Witches!

Is Witchcraft a belief system that has survived more or less intact since the beginnings of civilization or a modern construction?

The suggestion that we can trace witchcraft back in its current forms more than a few decades is ridiculous. It's even difficult to tell whether or not it actually died out and was reformed in a similar form a few decades ago.

People have tried to reconstruct what is done based on available (very scanty) evidence and cobbled together the rest from what seems comfortable. I'd suggest modern witchcraft is probably a reconstruction of much older practices. Much of the belief structure seems probably a modern creation to fit in with modern demands. We all know what happens if a religion tries to hold on to outmoded moral structure.

Is Druidism a belief system that has survived more or less intact since the beginnings of civilisation or a modern construction?

Modern Druidism can be traced back a couple of centuries. I see no evidence that modern Druidism is the same as Druidism when the Romans destroyed the Druid College on Anglesey in what is now Wales. There is incidentally little historical evidence that the Druids worshipped in stone circles. The Megalithic sites were built long before the Druids arrived on the scene. There's an obscure reference to a Temple of Apollo in Britain being used by people who sound like Druids in Herodotus' Histories. It has been suggested that this temple is Stonehenge in what is now Wiltshire, England, but it's not a convincing argument. Most other references date from the late mediaeval period or after and are too late to be reliable. The modern Druids use stone circles today. I feel it's good someone respects and uses these ancient ritual sites.

Is it true that only women can work magic?

Nope. I know there are some people out there who think that only humans who do not have a willy can work magic because (paraphrased) only women can bear children. Excuse me, but they do still need us. This suggestion seems as daft as the patriarchal idea that only a human with a willy can act as an agent of Yahweh, by the "logic" that all the Jewish prophets were male.

Are Wicca and Witchcraft the same thing? That is for you to decide, to some it is and to others it is not. Wicca is a modern religion based on the teachings of Alex Sanders and Gerald Gardner. Many Wiccans call themselves witches and I believe they are entitled to do so. However, I'm a witch and, do consider myself a Wiccan. To say that all Witches are Wiccans has the same logical structure as the statement that all birds are ducks. Can we leave this sort of behaviour to the Christians? Please?
Do witches work naked?

Some do, but only some of those who live in a warm climate or who work indoors with the central heating on. I don't. You might be able to work naked in Italy or Florida (provided you don't mind getting eaten by midges almost as savage as the ones we've got here), but you can't where I live. I know of some people who get undressed to work outside, then cover themselves in grease to prevent hypothermia. This appears to be defeating the objective. The Gods don't seem to be annoyed with me working magic in jeans and a synthetic fleece jacket, so I'm not going to change just because Charles Leland or Gerald Gardner said so.
Is magic spelled with a "k" on the end?

I just added a "k" to the word above and ran it through an American English spell check. It didn't recognise the word. The British English one didn't recognise it either. I know Evil Empire software is less than reliable (it didn't recognise "Wicca" either), but it makes the point. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary spells the word without a "k" and does not, as it usually does if there is an accepted variant, give an alternative spelling. Shakespeare spelled the word with a "k" ("Oh Royall Peece: There's Magick in thy Maiestie" [guess what the spell check thought of that] - copied verbatim from the SOED; I think it's King Lear). Surrey spelled it "magike". Both of these were writing before English was more or less standardised, so unless you want to argue that we should be writing about Wilyam Shaksper I think we should abandon "magick" as having no etymological merit. I know there is a convention that stage conjurers use "magic" to describe what they do and we use "magick" to describe what we do. However, I feel that stage conjurers can use the word "trickery" or "sleight of hand" to describe their practices. Some of them are very good, and we're all very impressed down here, but it's not magic.

Are we about to enter a Great New Millenium at all then?

I see no reason to make such an assumption. The Christian Millenium is based on an inaccurate and mathematically naпve calculation for the birth of a Jewish heretic. It's an accident of human dating imposed on the rest of us by an imperialist religion. Many cultures use completely different calendars anyway.

Was there ever such a thing as a Celtic Shaman?

The simple answer to this is that there are insufficient data to support the assumption. To point out that most primitive cultures have a person fulfilling shamanic responsibilities is not convincing in terms of "proving" the existence of the Celtic Shaman. In any case the term "shaman" is properly used only to describe the priest-magicians of certain Siberian tribes. It might be argued that the witches or the early druids fulfilled the same function. In this case I fail to see what the problem with calling a "Celtic Shaman" a "witch" actually is. In the case of the only Celtic Shaman I know the differences between my practices and hers are mostly semantic.

Are male witches called "wizards" or "warlocks"?

People suggesting this have probably been playing too many fantasy role-playing games. A male witch is called a witch. Synonymy between these three terms appears relatively recent or part of Scots or Northern English Middle English dialect (SOED). To use these terms could be regarded as meaningful English, but will probably only promote confusion. For this reason I feel the use of "wizard" or "warlock" should be discouraged.

* The observant will notice that it looks as if I've added an extra year here. This is because the Christians who worked out our calendar had no concept of zero at this time. Other cultures did, but censorship and burning libraries will do strange things to your outlook on the sciences. Thus the Julian and Gregorian calendars have no year zero.