Respectfully, I would disagree with your teacher; but I don't think "witch" means whatever you want it to mean. I think the Gods hold the egregore, and people have been drawn into their Craft in many ways at many times, but always into the same Craft.

Thanks! Nice to see another NZer here.🙂

Perhaps I’m looking through an ethnography lens. I see the harm the belief causes, but my first impulse is curiosity about how the idea functions in that society. I even hesitate to entirely discount its validity, as a cultural relativist and one who has had very strange experiences on occasion.

Do you mean the folklore is bad, or the folklorist’s attempt to impose their own world view on the lore is bad?

I started from Ronald Hutton’s assertion in “Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles” that the very last pre-Christian faith in Europe finally became extinct in 14th Century Lithuania. He said that included remote or underground faiths! So I always get excited to hear about later survivals.

There’s nothing wrong with plunging in where it gets interesting. I’d love to read more about Estonia. I remember Juhan Kahk describing the disdain that Estonian peasants had for Christianity and their continued worship at sacred sites until the end of the 17th Century.

“A Cabbage in a Nutshell” by Tin Can Forest

This is traditional to much of Europe. E.g. marauding groups of spinners who at times tore the trousers off any men they could catch and threatened them with castration. Or midwives who would strip and beat any man they could catch, and make him buy his freedom. See Duerr’s “Dreamtime” ch. 3&4.

Linked lists are in the Technic Lego range. You can build shops with plain Lego, but if you want to build machines you need Technic—and sooner or later, a linked list.

It’s not in wide circulation. I wish it were!