Which Witch is Which

Hallowe'en has been passed down to us from antiquity. It was one of the ancient festivals important to people struggling to survive the seasonal cycles. It was part of their beliefs, referred to as The Old Religions by the people who set out to propagate new religions. 

Those who resisted conversion to new faiths were portrayed in a negative light very much in the manner modern politicians are trying to portray each other to gain favour at the polls. That's probably how these old pagans became witches and how witches became evil.

It would appear that among our ancestors a couple of thousand years ago were those who did not idly sit around waiting for someone to invent new religions for them. They carried on celebrating the festivities to mark the seasonal cycles. 

Today, we still observe these festivals as the sanitized and politically corrected versions of Christmas, Easter, the summer solstice and Hallowe'en. 

There can be little doubt that some form of witchcraft has been a fact of life in every early culture right from its beginnings, but modern media hype has reduced the witch to about the same level of credibility as the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny.  

These attempts to make witches irrelevant 
worked, but not too well. Witchcraft has not entirely disappeared. I had personal contact with it before the middle of the 20th Century when I was too young to even give it a thought or talk about it. Now, as I look back over the events of my life, I see my own experience with witches was an ordinary event that lacked the excitement that we have come to expect in the pages of literature. Here's how it went.

When I was about 5 years old, I developed runny ears. It was an inner ear infection, a common enough ailment in the days of log-and-clay cabin walls, no central heating or ventilation, outdoor toilets, excessive tobacco smoke and poor sanitation. 

My parents decided to take me to a local witch baba who had a reputation for dealing with such matters. The people of East European background I grew up with in rural Saskatchewan referred to the healing (good) witches as Witch Babas. In those cultures, Baba is almost a universal term for Grandma.

The bad witches who caused cows to stop lactating or the hens to stop laying were called the Witch Widmas (phonetic).

Another category of witches who were believed to cast evil spells (chari) were referred to as Chariwnitzas. So were witches real? Yes indeed. They were as real as you and I.

It was a witch Baba my parents took me to see. The woman tore an old pillow case into strips, soaked them in melted paraffin and wound them around a spindle to form a pair of tapered tubes less than a foot long. She then produced scissors and proceeded to snip off the pointy end of the tubes to make sure there was a clear passage. Positioning my head on a pillow with left ear up, she stuck the thin end into the ear canal, struck a wooden match to light a hand-rolled cigarette before igniting the other end of the tube.

While she sat there, quietly sucking on the cigarette, the tube burned slowly, creating an oddly warm sensation deep inside my skull. I'm not sure, but I think I felt better after both ears were treated like that. I might have even dozed off. When you're four or five years old, you really haven't much information to compare things with, so it's hard to tell how well it worked. But here I am today, on my 82nd orbit of the Sun and, while my hearing has grown quite selective over the years, I still hear as much as I need or want to without electronic aids in a noisy city environment.

My parents didn't take me to a real doctor because it was the depth of the Great Depression and there wasn't much money available for such frills as certificated medical attention. And even if they had, the results probably would have been a tonsillectomy or the removal of some other easily accessible part of the lymphatic system that was unlikely to cause too much long-term damage. The tonsillectomy was a popular operation in those days and no doubt generated much ready cash for the cash-strapped medics of the day.  

That was my personal experience with witches. A few years later in school, I saw a friend have his warts removed by a witch baba. This kid's hands were so warty that he sat on them just to avoid people's stares. Popular wisdom at the time was that it was possible to contract warts simply by handling toads. Since there was no shortage of toads for us to play with in the Prairie environment, this was easy to believe.

One day he confided in me that his mother had an appointment to take him to see a local witch baba on the night of the full moon. Sure enough, the moon waxed, the deed was done and my friend came to school with ordinary hands, still not terribly clean, but with nice, pink patches where the warts had been only a week earlier, and which he proudly showed off to anyone who asked to see.

Curious, I asked him how it was done. He described a scene that involved an open fire, toothpicks, a pot of melted paraffin, gestures with a large scary-looking knife, and much low-pitched mumbling. I assumed that it was an incantation or some weird mumbo-jumbo like that. There was, and still is, much discussion to the effect that warts are suggestible.

It is fairly common knowledge that in all cultures, witches were the apothecaries, reputed to be well versed in the wisdom of the healing arts and the local flora that provided the healing potions that people needed to get them through their illnesses, real or imagined. It is possible that their well-recorded successes attest to the fact that many illnesses have a strong imaginary component. That is why there is a lot of medical research going on into the placebo effect right now, but that's another story.

These people were the direct forebears of our modern vitamin shops that sell you pills and potions for just about every physical deficiency you can imagine. Their rate of success and failure could be measured by the statistic that in some cultures, one had about a 50 percent chance of reaching adulthood. What that percentage might have been without the witches we can only speculate on. It ought to be mentioned here that the proof of the 50 percent figure seems a good estimate when one checks out the grave markers in the abandoned old cemeteries which seem to be populated heavily by children.

There was a darker side to witchcraft. The witches were expected to perform a function which every community needed and nobody wanted to talk about because it was controversial even then: abortion.

It is generally understood that many of these women were very skilled in that function. Knowledge of the local flora and fauna gave them the materials they needed to do the job effectively without endangering the lives of the women involved any more than they needed to. Popular wisdom has it that their traditional skills made the modern abortionists wielding the equivalent of coat hangers and vacuum cleaners look like fumbling amateurs by comparison.

It is also this function that got the witches into trouble. Being in possession of knowledge of whose wives and daughters of local officialdom needed their services no doubt resulted in many of those witch burnings we read so much about. It is also probable that this was where some of the more grotesque and unbelievable mythology involving association with the Devil originated to justify the burnings in the eyes of the rest of the community.

Witchcraft has been romanticized and demonized by the tellers of tall tales both in folklore as well as print after Herr Gutenberg developed the means to mass produce writing, but the truth is, the practitioners of the "Black Arts" were valued members of every community throughout the known world. They wouldn't have been there if their services were not needed.

Clearly, the witches were as vital to our ancestors in every community as were the brewers, the bakers, the blacksmiths, the cartwrights, wheelwrights, the coopers, millers, farmers, gardeners, tailors, thatchers, etc.

A woman who is said to have filled the role of witch in our community in Saskatchewan during the early part of the 20th Century practiced her craft secretively from a log cabin set near a road in a dense poplar bush lot near the edge of town. By the time I was old and big enough to ride my bicycle along the trail to the nearest general store, she was no longer there, but her reputation lived on.

A series of small mounds near the abandoned and decaying log cabin were said to be where she had buried some of her handiwork. It is possible that those tiny mounds were nothing more than piles of dirt pushed up by tunneling blue-assed moles which infested the prairie farmland, but our local tellers of tall tales hinted they were otherwise, especially around Hallowe'en. That was enough to discourage our hanging around that abandoned log cabin in the woods any more than we absolutely needed to. 

That is how rural as well as urban communities functioned in the days when people were valued for demonstrable skills, not simply for that certificate on the wall.

We don't know how many witch Babas were awarded the Order of Canada for what they did, but there is much speculation that they had a hand in promoting the award to the late abortionist, Dr. Henry Morgentaler.

This man was lucky he practised his craft in a hyper-permissive social consciousness. In another time, he might have run the risk of premature cremation.