A warlock is a male practitioner of witchcraft.
Etymology and terminology
The most commonly accepted etymology derives
from the Old English , which meant "breaker of oaths" or "deceiver".
The term came to apply specially to the
devil around 1000 AD.
In early modern
Scots language, 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
Romanticism literature and ultimately into 20th-century popular culture. A derivation from the
Old Norse varð-lokkur, "caller of spirits", has also been suggested,
but the
Oxford English Dictionary 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 were women, some men were executed as warlocks.
[Thomas Thomson, A History of the Scottish People from the Earliest Times (1896), page 286: "Where one man suffered as a warlock, ten women at least were executed as witches."][Robert Chambers, Domestic Annals of Scotland: From the Reformation to the Revolution (1874), page 244][ Journal of Jurisprudence and Scottish Law Magazine (1891), Execution of the Judgment of Death, page 397: "We read (Law's Memor. Pref. lix.) that 'one John Brugh, a notorious warlock (wizard) in the parochin of Fossoquhy, by the space of thirty-six years, was worried at a stake and burned, 1643.'"]
In his day, the Scottish mathematician John Napier (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.[Roger A. Mason, Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603 (2006, ), page 199][Julian Havil, John Napier: Life, Logarithms, and Legacy (2014, ), page 19]
