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Witchsona 2015

Slavic Witch. 

Slavic witches were women who were smart, bright and have a lot of skills. Before Christianity they were very important society members. Legend say that the first witch got her knowlegde from God of magic - Weles. By a simple trick she made him say all his secrets. 

From what I’ve heard, before the Christianity took toll on the society, it was common to address women as either niewiasta - meaning one-who-doesn’t-know[-yet] - or wiedźma, meaning one-who[-already-]knows.

Addressing the women by their education status like that supposedly used to be common, although later it was mostly replaced by addressing the women by their marital status - pani (Mrs) or panna (Miss) - inserting Christianity into culture was what brought the change.

The word wiedźma is translated to hag or witch but such translation is mostly a result of interpreting this word trough Christian Latin in the Middle Ages. The Christianity of Middle Ages invented the use of this word in a negative context. I guess the reason was that the Christian Church had no control over the knowledge of those women, therefore interpreted them as a threat. (Note: being a one-who-doesn’t-know[-yet] even seems to had become something more socially acceptable than having the knowledge, at one point - according to the sources written in the Latin alphabet* - and therefore associated with Christianity. Hence the word niewiasta being translated simply as a woman.)

Despite word wiedźma being rooted in the word wiedza (knowledge,) it is heavily associated with magic, yes. One can argue that extensive knowledge about herbs (healing, nutrition,) rituals (holidays, customs, psychological and religious meaning behind them - so they could be subtly changed according to need) and such things - is a knowledge about magic, after all.

*Latin alphabet with some modifications is a basic alphabet used by the Polish language. It is unknown if any alternative alphabet for Polish language ever existed - either the language was spoken only, or all the recordings were later destroyed (just like almost all except for a few recordings of Bulgarian głagolica.) I’d argue the latter: the first clumsy attempt to write a sentence in Polish using the Latin alphabet is from an early 13th century, and Polish language (along with German, in many cities) was considered a language of the Polish State, long before that. So either nearly all the agreements within the state were made in spoken form only, or there was cultural colonialism involved.

Some suggest that the głagolica alphabet was a likely an alternative way for writing the Polish language down. It has letters for the distinctly Slavic sounds, and we already know that Christian Church was responsible for destroying most recording of it. At least some of that destroying was a result of clerks’ belief about głagolica writings containing magic. There is a description of monks collecting pieces of such writing from the necks of Slavic fighters’ corpses, and burning those pieces of writing for being “charms of devil’s sorcery.” Personally, I guess that those could simply be name-tags.

Thank you

I’ll add a bit about written language- it’s hard to believe that such a big community (and by it I don’t only mean Poland, but all Slavic nations- we are really really plenty and our languages didn’t really separate until 8th-9th century) wouldn’t have a written form of communication - that is for one. Secondly there are some clues that suggest existance of writen languages: mentions of pagan cult places with gods’ names written under icons, pieces of written texts that are wrongly attributed to Nordics (this is another topic of minimizing Salvs’ existence in Europe, thank you German and Prussian historians) but read rubbish if you try to apply any Nordic language, Cyrillic writing is way too complicated to be thought out just like that and early writings in Glagolitic are already adapted to the sounds of Slavic languages and have common regularity suggesting it did exist for a longer time to gain momentum and spelling structure and at best it was only a tiny bit changed/ popularised by Cyril and Methodius, who BTW were both part- Slavs and spoke the languages. Finally the word “to write”-“pisać” in at least Polish (and very likely majority of the languages of Slavic origins) comes from very different source than in western-European ones and is far, far dated than introduction of modern writing system (to paint instead of to scratch- you paint on wood, instead of scratching on stone and if the writing existed, I think the biggest fault of it was that it was done on wood, which as we know has usually little chances of survival if left alone in ground) .
Finally, finally after aggressive Christianisation in Poland there were few edicts issued by kings “to burn those pagan books”. They did, thoroughly, alongside any cult place nearby.
There’s a lot of literature on that particular subject in Russian, as they sometimes seem a bit obsessed with their “panslavia” ideal, but when you can weed out idealogism, a lot of interesting points remain.

I’ll let the ‘panslavia’ comment go, since I can’t resist anything on language origins. *g*

Just interesting that niewiasta has apparently become nevesta in Russian, which means, of all things, ‘bride.’ Seeing as brides were traditionally considered innocent, in other words, not knowing yet, it’s completely fascinating. 

I don’t really know, btw, just couldn’t help noticing. Fascinating stuff.

In Polish, “niewiasta” can be use as a synonym of miss/virgin, so I guess that Russian meaning is simillar. So we can say that mostly name “one-who-doesn’t-know[-yet]” is connected to virginity and sex life of woman. 

But then, when we are looking at the more spiritual and religious way (not historicial/language/sociological) understanding witches (wiedzmy) woman doesn’t need to be a wife to become a witch. According to legends only woman can teach other woman magic. But still - it’s a version from a fairy tale.