to Ava) could be used and applied to Hagazussa. So there'd be "Hagazussa's Handmaid's", for example. Do you think this could work within Santharia - as an alternative to the 'pantheist' version of my last post? Or maybe even as a facet of the same belief (not quite sure which at this point)?
  Needless to say, Hagazussa doesn't know good or evil. A demon or a human being are both just images Hagazussa weaves to make the tapestry interesting.
  And of course, scholars could speculate that Hagazussa might be a 'twisted version of Ava', as you suggest: a particular human interpretation of the elven Dreameress, and one whose origins in elven belief the witches have forgotten?


(2) And another question: from what I have described in the draft, do you think that witchcraft should be classified as 'Raw Magic'? Or maybe only some kinds of witchcraft should be classified so (maybe the most powerful forms)? I'm really not sure at all!

I have a few things to say, ideas to spout, nuisances to cause &c. &c.

Thing the First - Wow. This is one of the best ideas I have seen, couched in the best of expression, and with the perfect blend of clarity, flourish and flair in the wording. Simply amazing.

Thing the Second - Shaba makes a good point about the morality of many pre-Judeo-Christian religions when he says that the gods have little to do with morality. The gods of Greece and Rome were like powerful men and women, with jealousies, pettinesses, squabbles and lack of foresight.

Thing the Third - This reminds me of the way magic works in the Earthsea - by telling the universe that a thing is other than it is, the universe changes to make it work (this is more accurate for users of song and word that others).

Idea the First - I humbly request permission to reference this entry in my (forthcoming - I promise!) masterwork, with regard to those of the Glandorians who are skarls (a corruption of the Terran skald, suggested by our dear Gobbleswap himself). They would, I suppose, be Spell-Chanters, inciting their warriors to greater fortitude and fury with their words and striking fear, doubt and weakness into the ranks of the enemy; in calmer times, they would layer strength into the fabric of boats and the iron of weapons. A comparison will be drawn between them and modern users of magic who call themselves "witches"

Idea the Second - Does a dream need a dreamer? Can there be thought without thinker? Does a tapestry need only one weaver or a song only one singer? Why must there be a lone celestial Ava figure? Why could the witches not regard themselves as the thinkers - in a thought that existed before the thinkers? The dream brings people, plants, animals into existence, but also it brings dreamers, who shape the dream.

Nuisance the First - Having given unqualified praise, let me temper it now with...well, with qualifications. And so, without further ado...Grammar. Some minor errors, which will be picked up (I hope) in:

Nuisance the Second - Uri-Check! Yay! *Realises nobody else is cheering and gets back in his apprentice's box*

Nuisance the Third - Exams are over, the summer is over, results are in - bringing closure - and so Athviaro is coming back to Santhria! Mwua-ha-ha-hah!

Apologies if any of this lacks the lucidity of the original entry - my comments can hardly hope to rival Shaba's entries.

Athviaro the Strangely Whimsical

@Ath: Nice to see you back! Haven't you got some more entries to finish? :)

@Shab: Yeah, you're right of course that there's more going on in terms of Gods and morality, Shabakuk & Ath, I merely simplified it a bit to try to elaborate where we can place the witches :)

Just trying to give some pointers, set a context where you play around with your ideas (acceptance of Gods etc.), and as far as I can see you have a pretty good vision anyway, though there's still room to shove it around a bit. At any rate: Aura +1 from me as well for your efforts so far! It's indeed a very important entry, and I'm very glad to see that it's now forming!

Concerning your questions:

"Hagazussa" (BTW, as I've read: it's also the German source for the English "hag") should be only a temporary word for now so that we can put in a Santharian/Styrásh one, whatever. But yes, the idea is very good and plausible to have the opposites reflected in it, like male and female etc. Reminds me for one of course of Avá dreaming and reflecting herself in the world, also of Etherus, the Twelvern androgynous God of Excess, Desire, Lust and Love with multiple faces - and as such on the brink of morality, where I'd place the witches as well. See also the associations of witches with "dances with the devil", "orgiastic feasts", all stuff that is also very Etherian.

So in that context people would look at witches and say: Ah, they don't know what they want and just pick the Gods the way they like them to be! They take some things from Avá and from Etherus and make themselves their own God(s), they twist not only one religion, but two and make an entirely unholy thing out of it!

Raw Magic: Well, raw magic isn't really that clearly defined, also weaving/resonance magic isn't established as satisfyingly as it should be. But I take one thing out from resonance magic, which is the "listening" to things around you. Witches maybe are more receptive, more in tune with the world/nature, more listening. So there are definitely similarities to the resonance magic entry.

But I wouldn't try to reduce it e.g. to such "raw magic". I'd say it that way:

- gifted people connect to the world on a very basic level to do magic (mostly unintentionally)
- Xeuatáns first have to get rid of their elemental approach (which is more like a mathematical science) on magic and relearn magic because they need to get through to the basic level
- clerics who cast e.g. healing spells believe that their spells work, so if Gods don't exist it is their belief on a basic level of existence that made it work
- and raw magic is also a way of reaching that basic level
- same with elves: nartural magic also reaches the basic level of trying to understand the world as it exists/dreams

All these things make it clear to the witches that their way of magic is the right one, that various kinds of magical users arrive at the same solution to go back to the simplest approach and drop all that unnecessary magical mumbo-jumbo. That I think is the way witchcraft is heading, and that's how I'd try to describe it: As an attempt to listen to this basic level, to the dream of how things exist, and simple use that because it's the most natural thing in the world :)

Yep, great to see you back, Ath! Thanks for the praise, and I'll be honoured if my text would eventually be subject to an AIUC (Athviaro's Infamous Uri Check). But do hold your horses while the substantive discussion is ongoing, otherwise you'll end up doing lots of work on paragraphs that may need to be deleted or completely reformulated, anyway.

Concerning the Glandorian skarls: I think that's a good name, and I personally have no objection to witches being referenced in the way you suggest. I know that there is some wariness in general about introducing ever-more new magic systems, but you'll have to battle that out with the magic experts, not with me. If the skarl-idea was accepted by members in general, maybe I could even sneak a cross-reference to the skarls into the Witchcraft entry? One thing to be careful about is the timeline, though: magic was outlawed and all sorcerers ostracized for a long time after the War of the Chosen, so your skalds might have had to tone down their magic, or even become (or pretended to become) mere poets for a considerable portion of Glandorian history.

(I'll respond to Arti in the next post.)

In reply to Artimidor:

I like this as one possible reaction to witches (from scholars and clerics, maybe - whereas common folk would be far less sophisticated in justifying their rejection.)

And:
  Yep, I can see that this would be what many witches could indeed think!

I was thinking that the "People" entry about witches would maybe be a good place to elaborate on the witches' own beliefs, and on the perception of witches by different types of Santharians. But I'd be happy to expand this Magic entry instead, if Arti or others think that would be the better approach.

Art, as far as I can see, we agree on the general approach. So let me attempt a re-write, and then we can see what still needs to be changed, what references to existing magic concepts need to be added, and so forth.


One question: I had the idea that the witches "twisted version of Ava" could maybe sometimes be depicted as a spider. (That would fit with the mythical hut of a certain mythical witch ...) Now, judging by the Tharian-Styrásh Dictionary, there is as yet no Styrásh word for spider (though there is one for weaving). Now, if the Styrásh for spider sounded remotely like 'witch', then we'd have a splendid little etymology. What do you think? Would you like to make a Styrásh word for 'spider' for me?

A spider? That can be arranged I'd say, yup!  :cool:

Splendid! *rubs hands*

I have the Kalta'hnk (on indefinite hiatus, awaiting reworking) and the Glandorians, for whose continuation I need to sort out the thing about migration - who came first? Ta'lia says one thing, the site another; would you be able to help with that?

Got to go now; would be appreciated if you could pop in and help work it out.

Ath

I deleted all references to Avá as an object of witch-lore, and added a few paragraphs to the "Concept/Worldview" section. Have I moved the text closer towards acceptability?

Yep, that's definitely a good step, Shabakuk! It still feels a bit on the edge of Aváism here and there, but basically it's quite ok. I see we have "dream threads" now established, which is perhaps the best word to link the dream and web, so whenever possible try to go with that word.

The Ximaxianism section works also I'd say, so it looks as if the whole thing is already heading towards an end. The history still isn't complete - I definitely need to check that one again in more detail when you're done, I made some mental notes last time I checked before we changed it around somewhat. Have to see again what still applies and where there's something problematic.

Thanks, Art!

Do feel free to tell me specifically what you think is too close to the elven belief, and I'm happy to make further changes. Suggestions are welcome. I'm not married to my ideas. I want the entry to fit well into Santharia, and I am all for preserving the distinctiveness of Aváism.

I realize I haven't spelled out the connection to the Weavers yet. I'll have a look at the Weaver entries again and see what I can come up with.


Have you had any further thoughts on a Styrásh word for spider that could serve for the etymology of 'witch'?

Stay tuned... coming up this evening!

Ok, here we have some words I propose:

rashán - to spin
rásh (m./f.)) - spinner; spider
háh - ultimate; outmost (pronunciation as in German "hach")
háh'rásh (m./f.) - the Ultimate Spinner; the World Spider; Dream Spinner(witchcraft term)
hásh (m./f.) - witch (Tharian version: "hag")
ouishán - to twist; to pervert; to contort; to wring (spoken in English: wishAn)
ouidshán - to practise twisted magic (short for "ouishán'dél'án"); to witch
ouídsh - charlatan; twister of magic; witch

Arti, this is great and more comprehensive than I had hoped for. I love the etymologies for hag and witch! They say a lot about the elven view of witches, and will serve as a stark symbol of the mistrust that witches encounter. Aura for you!

I have but one suggestion: what if rashán meant "to spin" rather than "to weave"? This would befit the connection to 'spider' just as well (so rásh could be 'spinner, spider' and háh'rásh 'Ultimate/World Spider, or Spinner'.

The reason for my idea is this: I think if we went with 'spinning', rather than weaving, I might have an idea of how I could remove the witches' ideas further from the elven ones. In short: the World Spider spins the threads, but doesn't actively weave them. The world is the result of a chaotic interweaving of the threads. So in this version, there is no 'Dreameress' anymore, and not even someone who weaves her dreams. Instead, there is only the chaos of threads and knots. Basically, the witches view the world as the work of a mad spider ... I'd have to spin  this yarn out some more, of course - for example, somehow the witches need to have an explanation why there is so much regularity in the world amid the chaos of the threads - but in general I think a worldview that emphasizes the randomness and chaos of reality might befit the witches well, and might also explain why they are viewed as renegades and 'twisted'.

What do you think?

Moreover, there is already a word for "to weave" in the Styrásh dictionary (sú'ufanán). Not that you can't have two words for the same concept - but there is no word for 'spin' (here in the sense of spinning a thread) yet ...

Yay, what a great idea! I'd definitely go for introducing the "spinner" rather than the dreamer/ess. The single persons or things would then weave the thread, eh? Makes the whole thing much more unique and quite different from elven concepts :) Love it very much, Shabakuk!  :thumbup:

Besides, "spinner" has also an additional negative connotation, so maybe there's a source there that comes directly from witchcraft: "You think you can make it all up yourself then, eh? Spinner!" :lol:

Could the witches - some - believe that THEY give and gave the chaos form? Perhaps that they were formed by the chaotic mingling of threads and built their world? So the order in the world is a result of the witches' interference, and they are the active weavers? They might then believe that they are in some ways superior, and that their art is an absolutely vital practice for the world itself.

Ath

@Shabakuk: Ok, I've now updated my post above replacing "weaving" with "spinning" where it occurred.

@Ath & @Shab: Good point Ath makes, a lot of things could be tied together here! :D

At this point also the connection with the weavers comes into play, and what they created (see Old Weaver entry etc.) As far as these guys are concerned a lot of it is shrouded in history, so I guess it's not really important to explain all the connections. However, they could be - in myths and legends - related to the witches, maybe they formed their own society and cities in what is now known as the Web, and the connections to them were eventually severed. But they might have had the same root as many witches, and maybe some witches still know about this place, or even make attempts to reach this domain.

Rumours might exist that witches with a suspiciously long life-span are actually travelling the Web (through time and space!), but would never reveal that secret. A lot of mystery could go on in this regard, and the good thing is that we could just touch on it, without going into much detail, and thus keep it open and fascinating what witches are capable of...

Thanks for the ideas, Ath & Art!

I think this discussion gives me enough to work with to produce a draft worthy of a thorough check. I'll need some time though (definitely more than a week, maybe much longer), since I'll be rather busy in the near future. Meanwhile, I changed the development icon to "pencil". I'll be back!

Shabakuk

Actually, Turya was female. 

Thanks, Mina!

Corrected.

... and ready for comments!

I have not had a good idea for a reference to the Weavers yet, and would appreciate suggestions.

Arti, I hope I've done your marvellous Styrash inventions justice. Let me know if there's more I can do to integrate them.

Arti, I'm sorry - I just now re-discovered your suggestions concerning the weavers. I had read your post at the time, but then managed to forget it, which is entirely due to me being a scatter-brain, and not to the quality of your ideas, which are excellent.

Anyway, I like the direction of your suggestions. I'm wondering whether they need to be included in the Magic entry, though, or whether they wouldn't fit better into the People entry on Witches?

Ok, comments ahead, Shabakuk!

- The meaning of the word "witch" (= its Stýrash origins) should also be mentioned in the Overview.

- You write that we're dealing only with Santharian witches here. That's fine as the term probably derived from elves living in Southern Sarvonia. You only briefly refer to shamanism up North, which bears resemblances. I'd say you could see it much broader by putting it more that way (see also what you mention in History): In general all kinds of magical practices outside of Santharia and which thus are not under Ximaxian influence or can be attributed to a major school of magic (e.g. elven magic) are regarded as suspicious and therefore often simply labeled "witchcraft" by many people, simply because they don't have a proper word for it. So even if these kinds of magic are very different to witchcraft as we describe it here, they might be still seen as such - and this of course contributes to the not so brilliant image witchcraft often has. I guess that's quite an important thing to make a bit clearer.

- :lol: I love the changes you made in the Concept/Worldview part. Like the introductory sentences and the hobbit take on it, and furthermore the scholarly take on the hobbit answer...  :cool:

The spider references also work very well now, so I'm very pleased with these alterations! As you mention the "spider" and "illusions" I'd say it is also in order to throw in a reference to the Weavers as you've asked in your question. It could simply be put in a footnote after the second paragraph, where you can put what I've sketched in that last post dealing with it. If there are actual direct connections can be completely left open, but mentioning the similarities has its place right there, I'd say.

- Upon reading the Concept/Worldview part I noticed that the description of the witch's worldview is pretty much the one of an artist (and again the parallels with Nietzschean philosophy I mentioned elsewhere, the Übermensch is the creative artist that forms life). Unlike regular people who just live their life to maintain itself and see the uttermost goal in reproducing themselves, hoping that it is all part of a greater purpose, a witch however takes it in her hands, plays the role of creator. The witch combines and weaves threads, because she sees it in her capabilities to do so, and that's what she does, she's the elemental energy that creates existence. It's not by definition something negative, but the prometheian impetus of the witch is not to be underestimated. A creation of a Dr. Frankenstein in Santharia could have a witchy worldview. Anyway, in short: I'd say using the term "artist" here and there would further strengthen the idea behind the worldview.

- Yep, yep, very nice reading there, e.g. also in the Knots and Threads part, where even phenomenons like déjà vu are explained in a way, and that's great! It makes connections on the basic level between space and time, which is what it all comes down to as far as witchcraft is concerned. As everything is interconnected you could even say that e.g. "chemistry" between people all is based on thread-theory, and similar things like that. A whole wide world opens that way, it's an entirely unique look on things...

- I see you also have some hints at what one could call "superstition" here and there, like references to the number thirteen etc. This is something that should be expanded on a bit more in the People entry I'd say, along with familiars (black cats etc.), broomsticks etc. But I guess you have that in mind already. (Speaking about broomsticks,  here's a little something: In the Santhworld Hall of Fame - try walking a few times from your portrait into Grinch's room and watch the broomstick... ;))

- Also nice details on the Ximaxians dealing with witchcraft!  :thumbup:

- And finally: The History part is also very solid, detailing the genesis and progression of witches throughout the ages. There are also some ideas in there I haven't heard before if I remember correctly, like the Night of the Hand stuff, where the witches could be responsible. A nice idea at any rate, which adds to the complexity of this important historical date. Maybe you could still add captions at the beginning of the paragraphs in this section, so that it is easier for the reader to capture the whole historical progression by looking at these captions.

And right until the witchfinder everything is there on its place and written in a most entertaining way with a lot of creativity and fresh ideas all over the place. Didn't really find anything wrong, it's all there, thought through and presented perfectly! :clap: :clap: :clap:

- BTW: There's still that picture from Eratin we haven't used yet (here (http://stuff.santharia.com/fun/witch.jpg)), could be added in this entry as well. It focuses on the dark sides of witches, however, but we also have the other one you wanted to have reserved, Shabakuk.

So of course you get another aura +1, Shabakuk! Brilliant work - looking forward to further entries in this context, like the one on the Witch Covens you mention!  :thumbup:

Thanks (and aura) for the helpful suggestions, Arti! I agree with everything, and shall work on changes during the next few days.

Regarding the comment on the profundity of hobbit wisdom, I had the idea that I could maybe ascribe it to Athiost of Carmalad (http://www.santharia.com/people/athiost.htm), unless you think that's unsuitable? I permitted myself to implement the suggested change in the "Concept" section.

And yes, I noticed the sloppy discipline in the Hall of Fame. Now we've even come to the point where lowly broomsticks think they can fly around anywhere they like. It's an outrage.

Yep, yep, Athiost is perfectly fine here, Shabakuk!  :thumbup:

Thanks again for all your comments, Arti. I made the following edits (in whatever this colour is called):

(1) Mentioned ouidshán in the Overview.
(2) Added a paragraph to the Prevalence section, explaining the difference between the everyday use of the term 'witchcraft' by non-witches, and 'witchcraft proper'.
(3) Added a footnote on Weavers.
(4) Added sub-headings to the History.
(5) Changed the spelling in the title of Turya Firebane's book to "On Ouidch-craft”. I thought that looked like a nice old-fashioned spelling for a 1,500 year-old tome, and it also reflects the etymology of "witch" that Arti has so elegantly developed.

I have chosen (for now) not to reinforce the reading of witches as Nietzscheans. Despite being fascinated by his sharpness and irreverence, I am not a great fan of Nietzsche, and certainly not of his idea of "superhumans". But of course, everyone is free to interpret the text as they wish. :cool:

Anyway, if someone had time and inclination to do a uri-check, I would appreciate it!  

But of course I'd be open to further comments on the concept as well.

The additions/changes are very good, Shabakuk - the Prevalence now comprises the full range of how witchcraft us seen throughout Santharia and really leaves no questions open anymore. :) Also nice touch with the "Ouidch-craft", always good to make things sound more ancient and connect it that way at the same time to a view of another race, so this fits very well also. The weaver footnote also does its job, so I'd say it's just perfect as perfect as it can get from top to bottom if you ask me.

As for an Uri check: Personally I find it extremely tough to spot anything wrong grammatically or typing-wise in a Shabakuk entry, so I'd say even without an Uri and with that entry length chances are that there are less mistakes than in a lot of other entries we have up on site already... ;)

Ok, just a few things to fix:



At any rate: I guess I can mark this one already for integration next update, and for your dedicated work you get yet another aura +1 - an important entry finally makes in on site, wonderfully creative, embedded and bridging various gaps that existed before. With one word: Fantabulastic, Shabakuk!  :thumbup: A round of applause! :clap: :clap: :clap:

I have been doing a Uri but I'll do it from the beginning after all the alteration. Coming up.

We already have update weekend, Ath, so I hope you can make it until then...

Update on Saturday/Sunday coming up? I can do it for then, I think.

Otherwise put it up as is.

I'd appreciate it, Athviaro!

If you've already started your check, please be aware that I've just made some edits of my own - correcting the mistakes Arti pointed out, and some others that I found in my own check. (And I also changed a formulation here and there, where I didn't like the old one anymore.)

I hope I will have the time to integrate your comments before the update - but of course, if you find glaring mistakes, Arti can just correct them himself when he prepares the text.


For Arti, I have also got suggestions for picture captions:

Seeker's picture: "A cauldron witch in her kitchen. The ingredients on her shelf suggest that she is cooking no ordinary soup.

Pointy hat picture: "Among other things, witches know how to converse with ghosts. What the pompion has to do with this only a witch could tell you!"

If you don't like them, feel free to write something else!  :)

Those are fine, Shabakuk! Make sure to put them in the first post, though, because I always grab the entry from there with all additional information that post contains. Otherwise I might miss/forget it!  :thumbup:

D'accord, Sage. Done!

A quick sweep for error and a bit of style, though I'm wary of interfering too much with the way you wrote it, Shaba.

Generally great. Love it, and hope I can do the idea justice with the skarls!

Ath.

PS: As always, comments are in orange and simple grammar corrections in red.



Have you ever been healed by a song? Have you ever felt that love is a madness, induced by some force outside I'd prefer no "of" here. It adds nothing. of yourself? Or have you ever found, after a seamstress mended a coat for you, that you were unable to take the dratted thing off? And did the seamstress smile? And did she promise that she would release her spell, if you would just do her a little favour? – Or maybe you once saw a man approach a wailwoman, and he withstood the ghost’s bone-melting cry, and with a curious dance and gesture lifted the curse that had detained the tortured soul within its spectral form?

If you have experienced any of these things, then you have likely received a better introduction to Witchcraft than letters on a piece of parchment will ever be able to impart. Witchcraft is the common name for the magical arts of Santharian witches. The term “witch” itself is derived from the Styrásh verb “ouidshán”, which means “to practice twisted magic” – and although witches themselves carry their name with pride, its origin tells a poignant tale about how they are perceived not only by the elves, but by all Santharian people. Generally, Witchcraft – or Black Magic, as it is known to its many detractors – is understood to be synonymous with dangerous, sinister, harmful sorcery. Witches have been treated with suspicion for as long as history records, since they often live outside of established orders, defy worldly and religious authority, and are loyal to none but fellow-witches (or so people think). After the calamitous War of the Chosen, the world was weary of both sword-fare and magic, witches were persecuted and suspected of being in cahoots with necromancers intent onof bringing forth creatures from the Netherworlds, and with them further deadly strife.

Yet on the other hand, fairy stories and sayings also betray a certain fascination with beautiful witches dancing on mountain tops, with the love potions that they brew, or with the idea that one might ask a witch to let a wart grow on one’s unloved neighbour’s nose. And indeed, the practice of Witchcraft would not flourish quite as well as it does if Santharians did not avail themselves of witches’ services rather more often than they would admit.

Prevalence

This entry is concerned with Santharian witches only. Some reports suggest that Santharian Witchcraft bears a resemblance to the practices of shamans in Northern Sarvonia, but at the present stage of research we are unable to make a confident statement to this effect.

In the Kingdom of Santharia, Witchcraft is practised by both men and women. Most witches are human, but we have personally met some gnomish practitioners of the art, and have even heard stories about hobbit witches. In fact, one of the best spell cooks currently alive is rumoured to live in a smial in the Helmondsshire. (And a spell cook, as you shall soon see, is a type of witch that specializes in enchantments achieved through cooking or brewing.)

Before we proceed to introduce the gentle reader to the philosophy and practice of Witchcraft, we feel that it is necessary to draw make draw or make? a distinction. For the focus of our article – the magical arts of the witches – is one thing. But what Santharians in their ignorance and superstition may choose to call  Witchcraft is quite another. In general, the terms “witchcraft” and “witch” are used to denote any kind of magic, and any kind of magic practitioner, that do not belong to one of the established and respected schools or systems of magic and that are therefore regarded with suspicion. As a scribe working in the Thane’s palace in Marcogg once told us: “If it ain’t Ximax, and if it ain’t Thalambath, and if it ain’t clerics, and if it ain’t elves, why, then for sure it’s foul, and for sure it’s witchery.” More sophisticated individuals might know that druidic magic, weaver magic, and life magic are also quite distinct schools of magical art – but even these knowledgeable ones might well fail to distinguish witches from mere gifted macanti, from shamans, or even from rogue mages. In short, Santharians tend to attach the label “Witchcraft” to any magic that they do not understand and do not have another name for – especially if they are afraid of it or repelled by it. That such confusion has done much harm to the reputation of witches in Santharia is beyond doubt, and it is the humble purpose of this article to try and dispel the ignorance that has clouded the perception of witches for far too long.

Concept/Worldview

Why is there a world, rather than nothing? Why does anything exist at all? – Because Avá the Beautiful dreams it, say the elves. – Because the Twelve Gods, praise be to them, are defending it against Coór the Shadow, say pious humans. – Because if the world didn’t exist, what would we eat, say the hobbits. (According to the philosopher Athiost of Carmalad, the hobbits’ answer is the most profound.)

Witches, for their part, have a different explanation again. The world exists, they say, because  Harash spins it. Harash – that is the Great Spider, the Spinner of the World Web. It is a being both male and female, beautiful and ugly, wise as a whale and dumb as a pebble. *Footnote 1* The witches believe that all the world we see, hear, smell and feel is made up of threads woven by Harash. The witches call these threads “dream threads”, because in our everyday lives, we are unable to see these threads themselves, but instead only illusions, “dreams” conjured up by them. This may be a bit complicated to understand, but a simile often used by witches to teach novice witchlings may help to make things clearer.

Consider what happens when you regard a tapestry. If you look from a distance, your eyes behold a picture: they see shapes and colours, and arrange them into objects and animals and people. Yes, if the weaver was skilled, you even believe that you see the figures moving. You think you see a boy running, a bird flying, a tree bending its branches in the wind. It is as if the tapestry were alive. But step closer, and you find that all these images are in fact composed out of thousands upon thousands of individual threads of different colours; and that the boy or the bird or the tree that you admired are, in fact, nothing but a deft assemblage of dyed wool. You begin to see beneath the picture; you begin to see how it was done.

And so, the witches say, it is with reality also. In our everyday life, we only see the images, the illusion: the boys, the birds, the trees. But the tapestry itself with its myriads of interwoven threads we do not see. If we want to see it, we first need to know how to “step closer” to it; only then can we see “how it was done”. If we managed to do this, we could even do a bit of weaving of our own. Not that we could spin new threads – that is Harash’s power alone. But we could rearrange the threads, make a new weft. In short, if we saw the fabric out of which the illusion of reality is constructed, we could make a new illusion, a new image, a new reality. And that is Witchcraft.

By reweaving the tapestry, the witches say, they make a little contribution to helping the dream that is the world to expand: this they do by helping to bring new beings into the world (for example, through fertility spells), by helping to bring new stories into the world (a love charm, say, leads to new and often complicated relationships, which make for good stories), or by helping to bring new emotions into the world (even if ordinary people may judge these emotions to be negative, such as wrath or lust for revenge). New beings, new stories, new feelings – all these are so many new snarls in the dream web, new pictures in the tapestry. And that, in the eyes of witches, justifies them. What grows is good, and what grows in a disorderly way is even better. The more confusing the dream, the more mazy its yarns, the more fun there is to be had.

It is not  the witches’ belief, by the way, that Harash the World Spider herself weaves the tapestry of the world. Harash merely spins the threads. The interweaving of them, which causes the world to be furnished with people, animals, plants and things, is an entirely chaotic process. Succinctly put, the world is a giant ball of tangled dream threads, and we are the knots in it. We have come about by chance, by the random muddled mess of Harash’s threads, and it is up to us to make something of this chance. Witchcraft, the witches say, is the best way to of doing so.

Sometimes young witchlings ask why Harash’s threads should assemble themselves to make a world such as ours, which features, despite its many unpredictabilities, a considerable amount of regularity. Oftentimes, the reply from older witches is but a shrug and an admonition to be careful only to ask questions that are answerable, lest your mind befuddle itself. Yet wiser witches respond that Caelereth, our world, actually is made up of but a tiny portion of the total number of Harash’s threads. In fact, they say, there is an infinite number of tangled balls of dream threads, and therefore there is also an infinite number of worlds, and no one is like the other. Some of these worlds, the witches say, are lifeless. Some consist only of swirling colours, like the winter sky in a Northern night. Others are inhabited solely by fluttersong moths. Then there are worlds that are so beautiful that on seeing one of them, our eyes would immediately go blind. Yet others are so ugly that if we saw them, our hearts would wither and refuse to beat another beat. We are lucky, say the witches, that we live in a world that is both beautiful and ugly, just like Harash herself, and that we can bear to see it. *Footnote 2*

Basic Principles: The craft

“Sing, and you shall hear; brew, and you shall smell; cook, and you shall taste; weave, and you shall see; dance, and you shall feel.”

Hildula Hauntwell: “The Arts of Warts, or: How to Take Revenge on the Infuriatingly Pretty” (New-Santhala, 1666 a. S.)

So how does Witchcraft actually work? How do witches contrive to see the dream threads? How do they “step closer” and inspect the weft of the world, and how are they able to change its structure? More competent authors than ourselves have failed in the task of making Witchcraft intelligible to the minds of non-witches. The single best introduction to the matter is still Archmage Turya Firebane’s “On Ouidch-craft”, written more than 1,500 years ago. Addressing her fellow Ximaxian sages, Turya explains:
“We know that magical effects can sometimes be achieved involuntarily, and even by untrained but magically gifted individuals, especially in situations of severe emotional distress or physical exhaustion. As you, venerated colleagues, are well aware, the principle of study that our Academy is proud to represent is that what the untrained individual can but achieve unconsciously, haphazardly, the trained mage can learn to achieve consciously, deliberately, by training his will to concentrate on the cár’áll, its configurations, and its manipulation. Witches, however, draw quite a different conclusion from the phenomenon of spontaneous, chaotic magic: they prefer to observe that these spontaneous effects occur when the person whom they originate from is, as it were, not herself – when fear or pain or hatred or love have thrown her out of her mind. The principle of Witchcraft is to lose oneself, or, as the witches would say: to surrender. They seek such experiences that bring about altered states of mind where the logic of dreams and nightmares rules, and where reason is silenced. So rather than striving for concentration and control, witches aim for ecstasy and trance; rather than avoiding everything that could disturb the calm execution of the will, they seek to renounce their will and use the forces that lurk beneath it; and rather than training the mind to control what it cannot directly perceive, they seek to subvert the mind in order to overcome its limits.”

(“On Ouidch-craft”, by Kar-ii Turya Firebane, Archmage of the Black Tower of Ximax, 1st century a.S.)

In the practice of Witchcraft, ordinary consciousness is suspended, and the witch experiences rapture, trance or ecstasy. The more spectacular variants of these states, such as wild dances and hypnotic chanting, have become predominant in popular perception, and exaggerated tales of naked rituals, orgies and licentiousness abound. Yet your average witch is far more likely to prefer quieter sorts of trance. The key to understanding this is the concept of “craft”.

Every witch knows a craft – an actual handicraft, or art – and it is through its execution that she *Footnote 3* accomplishes her magic. Thus, a witch trained in tapestry may “weave a spell”, a witch good at woodwork may “whittle a spell”, and a witch inclined to poetry may “rhyme a spell”. In this way, depending on the witch’s craft, her work may involve dancing a spell, singing a spell, baking a spell, cooking a spell, sewing a spell, spinning a spell, and so forth.

It is not necessarily the case that the witch, by her craft, produces a magical artefact (although this happens too, as witches may make magically enhanced brews, charms in the form of wooden figurines or embroidered clothes or amulets, or even magical sculptures of stone). But it is always through her craft that the witch “dives into the web of dream-threads”, as the witches put it. The crucial transition from everyday consciousness to trance is accomplished through the craft itself: through the hypnotic effect of repetitive movement (such as in dancing, or in loom weaving), through evocative chanting , or through the “surrender” of the mind to a tricky task.

Once she is in trance, the witch’s concentration is wholly on the invisible fabric of Harash’s tangled web. Witches believe that through losing themselves in this way, they can leave the illusion of reality behind, and can fiddle directly with the weft of the world tapestry: loosening a thread here, reweaving it there, cautiously making the picture yet more intricate, yet more interesting.

What makes witchcraft unique: knots and threads

“The spider that catches us liberates us. It is by being entangled in the web of life that we become free.”

Hildula Hauntwell: “An invitation to the spider’s web” (New-Santhala, 1456 a. S.)


So far, a reader educated in Ximaxian magic might think that the witches’ craft is just an alternative road to the goal that Ximaxian magic shares: the manipulation of the invisible energetic essence of the world. Furthermore, the reader might think that the witches’ notion of ‘tapestry’ and ‘threads’ are but simplified expressions of Ximaxian theory with its concepts of  the cár'áll, the oúnia, and their links. Yet there is more to Witchcraft, and this is why the Ximaxian mages’ efforts to integrate the witches’ arts into their conceptual system have so far failed.

The witches say: You are a knot. And so am I. We are all knots. We are knots in Harash’s tangled web, a web that is ever-moving, ever-changing. Each of us consists of thousands upon thousands of threads, some of which are thick and constant, while others are thin and fleeting. We are chaotic entanglements of dream threads, and so is everything else: the animals, the plants, the objects, and the materials. Wherever we go, we carry a long trail of loose threads with us. And that is good, because loose threads allow us to make connections.

Have you ever thought about why you can recall in your mind a place that you have not visited for many years? Why you can sometimes, in lucid moments, remember this place as clearly as if you were there? It is because you some of your dream threads are still tied to it. When you were in that place, one of your loose threads tied a knot around some rock or tree or doorpost there. And thus you became a part of the place, and the place became a part of you. This is how you remember: the thing you remember is still with you, because you are tied to it. And your memory of something is the richer, the more of your dream threads are entangled within it.

And have you ever thought about what love is? It is a form of intense entanglement of the dream threads of two people. That is why it hurts so much when someone you love dies. The soul of the deceased, travelling into Queprur’s realm, pulls on your dream threads, to which it is fastened; and thus it tears your dreams apart.

Another form of intense entanglement between two people, by the way, is hatred. Power is another. And fear, another.

Such entanglements – or connections – between people might be weak or strong, fleeting or durable, flimsy or robust. But they may persist over space and time. This is why love can endure even when the lovers have been separated for many years. It is why a bird that migrates hundreds of strals south in the winter always finds the way back to its home forest, and yes, even to the very tree on which it was born. And it is why Witchcraft works.

For witches, when they leave their everyday minds behind and dive into the web of dream-threads, can see these connections, and use them in their art. Say, for example, that a witch has obtained a lock of your hair. This hair, although apparently separated from you, is still connected to you through dream threads. For you cared for this hair once; you washed it and combed it, you looked at it in a mirror. It belonged to you; and because it once did, it still does. Its separation from you is only superficial. Never mind the scissors that cut it off – the connection persists. Now, the witch can use this connection. Taking hold of your lock of hair, she can pull on the threads that tie it to you, and thereby achieve effects that affect you. For example, she might weave this hair into a doll; and pricking this doll with a needle will cause you pain. Or the witch might spin your hair into a rope and tie the rope to a tree, and thereby draw you to that tree by a force as strong as if she held an actual rope in her hand that was tied to your waist. Or the witch might use your hair as an ingredient in a mixture she concocts, which will make someone into whose eyes it is dropped fall in love with you. Or she might enclose your hair in an amulet, and speak a charm, so that the amulet will become warm when you are near. In this way, someone wearing this amulet may find you and recognize you even if you are in disguise.

Abilities, Practice, Limitations, and Restrictions

“Thirteen needs has a man: food, drink, air; warmth, coolness, shelter; sleep, wakefulness, steadiness; embrace, beauty, wholeness; and silence. And thirteen desires he has: love; sex; friendship; respect; adoration; belief; solitude; invincibility, subservience, dominance; perfection; rules; immortality. These, my sisters, are the hooks. Like fish the men will swallow them and hang at the end of your line. But you must know the right bait.”Inconsistent semicolons and commas here - is that stylistic?

Hildula Hauntwell: “To Make Your Loved One Want You: Amorous Enchantment in Seven Times Seven Easy Steps” (Nyermersis, 945 a. S.)

To some extent, a witch’s skills are determined by her craft: the protection spells, magical banishments, and enchanted cloaks of a spell seamstress are a dream apart from the love soups, healing breads and pestilence pellets of the spell cook, or the spirit whispers and summoning rituals of the spell dancer. Also, it is clear that some “witch’s crafts” are more limiting than others. A witch who “embroiders” her spells must have access to a needle and fabric to work her magic, while a “rhyme-crafting” witch is limited only by her poetic imagination. However, the more experienced a witch grows, the less important those limitations become: a skilled spell seamstress may need no more than a few blinks to quickly stitch a pattern into her sleeve and thereby craft a charm.

Witches use five categories to describe the varying levels of ability among their kind. These categories are: the Gifted, the Witchlings, the Spell Crafters, the Dream Bringers, and the Handmaids of Harash. Outsiders that have encountered but one kind of witch, and have prematurely generalized from their experience, have therefore come to rather contradictory conclusions about witches: while some have said that witches are “wicked but weak”, others have called them “powerful and terrible as demons”. The following overview of the five stages of Witchcraft shall, we hope, help to dispel such confusion.

The Gifted. First, there are the Gifted. A Gifted One is a person who was born with a talent for magic, but has not learned to use it. As such, a Gifted One is not a witch, but may become one under the guidance of a teacher, who must herself be a witch. Of course, a Gifted One may instead train to be a different kind of magic practitioner, such as a mage, a druid, or a cleric. Furthermore, many Gifted Ones never develop their talents, but remain dilettantes, whose access to magic is sporadic and haphazard. Some even reject or deny their talent. Others, the so-called macanti, become charlatans who exaggerate their magical powers, and make a living from folk’s credulousness and superstition.

Witchlings (Apprentices). Second, there are the witchlings. A witchling is an apprentice, who is learning from an accomplished witch. Witchlings usually live with their teachers, and help them with everyday chores in exchange for instruction. Witchcraft is always taught this way: from witch to witch. According to the craft of their teacher, witchlings are referred to as “song witchlings”, “needle witchlings”, “cauldron witchlings”, and so on. The witches say that of every thirteen apprentices who start the path to Witchcraft, three will never pass beyond the skill level of a witchling – whether for lack of talent, lack of dedication, bad teaching, or bad luck (such as, say, the death of their teacher before the end of the apprenticeship).Bracketing not needed here - try 'bad luck - such as, say...'

Spell Crafters. Third, there are the Spell Crafters. These are ordinary witches, whose magic is limited to a small selection of specific spells that they have learned. Witches themselves rarely use the word “spell crafter”, by the way,Is 'by the way' really needed here? but refer to the individual witch’s craft instead, calling her a “spell singer”, “spell seamstress”, or “spell cook”, and so on. For nine out of every thirteen witches, spell crafting is the summit of their development. Spell crafters are therefore the most common of all witches, and the mediocrity of their skills has led some sages to conclude that Witchcraft in general is inferior to Ximaxian magic. May our readers make up their own minds about this point, but not before they have read on.

Dream Bringers. Fourth, there are the Dream Bringers, accomplished witches who are far more powerful than ordinary spell crafters. A dream bringer’s skills are no longer bound by the necessity to adhere to specific spells she has been taught. Instead, she is able to compose her magic freely. Rare is the witch who has the talent, the dedication, and the good fortune that are needed to become a dream bringer; and whoever rises to this level is highly respected among witches. The witches say that of every thirteen witchlings who begin an apprenticeship, only one will become a dream bringer. Like spell crafters, the dream bringers are commonly referred to by terms that are specific to their craft, such as “dream singer”, “dream seamstress”, “dream cook”, and so on.

Should these to be capitalised completely? It's currently a bit mixed.

Harash’s Handmaids. Last, we come to the most powerful witches of all, the terrifying Handmaids of Harash. They are the stuff of legend, and you are about as likely to meet one in your life on this disk as you are to meet a resonance dragon. Some witches say that a Handmaid of Harash appears only once every seven times seven years. Others say that the true number is closer to once every thirteen times thirteen years. In any case, a Handmaid of Harash is always an influential figure, and if one is around during your lifetime, you will either have heard of her, or have heard of events that she has caused, even if you don’t know that it is she who is at the roots of it all.

Witchcraft and Ximaxianism

The effects of Witchcraft continue to befuddle Ximaxian mages, as they defy the neat classifications and hierarchies that Ximaxianism prefers. For example, relatively undistinguished witches, who would fail at something simple such as conjuring a little wind to drive a fly off (an elementary Ximaxian wind spell), may nonetheless succeed in brewing a magically enhanced potion that temporarily change the appearance of anyone who drinks it (say, making their skin radiantly beautiful, or increasing the size of their teeth to give them the appearance of a donkey) – an effect that Ximaxians would consider to be an “enchantment” and a “Level 9-spell”, a level of skill that a Ximaxian can expect to attain only after decades of study.

Many Ximaxians have therefore concluded that witches must have supernatural help, and the theory that witches achieve their results through entering pacts with demons is rather popular even among archmages. Certainly, most mages are proud to distinguish their own profession from the “wild” magic of the witches, and would be greatly offended to be considered in the same category. Yet a few mages have shown interest and genuine curiosity. The archmage Kar-ii Turya Firebane’s treatise “On Ouidch-craft”, for example, presents a dispassionate account of what was known of witches at the time, and a valiant attempt at explaining both the witches’ world view, and the manner in which they achieve their magical effects.

Locations

Witches can work magic anywhere they can perform their craft. Obviously, if you want a spell cook to make a healing potion, you had best provide her with a kitchen, a large fireplace, and two dozen shelves full of ingredients suitable for her receipts. At a pinch, however, the spell cook might be able to make do with a campfire, a few herbs, and a drop of saliva that she scrapes off your tongue.

More intriguingly, groups of witches sometimes assemble in remote locations, such as high in the mountains or in forests, in order to combine their magical powers for particularly difficult or demanding spells that one witch on her own could not accomplish. Spell singers and spell dancers, in particular, are known for holding such congregations from time to time. Needless to say, witches are very wary of persecution, and many have withstood torture without revealing their sisters’ and brothers’ secret meeting-places.

History

Witchcraft has been practised for so long that no tale tells of its beginnings. Historians have speculated that Witchcraft provided some of the many magic weapons that came close to destroying the world during the War of the Chosen (9500-9000 b.S.). Yet even halfway reliable records only begin to appear in the subsequent Era of Consolidation (8500-3400 b.S.).

Ostracism and Persecution: The Era of Consolidation. At this time, the world was weary of magic, and its use was banned almost everywhere. The term “witchcraft” seems to have originated during that time. In Styrásh, the elven tongue, a “ouídsh” is a charlatan, or someone who practices twisted magic. And it is clear that from the beginning, Witchcraft was thought to be a sinister art practiced by malevolent sorcerers.

Punishments for the crime of Witchcraft were severe. The scant records from the Era of Consolidation available to us suggest that every year thousands of people throughout the continent of Sarvonia were burned, drowned, or otherwise executed for using magic. Since at that time no legitimate magical schools for humans existed, it is possible that the words “witch” and “witchcraft” may have been applied to any magic practitioner and any practice of magic, rather than specifically to what we today understand the terms to mean. In general, magic practitioners at that time were always suspected of intending to bring harm, even if (and indeed, especially if) they were apparently using their powers for harmless or even benevolent ends.

Thus, we know of a woman in Serpheloria who in the year 4523 b.S. was drowned for using a charm made from wizardleaf to bring a child back to life from the Black Death. And a document from what in 5511 b.S. was called “Hobbitshire” (today’s Helmondsshire), tells of a gardener who was burned at the stake for “enchanting his vegetables to have unnatural shapes and colours, and for growing corpseberries as big as pompions”.

Witchcraft and Ximaxian Magic. Around the year 2000 b.S., the institutionalization of magic began with the building of what came to be known as the Magical Academy of Ximax. At the time, mages were working hard to gain the trust of kings and common folk, who nonetheless remained suspicious. One way in which the early Ximaxians sought to gain respectability was to distance their own “controlled”, “virtuous”, and “scholarly” magic from the alleged “wild magic” of other magic users. Indeed, it was at this time that mages invented the term “black magic” to draw a firm line between the allegedly evil Witchcraft on the one hand, and their own “white, clean” magic on the other.

The First Sarvonian War. In the first millennium b.S., the Ximaxians gained prestige as their art supported the human armies in the three Sarvonian wars against the elves, and also helped to alleviate the suffering brought about by the war. Witches, on the other hand, who by now had a firm place in the public imagination as evildoers, were routinely blamed for undermining the human war efforts. During the first Sarvonian War (806-729 b.S.), witches were suspected of having dealings with the elves, because they did not participate in the battles. Spontaneous witch-hunts against the supposed “enemy spies in human lands” are said to have cost the lives of thousands of actual or suspected witches.

The Second Sarvonian War and The Night of the Hand. The Second Sarvonian War was even more disastrous for the reputation of witches. This conflict began on the infamous “Night of the Hand” (7th Singing Bird, 550 b.S.), when elven artifacts from the “Grave of the Leaders” of the First Sarvonian War were stolen by unknown thieves, while artifacts of the human heroes remained untouched. Suspicion fell on the elves, and the humans declared war. In 501 b.S., after almost fifty years of bloodshed, the humans surrendered to the elven forces, but were surprised by the elves’ magnanimity in victory, as they demanded no payment of reparations. This spurned rumours that the elves might not have been responsible for the war after all, and people began to put the blame on witches instead. Witches, it was said, wanted to provoke a new war to distract human rulers from persecuting their own misdeeds. This version of events is still widely believed to this day.

Indeed, the night after the seventh day in the month of Singing Bird, the date of the “Night of the Hand”, now has a firm place in the Santharian calendar. Superstitious folk believe that every year during this night, witches perform rituals that enhance their magical powers, and that they roam towns and villages to look for victims for their malicious machinations. So when night falls on the 7th Singing Bird, Santharians lock their doors, close their window shutters, and won't leave their houses until the morning. Many put blossoming branches outside their homes in the belief that the sign of the Tree of Life will fend off witches. The witches themselves, by the way, also tend to stay at home during that night, for they say that on no other day in the year have so many witches been hunted, caught, and slaughtered than at the anniversary of the Night of the Hand.

In any case, by the second half of the first millennium b.S., the term “witchcraft” had been all but synonymous with “evil magic” in most people’s imagination. Thus it comes that an elven sorcerer such as Saban Blackcloack (110-60 b.S.), who brought much destruction over humans, dwarves, and other elves, has come to be known as the “Witchking” in popular parlance, even though there is no evidence to suggest that witches were ever among his followers.

Witchcraft in the Santharian Kingdom. Even in more recent history, and specifically in the Santharian Kingdom, whose founding marks the Year Zero of our calendar, witches have continued to suffer persecution by authorities, as well as pogroms from enraged mobs. Although no Santhran has ever sanctioned a witch-hunt, provincial rulers and town patricians have often found it expedient to blame the witches for all kinds of ill befalling their grand or petty realms. Droughts, plagues, floods, deadly hailstorms, troll attacks, wars, and even holes in a duchy’s treasure chest have been ascribed to the witches’ machinations.

The witches’ situation is not helped by the existence of the so-called witchfinders: men and women who claim expertise in the art of finding and identifying the secretive witches, as well as to Not quite clear here. Perhaps try "as well as that of" here? extracting confessions from those suspected of witchery. Most witchfinders are solitary individuals, who travel the land and offer their services to anyone who will pay. Yet some dukes and lesser nobles have raised this occupation to a regular office, and keep a witchfinder at their court, in order to protect their family and their retinue from witches’ interference.

The Moundgraven of Cinnabark Ridge in southern Manthria is said to demand any family who wants to join his own by marriage to undergo a thorough examination by his witchfinder. The skill of this remarkable individual in detecting witches is said to be so great that none of the Moundgraven’s three daughters has yet been able to find a husband, even though the extraordinary beauty of the young gravionesses is beyond doubt, as is their father’s considerable wealth. The witchfinder in question has no wife of his own, by the way, but considers it his professional duty to carry out daily inspections of his protégés’ private chambers lest a witch may have placed an enchantment therein. By virtue of his office, he is therefore the only man, other than their father, who is permitted to spend time in the company of the gravionesses without the presence of a chaperone. We have heard rumours that the pleasures which this privilege affords on the one hand, and the witchfinder’s exactitude in judging the families of the gravionesses’ many suitors on the other, stand in causal relation to one another. Yet the witchfinder assures us that any such insinuations are entirely without foundation, and can only have been circulated by witches, who forever aim to thwart him in his noble work of exposing their foul schemes.

In short, being a witch in Santharia today remains a precarious occupation. In response to the persecution they encounter, witches have become rather secretive – which, while understandable, is liable to reinforcing"liable to reinforce", I think. the mistrust against them. The humble author can only hope that the present article, in conjunction with his report on the witches and their covens, Cut the comma which he intends to submit to the august Compendium soon, will serve to disperse the poison of mutual suspicion, and foster understanding between witches and non-witches in Santharia.


Footnotes

1: Harash’s name derives from the Styrásh word “háh'rásh” (“Utmost Spinner”), which has given rise to speculations that in an age long gone, the earliest witches learned their magic from elves. By the way, the Tharian word “hag” also derives from the same elvish root, and is of course an insult that few female witches who live long enough fail to encounter.

2: In her seminal work “On Ouidch-craft”  (Ximax, 1st century a.S.), the Archmage Turya Firebane has speculated that the witches’ idea of other worlds besides our own may have been influenced by the beliefs of those most mysterious of magicians, the Old Weavers. These Old Weavers, it is said, collectively left Caelereth around 800 years before Santhros, to enter what they called “The Web”, a world woven entirely of magic. Indeed, when witches gather in their covens and sit around their fire by night, they like to tell one another stories of how their most powerful sisters, the “Handmaid’sHandmaids of Harash”, are able to travel to other worlds, just like the Old Weavers did. We have even heard it claim that these dauntless witches visit the Old Weavers in their magic cities, and converse with them, and learn their secrets. Yes, some witches say that the real power of a Harash’s Handmaid lies in the fact that she has overcome death, and that when she leaves this world, it is only to continue her life in another. Since the author of this article has not been lucky enough to meet a Harash’s Handmaid, however, he has not been able to verify these assertions.

3: As we have said, Witchcraft is practised by both males and females. However, since among the witches women outnumber men by a ratio of about three to one, we have decided to use feminine pronouns in this compendium entry whenever we refer to a “generic” witch.

Thanks and aura, Ath!

I've corrected the mistakes, and taken up almost all your suggestions. Sorry for lack of colour - I'm in a bit of a rush this morning.

Thanks to your thoroughness, I have now realized that I had used the construction "liable to do something" wrongly for many years!

Okeydokey, I'll take over from here then and get it up on the site!  :thumbup: