Words of Power: Naming the Wizard, Witch, Mage, and Sorcerer

by

Updated 31 August 2026 · 12 min read

Words of Power: Naming the Wizard, Witch, Mage, and Sorcerer

Whether a person who deals with the invisible is respected or executed has rarely depended on what they did. It has depended on what they were called.

That is the argument of this article, and it is not a metaphor about the mystical power of names. It is a straightforward historical observation with a body count. The same practitioner, described as a healer in one word and a witch in another, faces two entirely different futures, and the choice between those words has usually been made by someone with more power than the person being named.

So it is worth getting the words right. Starting with the ones we get wrong.

The English words, corrected

Wizard is not an old word, and it is not Old English.

It is Middle English, first appearing in the early fifteenth century, formed from wys, “wise”, plus the suffix -ard, which does roughly what it does in “drunkard” or “sluggard”: marks a person characterised by the thing. A wizard was a sage or philosopher. Someone notable for wisdom.

The magical sense arrives about a century and a half later, in the mid-sixteenth century. The learned man and the magic-worker were separate meanings, and the second grew out of the first at a very particular moment in European history, which is to say, just as the witch trials were getting going.

Witch is genuinely old. Old English had wicca, masculine, and wicce, feminine, alongside wiccecræft. The pairing is worth pausing on: English once had a male witch as a normal, unremarkable form. That form did not survive, and the surviving word acquired an almost exclusively female application. The grammar was flattened by the culture, not by the language.

Warlock is the sharpest of the four, and it did not begin as a male witch. It comes from Old English wǣrloga, from wǣr (“covenant, faith”) and -loga (“liar”). An oath-breaker. A traitor. The word was applied to the Devil before it was applied to a man, and it never lost the sense of betrayal. By the time it settles into Scottish folklore, the warlock is a man who traded a broken baptismal oath for the Devil’s power, which is the original meaning doing exactly what it always did. Anyone using it as a plain masculine of “witch” is using a word that meant something closer to “perjurer”.

Mage and magic come from Persia, by way of an insult. The root is Old Persian maguš, a priest of the Median religious class. It passed into Greek as magos, and Herodotus lists the Magi as one of the six tribes of the Medes. From there into Latin as magus, and eventually into English.

The interesting part is what Greek did with it. Mageia rapidly acquired a pejorative edge: foreign, suspect, the ritual expertise of outsiders as opposed to the proper civic religion of the polis. The word for “magic” in most European languages descends from a Greek term for “what those foreigners do”. Two thousand years later that has not entirely worn off.

And the Magi of Matthew’s gospel are the same word, which is why the same root can support both the wise men at a nativity and the accusation levelled at a rival.

Sorcerer is about lots, not fate. English took it from Old French sorcier, from a Latin form sortiarius, built on sors, sortis: a lot, a token drawn to produce an answer, and by extension an oracular response.

A sortiarius is therefore someone who casts or reads lots. A diviner. Not, as is frequently claimed, “one who influences fate”. The word describes reading the answer, not writing it. The difference is the whole difference between divination and magic, and it has been collapsed in almost every popular gloss of the word.

Four words, then, and each carries a different accusation: the wizard is too clever, the witch is the wrong sort of woman, the warlock has betrayed something, and the sorcerer is meddling with what should be left to the gods.

Africa: the vocabulary is precise, and the translation was not

African languages draw distinctions between kinds of ritual specialist that English simply does not have, and the collapse of those distinctions into one English word did real damage.

In Yoruba, a babaláwo is a “father of secrets”: a priest-diviner and keeper of the Ifá oracle, an authority on fate, medicine and conduct. The role is one of honour, and its deity is Orunmila. The corresponding title for a woman is ìyánífá.

Dibịa in Igbo names a healer, herbalist and diviner. The term carries something like “master of knowledge”. Respected, occasionally feared, and not a witch in anything like the Western sense. Further south, the Nguni isangoma is a diviner who works through the ancestors, and is distinguished from the inyanga, the herbalist. Two jobs, two words, and confusing them is an error inside the tradition, not just outside it. Across Central and Southern Africa the nganga is the ritual expert, and in Kikongo the nganga nkisi is specifically the one who works with minkisi, the containers of spiritual power.

Then there are the words that are accusations rather than professions.

  • Àjẹ́ in Yoruba describes a woman with mystical power, and it holds both possibilities at once: she may protect, and she may destroy. The tradition does not resolve this and does not want to.
  • Bemba has ubulozi for witchcraft and umulozi for the one who works it. This is not a job title. It is a charge.

What colonial administration and missionary translation did was take all of it (babaláwo, dibịa, isangoma, nganga, àjẹ́, umulozi) and render it as “witch” or “witchdoctor”. A word of honour, a word for a herbalist and a word of capital accusation were made into synonyms.

That is not a translation problem. It is the mechanism by which healers became criminals. And it is still running: witchcraft accusations across parts of the continent today are made in a vocabulary that colonial mistranslation helped build. African mythology, Yoruba mythology, Igbo mythology and Zulu mythology are all traditions in which the internal vocabulary is far more careful than the English that replaced it.

East Asia: legitimacy is written into the word

In Chinese mythology the oldest term is wu (巫), a spirit medium, attested as far back as the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang. Early on, a wu could be of either sex and could serve the court, interpreting dreams, calling rain, communicating with the dead. Over time the word feminised and drifted outward, away from the state and toward folk practice, and picked up suspicion on the way.

Compare the terms that stayed inside the institution. A fashi (法師) is a ritual master. A daoshi (道士) is an ordained Daoist priest. Both are respectable. Both describe people doing things a wu also did.

Japan makes the same point more starkly. The onmyōji (陰陽師) was a government official. The Bureau of Yin and Yang was part of the state apparatus established under the eighth-century legal codes, and its practitioners handled calendar-keeping, divination and the management of spirits as a matter of administration. Abe no Seimei is its most famous figure, and the shikigami he is said to have commanded are spirit-servants, not demons he consorted with. Nobody was ever burned for being an onmyōji. It was a career.

Meanwhile majo (魔女) means witch, is always female, and belongs to the imported and the fictional. Mahōtsukai (魔法使い), “magic-user”, is gender-neutral and modern. The yamabushi (山伏), mountain ascetics of Shugendō, sit across priest, monk and wizard, and folk tradition credits them with powers it also credits to tengu, which is a compliment and a warning in the same breath. See Japanese mythology for the wider field.

In Korea, the mudang is the shaman of folk religion, overwhelmingly female, central to the gut ritual, and socially marginal in a way that has persisted through Confucian, colonial and modern periods. The male practitioner is the baksu, considerably rarer. The tradition tells its own story about how this came to be: Princess Bari, thrown away at birth for being a girl, walks to the Western Heaven for the Water of Life and returns as the goddess who guides the dead. The office descends from a discarded daughter. The pattern in Korean mythology is the East Asian pattern in miniature: the state-sanctioned term confers standing, the folk term withholds it, and the folk term is the one attached to women.

Indigenous America: the healer, and the thing you must not be

Across Indigenous American languages the distinctions are, again, finer than English allows, and in several cases the most feared category has no European equivalent at all.

Among the Diné (Navajo), the hataałii is the singer: a ceremonial specialist whose knowledge is measured in the ability to perform long, exact, sung ceremonies. It is a position of standing and long training. Against it stands the yee naaldlooshii, “by means of it, he goes on all fours”: the shape-shifter. The accusation is grave enough that in many communities the subject is not discussed with outsiders at all. There is no benign version of that word.

The Haudenosaunee False Face Society are healers whose ceremonies use carved wooden medicine masks. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy has formally asked that these masks not be displayed or reproduced publicly, and that request is part of the record on this subject. They are ritual objects in current use, not artefacts.

Among the Lakota, the pȟežúta wičháša is the medicine man, working with herbs and ceremony, and wakȟáŋ names the quality of the sacred itself rather than the person who handles it.

In Nahuatl, the tlamacazqui was a priest, a formal office of the Mexica state, while the nahualli was a shape-shifter, the source of the modern nagual, and a figure of real fear. Tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror, is the divine version of the same idea: the god of sorcery, of the night, and of transformation, in Aztec mythology.

In Yucatec Maya the h-men, “the one who does”, is a working ritualist and healer whose role remains communal. In Quechua, the yachaq is “one who knows”. Further south, the Mapuche machi is a ritual healer who enters trance and climbs a carved pole toward the sky world, and serves the communal ngillatun rite. The office is usually held by women.

Two patterns hold across all of these. The healer’s title describes an activity: singing, doing, knowing, herb-work. The feared title describes a transformation. And the colonial-era translation of both into “sorcerer” and “witch” erased the distinction exactly as it did in Africa.

The magicians we name in stories

Once you can hear what these words are doing, the famous figures start to sort themselves.

Merlin‘s name is a small case study in itself. The Welsh form is Myrddin, and it is most plausibly derived from the place name Caerfyrddin, Carmarthen, which descends from the Romano-British Moridunum, “sea fort”. So the name does not mean “sea fort” and does not encode anything about wisdom or the elements; it appears to be a person back-formed from a town. And when Geoffrey of Monmouth put him into Latin in the twelfth century, he chose Merlinus rather than the expected Merdinus, a swerve usually explained by the fact that the obvious form sits uncomfortably close to French merde. The most famous wizard in English literature is named the way he is partly to avoid a joke.

Romania’s Solomonari show the opposite mechanism: a wizard defined by his book and his school, riding the weather, named after Solomon because a written source is what confers authority.

Väinämöinen does his magic by knowing the origin-words of things and singing them. In the Kalevala a contest of magic is a contest of who knows more, sung aloud. That is the naming principle in its purest form. See Finnish mythology.

Baba Yaga has no institutional title at all, which is the point. She is outside every naming system in Slavic mythology, and she is the one who asks whether you have come of your own free will or been sent.

And Tolkien’s Gandalf did not get his name from a meaning. Tolkien took it from the Dvergatal, the catalogue of dwarf-names in the Völuspá, where it sits in a list. The elements are usually read as gandr (a staff or wand, and by extension sorcery) plus álfr, elf. A wand-elf, in a dwarf list, borrowed by a philologist. Which is the next article’s subject entirely.

Modern fantasy names are coinages rather than etymologies, and it is worth saying so, because they get treated as evidence. Rowling’s Voldemort reads like French for flight or theft of death, and readers have been making that observation since 1997, but it is an author’s invention that suggests a meaning rather than a word with a history. The distinction is exactly the one this article is about.

Why it matters

To name is to draw a boundary. Healer or witch, official or outsider, consulted or accused. In every tradition surveyed here, the same practical skills (herbs, divination, dealing with the dead, negotiating with spirits) appear under words that decide whether the practitioner is paid or prosecuted.

And the words are not fixed. Majo in Japan is now as likely to name a sympathetic heroine as a villain. Babaláwo and dibịa are actively reclaimed by practitioners. “Medicine man” and “medicine woman” have recovered their standing in many Indigenous communities. “Witch” has been taken up deliberately by people who understand precisely what it was once used to do.

That reclamation is the same mechanism running in reverse, and it works for the same reason. Naming was never a decorative act. It has always been the part of magic that had teeth.

Further Reading

  • Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture 1736–1951 (1999), and Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History (2003). On what English actually called its practitioners.
  • Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (2005). Essential on the gap between what practitioners did and what the courts called it.
  • Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear (2017). The comparative sweep, and careful about the vocabulary.
  • Nwando Achebe, The Female King of Colonial Nigeria (2011). On the collision between Igbo categories and colonial ones.
  • Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (2018). Argumentative, and directly on accusation as a social instrument.
  • Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft (1997). On what the vocabulary is doing in Africa now, not only historically.

Explore More on Gods and Monsters