The Social Meaning of Witchcraft

 

     When I was teaching in West Africa, the Senior School Certificate Examination included questions about Shakespeare’s Macbeth, so the three upper forms read and reread that one play.  A compact thriller, it is probably a good choice for secondary students, but several in my class were particularly impressed with the witches.  “You see,” one of them told me, as though he had uncovered something he was not supposed to know, “the English have witches, too.” 

     The Nigerians, it seems, have so many that they are still outlawed, though legal conviction punishes far fewer than the number who suffer vigilante action.  Are the fictional Elizabethan weird sisters in fact substantially the same as their real Nigerian contemporaries who announced a professional conference of witches not so long ago in Benin City? [1]  How much does either have in common with the self-identified contemporary witches for whom the identity is associated with feminism and New Age beliefs or, on the other hand, with the traditional Christian view that a witch is a conscious agent of the devil?  In Margaret Murray’s many publications (pooh-poohed by other specialists), she argued that witches were simply devotees of a pagan religion.  Writers who were not anthropologists (and even some who were) used to refer to practically any tribal shaman, healer, or priest as a “witch doctor.”  Slippery as it already sounds, the definition is further complicated by the fact that there exist numerous accounts of male witches and of benevolent ones, and that the great majority of people who have been considered witches by others have denied the charge, at least until torture began.  Practically the only common factor is the alleged use of supernatural means, but a great variety of practitioners meet that criterion.

     The present inquiry therefore adds two further conditions.  The supposed witch is female and she uses her magic power with a malevolent aim.  Probably the most common usage in English and sanctioned by centuries, what this definition loses in inclusiveness, it gains in a sharper focus on the meaning of what is surely the most historically significant set of witches, those considered to be wicked women.  The great majority of people charged with witchcraft had, of course, no such malicious intentions, but the prejudice built into the term is itself informative.  Virtually all information about the phenomenon derives from the statements of the supposed witches’ voluble enemies, who considered these unfortunate women the worst of malefactors, leaving us with a substantial story of their persecutions but almost nothing about their actual beliefs or activities. 

    Hostile accounts of witches are prominent not only in European history, but in other parts if the world as well.   A few years ago the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution calling for the “elimination of harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks.”  In many countries of Africa the existence of witches is widely accepted.  Only a few weeks ago the African Union voted to encourage its members states to remedy the damage done by such beliefs.  The resolution aimed at halting the outright murder or subjugation to ordeals of suspected witches, as well as a variety of harsh punishments such as their confinement to “witch-camps” in Ghana and enslavement in Tanzania [2].

     Several accused witches have been judicially executed in recent decades in Saudi Arabia where witchcraft remains a statutory crime [3].  In India accusations of witchcraft, primarily directed against poor, elderly, and low caste women, have occurred from early times until the present.  Over a thousand five hundred people so labeled are still killed every year [4].  In Papua New Guinea about a hundred women are killed annually for similar reasons [5].  Even in relatively developed countries such as Russia [6] and the United States [7] such incidents occur.

     The Biblical text most often invoked in European witch-hunting is Exodus 22:18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”  Whether the term mekhashepha in this passage derives from a root meaning “mutterings” (referring to incantations) or from another meaning “cutting,” (indicating one who gathers plants) [8], it clearly indicates a practitioner of traditional remedies.  Of course, as the Hebrew scripture abundantly reminds us, anything savoring of another religion was anathema to the ancient Jewish leaders for ritual reasons apart from any ethical implications.  In this way all unorthodox beliefs became associated with disloyalty to Jehovah.  Later, of course, the Christian god proved no less jealous [9], and the practice of magic was identified with fealty to the devil.

    Due to the hegemony of European Christianity, witchcraft was universally forbidden from the start [10], but widespread persecution did not occur until the Early Modern era.  While the anxiety caused by wars and epidemics may have played a role, surely the principal reason for this escalation of violence in which tens of thousands were executed was the Reformation as the Roman Catholic Church moved to protect its exclusive franchise on the supernatural just as the ancient Jewish priesthood had done.  This is true in spite of the fact that few if any of the accused “witches” were in fact Satanists [11].  Whereas one might have expected that the belief in witches would have been more widespread during the Middle Ages in Europe when science was less developed, in fact it was not until the Reformation threatened and then overturned the long hegemony of Roman Catholicism that authorities seeking to reestablish control were moved to take action not only against the Protestant reformers but also against imagined enemies who were more easily overcome: old women, Jews, and those suspected of covert unorthodox beliefs.

     Beyond the attempt to maintain the hierarchical religious power structure the pursuit of witches also reinforced male authority in the family and in the community.  At base like all superstition and much of religion it expresses the anxiety people feel concerning events beyond human control.  Misfortune of all sorts, first of all mortality, but illness, injury, crop failure, and any of a myriad other calamities might strike at any moment.  Seeking protection from such undesirable but unforeseeable suffering, people fenced their actions with elaborate defensive systems. They honored the deceased ancestors, yet also took precautions to prevent them from bringing problems to the living. They relished the meat their hunters brought, yet performed rituals to propitiate the animals’ spirits. They courted, divided the tasks of life, and made heterosexual love, but remained anxious that the mysterious other might be surreptitiously causing harm.  The veneration of female fertility deities in prehistoric times represented at once the joy of nature’s plenty and the fear that its largesse might be withheld. Once such earth mothers were replaced in the role of divine chief executive and source of the good things of life by male sky gods such as Zeus and Jehovah, the rich gifts once associated with females both holy and human were lost and only trepidation remained in the face of the female supernatural.  It is the story of the rejection of Asherah among the Jews and of Pandora, once named “all-gifts,” but then said to have brought woe among the Greeks.

     The misogynistic implication of the belief in this sort of witches is undeniable. The wish of male culture makers to project responsibility for misfortune on the other led to the systematic repression and exploitation of women in patriarchies around the world. The case of witches makes clear that women’s relegation to second-class status was motivated by their oppressors’ self-interest (or, at any rate, by selfish intentions), yet men felt apprehensive still.  Customs such as the sequestering of women during menstruation certainly arose from the same sort of fear that led to the witch prosecutions. Often marginalized people – the poor, the eccentric, the foreigner -- were selected as particular scapegoats in the desperate effort to control the unpredictable turns of fortune or to seek revenge for misfortunes that had already occurred.

     Apart from those with religious power seeking to retain it, believers wishing to exhibit piety, and everyone’s wishing to avert bad luck, the concept of vicious female witches enforced male patriarchal control in a way accepted by most as self-evident and natural.  A more general, non-religious fear of women is suggested by the word witch’s otherwise paradoxical use to mean both an "old, ugly, and crabbed or malignant woman" (from the early 1400s) and a "young woman or girl of bewitching [i.e., attractive] aspect or manners" (middle 1700s) [12].

     Thus it has been the witch-hunters and not the witches who behave in a superstitious and an unchristian manner.  The strategy of scapegoating is of a piece with the prodigious human sacrifices of the Mayans and the Aztecs and the monstrous crime of the Holocaust as well as with the dehumanization of the poor and enemies in war, xenophobia, racism, and bigotry in general.  On a smaller scale similar patterns abound: the bullying of schoolchildren, domestic violence, blame-shifting and even supercilious language toward subordinates.  Life is insecure, suffering always at hand, and the resulting fear and anxiety stimulate the desire to believe that untoward events must be caused by others and that hostile action is required in self-defense.  Those with power easily believe that their power is justified.  Deflecting responsibility does not, of course, solve problems, and the result is often a redoubling of violence in the pursuit of well-being that would be poignant were it not so selfish.  The empathy and cooperation of people has always existed in tension with the demands of ego and the convenient ability to dehumanize those who live over the next hill and the more vulnerable among one’s own group. 

     While campaigns against witches have diminished, our species is as irrational as it ever was, and blaming and penalizing those who are weaker is as common as in the day of the Salem trials.  Magic thinking is so appealing to many that the mythic patterns survive.  When the war in Vietnam was draining the spirit of our nation and causing untold misery, a good deal of the public thought the problem was protesters.  When unions were organizing and Black scabs were brought in, white working-class people readily believed that their enemy was their fellow worker rather than the plutocrat exploiting them both.  When the government must save money, the savings are most often found in the small amounts spent on the poor, the ill, the outcast, the nonconformist.  In a curious echo of earlier delusions, many people thought during the 1980s and 1990s that Satanic ritual abuse and murder of children was occurring in spite of the lack of corroborating evidence [13].  Currently, many right-wing extremists fantasize that “liberals” and Democrats and the witch-like Hillary Clinton are regularly committing such crimes.  Today, when the existence of our species is imperiled by imminent environmental catastrophe, when millions of our brothers and sisters are in want, when the rich steal an ever greater proportion of our productivity, some are convinced that what needs remediation is people in drag reading stories to small children. 

     The black arts derive their evil character not from the acts of the so-called witches, but from the barbarous viciousness of those considered righteous.  Projection of one’s own faults, displacement of blame for adverse events, vilification of those who are in some way different, and, most dramatically, outbursts of murderous ferocity against outsiders have always been the most readily available solutions to human problems.  The only flaw in these approaches is that they do not work.

    

 

 

1.  in 1987, High Priest Osemwegie, playwright and founder of the Ebohon Cultural Center, announced a meeting of witches in Benin City.  After a storm of protest from fundamentalist Christians, he declared that the gathering would proceed, but, for security reasons, would be invisible.  More recently, in 2019 an academic meeting featuring academic papers in topics relating to witchcraft had been scheduled at Nsukka University, but had to reformulate its announcements due to Pentecostal pressure from churchmen who thought it was, as the earlier meeting had indeed been, a gathering of practitioners.

 2.  The UN resolution (#47) passed in July 2021.  Among many other sources, the camps are reported by Leo Igwe, “Witch Camps and Politics of Witchcraft Accusations In Ghana.” Maravi Post, June 13 2022 and enslavement in Dale Wallace, “Rethinking Religion, Magic and Witchcraft in South Africa: From Colonial Coherence to Postcolonial Conundrum,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Vol. 28, No. 1 (2015).

 3.  Among recent victims of this legalized murder have been Fawza Falih Muhammad Ali in 2006 and Amina Bint Abdulhalim Nassar in December 2011,

 4.  Seema Yasmin, “Witch Hunts Today: Abuse of Women, Superstition and Murder Collide in India,” Scientific American January 11, 2018.

 5.  An even higher estimate is suggested in the Wikipedia article titled “Witch-hunts in Papua New Guinea.”  The general situation In Papua New Guinea is surveyed in Charlie Campbell, “How a 7-Year-Old Girl Survived Papua New Guinea’s Crucible of Sorcery,” Time July 16, 2019.  Other stories may be found in   Maya Oppenheim, "Rising numbers of women in Papua New Guinea suffer brutal violence after being accused of 'witchcraft'," The Independent June 10, 2021.

 6.  Samantha Berkhead, “Practical Magic: How Russia’s Ancient Witchcraft Traditions Continue to Thrive,” Moscow Times, November 4, 2020.

 7.  Among the cases in the United States is that of E’Dina Hines in 2015.  Often, as in the case of Eder Guzman-Rodriguez in 2011, children are the victims. 

 8.  The translators of the Septuagint rendered the word as φαρμακοὺς, a word that (as Derrida in Plato’s Pharmacy noted) applies equally to a healer and a poisoner.

 9.  Witchcraft is a capital offense in the Laws of Hammurabi (eighteenth century B. C. E.).  Similarly, verse 102 of the second surah of the Koran (Al-Baqara) propounds the idea that devils teach magic.  “And they followed what the devils taught during the reign of Solomon. It was not Solomon who disbelieved, but it was the devils who disbelieved. They taught the people witchcraft and what was revealed in Babylon to the two angels Harut and Marut.”

10.  In England the laws of Alfred, for instance, condemn unrepentant witches to death.

11.  A sort of synthetic Satanism, primarily meant to be provocative, arose in the 18^th century with Philip Wharton, 1st Duke of Wharton’s Hellfire Club (1718) and Sir Francis Dashwood’s Order of the Knights (or Friars) of Saint Francis (1749) whose meetings Benjamin Franklin occasionally attended.  Later, playing with Satanism enjoyed something of a vogue with Éliphas Lévi and Aleister Crowley.  This trend reached a sort of epigone with Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan (1966).  The Satanic Temple, an entirely secular organization, was founded in 2012 by Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry with the goal of provocatively challenging the intrusion of religion in American government.

12.  Oxford English Dictionary.

13.  A useful brief survey is provided in Bette L. Bottoms and Suzanne L. Davis, “The Creation of Satanic Ritual Abuse,” Journal of Social and Clinical Pychology vol. XVI, no. 2 (1997).

Notes on Recent Reading 42 (Bulgakov, Tedlock, Williams)

 

The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov) 

     A symphonic and sustained phantasmagoria, the novel has attracted considerable political comment because of the author’s difficulties under Stalin’s rule. Yet this reader suspects Bulgakov would have been ill at ease even under less despotic rule. His sense of the absurd, his social satire stretched to universals, his dazed reaction to the procession of experience, all make him a worthy successor to Gogol. 

      In their objective particularizing, the Pilate sections reminded me of Flaubert’s Salammbo, though I remain puzzled over thematic aspects of these passages which Bulgakov seems to wish to affirm as authentic by draining them of their supernaturalism, an odd compensation for the constant supernatural characters and sudden scene-shifting throughout. Perhaps the reader is meant to be caught off-balance. 

  Rabinal Achi (Tedlock) 

      One expects, I suppose, too much from an artifact like this, a vestige of pre-Columbian drama preserved in what looks like good condition by the merest chance.  

      It is many years since Sir John Eric Sidney Thompson’s picture of the Mayans as peaceful gentlemanly scholars has been devastated by decoding of the glyphs, most of which turn out to be records of the power of rulers proven by their military victories very like those found in Egypt or Babylon. So here the drama centers on the same sort of theme, the ritual submission and sacrifice of a conquered nobleman, performed in a highly ritualized atmosphere and bedecked with luxurious mythological context.

      Tedlock, a participatory anthropologist (he prefers the term “dialogic” anthropologist) who had himself initiated as a shaman, a poet and founder along with Jerome Rothenberg of the influential Alcheringa, is surely the ideal guide for a work of this sort.  His edition of the Popul Vuh is probably the best both for artistic and scientific reasons, but this work left me disappointed.  While the Popul Vuh provides a fascinating, provocative, and dramatic creation story, the Rabinal Achi offers mainly aggression, though clothed in stately and operatic mythological and rhetorical finery.  

A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (Williams) 

     This late play, first staged in its final form in 1979, is theatrical and entertaining with considerable comedy as well as the author’s characteristic pathos. The reader may sit back and enjoy the lines of the extravagant Dorothea, her Teutonically weighty roommate Bodey, and her waspish coworker Helena. Often richly comic but sympathetic nonetheless, each is defined by the blinders they wear. The trajectory of the plot is clear from the outset, lending dark shadows to the scene, heightened by the presence of Sophie Gluck, a frantic, grieving, and mentally ill neighbor. The conclusion of the play, in which Dottie decides to join the picnic excursion, accepting the presence of Bodey’s brother in spite of his poor taste, beer, and cigars, indicates that she will survive despite her lover’s betrayal, though with radically reduced expectations. 

     The stage set is unusually significant in this play. The discordant and shabby décor of the ladies’ apartment is the occasion for humor, not squalor or real despair. If this play never reaches the heights or depths of Williams’ masterpieces, it is funnier than most, and the characters, though recognizable, are sufficiently individualized to engage the audience for the hour and a half of this extended single act. Williams was a master of the stage, and these four women, though quite unlike one another, are all quite amusing to those of us in the audience as they all do their best to pursue happiness, through frustration, poor judgement, and repeated defeat. There is, perhaps, a sort of courage, if not good taste, in the “fierce purple carpet.”

Notes on Recent Reading 19 [Powers, Zhang Ji, Vietnamese folk song]

Sacred Language: The Nature of Supernatural Discourse in Lakota (Powers)

     William Powers’ book, though a scholarly anthropological work, engages the poet and the literary theorist as well. The author, who is fluent in Lakota, had, at the time of the book’s publication, spent thirty-six years in field work on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
     His primary focus is the special language used for sacred discourse, both among the group’s spiritual leaders and between an individual “medicine man” and supernatural entities. (The term may sound out-dated, but it seems it is a direct translation from Lakota.) Other Lakota maintain that the language of such utterances is wholly unintelligible to them, though this is not literally true. Reaching the spirit realm is certainly an ambitious task for words, but even the secular poet generally strives for some level of discourse set apart, lexically, rhythmically, and formally from other uses of language. He covers as well the extreme case of verses in vocables without any ordinary words, rather like scat singing or Dada sound poetry.
     Powers provides a good number of song texts to demonstrate the character of this poetry, though the words seem weak isolated from the performance situation. In addition he comments on the significance of numerological patterns to the community and on a variety of other fascinating topics, among them the complex and dynamic interplay between Christian and indigenous religious thought, the relationship of ritual to song, and the role of the cross-dressers often (misleadingly) called berdaches. His exposition of each of these topics is supported by precise and convincing evidence. He is explicit about his debts to Lévy-Bruhl, often disregarded now, on the one hand and the still-fashionable Lévi-Strauss on the other.


Cloud Gate Song (Zhang Ji, trans. Jonathan Chaves)

     Impressed as are many other Westerners with the great Tang Dynasty Buddhist poets, I read with interest Chaves’ versions of this Confucian, the first book-length presentation of the poet in a European language. Much of the poetic sensibility is familiar: the pleasure in retirement, in observation of nature, and in friends. Here the lens is more worldly, less mystical, than in the Buddhist Wang Wei, for instance. Zhang was known for “Music Bureau” poems mimicking folk forms which purport to express popular sentiments. A good number of poems comment on contemporary history, in particular the wars resulting from Tibetan incursions.
     Chaves’ book is valuable not merely because it allows a glimpse of a significant Chinese poet. His introductory remarks defend his choice here to preserve the rhyme schemes of the original texts in his translations. He ably discusses the issue in general, noting the overwhelming choice of free verse among European translators of Chinese in spite of the fact that, as he notes, all classic Chinese poetry is rhymed. His thoughtful work should be welcomed by all who love Chinese poetry, even those who lack Chaves’ apparent sympathy for the New Formalists among American poets.
(Zhang Ji, the Tang Dynasty poet from Jiangnan whose work Chaves translated, should not be confused with the poet of the same name from Hubei who lived a few decades earlier.)


Ca Dao Viet Nam (trans. Balaban)

     John Balaban did alternative service in Vietnam and later returned to collect the folk songs of the countryside. He provides an adequate introduction to place his texts in context, but the reader is left wanting far more literary and anthropological information as well as notes on the individual songs. As it is, Balaban is a competent poet in English who provides a heterogeneous collection of material of a sort that had not at the time been published even in Vietnam. His simple, easy, direct language seems appropriate for a book whose range encompasses the proverbial saying, the wistful lament, the evocative image, the love-note, and a variety of other sorts of utterance. Readable though he is, I feel I have little sense of the style of the originals or the characteristics of the genre. Creditable as Balaban’s story is, very likely only a specialist scholar could provide such information. Still, one can only thank him for going out into the villages in the midst of war to preserve an art threatened by modern mass media even more than by armed conflict. It seems almost a golden age when every laborer had a favorite poem.