The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  In other areas of the world, informal and illegal violence against presumed witches has also reached, or been maintained at, serious levels in recent times. During the 1960s one small Mexican town inhabited by Maya had a homicide rate fifty times that of the USA and eight times that of the Mexican average, and witchcraft was the motive in about half of all cases.200 In north-eastern India, there were twelve witchcraft-related murders in the Maldo district in 1982 alone, and over sixty in the Singhbhum district during four years of the 1990s.201 A Bolivian villager was tortured and exiled in 1978 by an informal communal tribunal for allegedly using magic to suck life out of neighbours while they slept; five years later, another such group burned a man to death for the same offence.202 Among the Ambrym Islanders of Central Melanesia, fear of witchcraft, and the homicides that it generated, had reached what was described as ‘critical levels’ in the late 1990s.203 By the 2010s other parts of Melanesia had become as severely affected, as a result of collapsing traditional social and cultural systems, declining health services, worsening poverty, and increasing lifestyle diseases and premature deaths. Violence against suspects was (as recently in southern Africa) mainly conducted by impoverished young men seeking to achieve value in the eyes of their communities, and was becoming more public as well as more extreme. In New Guinea a young woman was burned alive in 2013 in front of hundreds of onlookers, including police, and two other women publicly tortured and beheaded on Bougainville Island in the Northern Solomon archipelago. In 2014 two men were publicly hanged in a community hall in Vanuatu.204 Nor is legal action against witchcraft missing from the world outside Africa, above all in Islamic states. During the period between 2008 and 2012, laws against magical practices of all kinds were more strictly enforced in Afghanistan, the Gaza Strip, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. In that period Saudi Arabia executed several people for such offences, mostly foreigners and mostly by beheading. A woman was murdered as a suspected witch in Gaza in 2010. The Saudi government trains employees not only as witch-hunters but in rituals to destroy the effects of witchcraft, while one recent president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, sacrificed a black goat nearly every day to ward off its effects.205 In Indonesia courts have become increasingly willing to try acts of magic as crimes, or at least as antisocial behaviour, judges often seeming to believe in it and their actions in doing so being popular.206

  It is possible to make a theoretical case that witch-hunting may, at least at times, serve a positive social function. In some contexts it may reinforce cultural norms, and so communal solidarity, by discouraging aberrant or antisocial behaviour. The identification of witchcraft with jealousy, greed and malice can serve to strengthen attachment to the countervailing virtues, and discourage the expression of animosity. It can be used to enforce economic obligations and reduce competition in favour of co-operation. In other contexts, it can be a midwife to change, in that anti-witchcraft movements have often legitimized or reinforced the power of new groups. Accusations have sometimes provided a means by which disempowered individuals, such as children or women, can attract attention and respect, and intimidate people normally in superior positions to them. They can articulate otherwise unspeakable fantasies, reveal and represent destructive impulses, and identify and express tensions within families and wider social groups, blasting away unsustainable relationships. Measures against presumed witchcraft have enabled humans to act purposefully in the face of adversity. It was for these reasons that an influential school of thought among anthropologists has held that witchcraft accusations functioned as instruments of social health rather than as symptoms of malfunction.207

  Others, however, have held a different opinion,208 and that is the one favoured here. It emphasizes that all these positive functions of belief in witchcraft have only acted to strengthen societies, or to enable them to adjust more effectively to changing circumstances, when the rate of accusation has been low and sporadic, and subjected to firm controls. In many cases this situation has not obtained, and suspicions and accusations have not resolved fears and hostilities, but aggravated them and represented obstacles to peaceful co-operation. At worst, they have torn communities apart and left lasting traumas and resentments, or greatly compounded the suffering consequent on adjustment to new economic and social developments. Most societies that have believed firmly in witchcraft have regarded it as a scourge and a curse, of which they have longed to be rid; but the only way in which they have been able to conceive of bringing about this happy result has been to destroy the witches. Such attempts have tended to reinforce vividly a consciousness of the threat from witchcraft, and so perpetuate fear of it, and make future witch-hunts likely, even if they have managed – often at a grim human cost – to reduce that which had existed at the moment.

  Further Reflections

  Anthropological research permits some other insights into the manner in which the stereotype of the witch can be constructed and maintained, which are not so readily available to a historian. One such insight – accessible to scholars working in relatively small, self-contained societies where they can themselves question inhabitants in detail – is that cosmologies do not have to be coherent mental constructions. Very frequently, traditional peoples have been shown to have believed in different kinds of supernatural entity, including deities, terrestrial spirits, animal spirits and ancestral spirits, without any clear idea of how they interrelated or could be distinguished, or of the precise relationship between each of them and witches. What mattered to the humans concerned was the presumed effect that these kinds of entity had on the human world, and what could be done to encourage, deter or counteract that according to its degree of utility and benevolence. In subsistence societies it was the practical consequences of dealings with spirit worlds that were the real issue, often being literally a matter of life and death. The fact that the theoretical origin and operation of witchcraft, and the stereotypical nature of the witch, seemed in some places to be – in the perception of the European scholar – at odds with general preassumptions about the workings of deities and spirits, did not seem to trouble the individuals whose beliefs were being recorded.209

  Another luxury permitted to anthropological research is to observe at first hand the manner in which beliefs in a given society can mutate in changing social and mental environments. The summary of extra-European beliefs concerning witchcraft made above may have given an impression of their being more or less static, the stereotypes of the witch held by particular peoples remaining broadly unchanged over time and little affected by contact with other cultures. In essence, that impression does seem to reflect reality, but there are a few qualifications to be made to it. On the whole, the image of the witch held by a particular human society alters in detail, with changing circumstances, while remaining the same in basics. It has already been noted that extra-European peoples in various different parts of the world have assimilated forms of Christian theology into their traditional beliefs about witches, and other and more specifically local additions of the same sort have been recorded by anthropologists. It is not uncommon for traditional peoples to accord new powers and modes of operation to witches, because of changing circumstances or contact with the ideas of other cultures. In the late twentieth century, the idea spread through parts of West and South Africa that witches were turning victims into zombies, to labour for them and increase their wealth; in Ghana this took the different form that they were changing humans into animals or plants and then selling them as such.210 Much earlier, in some areas of East Africa, particular tribes acquired from Arab traders the idea that witches controlled evil spirits (sometimes by buying them from the Arabs themselves), while the mixed-race inhabitants of the Lebowa district of Transvaal adopted the idea that witchcraft employed spirits in animal form from the neighbouring Zulus.211

  It was rarer for the stereotype of what a witch should be to change, but that sometimes occurred. As the Giriama of Kenya moved from fortified communities into dispersed homesteads in the late nineteenth centu
ry, greater discrepancies of wealth appeared among them, and it was the newly enriched who became particular targets for suspicion.212 In the Gwembe Valley of southern Zambia, witches were traditionally male relatives of their victims but not the latter’s parents. From the 1980s, however, a declining economy produced a younger generation less wealthy than the older, who turned on their fathers with accusations of witchcraft as one product of the ensuing tensions.213 In the lower Congo Valley, witches had stereotypically been elderly, but in the capital city of Kinshasa during the 2000s, as said, children and teenagers came to be blamed for all misfortunes instead.214 Most rarely of all, it seems that some peoples who had no traditional fear of witchcraft could acquire one, or those who had feared it little could become severely afraid. Among the Kerebe of the Lake Victoria border of Tanzania, it seems that before the early nineteenth century uncanny misfortune was attributed to chiefs, who were credited with wielding a legitimate magical power over people to discipline them. Then a new trading economy disrupted the power of both chiefs and communities, producing a new competitive and individualist society in which fear of witchcraft became rife.215 The Kaska, on what became the border between Alaska and Canada, seem to have acquired a belief in witches in the late nineteenth century, when their society underwent drastic change, endangering its very survival, because of European conquest. They therefore took on the belief from their western neighbours the Tlingits, among whom witch-hunting was traditional.216

  Ethnographic fieldwork also allows some answers to the question of how far, and in what sense, witchcraft has ever been a ‘real’ phenomenon. Anthropologists all over the world have reported similar experiences, in finding that peoples who believed in witchcraft would, when their trust and confidence had been gained, talk avidly about who witches were, and what they were supposed to do. It was virtually impossible, on the other hand, to interview somebody who actually claimed to be a witch and to act out the role expected of one. It is equally true, however, that witch accusations among traditional peoples have regularly produced confessions, especially after the accused had been found guilty by their community. Fear and despair, and a hope to win mercy and forgiveness by a show of penitence, may well have produced many such responses. On the other hand, it is also credible, and perhaps logical, that some of the accused actually had tried to curse neighbours or relatives when moved by anger, jealousy or malice, using formulae and materials associated with witchcraft. This is, however, remarkably hard to prove.217 Anthropologists have noted from first-hand observation that when a witch-finding movement passed through a district, the people whom it convicted and forced to surrender their materials of witchcraft certainly produced objects in response. These were, however, of a kind also associated with positive magic, such as that intended for protection and healing.218 A scholar working in New Guinea commented on how destructive magic was worked there by wrapping up physical waste products of the intended victim with bark, leaves and stones over which a spell was recited. She added that these bundles were sometimes genuinely made, but did not enlarge on the circumstances.219 The Gusii of the south-west Kenya highlands believed that witches were usually women, and ran naked at night carrying a pot of burning vegetable matter. One man told the anthropologist Robert Levine that as a child he had seen a female neighbour hurrying home nude at dawn with a firepot, while Levine was also told that women had confessed to witchcraft and brought human remains out from their homes during a witch-finding movement. This testimony, however, remained unproven, as did that made to an anthropologist by informants among the Barotse in what is now Congo: that human bones were often found in the homes of suspects of witchcraft, which must have come from graves.220 Some of the most convincing and disturbing evidence for the actual practice of magic with the intention of harming others comes from the recent escalation of fear of witchcraft in Africa. In Soweto in the 1990s, magical healers admitted that clients regularly asked them for spells with which to kill, and there seemed to be a black market in witchcraft equivalent to that in drugs in other parts of the world.221 Proven cases have occurred elsewhere in South Africa of people being killed so that their body parts could be used in evil magic.222 Among the Kamba of Kenya, magicians who normally market their powers for benevolent purposes are known often to sell the materials for curses, especially for the pursuit of neighbourhood feuds; though the main product concerned overlaps with literal poison, being a potion slipped into food.223

  If it is certain, therefore, that some people do try to work destructive magic within their own communities at the present day, and that some are likely to have done so among tribal societies in the pre-colonial past, it is harder to find evidence that some of these actively attempted to live up to the broader image of what a witch was held to be. Certainly, the existence of any of the horrific cannibalistic and amoral witch societies in which many traditional peoples have believed remains entirely unproven, as do the serial murders with which their members were credited. Margaret Field, working among the Gă on the coast of Ghana, interviewed over four hundred women who had been accused of witchcraft, one of whom claimed to have killed fifty people, including her own brother and seven of her children, while another confessed to having caused the deaths of four of her children and one of her grandchildren. Field was left unable to decide whether they had committed any of these crimes in reality, or whether they had only dreamed of doing so, and of gathering with fellow witches.224 One apparently unequivocal and credible first-hand testimony of active witchcraft in a traditional society was provided to an American visitor by an old Tlingit woman, who described how she heard a Christian missionary preach, and decided that his Devil was stronger than his God. She accordingly became a Satanist, as part of which she stole the hair and pieces of clothing of certain people, including children, and put them to rot in the tomb of a shaman according to one reputed method of destructive magic. The people concerned died, and she felt herself responsible and subsequently confessed herself to be a witch.225 This all sounds very real, and perhaps was, but it is hard to prove with absolute certainty that this was not also the result of dreams or fantasies. Between 1958 and 1962 a number of Shona women, who had confessed volubly to witchcraft appeared before magistrates in what was then the British colony of Rhodesia. In particular, they claimed to have met naked in the bush at night, called up evil spirits, and travelled through the air or ridden hyenas to the homes of neighbours to bewitch them to death and then eat their flesh. Under questioning, it was discovered that they had dreamed of doing this, and then compared their experiences with others, so that their individual stories were polished into a common and mutually corroborative form. As their cultural tradition was that it was the spirits of witches that left their bodies at night to work evil, there was no obvious discrepancy with the actual sensations of sleep and dream, and the confessions could be made with complete personal belief. In the short term, a reputation for being a witch could enhance the status of a woman in Shona society, in which females were usually repressed.226

  Even witchcraft beliefs that rested on dream or fantasy, however, could still be lethal. In 1942 an American medical doctor called Walter Cannon took an interest in reports, drawn from South America, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Polynesia and the Caribbean, of tribal people falling sick, and often dying, simply because they thought themselves bewitched. He suggested that the individuals concerned responded to the belief with a sustained terror that made eating and sleeping difficult, weakening the body even while it was flooded constantly with adrenalin. This forced down blood pressure and put stress on all organs, damaging the heart in particular and making any normally sustainable weakness dangerous.227 Subsequent medical studies served to confirm the reality of the phenomenon of ‘death from suggestion’, broadening it out to a realization that it can result from excessive stimulation of any system of the human body, and that a loss of hope can seriously reduce the capacity of that body to deal with any potentially pathogenic processes.228 Claude Lévi-Strauss built on the
earlier of these studies to construct a classic essay emphasizing the critical role played by absolute belief in the efficacy of magic.229