“Cunning” is a very interesting word. What follows comes largely from rummaging around in the OED.

Long ago it could mean little more than “quite knowledgable” — as when Richard Rolle, in the fourteenth century, refers to “Clerkes of grete cunnyng” — though it more typically acknowledged some kind of physical skill or dexterity, as when the Psalmist says, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” See also this description of the boy David: “I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, that is cunning in playing, and a mighty valiant man, and a man of war, and prudent in matters, and a comely person, and the Lord is with him” (1 Samuel 16:18, KJV).

But gradually, over the centuries, it began to take on a certain coloration, that of rare and hidden knowledge or skill — thus the “cunning men” or women, the healers that I write about in this essay. Cunning folk may not be formally educated, but they possess much lore or local knowledge, and are capable of exercising wise discernment and tact in their healing art. What they do is not easy to learn or easy to teach; it’s not readily formulable in any commonly-shared language.

Which surely is what leads to the pejoration of the term: the use of “cunning” to mean something like manipulative or deceitfully malicious. Thus Francis Bacon: “We take Cunning for a sinister or crooked Wisdome.” And Tolkien says that Saruman means “man of cunning” — originally in the neutral sense, but as he becomes corrupted by Sauron, in the Baconian sense.

And yet cunning can also be a necessary tool for the marginalized, the oppressed, the threatened — the weak. Emerson says, “Nature has endowed some animals with cunning, as a compensation for strength withheld.” When Stephen Dedalus, at the end of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, pledges to practice “silence, exile, and cunning,” he must do so because his powers are slight in comparison with the great forces (religion, nation, family) with which he must contend if he wants to fulfill his calling as an artist.

The kind of cultural repair I am inviting my readers to participate in requires the cultivation of cunning men and women — but woe be unto us if our cunning becomes corrupted. The path from a necessary guile to “a sinister or crooked Wisdome” is not a long one. It is interesting in this context to note that William Tyndale’s translation of 1 Corinthians 2:13 directly juxtaposes the positive and negative connotations of the word: “which thinges also we speake not in the conynge wordes of manes wysdome but with the conynge wordes of the holy goost.”