Widdershins

adverb. in the wrong way, counterclockwise, against the way things should be. going against the natural course of the sun's movement, or the movement of events.

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair: hover through the fog and filthy air.”

Shakespeare, Macbeth Act I, Scene i

“You never miss the water until the well runs dry” is an easy cliche. But it’s becoming a kind of shared experience that we’re compelled to navigate. One thing that’s been removed recently from our collective experience is the safety in assuming that progress is a shared objective, or that inherited norms are reliable.

Looking back to the early 1500s, the word widdershins meant counter to the sun—counterclockwise. In early English and Scottish folk tradition, circling widdershins wasn’t just a reversal; it involved knowingly inviting malice. Walking that direction meant summoning what was feared, casting spells, or invoking what ought to stay buried. A conscious preference for curses over the crop.

What unfolds before us today is exactly that: a kind of progress best defined as the momentum of retreat. Norms slide. Established meanings drift away. We watch, passively, as a society stops building toward the horizon and instead tears down its scaffolds to fortify the mausoleum. There’s a feverish urgency to repeal and un-name. Call it what it is: curse work. A new kind of dark magic, really. By legal sleight of hand, existing protections are reinterpreted to restore the comfortable darkness—the obscurantism—of earlier centuries.

And so it unfolds as if the world is engaged in an extended hike into headwinds. It takes you double the work to make a forward step, and every pause sends you drifting back toward a path you thought your ancestors had fenced off generations ago. What makes now so strange isn’t that things move in reverse (we all know how many things have been unmade through history) but rather that reversal and revenge are the stated destinations. Retreat isn’t a tactical maneuver, and revenge is no longer a motive anyone bothers to hide. We mostly watch as the architects of this unmaking smile from podiums, their followers celebrating each slammed door as a triumph of order. Behind them, far too much of what took centuries to build spills across the floor.

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Widdershins.

(adv., 1500s; Old High German/Scots; counter to the sun; counter-clockwise; against the course)

The procession should circle right,
sunwise, blessing each corner;
but the drum turns left
coldly wading
into dank water,
as shadows unspool.
Candles reduce inward,
bread sours in its basket.
Crowds feel the tilt
of chants.
We see how language, spun wrong,
makes meaning stagger.
Even rivers recoil,
as currents bend back
to mouths.

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Widdershins. ((adv.) roots itself in Middle High German, a combination of widar (against, back) and sinnen (to travel). The term literally translates to “against the way.” Its earliest recorded appearances, in 16th-century English, described movement in the wrong direction or against the natural grain.)

By the mid-1500s, widdershins was used to identify movement opposite to the sun’s clockwise path across the Northern Hemisphere. Before mechanical clocks standardized time, moving clockwise was known as deosil or sunwise motion aligned with light, growth, and natural order. To turn widdershins was to turn your back on the sun.

In traditional British folklore, deosil movement was used to bless and protect, while circling widdershins around a church, town, or person was believed to cast curses or invoke dark spells.

The literal practice of avoiding counterclockwise movement due to a fear of dark magic faded from mainstream society during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, as scientific reasoning replaced then common folk superstitions.

For centuries, walking widdershins was genuinely feared in Britain and Scotland as an omen of bad luck or a sign of witchcraft. As European witch trials ended and the Enlightenment popularized rationalism, the belief that counterclockwise movement could summon evils gradually died out.

By the late 19th century, “widdershins” was considered archaic. Though, unlike many other words in this collection, it has experienced a modern revival.