I always believed in magic. Not in the fake magic of technology, nor in fantasy spells involving wands and absurd pseudo-Latin words, but in true magic: the hidden force that gives shape to reality, deciding every single event in our lives.
Nowadays most people in the West have lost sight of that mysterious force, but all cultures in the past knew of its existence. In Old English it was called wyrd. In Euskara it is called adur.
In modern dictionaries, the word adur is translated as "luck, destiny". This may seem strange to a contemporary sensibility, where "luck" and "destiny" are usually considered opposites: but for our ancestors, luck wasn't the result of random chance, and destiny wasn't something fixed, unalterable. All events in a human life were seen as the manifestation of that mystical force, the adur, the creative force that makes things happen.
In Euskal Herria, the adur has been traditionally linked to the world of witchcraft and sorcery. Sorcerers and witches (sorginak) are people who have learned to manipulate the adur, to use it for their own purposes. The word sorgin (usually translated as "witch") may derive, according to some authors, from the Latin sors ("luck, fortune, destiny, fate"), like the English sorcerer. But it could also come from the Euskal word sortu, "to create".
In any case, the words sorgin (witch, sorcerer) and sorgintza (witchcraft, sorcery) have negative or purely folkloric connotations for most people in contemporary Euskal Herria. That's why I started using the terms adurgin and adurgintza. These are not documented in any written records, as far as I know, but they are consistent with our oral tradition.
Adurgintza is the art of using the adur, of working with it in a conscious, purposeful way. An adurgin is a person who practices that art.
#sorcery#adurgintza#sorgintza#euskalherria
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