14 WOMAN AS WITCH 



It was a knowledge which appeared to the folk as 

 magic, and its fossils are to be found in the power 

 attributed to latter-day witches of producing thunder 

 and hail at will. Learned in medicine, cunning in 

 weather, leader of the folk in sacrifice, such appear to 

 be the characteristics of the old priestess as fossilised in 

 the attributes of the mediaeval witch. Let us pursue 

 these ideas further into the ceremonies and symbols of 

 early witchcraft. 



The equivalent for witch in modern German is 

 Hexe, but in the oldest forms it appears as hagazusa, 

 hagetisse (Swiss hagsch, and our English hag). The 

 hagetisse can, I think, mean nothing else than the 

 woman of the Hag, Hagen, or Geliag that is, the fenced 

 or staked enclosure. This might mean, and likely 

 enough in later times was used for the grove or sacred 

 Hain of the goddess, but in early times it far more 

 probably referred to the fenced dwelling of a clan or 

 group. 1 This fenced dwelling as home of the group was 

 the seat of its deity, and the transition from the tribal 

 mother to priestess, from fenced dwelling to sacred 

 enclosure, is natural and direct. But the origin of 

 witch in the woman of the Geliag is of considerable 

 interest, for it suggests a male correlative in the 

 Hagestalt, the Stalt, or male servant, fighter, domestic 

 of the Gehag. The Hagestalt is the man who has not 

 his own household, the member of the Gehag group. 

 In the Eheinpfalz it means to-day the man without 

 children, whether he be married or not. Later on it 

 came to be used for the wifeless man, and ultimately in 



1 See Essay XI. for a further discussion of the whole subject of the Hag. 



