What did you just call me, Hag?

    Witch, Wizard, Warlock, Druid, Hagan, Benandanti, Mage, Wiccan, Pagan, Shaman, these are all names for people associated with the use of magic, some times in a religious context sometimes not. Yet you would be surprised how important these can be to the people that hold them. How fiercely they will argue over the definition.

A popular favorite is the title of Warlock, commonly used today to refer to male witches in an effort to separate them from the feminized title of Witch. The word definition is a bit different. Where some hope to redefine it as male witch historically it is used to refer to a person that broke an oath literally meaning Oath breaker. In the magical world this occurs when someone inducted into a coven turns on his or her fellow witches and commits an act of betrayal.

They are then ritually divorced from the coven the nature of how this is done changes from group to group but generally taking the form of any letting go of negativity or banishment spell.

So it is understandable that some people chafe at hearing someone introduce themselves as a betrayer.

Benandanti is modernly known as a Italian Wiccan path and is less popular then the more common Striga or Stregheria is a system of Witchcraft with Italian roots, and the term itself is of archaic Italian origin. It’s most frequent contemporary usage indicates a form of ethnic Italian Italian Witchcraft originating in the United States, popularized by Raven Grimassi since the 1980s. Stregheria is sometimes referred to as La Vecchia Religione ("the Old Religion")The word stregheria is an obsolete Italian word for "witchcraft", the ordinary Italian word being stregoneria. 

While Benandanti is not so much a path as a birth right In Italy when a man or woman was born with a birth veil or cowl, then were assumed to be dream walkers that could never drown and when fostered out to be taught magic by other Benandanti. The cowl its self was often sold as a protection amulet to sailors. Now as this birth phenomenon only occurs in one out of every hundred thousand births it is a bit understandable why this branch of the craft died out. Fresh recruits were hard to come by in a localized area and with the proliferation of the church you could no longer proudly proclaim the difference of your child’s birth. Instead having to hide it, or in the case of some Christian converts kill the devil child.

Now modern witches are a self-educated lot   as there are very few Wiccan Temples to go to for guidance. By and large they find books that speak to them normally through referral by others sometimes through the hard won effort of finding it themselves. So we do tend to not consider the fact that someone could be educated differently then others have their own definition of a title, or simple have inherited a family definition if they were taught by an elders verbal instruction.

So it is important to remember we are all one. The spark of magic unites us across the Babble line, and it doesn’t matter what it’s called.