Warlock

Region/Culture: Northern Europe (the British Isles, chiefly England and Scotland)
Mythos: English Mythology, Scottish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: A male practitioner of witchcraft believed to have gained supernatural power by sealing a pact with the Devil.
Role in Mythos: The warlock serves as folklore’s male counterpart to the witch, a human traitor who exchanged his Christian baptismal oath for forbidden craft.
Relation to Humans: A warlock lived among ordinary people as a neighbour, soldier, or churchman, and was feared because nothing in his appearance set him apart. He was thought to use his power against the community that trusted him, blighting crops, souring milk, sickening livestock, and harming his rivals.

The staff went into the fire with the man. It was black thornwood, carved along its length with the small leering faces of satyrs, and Major Thomas Weir had carried it through the streets of Edinburgh for years, leaning on it in the kirk while his neighbours admired the fervour of his prayers. In April 1670 it burned beside him at the Gallows Lee, on the road between Edinburgh and Leith, and those who came to watch said the stick seemed to twist in the flames as though it did not want to go. Weir had named himself a warlock. He did it from a sickbed, confessing to people who at first would not believe a word of it, because the man they knew was the most pious in the city.

A warlock is a male witch. That is the short answer, and for most of the word’s life it was the whole answer, but the word carries more freight than that. It comes from the Old English wǣrloga, which binds together wær, a pledge or sworn covenant, and a word meaning to lie. A warlock, stripped back to its root, is an oath-breaker. A traitor. By around the year 1000 the term had already been turned against the Devil himself, the first and largest liar, and from there it drifted down onto any man thought to have done business with him.

In the Scots of the sixteenth century the word settled into its familiar shape. A witch could be a woman or a man, though the trials overwhelmingly hunted women; a warlock was specifically the male counterpart, and the logic that made him was grim and tidy. A man who took power from Auld Hornie, the Devil, had by that act renounced his baptism. He had sworn vows at the font as an infant and then, as a grown man, broken them for a darker patron. The oath-breaking was not a side effect of being a warlock. It was the definition. The English word for traitor had found the perfect traitor to land on.

There is no monstrous body to describe here, and that was always the unsettling part. A warlock looked like a man because he was one. He could be a neighbour, a soldier, an elder of the church. What marked him, if anything did, was hidden: the Devil’s mark, a patch of skin somewhere on the body said to feel no pain and shed no blood, pressed there by the Devil’s own hand as a sign of ownership. Witch-hunters undressed the accused and probed them with pins to find it. The terror of the warlock was not that he was strange to look at. It was that he was not.

The work itself was quiet. A man might be sought out after dark by someone wanting a neighbour’s cow to sicken or a rival’s child to fail, and for the right words and the right fee the thing would be arranged. Imps and lesser familiars were said to come to a novice first, teaching him his early charms the way a tradesman teaches an apprentice, and the more he learned the hungrier his ambitions grew.

What the pact bought was real power, or was believed to be. A warlock could call up spirits and set them to errands. He could turn the weather, raise a wind, sour milk, blight a field, send sickness into a house and lift it again. The North Berwick affair of 1590 turned on exactly this fear. A gathering of witches and warlocks, among them a man named Richie Graham described as schooled in conjurations, was accused of raising storms at sea to drown King James VI as he sailed home with his bride. The king took the charge personally enough to question the accused himself. A law followed in time that made witchcraft a capital crime, and it stayed on the books, in Scotland and England both, until 1735.

Weir’s own end came without a fight. Pressed to pray for mercy at the stake, the old major refused. “Let me alone,” he said. “I will not. I have lived as a beast, and I must die as a beast.” Then the strangling, and the fire, and the staff burning with him. His house on the West Bow stood empty for over a century afterward, shunned, and people swore they saw him still, a figure on a black horse wreathed in flame, or heard the tap of that carved stick moving along the cobbles at night.

The warlock’s weakness was folded into his strength from the start. He was mortal. He could be seized, stripped, pricked for the mark, tried, and burned, and unlike the creatures of older folklore he had no second body and no way back. His power was borrowed, and the lender was not kind; the same pact that armed him also owned him, and the soul was the price. He had broken one oath to gain everything, which left him with nothing to swear by and no one to trust. He was a man, and men can be burned. In the end the warlock was undone by the very thing that made him, the broken word, because a creature defined by treachery has, by definition, no loyalty left to shield it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a warlock?

A warlock is the male practitioner of witchcraft in English and Scottish folklore, the counterpart to the witch. He was believed to have gained supernatural power by making a pact with the Devil, and was feared as a man who could call up spirits, control the weather, and bring sickness or ruin on his neighbours.

Where does the word “warlock” come from?

The word “warlock” comes from the Old English wǣrloga, which combines wær, meaning a pledge or sworn covenant, with a word meaning to lie. Its literal sense is “oath-breaker” or “traitor.” By around the year 1000 it was being used for the Devil, and in sixteenth-century Scots it came to mean a male witch.

What is the difference between a warlock and a witch?

A warlock is specifically male, while a witch could historically be either a woman or a man, though witch trials overwhelmingly targeted women. In early modern Scotland the warlock was understood as the male equivalent of the witch, and the term carried the extra charge of treachery, since a man’s pact with the Devil meant breaking the Christian baptismal vows sworn for him at the font.

Who was the most famous warlock?

Major Thomas Weir, known as the Wizard of West Bow, is Scotland’s most famous confessed warlock. A respected and devout Edinburgh soldier, he confessed in 1670 from his sickbed to a secret life of witchcraft and was executed by strangling and burning, along with the carved thornwood staff he always carried.

What were warlocks accused of in Scotland?

Scottish warlocks were accused of using Devil-given power to harm their communities, including souring milk, blighting crops, sickening livestock, and summoning spirits. In the North Berwick trials of 1590, a group of witches and warlocks was charged with raising storms at sea to drown King James VI, and a 1604 law made witchcraft a capital crime that remained in force until 1735.