The Actual Meaning Of “Hag”

“A hag,” she says, “was once a holy woman.” And she smiles.

I watch her walk away, her perfect dancer’s legs, her straight back, her pewter curls escaping from the knot at the back of her head. If I were a man, I would fall at her feet.

Mary Sojourner – Hag

“Hag” as in an insult that refers to an apparently “repulsive old woman” still stings and amazingly, it’s trotted out to this day, most commonly against female politicans and performers.

It’s striking that there is no male equivalent and that it’s also the most misappropriated term possibly ever. How come? Well, it actually means Holy Woman. It not only once implied a female with metaphysical or shamanic powers, it was one of the titles of the goddess Hekate.

The historian Barbara Walker writes about how the word comes from the old German Hagazussa – a moon priestess – and says the hag’s cauldron as ‘sacred symbol of regeneration’ became a vat of terrifying poisons.

Other classic associations like Winter, night-time, black cats and ravens or crows were likewise downgraded into being downright suss.

Etymology Online says before the 16th Century, the meaning of “hag” was closer to ‘diviner or soothsayer’ and thrillingly, links it to the Hawthorn tree and the term “hedge-rider”:

“Later, when the pagan magic was reduced to local scatterings, it might have had the sense of “hedge-rider,” or “she who straddles the hedge,” because the hedge was the boundary between the civilized world of the village and the wild world beyond. The hægtesse would have a foot in each reality.”

The original connotation of liminal woman – Hekate rules crossroads and backroutes, she guided Persephone out of the underworld via a secret path – and wise, learned elder female – wasn’t lost overnight or struck out in one dictate. But it stuck, regardless.

Even the more esoteric of the mythologists and transcribers of old tales cast the hag as a hideous juxtaposition to the far more fetching character of the virtuous, virginal princess or immeasurably beautiful love goddess. She was not only assumed to be automatically enraged with envy at any younger woman, she could even shape-shift into one, purely to entrap feckless men.

“The Goddess is a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose,” wrote Robert Graves in The White Goddess, “…who will suddenly transform herself into sow, mare, bitch, vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome hag.”

But the hag as holy woman theme has returned in recent years: Angelina Jolie’s Malificent stripped back centuries worth of misogynist layers and returned it to something more akin to the original. The “hag” isn’t jealous of the princess, she nurtures her.

And the last three years have seen the release of Virago’s Hag – Forgotten Folktales Retold,  Hagitude – Reimagining the Second Half of Life by psychologist Sharon Blackie and Victoria Smith’s Hags – The Demonization of Middle-Aged Women as well as The Sacred Hag’s Oracle from author Danielle Dulsky.

She writes evocatively here about learning to follow the promptings of her ‘inner hag’:

The time of snow and shadow was upon us, and the jubilant hag who sits atop my ribs and skips stones in my blood made new demands. Leave nothing undone, she said. Harvest what’s hearty now. Gather your people. Stack the wood high. Take your lessons from the mountain-dwellers. Stock salt. Build a better fire.

Not that that sort of people likely to sling the ‘hag’ epithet at Madonna, Hillary Clinton, Julia Gillard, Courtney Love or Britney Spears – to name but a few – will care about any of this, obviously.

But still, thoughts?

Image: Remedios Varo – The Night Hag