Wicca, Witch, Wicked
The ultimate source of this word is a mystery. I will not go into all the various possibilities and theories here, but the Online Etymology Dictionary has a good survey of them. Old English had a verb wiccian, which meant “to practice witchcraft; to tell the future”, and different theorists have different ideas about where that verb came from. A couple of the most interesting:
- Connected with the Old English word wigle, “divination”, and/or wig, wih, “idol”.
- Descended from Proto Germanic wikkjaz, “necromancer, one who wakes the dead”, related to waken and awake.
- Connected somehow with German wiehan and Gothic weihs, “consecrate, holy”.
In any case, from the verb wiccian came the noun wicca, which meant a “male sorcerer, wizard”. The feminine form of that noun was wicce, and this feminine form descended into Modern English as witch, while wicca fell into disuse and was lost — until it was picked up again by Gerald Gardener’s followers in the mid-twentieth century and adopted as the name of a religion.
The very oldest citations of wicce in context suggest that a wicce was only one of several different kinds of magic users; it appears in lists alongside words that mean herbalist, enchantress, and sorceress, and in other places is used to mean Magi and midwife.
As for wicked, it is derived from witch, and originally meant simply “witch-like”. As witches came to be viewed as evil, “witch-like” gathered bad connotations. Wicked was first used to mean “wonderful” or “cool” in the 1920’s.
The phonosemantics of the wic- element indicate a willful energy that is bound up, contained, perhaps for later release. You can see this also in the noun wick, which is fuel for a candle. In Wicca, the energy is released in such a way that promotes connection with the Source energy. In wicked, the contained energy is channeled towards a choice point of some sort; this may hint at why the word supports such opposite meanings. Witch, however, indicates willful energy that encounters a difficult, challenging resolution.
