I've been wondering for a while now whether the words "exorcism" and "sorcery" are related etymologically in any way. The question came to me from the fact that, in Greek, we have the word εξορκισμός for "exorcism", εξορκίζω for "exorcise", etc. And what made me curious is that we also use another derivative of the word "exorcism" (written out as ξόρκι/ksorki) to mean "sorcery" (or "spell"). I thought that maybe this could be more than coincidence.
But after looking around, I'm under the impression that they aren't related to each other. "Exorcism" seems related to όρκος/orkos (Greek for "oath", with "exorcism" meaning "to bind by oath"), while "sorcery" seems to share a (Latin) root with "sort".
Is there any deeper (maybe older) relationship between the two words that I'm not seeing? Or are they really just two unrelated words that happen to share a few letters?
Best Answer
It seems to be a coincidence.
In the etymology of "exorcise" the Greek horkizein (to take an oath), or rather horkos (oath) seems to have been transliterated eventually to "orc", losing the initial eta and replacing the kappa with C.
In "sorcery" the Latin sortiarius, the T sound was eventually transliterated to a C (in English, "tian" or "tion" are pronounced like "shun", exactly as we also pronounce "cian" as in "mortician" or "physician".) So there is a plausible phonetic path from "sortiarius" to "sorcery", without invoking any other root.
Interestingly, "sort" in Latin otiginally had to to with the casting of lots, which once was done by choosing, blindly, sticks of various lengths to determine the winner (or loser, depending on the situation). So I suspect (maybe you can prove this by research) that "sorcery" originally applied to casting sticks and reading the result to interpret one's fate. Compare, for example, the "I Ching" yarrow-stalk method.