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.
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 18th 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).
