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.
as a Croatian person I can see niewiasta in Croatian nevjesta, vhich is also used for a girl who is getting married (the bride)..it can also be used for your brother’s wife or can be interchangeable with snaha (you’r son’s wife) whom are sometimes seen as evil temptresses (Striborova Šuma - Stribor’s Forest)
(my own interpretation, not a linguist here so beware!)
There are some archeological finds of glagoljica in Croatia, but as for the decline of paganism down here it is said that it happened really slowly, because we were all over the place so it was going on throguhout the 12th century…but it was because one of our rulers converted to Christianity that we lost most of our monuments… he had all the temples and statues brought down.
(just writing these from memory.)
thank you very much for the commentary on adressing women by status! :D
(trying to write something about 12th century Croatia and muddling through tonnes of resources of debatable quality.)
So many interesting topics under one post!
First of all, it’s also curious how many words for the witches and their specializations do we have. There is the wiedźma, roots of which are described precisely above, older form: wiedma; there is the czarownica / czarodziejka / czarodzielnica (derived from czary = spells); the szeptunka or szeptucha (= whisperer) who are still quite many in numbers nowadays; the jędza (this is the word that would originally mean an evil witch or hag) and baba jędza / baba jaga; the word baba itself meaning just an old woman associated with great knowledge and experience (the word babcia = grandmother is a diminutive form of it), thus for example the Babia Góra / Babia Hora (meaning Mount of Baby <- plural form of a baba) on the Polish-Slovakian border that was believed to be a place of the witches’ gatherings in numerous folk tales; in the old days the woman assisting in childbirth, providing the pain-relieving herbs and later helping in taking care of a newborn was also called babiarka or babka; woman having the greatest knowledge about herbs and healing with them was called zielarka (female herbalist); the one telling the future was called wieszczka; the one performing old rituals was called guślarka… Plus many many more words coming from various Polish dialects. Most of these words have both female and male forms, as even though the Polish nouns as such are gendered, the access to knowledge wasn’t restricted to a gender in the past (although women were praised in this field for their better patience, intuition and understanding). Moreover, the word wiedza = knowledge is a female noun in Polish language.
Most of these words acquired negative connotations in circumstances already mentioned above. Interestingly, in Poland there was much less interest in the medieval witch-hunt in comparison to the West and apart of the cases of condemned herbalists (indeed, many feared their knowledge), numerous of the recorded cases appeared to be caused only by “unfortunate” land ownership - the imposed Western laws beneficial to males at that time were used for taking over the properties. Throughout the history of Poland, properties could have been legally inherited by women of the clans, later of szlachta, without any problems or forced marriages if it was decided so within the family or there was no male descendant left (later in history this appeared to be crucial - during the times of 19th-century Partitions when the state was erased from the maps and most of the men perished in the wars and uprisings, it was mainly the Polish women who were protecting their old lands in the term of legal rights and keeping the old traditions alive, while everything old-Polish was often banned and meant to be erased from the cards of history).
Coming to the topic of language, I just have to mention how I love what is considered the first old-Polish/Silesian sentence written down in an old Latin manuscript (Book of Henryków), which is translated to sth like “let me, I shall grind [the hand-mill], and you take a rest” said by a husband to his wife, interesting enough to the Western monk to include it in the manuscript - as apparently the hand-mill work was associated with an activity performed only by women back then.
As it comes to the old-Slavonic forms of writing, there’s indeed less and less doubt about their existence with more of actual analysis performed, cutting off the “legacy” of old totalitarian archaeology schools and finally taking into consideration the tragic loss of old artifacts destroyed during the Balto-Slavic crusades (do not forget about them). As was mentioned above, Slavs were often using wood - still nowadays coping well with the woodwork (e.g. the relatively small Poland is the fourth/fifth largest exporter of furniture globally and Polish workers are very often desired in the Western corporations dealing with wood that come higher in that rank!). Slavs were called the “culture of wood” as opposed to the Western “culture of stone”, with Slavic wood-and-earth early medieval castles (gords, in Polish: grody), earth kurgans and sacred “temples” enclosed with wooden palisades (archaeological sites often include remains of old sacred trees, roots of one were even discovered on top of Kopiec Kraka) as opposed to the stone castles, stone circles and runestones. And yes - both “wood” and “stone” cultures were having some elements of each, but there were significant groups of predominant characteristics as mentioned.
There are the records of for example, namely, statue of Svetovid in Arkona clearly described as signed with marks of a meaning, there are some runes that make actual sense only when Slavonic languages are applied on them (Norse “Vikings” and Western Slavonic “Chąśnicy” were the same “profession” around the Baltic sea region that shared some cultural elements with each other), there are the numerous tamgas, pottery signs and house marks (gmerki/merki) discovered in the course of archaeological excavations, there are the tamgas and runes in the coats of arms of the Slavonic nobility clans, there are the ancient ownership signs of the Kashubian fishermen or beekepers from Poland that were inherited in families and still in use even at the beginning of 20th century, finally - if someone wants to actually explore more - I would put my eyes on the old embroidery (and theories of Slavic “talking knots”), e.g. the surviving Eastern traditions of preparing the ritual rushnyky [ruszniki / ręczniki obrzędowe] with historical records of women claiming that they still can’t write or read but they always know the precise stories and meaning behind the old signs embroidered on their sacred cloths and the blouses.
As it comes to the verb pisać, it cannot be analyzed without the connection to the old pisanki that were also decorated with meaningful symbols for the rituals of welcoming the spring, later adapted to Christianity just as many other old-Slavic customs.
madzwierzwithinternet