9 What is witchcraft?

What is witchcraft?

Dear Lily,

Almost every day we are faced with problems of explaining why unpleasant things happen. Friends are injured, children are ill, we suffer accidents and pain or, despite our best plans, we fail to achieve what we set out to do. It is natural to search for causes of these misfortunes, both in order to help deal with the suffering and to avoid future difficulties. Why did the car skid and crash on this particular day? Why do I and not someone else contract a painful disease?

Usually we know the obvious cause. The road was slippery, the light was poor. Yet we have driven down this road many times and there has previously been no problem. We drank untreated water, or went to a new restaurant, or were bitten by an insect. Yet at other times we took the same risks and this did not lead to illness. So, very early on in life, we learn to distinguish between the ‘how’ questions, how something happened, and the ‘why’ questions.

There is a story of an African who got malaria and went to the doctor, claiming he had been bewitched. The doctor said that malaria was spread by mosquitoes, to which the sick man replied that he knew that, but who had sent the mosquito?

There are two levels of cause, the material one and another which we like to relate to human purpose. When a granary falls and crushes someone among the Azande of North Africa everyone knows that the immediate cause is white ants which have eaten away the wooden pillars. But why was this person walking under it and not another? Who was the witch who turned chance into design.?

Since most things that have happened to us from when we were very young seem to be the result of decisions made by others, it is quite natural that we should believe that the suffering which constantly afflicts us is caused by a human-like force, someone who consciously hurts us in some way. Once we have decided on such a cause we have various choices depending on the culture we live in. They may be evil spirits, ancestors, God or witches.

To choose witchcraft as the explanation, that is the bad intentions of another human being, has a number of advantages. Evil spirits are largely uncontrollable. We are uncomfortable (if we believe in them) to think our ancestors are plotting against us. God is supposed to love and care for us, not kill or maim us. On the other hand, we know many people who are ambivalent towards us. They blow hot and cold. They may secretly be wishing us harm and be able to carry out their intentions because they are witches.

Why not believe in witches?

People in the majority of human societies both today and in the past believe that much of the pain and trouble in the world is caused by witchcraft. The effects of the stars, of random chance or of God’s punishment, are less appealing as explanations largely because there is less we can do as a result of such beliefs. The stars are mindless and unapproachable, chance is uncontrollable and random, God is inscrutable and acts on a plan which often runs counter to our wishes. Yet witches are detectable and can be fought. They think like us, but with evil intentions. To find them we can turn to diviners.

Divination, using various kinds of oracle or shamanic ritual, is a technique to discover the cause for a misfortune. A sign in a mirror or glass ball, throwing of dice, bones or stones, footprints in ash or sand or the voice of a summoned spirit, points us to the offending witch. We can then take action and eradicate him or her. We can set up anti-witchcraft devices such as special substances or sacrifices to ward off the evil or treat the afflicted. All such divination uses devices which prevent it from being shown to be false. If a cure fails, it is because the witch was too strong or the counter-magic used against her was wrongly performed. If the wrong person is accused of witchcraft it is because the real witch has laid a false trail.

Witchcraft is a closed world. It is impossible to challenge its basic premises from within. In the past, almost everyone believed in the power of witchcraft. A sceptic, if such existed, would be accused of being a witch or in the power of one. It is very like many other closed systems which you will have heard about, for example communism. It explains much of the suffering in the world. Every new event adds to its strength. It is very attractive to human beings who live a pain-filled existence.

Does witchcraft help us to feel less guilty?

All of us have ambivalent feelings to those around us, even towards our nearest and most loved friends and families. Sometimes we even want to hurt our parents or siblings in a burst of rage. Witchcraft helps to explain and even justify many of these feelings. It helps to shift the blame for them onto the witch. It helps us to feel less guilty.

Many of us have experienced confusion when stopped by a hungry, poorly dressed beggar in the streets, particularly if it is a girl or woman with a baby. They ask for money. Sometimes we give, often we turn away. In our mind we justify our lack of charity: ‘the money would only go on alcohol, it will only encourage further begging’. ‘Anyway’, we tell ourselves, ‘we are not going to give in to menacing or threatening behaviour’. Yet we still feel guilt, which often leads to a sense of impotence or even anger.

In many parts of the world, including England three centuries ago, this was the typical witchcraft situation. A poor old woman comes to the door and asks for help. She is a neighbour or distant relative. We have helped her before, but this time we refuse. Our religion tells us that we ought to give, but our fear of encouraging dependency or the demands of our family leads us to say no. We feel guilt.

As we turn her away we think we hear her muttering or see a scowl on her face. She looks a bit frightening, witch-like. We are apprehensive. A few days later our child is sick or an animal dies. We suspect that her malevolent anger has caused this. We go to a diviner or take a case to court and the inner suspicions are made external. Others support us and report similar incidents. She is shortly imprisoned and tried as a witch. This is a situation I have read about in English court records many times and seen in action in a Nepalese village.

So witchcraft beliefs can be seen to be both intellectually and socially attractive. It should not surprise us that they are so deep-rooted and almost universal. Rather, the surprise is the exception, the societies where witchcraft has, apparently, never been believed in (for example Japan for a thousand years). Even more curious are the places where witchcraft, having been an important belief system then died away, as in England in the later seventeenth century or most of Europe from the middle of the eighteenth century.

Why did witchcraft decline?

Up to the later seventeenth century in Europe almost everybody believed in the reality of witchcraft and the courts tried many suspected witches. A hundred years later most intellectuals had rejected such a belief and the courts no longer accepted this as a subject for trial.

If the beliefs in witchcraft were circular and irrefutable, how were they undermined? If it is so logical, why give it up for the less emotionally satisfying world which we now inhabit where we constantly ask ‘why’ questions and are given such answers as ‘I don’t know’, ‘it is all random’, ‘there is no meaning or pattern’? If witchcraft beliefs help us to overcome feelings of anger and ambivalence (which we continue to feel to this day) by projecting the guilt onto others, why abandon them and leave us alone with both our suffering and our guilt? We seem to have chosen a dry and rather unsatisfactory option, even if in doing so we have saved many poor old people from torture and death.

Some say that the rise of experimental science in seventeenth century western Europe undermined the world of magic and witchcraft. This is part of the story, but we need to remember that many of the early scientists were believers in witchcraft. When I asked my ‘adopted’ niece, who had done biology and other sciences at school in a town in Nepal, whether she believed in witchcraft she said that of course she did. Whenever a mysterious or incurable disease occurred, she would suspect witches.

This suggests that to a certain extent ‘scientific’ explanations in terms of atoms and germs only answer the ‘how’ questions and so the need for a ‘why’ cause is still present. Indeed this blend of science and religion is what a number of distinguished modern scientists who argue for the need for religion often affirm. Albert Einstein caught this beautifully. ‘Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.’

Another argument is that the levels of risk and suffering which were behind many of the accusations began to diminish in the later seventeenth century. It is suggested that magical and witchcraft beliefs bridge gaps in our control of the material world. When we lack technical, organizational or social solutions, we turn to magic.

Faced with rough seas in a fragile wooden boat, we use magical protections. Faced with the hazards of the road, we hang little charms and talismen in our cars. When we do not know why hundreds are dying of a mysterious disease, we use amulets and magical protections. When financial insecurity, crime, disastrous fires are widespread, the beliefs in a magical universe, so the argument goes, tend to rise.

If, on the other hand, the risks from fire, flood, old age poverty, crime or disease are diminished, confidence will rise. The ‘swamps’ of insecurity where witchcraft ‘breeds’, will be drained, so such beliefs will decline, or so it is argued.

There are many difficulties with this argument, although again there is probably something in it. Most of the insecurities continued largely unabated until several centuries after witchcraft accusations and beliefs had died away. People would have had to anticipate a more secure world some generations before it happened. It was not until the later nineteenth century that the causes of disease began to be properly understood, or that public sanitation and financial security for the old and sick improved significantly.

We can see that witchcraft beliefs fluctuate. My visits to a Nepalese village over thirty years gave me the experience of a place which was full of witches and counter-witchcraft rituals in 1970. Twenty years later the shamans were gone and open beliefs and accusations of witchcraft had greatly declined. There was far less interest in magical explanations. For even though the risks remained and the western scientific and technological solutions, medicine, electricity, artificial fertilizer, were largely unobtainable at the village level, people believed in the new technologies as potentially more powerful than spirits or witches.

Certainly one reason for this was largely accidental. Just as some have argued that doctors ‘manufacture’ disease, lawyers encourage disputes, teachers generate ignorance, missionaries imbue a sin complex, so it is clear that having a resident diviner who earns his living by finding witches generates, or at least re-enforces, the belief in witches. Once the shaman had left the village for more lucrative work in the town, witchcraft beliefs, or at least accusations, dried up.

Yet there are other parts of the world where the fear of witchcraft is increasing. It is reported that in many of the cities and shanty towns of Africa the consciousness of witchcraft and the desire to try to protect oneself from it is growing. There are new witch-finding cults and diviners are doing a good trade.

Furthermore, the emotions and fears that lay behind the great witch purges of the past are still with us today. We still engage in ‘witch hunts’, though the subjects may be suspected communists or terrorists. So we refuse to accept the blame. We feel less consumed by guilt when we turn from the hungry and hopeless and blame them for their own condition, whether on the streets of our town or in the developing world. We still surround our risky endeavours with magic, whether setting out on a journey, taking an exam or going to hospital for an operation. We still read the stars and peer into the future with mixed hope and scepticism.


What do we learn from witchcraft?

We learn to distinguish between types of power. There is power to do good, which we approve of, and power to do harm which, if directed at us, we dislike. So people, using the association of black with night and evil, call these ‘black’ and ‘white’ witchcraft.

We distinguish power which is internal, a matter of thought and emotion, which leads to prayers and curses, and we call this witchcraft or religion. Such power usually comes from requesting, addressing words of an imploring kind, to a larger power, Satan or God. We ask for diabolical or divine power.

On the other hand there are externalized actions, making of images and sticking pins in them, burning of hair or fingernails, making a potion and uttering a commanding spell aloud. Here by the manipulation of objects, often accompanied by words, we force or conjure nature to act. This is magic.

This famous distinction, first developed in the study of the Azande tribe, is somewhat similar to that between religion and science. Witchcraft is internal and invisible, like religion. Magic is external and visible, like science. Magic like science aims to control nature. Its goals are also very similar to those of science.

Are we free of magic?

Our modern lives, however apparently ‘rational’ and free of superstition, contain much magical thinking. We curse our politicians, half hoping the curse will strike them down. We pray for delivery when we are frightened, we engage in a thousand minor protective rituals through our day. Just observe yourself and you will see how many magical acts there are, particularly when you are afraid or out of control. The world of witchcraft and magic is never far away.

One reason Harry Potter, the hobbits, even Alice in Wonderland strike so many resonances is that because even as adults we are reluctant to relinquish magic. There are those who argue that the greatest art derives its power from enchantment, or magical beliefs. Certainly many great artists seem like magicians.

We may think that we now live in a ‘disenchanted’ world, that we have banished the witches, vampires, goblins. Yet five minutes in the ‘real world’, in a bookshop, watching television or in a school playground will show us how wrong such a presumption is. Magic is alive and well. Its capital is Disneyland.