The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  Other societies regarded involuntary witchcraft as more of a spiritual than a physical affliction, though the boundaries between the two were hazy. Among the Azande, those whom Evans-Pritchard termed witches were thought to inherit an evil spirit from a parent, fathers passing it to sons and mothers to daughters. This dwelt inside their intestines, possessed them, and needed to prey vampire-like on the life forces of non-witches. Those afflicted by one were born with it, but like some genuine hereditary illnesses it grew stronger with age.88 The Nyakyusa thought that witchcraft was endowed by an evil entity which took the form of a python lodged in the belly of the witch, while in New Guinea the Kaluli thought that such a being lodged in the witch’s heart.89 In parts of the Indian region of Mysore, witches were likewise believed to be women afflicted with an evil spirit that drove them to do harm.90 Among the Gă people of southern Ghana, it was thought that the spirits that possessed witches could torment or kill their human hosts unless they placated them by murdering others; those who feared that they were in danger of becoming thus possessed would seek magical cures for the condition.91 In the Philippines, the tariff demanded by the possessing spirit was at least one murder per year, in default of which it would kill the witch.92 Most cultures to have credited the existence of witchcraft, however, have considered it to be as controllable, and culpable, as any other kind of human ill nature (though normally more frightening and dangerous). Even some that regarded witches as people completely possessed by evil spirits, and so no longer responsible for their actions, have often thought that to permit such a degree of possession, the individuals concerned must have been at least weak and perhaps malevolent. Nicola Tannenbaum, studying the Shan, a Buddhist tribe spanning the border between Thailand and China, noted that they treated suspected witches in much the same way as antisocial drunks: as a real danger to others, and responsible for their condition although not really responsible for particular actions.93

  Another variation in global perceptions of the witch figure has been between those who have regarded witches as essentially solitary or operating in partnership with the occasional friend or ally, and those who believe that witches are members of organized secret societies. A belief in such associations has been recorded across much of sub-Saharan Africa, and in the south-western United States, India, Nepal and New Guinea. The participants were generally thought to feast together, encourage and strengthen each other in their vocation, plan in concert to work evil magic, and often actually do so. The methods imagined to be employed by witches in the working of such magic, whether collectively or alone, have inevitably taken different forms in different places, but certain patterns are found commonly across the world. One is a belief that witchcraft is worked with especial ease if the witch can obtain bodily waste from the person who is the target. Among the Maori of New Zealand witches were said to kill victims by destroying their clothes, hair, nails or excrement while uttering spells.94 The Zuñi burned all hair clippings and their neighbours the Navaho concealed all human waste, lest it be used to work magic against the former owners.95 In Alaska the Tlingit thought that witches took food leavings or scraps of clothing from intended victims, and made them into dolls, which became the vehicles for curses.96 Such fears, and reactions, are recorded across most of Polynesia, Melanesia, Africa, South Asia and North America. Another belief system, which is not mutually exclusive with the first, is an emphasis on the use made by witches of magical properties within objects taken from the natural world, such as special stones, plants and parts of animals. The Nyoro of Uganda thought that most bewitchment was achieved by use of vegetable matter, mixed with pieces of reptiles.97 Another very widespread tradition, found in North America and Africa, is that witches strike by introducing magical objects into their victims’ bodies, such as stones, bones, quills or ashes, the removal of which cures the effects. Yet another belief pattern, especially common in areas of West and Central Africa and Melanesia, is that witches work through their own innate powers of evil, having no need of physical aids. A further very widespread tradition is for the witch to be assisted or empowered by a personal spirit helper, or a set of them, often in animal form; such traditions will be examined in detail in the last chapter of this book. In the Solomon Islands of Melanesia, it was thought, unusually, that the evil spirits serving living witches were the ghosts of their dead predecessors.98 Across the Americas, Africa and Melanesia, tradition also varied with regard to the question of whether witches were expected to go about their work as their normal, physical, selves, or to travel in some spiritual form to do it while their bodies remained asleep at home. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Melanesia and North America, it was believed that they could fly, which greatly enabled their ability to cover distance in pursuit of their targets, although, again, opinion varied as to whether they did so in physical or spectral bodies.

  Characteristic Four: The Witch is Evil

  Across the world, witches have been regarded with loathing and horror, and associated with generally antisocial attitudes and with evil forces in the supernatural world. Such a trait rules out from the category of witchcraft the sanctioned or informally approved use of magic in neighbourhood feuds. That is sometimes found: for example in the Trobriand Islands service magicians would employ their skills to harm individuals who had incurred the jealousy of chiefs or neighbours by prospering above their station in life and disrupting the usual social order. Their activities were regarded as generally justifiable.99 Among most peoples, however, the use of magic was never regarded as a legitimate means of pursuing feuds and quarrels within communities, but as an activity distinguished by secrecy, malevolence and intrinsic wickedness. The element of secrecy was considered to deprive the intended victim of any warning of the coming attack or consciousness of what was happening, until the harm had been done. It was designed to prevent any opportunity for compromise, negotiation and reconciliation, and for defensive measures, and to shield the witch as far as possible from being called to account for the crime. Such a way of proceeding, linked to the witch figure, violates common human notions of courage, sociability and justice. In some aspects, witchcraft has been used to represent the evil inherent in the universe, manifesting through humans who are fitted by their natures to act as vessels or conduits for it. In others, it has embodied all that is selfish, vindictive and antisocial within human nature, epitomizing treachery and disharmony in societies that strive for unity and neighbourliness. Godfrey Lienhardt summed up a general rule when speaking of one African people, the Dinka: that the witch ‘embodies those appetites and passions in every man which, ungoverned, would destroy any moral law’.100 Accordingly, across most of the world, it has often been believed that witch societies reverse those norms in more dramatic ways, engaging during their meetings or their acts of evil-working in such activities as incest, nudity or cannibalism. Examples of this belief are abundant. The Zuñi of the American south-west thought that witch associations were dedicated to the destruction of the human race, and entry was allowed only to somebody who had already claimed a victim by magic.101 Their neighbours the Hopi thought that their own local witches were the leaders of a worldwide network in which every nation was represented, the initiates of which had to keep sacrificing the lives of their relatives in order to prolong their own.102 The Yoruba of Nigeria and Gonja of Ghana held that to join the secret witch society, people were even required to kill their own children as an initiation rite.103 In New Guinea the Abelam believed that witch power was activated in a girl if she participated in a rite whereby a group of existing local witches dug up and ate a recently dead baby.104 Across Polynesia there was no apparent belief in witch societies, training in witchcraft being conceived of as an individual business passed by an experienced practitioner to a novice, but those practitioners were still believed to have a general grudge against humanity and the test of proficiency was to slay a near relative.105 The Iroquois thought that the price of joining the local witch organization was to use magic to murder one’s
nearest and dearest relation.106 Across most of the world witches have been thought to gather at night, when normal humans are inactive, and also at their most vulnerable in sleep. The Tswana believed that they assembled in the hours of darkness to exhume corpses and use parts of them for their destructive magic.107 More often, across most of Africa and Melanesia, including New Guinea, witches were expected to dig up freshly buried bodies in order to feast on them together, this being the prime motivation for murdering the people concerned. The Bemba of Zambia thought that witchcraft was the work of people who committed incest as well as murdering babies.108 Nudity was a common attribution of witches, not merely because it transgressed social norms but because it stripped away their everyday identities. In the Solomon Islands, witchcraft was attributed to women who met at night to take off their clothes and dance.109 The Agariyars of Bengal thought that women became witches by going to the cremation ground at midnight, removing their clothing, sitting on the ground and speaking incantations over cremated ashes.110 Children among the Lala of Zambia were told not to go out naked lest they be mistaken for witches, while in the Lowveld region of the Transvaal the same fate met, and still in places meets, any woman seen without clothing out of doors, even in her own yard.111 On Flores in the southern Indonesian island chain, it was said that a person could attract a possessing spirit, which conferred the power of witchcraft, simply by running nude in the open air.112 Witches among the Kaguru of Tanzania were not merely thought to operate naked, but to walk upon their hands and to smear their normally black bodies with ashes to turn them white, in further rites of reversal.113 The Amba of western Uganda thought that they rested by hanging upside down in trees and ate salt when thirsty (as well as embracing the usual nudity and cannibalism).114 In the Philippines, they were also supposed to hang upside down like bats, as well as having no sense of physical modesty.115 Zulu witches were said to ride naked on baboons at night, facing backwards.116 Those imagined by the Western Apache removed their clothing for all-night dances around bonfires, holding parts of exhumed corpses, as part of which rites men deliberately copulated with menstruating women.117 In these senses, the witch figure has represented an attempt to imagine how human beings can continue to live within communities while secretly rejecting and attacking all of their moral constraints, striking at all the imperatives that bind their societies together and make them functional. In societies where the expression of aggression and resentment is customarily repressed in the name of communal solidarity and harmony – and these are very common among traditional peoples – the witch figure provided a kind of human being whom it was not only proper but necessary to hate actively and openly.

  Characteristic Five: The Witch Can be Resisted

  The belief that witches can be resisted by their fellow humans is also found worldwide, in the three main forms which it took in Europe. One of these was to protect oneself or one’s dependants and property by using benevolent magic, which could turn away spells and curses; if the latter seemed to take effect, then stronger magic could be employed to break and remove the effects of bewitchment; and perhaps to make the witch suffer in turn. The Dowayo of Cameroon put sharp thistles or porcupine quills on the roofs of their homes, and spines and spikes around their fields and threshing floors, to ward off evil spells.118 The Navaho had a wide range of objects and techniques which were said to proof the owner against witchcraft, including songs, prayers, stories, consecrated artefacts, paintings and plants.119 In northern India, the performance of blood sacrifices or the deployment of tamarind or castor oil plants was thought effective.120 Across Polynesia, protective rituals were enacted to safeguard people against witchcraft, and if these apparently failed, others were used to counter-curse the witch.121 The Vugusu and Logoli of western Kenya usually responded to the threat of witchcraft by avoiding presumed witches and carrying out counter-magic against them.122 On the Melanesian island of Gawa, suspected witches were never publicly accused and no mechanism existed for trying them, the population depending instead on defensive magic.123 The Gaya of northern Sumatra treated bewitchment with exorcism, designed to send back the evil spirit that caused the complaint to the witch who had originally sent it out.124 Most societies that believed in witches have contained service magicians who were regarded as expert in such remedies and could provide them to others as a duty or for payment. Indeed, this activity is embodied in the common English term for such a magician (usually in a non-European and tribal context) of ‘witch-doctor’, which was first popularized by a best-selling book by the famous Victorian British explorer Mary Kingsley. It has sometimes been mistaken as meaning a witch who is a doctor, but it signified instead a doctor who specialized, at least some of the time, in curing the damage done by witches: Kingsley’s own definition was a ‘combatant of the evils worked by witches and devils on human souls and human property’.125 Under whatever name, the breaking of bewitchment has been, worldwide, one of the most commonly found and important functions attributed to service magicians.

  The second widespread remedy for bewitchment was to adjust the social relations that had created the suspicion of it. This could take the form of persuading or forcing the witch into removing the spell that she or he had placed, and so its destructive effects. Among the Azande, when a service magician or chief had decided that a malady was the result of bewitchment, then the next step would be to ask the alleged culprit to lift the spell. The same pattern was found in Botswana, with the Tswana.126 Among the Gusii, the first reaction to a suspicion was to employ private magic to break the hostile spell, and the second to sever all relations with the suspected witch, to deprive the latter of those contacts with their victim(s) that had made bewitchment possible.127 In the Tonga Islands of Polynesia, it was believed that the only way to cure bewitchment was to persuade or force the witch to remove it.128 The Yakö of eastern Nigeria thought that suspicions were best dealt with in private, by asking the suspect to desist from bewitchment.129 In Ghana the Ashanti blamed the act of witchcraft rather than the person perpetrating it, so the presumed witch was forgiven after making a public confession (which was presumed to break the bewitchment) and paying a fine or enacting a penance.130 The Tangu of New Guinea expected an unmasked witch to pay compensation to the victim, after which the matter was closed.131 On Dobu, a service magician was hired to identify the source of bewitchment, usually by gazing into water or a crystal. A suspect would be accused as a result, and required to recall the curse placed upon the victim; and when this was apparently done, both diviner and alleged witch would be paid by the victim. Such faith was placed in this process that, if the victim still failed to recover, a new curse and witch were presumed to be the cause.132 In Cameroon the Bamileke, who thought that witchcraft was the involuntary consequence of an extra organ in the body, likewise believed that public exposure as a witch automatically destroyed the power of the growth and so the accused was both disarmed and reintegrated into society.133 The Lisu of the northern Thai highlands feared witchcraft acutely but relied on service magicians or private counter-magic to keep them at bay. If this failed, then a suspected witch would be accused and made to pay compensation and retract the spell; people very rarely killed those whom they blamed for bewitchment, for the good reason that people who murdered witches were thought to become witches themselves, by contagion.134

  The third remedy was to break the power of the witch with a physical counter-attack, which could take the form of direct action, such as a severe beating or murder, or intimidation that ran the person concerned out of the neighbourhood. In most societies, however, a formal and legal remedy was preferred to this sort of private action, by which the suspect was prosecuted before or by the whole community, and if found guilty was subjected to such punishment as it appointed. In many cases the identification of the culprit was assisted or carried out by the same kind of magician as that which provided counter-magic against witchcraft. In Central and Southern Africa, the ability to detect witches was also believed in several places to be i
nherent in chiefs, as one of that concentration of semi-mystical qualities that gave them the right to lead. In central India the same power was attributed to holy men. Across much of the world, oracles and special rites were employed to find the guilty party when witchcraft was suspected. The Dangs of western India would drop lentils named for each adult male villager into a vessel of water: the one that floated would be that of the husband of the witch.135 Service magicians of the Lala of Zambia found witches by gazing into a bowl of consecrated water, throwing an axe handle into ashes or watching horns stuck into the ground.136 The Nyoro of Uganda tossed cowrie shells into a mat and interpreted the pattern they made, while in the same country the Gisu asked questions of pebble patterns in a swung dish.137

  Once under suspicion, people were commonly forced to undergo an ordeal to demonstrate innocence or guilt. The traditional witch-finding society among the Nupe of northern Nigeria forced suspects to dig the ground with bare hands: if they bled, they were deemed to be guilty.138 The Dowayo would make them drink beer in which a poisonous sap had been mixed. A person who died or produced red vomit as a result was deemed guilty, while those who produced white vomit, and lived, were exonerated.139 Different forms of this poison ordeal were found across Central Africa, from Nigeria to Zambia and Madagascar, and its consequences depended on how toxic a potion was made. The Lele herded suspects into pens for testing, and the drink administered killed many of them.140 The same test was used in north-western New Guinea, where those who vomited the poison were declared guilty and put to death: as it was quite difficult to survive the poison without bringing it up, this was an ordeal heavily weighted against the person submitted to it.141 In Africa from Ghana to the islands off the Tanzanian coast, a chicken had its throat cut or was given poison in front of a suspect, whose guilt or innocence was determined by the final posture of the dying bird. The danger in which the accused was placed could be manipulated by deciding how many such postures counted as proof of innocence: in much of Nigeria during the 1940s and 1950s, the odds were heavily weighted against acquittal by the ruling that only one position did.142 A standard test for witchcraft on Flores, in the southern Indonesian island chain, was to have to pick a stone out of boiling water: the guilty would blister.143