WOMAN AS WITCH 13 



good, but the performance of which it would have been 

 impious to neglect. 



We have accordingly to look upon the witch as 

 essentially the degraded form of the old priestess, 

 cunning in the knowledge of herbs and medicine, jealous 

 of the rights of the goddess she serves, and preserving 

 in spells and incantations such wisdom as early civilisa- 

 tion possessed. She is the lineal descendant of the 

 Vola or Sibyl who, in the Edda, is seated in the midst 

 of the assembly of gods, and from whom Woden himself 

 must inquire his fate. She is also the lineal descendant 

 of the priestesses who, Strabo tells us, stood before the 

 Cimbrian army and read auguries in the blood of their 

 human sacrifices. The witch, like the priestess, is 

 reputed to have power over the weather, nor is the 

 reason far to seek. If we admit, as we must do, that 

 women were the earliest agriculturists, then we under- 

 stand how they must have observed the course of the 

 seasons and the signs of the weather. Their weather-lore 

 was like that of the peasant, who will often startle the 

 town-bred stranger by a promise on the most glorious 

 of mornings of bad weather towards night. The old 

 Chaldean astronomers obtained the reputation of magi- 

 cians, because they had learnt by experience the nine- 

 teen years' cycle of moon and sun, and could predict 

 eclipses. Plutarch tells us that Aganike, daughter of 

 Hegetor of Thessaly, befooled the Thessalonian maidens 

 by using her knowledge of coming eclipses "to draw 

 the moon out of the sky." A weather- wisdom, a power 

 of foreseeing coming changes, is what we have to attri- 

 bute to the old priestesses and woman -agriculturists. 



