A warlock is a male practitioner of

witchcraft Witchcraft is the use of Magic (supernatural), magic by a person called a witch. Traditionally, "witchcraft" means the use of magic to inflict supernatural harm or misfortune on others, and this remains the most common and widespread meanin ...

Etymology and terminology

The most commonly accepted etymology derives ''

warlock A warlock is a male practitioner of witchcraft. Etymology and terminology The most commonly accepted etymology derives '' warlock'' from the Old English '' wǣrloga'', which meant "breaker of oaths" or "deceiver". The term came to apply special ...

'' from the

Old English Old English ( or , or ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...

'' wǣrloga'', which meant "breaker of oaths" or "deceiver". The term came to apply specially to the

devil A devil is the mythical personification of evil as it is conceived in various cultures and religious traditions. It is seen as the objectification of a hostile and destructive force. Jeffrey Burton Russell states that the different conce ...

around 1000 AD. In early modern Scots, the word came to refer to the male equivalent of a "witch" (which can be male or female, but has historically been used predominantly for females). The term may have become associated in Scotland with male witches owing to the idea that they had made pacts with Auld Hornie (the devil) and thus had betrayed the Christian faith and broke their baptismal vows or oaths. From this use, the word passed into Romantic literature and ultimately into 20th-century popular culture. A derivation from the

Old Norse Old Norse, also referred to as Old Nordic or Old Scandinavian, was a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants ...

''varð-lokkur'', "caller of spirits", has also been suggested, but the ''

Oxford English Dictionary The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP), a University of Oxford publishing house. The dictionary, which published its first editio ...

'' considers this implausible owing to the extreme rarity of the Norse word and because forms without hard ''-k'', which are consistent with the Old English etymology ("traitor"), are attested earlier than forms with a ''-k''.

History

Although most victims of the

witch trials in early modern Scotland In early modern Scotland, in between the early 16th century and the mid-18th century, judicial proceedings concerned with the crimes of European witchcraft, witchcraft () took place as part of a series of witch trials in Early Modern Europe. In ...

were women, some men were executed as warlocks. In his day, the Scottish mathematician

John Napier John Napier of Merchiston ( ; Latinisation of names, Latinized as Ioannes Neper; 1 February 1550 – 4 April 1617), nicknamed Marvellous Merchiston, was a Scottish landowner known as a mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. He was the 8 ...

(1550–1617) was often perceived as a warlock or magician because of his interests in divination and the occult, though his establishment position likely kept him from being prosecuted.Julian Havil, ''John Napier: Life, Logarithms, and Legacy'' (2014, ), page 19

References

{{Witchcraft Supernatural legends European witchcraft Rebels Witches