The skilful one

In my post "Wratch" I talked about an interesting linguistic "coincidence":

In Cornish and Welsh the word "wrach" means old woman, hag, witch. Fraic as in the placename Leitir Fraic is said to be an old obsolete Irish word for a woman. In Serbian, the word "vrač" pronounced "vrach" means doctor, physician, shamanistic priest, witch doctor, magician, warlock. The verb "vračati" means to cast spells, to divinate, to perform any magical action. The word is found in all South Slavic languages. 

In Serbian villages the role of "vrač" was usually performed by an old, wise, experienced, skilful woman who was then called "vračara", feminine form of "vrač". Vračara was the healer, midwife, amulet maker, spell caster, fortune teller, and basically keeper of "magical" and other ancient religious traditions and taboos. 

Basically "Vračara" performed the role of the good village Witch. 

Now what about the etymology of the word "witch"? 

On the Wiktionary page for "witch" we can read this about the etymology of this word:

"The word witch comes from Middle English wicche, from Old English wiċċe (“sorceress, witch”) f. and wicca (“witch, sorcerer, warlock”) m., deverbative from wiccian (“to practice sorcery”), from Proto-Germanic *wikkōną (compare West Frisian wikje, wikke (“to foretell, warn”), Low German wicken (“to soothsay”), Dutch wikken, wichelen (“to dowse, divine”)), from Proto-Indo-European *wik-néh₂-, derivation of *weyk- (“to consecrate; separate”); akin to Latin victima (“sacrificial victim”), Lithuanian viẽkas (“life-force”), Sanskrit विनक्ति (vinákti, “to set apart, separate out”)."

However on the Oxford University Press blog page "The Oxford Etymologist goes Trick-or-Treating"  written by Anatoly Liberman, we can read this about the etymology of the word "Witch"

"The etymology I find acceptable connects wicca with the verb wit “know” (as in to wit, the noun wit, witty, unwitting, and witless). Yet this derivation, arguably the best we have, is not flawless either. It presupposes the existence of witga (pronounced witya), the form that later developed into witch. The difficulty is that the combination tg (= ty) yielded (t)ch in extremely few words. However, the verb fetch was probably one of them. Old English had wita “wise man” and witega “wise man, prophet, soothsayer.” Witga, a third member of this family, would have meant approximately the same as witega, but with the accent on occult practices and knowledge of things hidden. If so, the negative meaning of witch developed later, under the influence of Christian teachings. Both wita and witega died out early, whereas witch has continued into the present. This reconstruction of the prehistory of witch has the support of Slavic: the Russian for witch is ved’ma “she who knows” (My comment: actually she who has knowledge ved + ima = knowledge + has). A similar form exists in several other Slavic languages like Polish where we find wiedźma.  Here ved– “know” being an easily recognizable cognate of wit."

Now here is something else which supports this etymology wit (knowledge) - witch (knowledgable):

In Serbian (South Slavic languages) there are two words that mean skilful, knowledgable, adept: "Vičan" (pronounced "vitchan") and "Vešt" (pronounced "vesht"). The word "Vešt" is the root of the Serbian word for Witch: Veštica, which means skilful, knowledgable woman. The word "Vičan" which means skilful knowledgable, and which also comes from "ved, vid" meaning "know", could have the same root as the word Witch meaning skilful, knowledgable woman... 

After all that is exactly what witches used to be...