The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  Author’s Note

  1.Rodney Needham, Primordial Characters, Charlottesville, 1978, 26.

  2.Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-hunts, Cambridge, 2004, 4.

  3.Katherine Luongo, Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya 1900–1955, Cambridge, 2011, 49.

  4.As before, I follow the practice of referring to the pre-Christian religions of Europe and the Near East as ‘pagan’, and modern religions which draw on images and ideas from them as ‘Pagan’, as a simple mark of distinction. For the development of these modern senses of the witch figure, see Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, Oxford, 1999.

  5.I intend to argue this point in detail in a subsequent publication.

  6.Ronald Hutton, Witches, Druids and King Arthur: Studies in Paganism, Myth and Magic, London, 2003, 98–135.

  7.On this see Adam Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy in South Africa, Chicago, 2005, 50–61.

  8.Ronald Hutton, Pagan Britain, London, 2013, viii–ix.

  1 The Global Context

  1.Most of the material in the first part of this section was published by me as ‘Anthropological and Historical Approaches to Witchcraft: Potential for a New Collaboration?’, Historical Journal, 47 (2004), 413–34, where full quotation and citation are to be found.

  2.Keith Thomas, ‘The Relevance of Social Anthropology to the Historical Study of English Witchcraft’, in Mary Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, London, 1970, 47–8; Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, London, 1970, 211–53; Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, Falmer, 1975, 220–3.

  3.Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations; Max Marwick (ed.), Witchcraft and Sorcery, Harmondsworth, 1970.

  4.Rodney Needham, Primordial Characters, Charlottesville, 1978, 23–50.

  5.H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562–1684, Stanford, 1972, 5; E. William Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland, Ithaca, NY, 1976, 11.

  6.T. O. Beidelman, ‘Towards More Open Theoretical Interpretations’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, 351–6.

  7.For example, E. P. Thompson, ‘Anthropology and the Discipline of Historical Context’, Midland History, 1 (1972), 46–55; and Max Marwick, review of Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, in Man, N.S. 6 (1971), 320–21.

  8.Hence Edwin Ardener, ‘The New Anthropology and its Critics’, Man, N.S. 6 (1971), 449–67.

  9.Hildred Geertz and Keith Thomas, ‘An Anthropology of Religion and Magic’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 6 (1975), 71–110.

  10.Malcolm Crick, ‘Two Styles in the Study of Witchcraft’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 4 (1973), 17–31 (quotation on p. 18); and Expositions in Language and Meaning, London, 1976, 109–27.

  11.For example, Robert Rowland, ‘“Fantasticall and Devilishe Persons”: European Witch Beliefs in Comparative Perspective’, in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (eds), Early Modern European Witchcraft, Oxford, 1990, 161–90.

  12.J.H.M. Salmon, ‘History without Anthropology: A New Witchcraft Analysis’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 19 (1989), 481–6. Historians in general had internalized this message, which became obvious to me when, from 1991, I began to suggest in guest lectures and seminar papers at other universities that a new attempt to compare data from different parts of the world might be useful, and was invariably told that anthropologists had ruled any such exercise invalid.

  13.A.-L. Siikala, ‘Introduction’, in A.-L. Siikala and M. Hoppal (eds), Studies on Shamanism, Helsinki, 1992, 15–16.

  14.Mary Douglas, Risk and Blame, London, 1992, 83–101; and ‘Sorcery Accusations Unleashed’, Africa, 69 (1999), 177–93.

  15.J. S. La Fontaine, Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England, Cambridge, 1998, esp. 180–92.

  16.Andrew Sanders, A Deed without a Name, Oxford, 1995.

  17.Ralph A. Austen, ‘The Moral Economy of Witchcraft’, in Jean and John Comaroff (eds), Modernity and its Malcontents, Chicago, 1993, 94; Ray Abrahams (ed.), Witchcraft in Contemporary Tanzania, Cambridge, 1994, 12; Barry Hallen and J. Olubi Sodipo, Knowledge, Belief and Witchcraft, Stanford, 1997.

  18.Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft, Charlottesville, 1997, 188–223.

  19.George Clement Bond and Diane M. Ciekawy (eds), Witchcraft Dialogues, Athens, OH, 2001, 5.

  20.Adam Ashforth, ‘Of Secrecy and the Commonplace’, Social Research, 63 (1996), 1183–1234.

  21.‘The Global Context of the Scottish Witch-hunt’, in Julian Goodare (ed.), The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context, Manchester, 2002, 16–32; and ‘Anthropological and Historical Approaches to Witchcraft’.

  22.Published at Cambridge.

  23.Of recent examples of anthropological use of history, see Soma Chaudhuri, ‘Women as Easy Scapegoats: Witchcraft Accusations and Women as Targets in Tea Plantations of India’, Violence Against Women, 18 (2012), 1213–34; and Niek Koning, who will be discussed in detail below. A few notable historians of the early modern European trials have recently taken notice of the existence of non-European material. Johannes Dillinger, Evil People: A Comparative Study of Witch Hunts in Swabian Austria and the Electorate of Trier, Charlottesville, VA, 2009, 4–5, urged others to compare it with European concepts of magic. Malcolm Gaskill, Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 2010, used it intermittently to leaven the European data in his necessarily brief study, and tended to emphasize its differences from European patterns. Julian Goodare, The European Witch-hunt, London, 2016, 173–6, 375–81, commendably added short global comparisons to his subject matter, and drew attention to the potential value of a more extended application of this method.

  24.All are listed either in the endnotes to the book or in its appendix.

  25.None the less, though other relevant studies do exist in French, German and Spanish, their number is relatively small: it is notable that the great majority of material used by Behringer for his survey of the globe was in English, though he himself is German. My sample may thus be deemed to contain most of the information actually in print on the subject.

  26.Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours, London, 1996, 394.

  27.Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft, 223.

  28.Thomas Frederick Elworthy, The Evil Eye, London, 1895; Clarence Maloney (ed.), The Evil Eye, New York, 1976; Alan Dundes (ed.), The Evil Eye, Madison, 1992; G. F. Abbott, Macedonian Folklore, Cambridge, 1903, 139–42; Fredrik Barth, Nomads of South Persia, Oslo, 1961, 144–5; Yedida Stillman, ‘The Evil Eye in Morocco’, in Dov Noy and Issachar Ben Ami (eds), Folklore Research Center Studies, Jerusalem, 1970, 81–94; William Francis Ryan, ‘The Evil Eye’, in Richard M. Golden (ed.), Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, Santa Barbara, 2005, vol. 2, 332–3; Aref Abu-Rabia, ‘The Evil Eye and Cultural Beliefs among the Bedouin Tribes of the Negev’, Folklore, 116 (2005), 241–54; Philippe Marcais, ‘Ayn, “Evil Eye”’, in H.A.R. Gibb (ed.), Encyclopedia of Islam. Volume One, Leiden, 1960, 786; Edward Westermarch, Ritual and Belief in Morocco, London, 1926, vol. 1, 414–78; Lisbeth Sachs, Evil Eye or Bacteria?, Stockholm, 1983.

  29.Philip Mayer, ‘Witches’, in Marwick (ed.), Witchcraft and Sorcery, 51–3; S. F. Nadel, ‘Witchcraft in Four African Societies’, American Anthropologist, 54 (1952), 18–29; P. Lawrence, ‘The Ngaing of the Rai Coast’, in P. Lawrence and M. J. Meggitt (eds), Gods, Ghosts and Men in Melanesia, Oxford, 1965, 198–223; Meyer Forbes, The Web of Kinship among the Tallensi, Oxford, 1967, 32–5; I. M. Lewis, ‘A Structural Approach to Witchcraft and Spirit Possession’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, 293–303; Andrew Strathern, ‘Witchcraft, Greed, Cannibalism and Death’, in Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (eds), Death and the Regeneration of Life, Cambridge, 1982, 111–33; Colin Turnbull, The Forest People, London, 1984, 205–7; Bruce M. Knauft, Good Company and Violence, Berkeley, 1985, 341–2; John J. Honigman, ‘Witch-Fear in Post-contact Kask
a Society’, American Anthropologist, 49 (1947), 222–42.

  30.Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process, London, 1969, 1–43.

  31.Malcolm Ruel, ‘Were-animals and the Introverted Witch’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, 333–50.

  32.Charles-Henry Pradelles de Latour, ‘Witchcraft and the Avoidance of Physical Violence in Cameroon’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, N.S. 1 (1995), 599–609.

  33.Edwin Ardener, ‘Witchcraft, Economics and the Continuity of Belief’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, 141–60.

  34.G. I. Jones, ‘A Boundary to Accusations’, in ibid., 321–32.

  35.Knauft, Good Company and Violence, 340–43.

  36.Robert Redfield, The Folk Culture of Yucatan, Chicago, 1941, 303–37.

  37.Elias Bongmba, ‘African Witchcraft’, in Bond and Ciekawy (eds), Witchcraft Dialogues, 39–79.

  38.Eytan Bercovitch, ‘Moral Insights’, in Gilbert Herdt and Michele Stephen (eds), The Religious Imagination in New Guinea, New Brunswick, 1989, 122–59.

  39.Hugo G. Nutini and John M. Roberts, Blood-sucking Witchcraft: An Epistemological Study of Anthropomorphic Supernaturalism in Rural Tlaxcala, Tucson, 1993.

  40.Wim van Binsbergen, ‘Witchcraft in Modern Africa as Virtualized Boundary Conditions of the Kinship Order’, in Bond and Ciekawy (eds), Witchcraft Dialogues, 243.

  41.Ashforth, ‘Of Secrecy and the Commonplace’, 1191.

  42.R. F. Fortune, Sorcerers of Dobu, London, 1932, 150–54.

  43.Knauft, Good Company and Violence, 112.

  44.George T. Emmons, The Tlingit Indians, ed. Frederica de Lagona (Seattle, 1991), 398.

  45.Wolf Bleek, ‘Witchcraft, Gossip and Death’, Man, N.S. 11 (1976), 526–41.

  46.J. Robin Fox, ‘Witchcraft and Clanship in Cochiti Therapy’, in Ari Kiev (ed.), Magic, Faith and Healing, New York, 1964, 174–200.

  47.Melford E. Spiro, Burmese Supernaturalism, Philadelphia, 1974, 30–35.

  48.Mary Douglas, ‘Techniques of Sorcery Control in Central Africa’, in John Middleton and E. H. Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, London, 1963, 123–41; Jean La Fontaine, ‘Witchcraft in Bugisu’, in ibid., 187–220; Edward L. Schieffelin, The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers, St Lucia, Queensland, 1977, 101; Paul Bohannan, ‘Extra-processual Events in Tiv Political Institutions’, American Anthropologist, 60 (1958), 1–12; Fortune, Sorcerers of Dobu, 150–53; Ryan Schram, ‘Witches’ Wealth: Witchcraft, Confession and Christianity in Auhelawa’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16 (2010), 726–42; W. Lloyd Warner, A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe, New York, 2nd edition, 1958, 193–4.

  49.This issue was one of the preoccupations of Sanders, A Deed Without a Name, 21–7, who concluded that the pattern of belief in a society seemed to have some independence of its social structure.

  50.P.T.W. Baxter, ‘Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder’, in Max Gluckman (ed.), The Allocation of Responsibility, Manchester, 1972, 163–91.

  51.Niek Koning, ‘Witchcraft Beliefs and Witch Hunts’, Human Nature, 24 (2013), 158–81.

  52.Robert Brain, ‘Child-Witches’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, 161–79.

  53.Fortune, Sorcerers of Dobu, 150–52.

  54.Max Marwick warned that his colleagues in anthropology were overstating the extent to which magical harm was attributed to outsiders among the peoples of Melanesia: ‘Witchcraft as a Social Strain-Gauge’, Australian Journal of Science, 26 (1964), 263–8. For examples of the use of magic as a weapon in war between rival communities there, see Fitz John Porter Poole, ‘Cannibals, Tricksters and Witches’, in Paula Brown and Donald Tuzin (ed.), The Ethnography of Cannibalism, Washington, DC, 1983, 6–32; Knauft, Good Company and Violence, 340–43; and Mary Paterson, ‘Sorcery and Witchcraft in Melanesia’, Oceania, 45 (1974), 132–60, 212–34.

  55.Austen, ‘The Moral Economy of Witchcraft’, 89.

  56.Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft, 11; van Binsbergen, ‘Witchcraft in Modern Africa’, 241.

  57.J. D. Krige, ‘The Social Function of Witchcraft’, Theoria, 1 (1947), 8–21; Armin W. Geertz, ‘Hopi Indian Witchcraft and Healing’, American Indian Quarterly, 35 (2011), 372–93.

  58.David Tait, ‘Konkomba Sorcery’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 84 (1954), 66–74.

  59.Robert F. Gray, ‘Some Structural Aspects of Mbugwe Witchcraft’, in Middleton and Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, 143–73.

  60.G.W.B. Huntingford, ‘Nandi Witchcraft’, in ibid., 175–86; Alan Harwood, Witchcraft, Sorcery and Social Categories among the Safwa, Oxford, 1970, passim.

  61.Victor Turner, Schism and Continuity in an African Society, Manchester, 1957, 151–2; Michael D. Jackson, ‘Structure and Event’, Man, N.S. 10 (1975), 387–403.

  62.Max Marwick, ‘Another Modern Anti-Witchcraft Movement in East Central Africa’, Africa, 20 (1950), 100–12.

  63.Philip Mayer, ‘Witches’, in Marwick (ed.), Witchcraft and Sorcery, 55; Monica Hunter Wilson, ‘Witch Beliefs and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology, 56 (1951), 307–13.

  64.K.O.L. Burridge, ‘Tangu’, in Lawrence and Meggitt (eds), Gods, Ghosts and Men in Melanesia, 224–49.

  65.John Middleton, ‘The Concept of “Bewitching” in Lugbara’, Africa, 25 (1955), 252–60.

  66.Benson Saler, ‘Nagual, Witch and Sorcerer in a Quiché Village’, Ethnology, 3 (1964), 305–28.

  67.Keith H. Basso, Western Apache Witchcraft, Tucson, 1969, 34–59.

  68.Jean Buxton, ‘Mandari Witchcraft’, in Middleton and Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, 99–121.

  69.Gray, ‘Some Structural Aspects of Mbugwe Witchcraft’; Alison Redmayne, ‘Chikanga’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, 103–28.

  70.La Fontaine, ‘Witchcraft in Bugisu’; Schieffelin, The Sorrow of the Lonely, 78–127.

  71.K. M. Stewart, ‘Witchcraft among the Mohave Indians’, Ethnology, 12 (1973), 315–24.

  72.Mayer, ‘Witches’, 55.

  73.Bercovitch, ‘Moral Insights’, 146.

  74.Scarlett Epstein, ‘A Sociological Analysis of Witch Beliefs in a Mysore Village’, Eastern Anthropologist, 12 (1959), 234–51.

  75.Godfrey Lienhardt, ‘Some Notions of Witchcraft amongst the Dinka’, Africa, 21 (1951), 303–18.

  76.E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, Oxford, 1937.

  77.Consider, for example, the titles of the famous collections edited by Middleton and Winter, Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, and Marwick, Witchcraft and Sorcery, a division reflected in many of the contributions to them.

  78.For example, Victor W. Turner, ‘Witchcraft and Sorcery’, Africa, 34 (1964), 314–24.

  79.The studies used here illustrate this point in detail between them. Sanders, A Deed Without a Name, 19–20, summed up the position reached by the mid-1990s, by which time the distinction between witchcraft and sorcery had largely been abandoned. Bruce Kapferer mounted a rearguard action to argue for its validity in 2002: ‘Introduction’ to Kapferer (ed.), Beyond Rationalism: Rethinking Magic, Witchcraft and Sorcery, New York, 2002, 1–30.

  80.Fortune, Sorcerers of Dobu, 150–54.

  81.Strathern, ‘Witchcraft, Greed, Cannibalism and Death’.

  82.Bohannan, ‘Extra-Processual Events in Tiv Political Institutions’.

  83.Hilda Kuper, An African Aristocracy, Oxford, 1947, 172–6.

  84.Susan Drucker Brown, ‘Mamprusi Witchcraft, Subversion, and Changing Gender Relations’, Africa, 63 (1993), 531–49.

  85.Pradelles de Latour, ‘Witchcraft and the Avoidance of Physical Violence in Cameroon’.

  86.Fiona Bowie, ‘Witchcraft and Healing among the Bangwa of Cameroon’, in Graham Harvey (ed.), Indigenous Religions, London, 2000, 68–79.

  87.Roy Ellen, ‘Anger, Anxiety and Sorcery: An Analysis of Some Nuaulu Case Material from
Seram, Eastern Indonesia’, in C. W. Watson and Roy Ellen (eds), Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeast Asia, Honolulu, 1993, 81–97.

  88.Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, passim.

  89.Wilson, ‘Witch Beliefs and Social Structure’, 308; Schieffelin, The Sorrow of the Lonely, 101.

  90.Epstein, ‘A Sociological Analysis of Witch Beliefs in a Mysore Village’.

  91.M. J. Field, Religion and Medicine of the Gă People, Oxford, 1937, 149–60.

  92.Richard E. Lieban, Cebuano Sorcery, Berkeley, 1967, ch. 2.

  93.Nicola Tannenbaum, ‘Witches, Fortune and Misfortune among the Shan of Northwestern Thailand’, in Watson and Ellen (eds), Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeast Asia, 67–80.

  94.Raymond Firth, Human Types, London, 2nd edition, 1956, 155–6.

  95.Parsons, ‘Witchcraft among the Pueblos’; Clyde Kluckhohn, Navaho Witchcraft, Boston, 1944, 67–121.

  96.Frederica de Laguna, ‘Tlingit’, in William W. Fitzhugh and Aron Crowell (eds), Crossroads of Continents, Washington DC, 1988, 63.

  97.John Beattie, ‘Sorcery in Bunyoro’, in Middleton and Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, 27–55.

  98.A. M. Hocart, ‘Medicine and Witchcraft in Eddystone of the Solomons’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 55 (1925), 229–70.

  99.E. E. Evans-Pritchard, ‘Sorcery and Native Opinion’, Africa, 4 (1931), 23–8.

  100.Lienhardt, ‘Some Notions of Witchcraft amongst the Dinka’, 317.

  101.Parsons, ‘Witchcraft among the Pueblos’.

  102.Don C. Talayesva and Leon W. Simmons, Sun Chief, New Haven, 1963, 331–3.

  103.P. Morton-Williams, ‘The Atinga Cult among the South-Western Yoruba’, Bulletin de L’Institut Français d’Afrique Noire, 18 (1956), 315–34; Esther Goody, ‘Legitimate and Illegitimate Aggression in a West African State’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, 207–44.