Witch Name Generator

There was a real place where the witches lived

Look down the names in this generator and you will find one that is not a name at all. Thessaly.

Thessaly is a region of northern Greece. It has plains, horses, and a mountain the gods lived on. And for something like a thousand years, everyone in the Mediterranean world was certain that its women were witches.

Not vaguely. Specifically. Thessalian witches were famous for one thing: they could pull the moon out of the sky.

We know the reputation was universal because of how a comedy uses it. In Aristophanes' Clouds, written in the fifth century before Christ, a character in debt has a bright idea. Hire a Thessalian witch, have her draw down the moon, and keep it in a box. No moon, no months. No months, no interest payments.

It is a throwaway joke, and that is exactly why it matters. Aristophanes never explains it. He expects an Athenian audience to laugh immediately, which means every person in that theatre already knew about the strange women up north and what they did to the sky.

The reputation outlived Greece. Virgil, Horace and Ovid all reach for the Thessalian witch when they need to signal magic at its most extreme. It became a stock phrase, and it eventually became a ritual name in modern witchcraft, which is how a joke about a debt in ancient Athens ended up in a book of shadows.

The witch who knew when the eclipse was coming

One Thessalian witch has a name, and her story is the best thing on this page.

Aglaonice is mentioned by Plutarch and in an old commentary on the Argonautica. She was the daughter of a man called Hegemon, and she was famous for drawing down the moon.

She was also, according to those same sources, an astronomer. She understood lunar eclipses. She knew when they were going to happen.

So she would announce that she was about to pull the moon out of the sky. And then the moon would darken, on schedule, in front of everybody.

Read that again, because there are two ways to read it and both are true. She was a fraud. She was also right. She possessed genuine knowledge of the heavens at a time when that knowledge was rare, and the only vocabulary available for a woman who knew things about the sky was witchcraft.

The old commentary adds a detail that is hard to shake. It says the trick cost the Thessalian women dearly, and that Aglaonice lost one of her own family for what she did.

Whatever else it is, that is a story about knowledge being mistaken for power, and then punished as though it were.

Half these names are plants

Now look again at the list. Asphodel. Celandine.

These are not invented. They are flowers, and they are the right flowers.

Asphodel grew in the meadows of the Greek underworld, the pale field where the ordinary dead go. Celandine is a small yellow thing that appears in hedgerows in early spring, and it has been in the herbals for centuries.

This is not decoration. It is the oldest true thing about the figure of the witch.

Before there was any question of devils and pacts, there were people in villages who knew which plant stopped a fever, which one brought on a birth, which one eased a death, and which one did all of that in the wrong dose. That knowledge was practical and it was mostly held by women, because it lived in the household rather than the university.

A name like Celandine says something a name like Zarael never can. It says this person knows the hedgerow. She knows what is growing in it, and she knows what it does to you.

The plant names in this list are the herbalist. The stranger, older-sounding ones are the sorceress of the poems. They are two different characters, and the name you pick decides which one walks into your story.

The word meant a man just as often

English used to have two forms. Wicce was a woman. Wicca was a man. Both practised the same craft and both were called by the same word underneath.

The word narrowed later, and once it had narrowed onto women, English needed something else for a man. What it reached for was warlock, a word that has nothing to do with magic at all. It comes from an Old English term meaning oath-breaker.

That single swap tells you a great deal. The woman got the old craft word. The man got a word meaning traitor. Neither is a compliment, and only one of them is about magic.

A note about the women who were actually accused

It is worth saying plainly, once, that the witch trials were real, that they killed people, and that most of those people were women.

And here is the part that matters for a page about names. None of them were called anything like the names in this generator.

The records are full of Agnes, Alice, Janet, Margaret, Elizabeth. Ordinary names, belonging to ordinary neighbours, most of them poor, many of them old, quite a few of them known locally for exactly the sort of herbal knowledge described above.

The beautiful strange name is a later gift. We gave it to the witch after she stopped being a real woman standing in front of a real magistrate, and became a character instead.

That is not an argument against using these names. It is an argument for knowing what you are doing when you do.

Naming a witch

The tradition gives you three doors, and they lead to different rooms.

The plant. Grounded, practical, unshowy. This witch has hands and a garden. She is the one the village goes to at three in the morning, and the one they blame in the spring.

The place. Thessaly. A name that is a location tells the reader she is from somewhere with a reputation, and that she has probably left it.

The strange one. The names with an unfamiliar shape belong to the sorceress of the poems, the one who draws down the moon. Grand, remote, and much harder to make sympathetic.

One practical thing. Give the reader something to say. Half of these names are also words, and a name that is also a word carries its own meaning quietly, without you having to explain a single thing about the character.

How the list was gathered

The names come from a list our team researched and checked by hand, drawing on plants, on the classical world, and on the older shapes of the tradition. One is chosen at random each time. It runs on your own device, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Questions people ask about witch names

Why is Thessaly a witch name?

Because for most of a thousand years the region was synonymous with witchcraft in the Greek and Roman world. Its women were said to be able to draw the moon down from the sky, and writers from Aristophanes to Ovid used the phrase as shorthand for magic at its most extreme.

What does drawing down the moon mean?

Originally, quite literally pulling the moon out of the sky, usually to harvest something from it for a potion. It survives today as the name of a ritual in modern witchcraft, where the meaning has softened into an invocation rather than a theft.

Was Aglaonice a real person?

Scholars are not certain. She may have been historical, or a figure who had already collected legends by the time Plutarch wrote about her. What is beyond doubt is what the story says about her, which is that she could predict lunar eclipses and used them.

Why do so many witch names sound like flowers?

Because the historical version of this figure was, more often than not, somebody who knew plants. Herbal knowledge was practical, it was mostly held by women, and it is the one genuinely real skill sitting underneath the whole legend.

Can a man be a witch?

In Old English, straightforwardly yes. There were two forms of the word, one for a woman and one for a man. The word narrowed to women only later, and the replacement word English found for men was not a magic word at all.

References

1. Aglaonice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aglaonice
2. Thessalian Witches. Ancient History Magazine, Karwansaray Publishers. https://www.karwansaraypublishers.com/en-us/blogs/ancient-history-blog/thessalian-witches
3. Moon Schemes. Lady Science. https://www.ladyscience.com/essays/moonschemes-eclipse2017