Glossary
Sixteen terms that recur across this site, defined without ceremony.
- Athame
- A ritual knife, conventionally black-handled and not used for cutting anything physical.
- Besom
- A broom of twigs bound to a handle, used far more for sweeping thresholds than for anything airborne.
- Book of Shadows
- A personal working notebook. The term is mid-twentieth century, popularised through Gardnerian practice.
- Cunning folk
- Practitioners of everyday charm and remedy work in early modern Britain, generally distinguished in law and in local opinion from witches.
- Esbat
- A meeting held at the full moon, as distinct from the eight seasonal sabbats.
- Familiar
- An animal companion attributed to a witch in trial records, most often a cat, toad, hare or bird.
- Grimoire
- A book of instructions for ritual work. The great medieval examples were scholarly Latin manuscripts, not folk objects.
- Hedge
- The boundary of the settled land, and by extension the boundary a practitioner is said to cross.
- Hex sign
- A painted geometric barn decoration from Pennsylvania Dutch tradition, decorative in origin whatever the name implies.
- Nine Herbs Charm
- An Old English metrical charm preserved in the tenth-century Lacnunga, naming nine plants against infection and poison.
- Poppet
- A cloth or wax figure standing in for a person in sympathetic practice, attested in both harmful and healing contexts.
- Scrying
- Divination by gazing into a reflective or translucent surface such as water, glass, or polished stone.
- Sigil
- A designed symbol condensing an intention into a single mark.
- Wheel of the Year
- The eight-festival seasonal cycle assembled in the mid-twentieth century from Irish, Germanic and British material.
- Witch bottle
- A stoppered vessel of pins, hair and urine buried at a threshold as a counter-charm. Hundreds have been excavated in Britain.
- Wort
- An old English word for plant, surviving in names such as mugwort, St John's wort and soapwort.