The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  In 1989 a review article uncompromisingly entitled ‘History without Anthropology’ concluded that anthropologists had very effectively deterred historians from taking any further interest in their work with reference to the subject of witchcraft.12 The irony of this was that during the same period the practitioners of anthropology themselves were starting to change their minds again. In an important sense they had never abandoned the comparative approach and the Western terminology that many of them had criticized in the 1970s, because even those who described the magical practices of non-European peoples using native terms still put English expressions such as ‘witchcraft’ and ‘magic’ into their titles. For the most part they continued to put them into their introductions as well, and some made such words the framework within which the local study was introduced: they retained their value as an international semantic currency for English-speakers. By the 1990s some of the most distinguished anthropologists were starting to become more actively interested in a new collaboration between their discipline and historians of Europe. One described the fixation of her discipline on holistic fieldwork in specific small-scale societies using participant observation as an ‘academic narrowness’, which had cut it off from the history of religion.13 Another used both modern African and early modern European data to compare attitudes to witchcraft and leprosy as strategies of rejection, and to consider the phenomenon of witch-hunting.14 A third suggested that early modern images of witchcraft were closely related to African beliefs. In doing so she explicitly attacked the earlier assertions that the term ‘witchcraft’ lacked any validity in cross-cultural comparisons: indeed, she restated such comparisons as a duty of her discipline.15 In 1995 a British sociologist, Andrew Sanders, made a parallel challenge to those assertions, and published a worldwide survey of occurrences of the witch figure, using both historic European and modern ethnographic records.16 The most significant development in this regard was among Africanists, who called for a renewed emphasis on cross-cultural comparison in witchcraft studies. It was propelled by one of the most distressing and – to many – surprising characteristics of post-colonial states in the continent, an intensification of fear of witchcraft and attacks on suspected witches as one response to the process of modernization after independence: it will be discussed below. Anthropologists who studied this phenomenon found themselves needing to dissuade fellow Westerners from attributing the persistence of a belief in witchcraft in Africa to any inherent disposition to ‘superstition’ or ‘backwardness’ on the part of its peoples. Such a strategy called for a new emphasis on the prevalence of such beliefs across the globe, including in the relatively recent European past, and a return to a comparative method; and direct calls for that were being made by prominent Africanists by the mid-1990s.17 Typical of them was an influential study of Cameroon by Peter Geschiere, who concluded that ‘these notions, now translated throughout Africa as “witchcraft”, reflect a struggle with problems common to all human societies’. He invited anthropologists to study research into the European trials, and termed their recent neglect of this ‘even more disconcerting’ than the loss of interest by historians of Europe in African parallels. Rounding upon experts in early modern Europe who had claimed that modern African societies were totally dissimilar to those which were their own focus of study, he argued that, especially with its ruling elites of colonial European administrators and settlers, early twentieth-century Africa had been as socially and culturally complex as sixteenth-century Europe.18 By 2001 the editors of a major collection of essays on African witchcraft could introduce it by warning scholars not to restrict the study of witch beliefs to ‘any one region of the world or to any one historical period’.19 In urban centres of modern Africa, a multicultural perspective had become essential in any case: the image of witchcraft in the Soweto suburb of Johannesburg, for example, was by the 1990s a blend of ideas drawn from different native groups with some brought by Dutch and English settlers and based on the early modern European stereotype.20 A rapprochement between historians and anthropologists over the issue was, however, an extremely difficult enterprise.

  Despite the call made by some for a return of the comparative method, few Africanists in practice paid attention to studies of the witch figure anywhere else in the world, or in time. Those who did attempt to cite early modern European material often seemed unaware of anything published on it after the early 1970s: the burgeoning of research that had occurred since, internationally, and taking ever more sophisticated forms, had passed them by completely. As for historians of witchcraft, almost all of them had stopped reading anthropology on the assumption that they had been discouraged from doing so by its practitioners. To resume an engagement with it after more than two decades would require a large amount of additional work of unproven value, when they were already achieving apparently impressive results as a consequence of relationships with a range of other disciplines. It was quite plain by the 1990s why Africanists concerned with witchcraft might profit from a fresh engagement with European comparisons, but not even the anthropologists themselves were making a clear argument for why historians of Europe would benefit from the transaction. A concealed irony in the situation was that the newly developed cultural history of the 1980s and 1990s, which had a profound influence upon the study of European witchcraft, was itself ultimately derived partly from anthropology; but reached most historians at one or two removes from it.

  Unsurprisingly, therefore, historians have largely ignored the opportunity for a new dialogue, and anthropologists have largely ceased to offer it. In the early 2000s the present author published two essays that drew attention to it and suggested specific advantages to experts in early modern Europe from such a comparative exercise.21 These have, however, been more cited than heeded. In 2004 one of the leading experts in German witch trials, Wolfgang Behringer, produced a heavyweight volume entitled Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History.22 It was in practice a detailed and impressive history of the European witch-hunts bracketed between two swift surveys of beliefs and prosecutions concerning witchcraft across the rest of the world. The first of these made the point that what happened in Europe was part of a global pattern, and the second of them proved that a continuation of witch-hunting was not merely a problem in contemporary Africa but in many other parts of the planet. This was a precise and fruitful application of the comparative method; but the present book seems to be the first to follow up on its achievement. The only general effect of the growing awareness of a new potential for collaboration between anthropologists and historians of witchcraft has been an apparent disappearance on both sides of assertions that such collaboration is itself inherently undesirable; which is some kind of progress. A few anthropologists have continued to make use of European material, but historians of Europe usually fail to repay the compliment.23 A refinement of methodology is needed if any advance is indeed to be made on earlier attempts to collaborate.

  Andrew Sanders was interested chiefly in the relationship between the witch figure and the pursuit of power through competitive social relationships in different parts of the world. As a sociologist, he was concerned more with the implications and consequences of a belief in witchcraft for human societies that held one than with the nature of that belief itself. Wolfgang Behringer’s aim was to show that in most parts of the world human beings have been inclined to attribute seemingly uncanny misfortune to evil magic worked by their fellows, and to illustrate the lethal consequences which such an inclination has often produced (and continues to produce). My own essays attempted to establish a coherent global model for the witch figure, with sustained cross-cultural characteristics, and proposed one based on the five characteristics delineated above as fundamental for the European concept of that figure. What will be attempted now is a more systematic application of the cross-cultural method, across the planet, checking off those characteristics one by one. It utilizes studies of beliefs concerning witches in a total of three hundred extra-European societies made between
1890 and 2013: 170 in sub-Saharan Africa; six in North Africa and the Middle East; thirty-seven in South Asia from India to China and Indonesia; thirty-nine in Australia, Polynesia and Melanesia, including New Guinea; forty-one in North America (including Greenland and the Caribbean); and seven in South America.24 The predominance of Africa in the sample reflects the amount of work that has been done there by anthropologists but also the resources available to a researcher based in the United Kingdom as so many of these anthropologists were British.25 There is enough data from the rest of the world, however, to provide comparison with the African material, and that exercise may now be undertaken point by point with respect to the characteristics of a European witch listed above. The societies studied are those on which anthropology published in English has chosen or been able to concentrate, being generally relatively simple and small, and consisting of tribal units. There is a dearth of information available from larger, state-based, social and political structures such as those of China and Japan, which to some extent will be made up by a sustained examination of ancient states in Europe and the Near and Middle East in the next chapter. None the less, the sample from smaller ethnic units, across the world, is large enough for a comparative exercise to promise some general insights.

  Characteristic One: A Witch Causes Harm by Uncanny Means

  There is little doubt that in every inhabited continent of the world, the majority of recorded human societies have believed in, and feared, an ability by some individuals to cause misfortune and injury to others by non-physical and uncanny (‘magical’) means: this has been the single most striking lesson of anthropological fieldwork and the writing of extra-European history. One prominent historian of early modern Europe, Robin Briggs, has in fact proposed that a fear of witchcraft might be inherent in humanity: ‘a psychic potential we cannot help carrying around within ourselves as part of our long-term inheritance’.26 Speaking from anthropology, Peter Geschiere proposed that ‘notions, now translated throughout Africa as “witchcraft”, reflect a struggle with problems common to all human societies’.27 What is valuable about these insights is that they testify to the general truth that human beings traditionally have great trouble in coping with the concept of random chance. People tend on the whole to want to assign occurrences of remarkable good or bad luck to agency, either human or superhuman. It is important to emphasize, however, that malevolent humans have been only one kind of agent to whom such causation has been attributed: the others include deities, non-human spirits that inhabit the terrestrial world, or the spirits of dead human ancestors. All of these, if offended by the actions of individual people, or if inherently hostile to the human race, could inflict death, sickness or other serious misfortunes. Wherever they appear, these alternative beliefs either limit or exclude a tendency to attribute suffering to witchcraft.

  In addition, many societies have believed that certain humans have the power to blight others without intention to do so, and often without knowledge of having done so. This is achieved by unwittingly investing a form of words or a look with destructive power: in the case of malign sight, this trait has become generally known to English-speakers as ‘the evil eye’. Belief in it tends to have a dampening effect on a fear of witches wherever it is found, which is mainly in most of the Middle East and North Africa, from Morocco to Iran, with outliers in parts of Europe and India. This is because it is thought to be part of the possessing person’s organic constitution. As such, it is wholly compatible with witchcraft if the person concerned triggers it consciously and deliberately to do harm, as some are thought to do across its range. A majority of those who embody this malign power, however, are believed to do so wholly innately and involuntarily, so that they cannot in justice be held personally responsible for its effects. Protection and remedies for it mainly take the form of counter-magic, including the wearing of amulets, charms and talismans, the reciting of prayers and incantations, the making of sacrifices and pilgrimages and carrying out of exorcisms, and the avoidance or placation of the person who is locally presumed to possess it. Across the range in which it is an important component of belief, it is used to explain precisely the sort of uncanny misfortunes that are blamed elsewhere on witchcraft.28

  Alternative explanations for misfortune that rule out or marginalize witchcraft are found across most of the world. Before modern times, the largest witch-free area on the planet was probably Siberia, which spans a third of the northern hemisphere; a consideration of it will play a major part in Chapter Three of this book. Elsewhere in the world, societies that do not believe in witchcraft, or do not believe that it should be taken very seriously, are seldom found in compact concentrations but scattered between peoples who fear witches intensely. Although rarer than groups with a significant fear of witchcraft, they are present in most continents: the Andaman Islanders of the Indian Ocean, the Korongo of the Sudan, the Tallensi of northern Ghana, the Gurage of Ethiopia, the Mbuti of the Congo basin, the Fijians of the Pacific, the hill tribes of Uttar Pradesh, the Slave and Sekani Indians of north-west Canada, and the Ngaing, Mae Enga, Manus and Daribi of New Guinea are all examples.29 The Ndembu, in Zambia, attributed misfortune to angry ancestral spirits, but the latter were seen as aroused by malevolent humans, in effect making the spirits the agents of witches. However, it was the spirits who were propitiated, by ritual, and so the witches rendered harmless and ignored.30

  Among peoples who do have a concept of witchcraft, the intensity with which it is feared can vary greatly, even within the same region or state. Among the ethnic groups contained within the modern state of Cameroon are the Banyang, the Bamileke and the Bakweri. The first of those believed in witches but very rarely accused anybody of being one. Those afflicted by hostile magic were believed to have brought their misfortune on themselves.31 The second took witchcraft seriously and made great efforts to detect its practitioners. The latter, however, were not held responsible for their actions, and were thought to lose their powers automatically on being publically exposed.32 The third people feared witchcraft intensely, hunted down its presumed operators, and believed that they remained dangerous and malevolent even when identified, so that they needed to be punished directly in proportion to the harm they were thought to have caused.33 In neighbouring Nigeria, a clutch of tribal societies shared very similar theoretical beliefs about the existence of witches, but in practice the Ekoi dreaded them, the Ibibio and Ijo feared them moderately, and the Ibo and Yakö took little notice of them.34 Likewise, a survey made in 1985 of a sample of well-studied peoples in the Melanesian archipelago found that two of them did not believe that humans used malevolent magic; five thought it a legitimate monopoly of hereditary leaders and used by them productively in order to keep order and conduct warfare; twenty-three believed that such leaders could use it but it was not respectable of them to do so; five conceived of it as a covert weapon of the oppressed, employed against unpopular leaders; eleven identified it as a means by which ordinary members of the community secretly harmed each other, but generally managed in practice to contain the tensions provoked by fears of it; and six had the same belief but were badly disrupted by the suspicions that resulted.35 Among a single people, the intensity with which witchcraft was feared could vary according to the kind of settlement in which people lived. The Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico all hated witches equally in theory during the early twentieth century, but those in villages were rarely inclined to suspect anybody of being one, while the tension was much greater in towns: in the district capital of Dzitas during the 1930s, 10 per cent of the adult population were thought to have been either perpetrators or victims of witchcraft.36

  The identification of a belief in witchcraft among extra-European peoples, by a European scholar, may often involve the extraction of one element from a range of native concepts of magic and of kinds of magician. The Wimbum of north-west Cameroon used three terms for occult knowledge: bfiu, the harmless employment of arcane powers for self-protection; brii, occult power malevolently
used, but sometimes merely as a prank; and tfu, an inborn magical force operated under cover of darkness which could be used for both good and evil ends. Witchcraft in the European sense could embrace some forms of both brii and tfu, but the Wimbum also believed in a special strain of the latter, tfu yibi, which consisted of killing other humans magically in order to eat their flesh, and those who deployed that would correspond precisely to the early modern European witch figure.37 The Nalumin of the mountains of south-eastern New Guinea distinguished biis from yakop. The former were people, mostly female, who killed others in uncanny ways, using invisible weapons while roaming in spirit-body, in order to eat the flesh of their victims in communal feasts. The latter was a technique, used mainly by women, which consisted of killing by burying personal leavings of the intended victim – food scraps, nail clippings and hair – with spells. The two methods, however, were believed to be combined at times by the same individual, and anybody thought to use either would correspond to the European figure of the witch; which is, indeed, how the anthropologist making the study interpreted them.38 A final example of such equivalence is supplied by the Tlaxcala province of central Mexico, where the rural natives have feared tetlachiwike, people of both sexes who harmed by a touch or glance (the local equivalent to the evil eye or touch); tlawelpochime, people, mostly women, who sucked the blood of infants and so killed them, and caused harm to humans and their crops or livestock; tetzitazcs, men who could bring rain or hail; tetlachihuics, magicians who were believed to have powers which could be used for good or harm; and the nahuatl, a person of either sex who changed into animal shape to work harm or play tricks. The tetlachihuics were generally respected, and much employed for healing and other magical services, though sometimes murdered if they were thought to have used their abilities to kill: here as elsewhere in this book, the term ‘murder’ is used in its precise legal sense of unofficial and unsanctioned homicide. The shape-shifting nahuatl was believed to employ her or his powers of transformation to steal or rape as well as to inflict practical jokes, but did not inspire the fear and hatred that was accorded the child-murdering tlawelpochime. It was the latter to which Spanish-speaking natives gave the term bruja or brujo, meaning ‘witch’, and was regarded as inherently evil and associated with the Christian Devil.39 Wim van Binsbergen, commenting on the complexities of belief in magic among Africans in 2001, could still conclude with regard to witchcraft that ‘the amazing point is not so much variation across the African continent, but convergence’.40 Adam Ashforth, considering attitudes to destructive magic and its alleged perpetrators in the modern Soweto township near Johannesburg, decided that he had to use the terms ‘witchcraft’ and ‘witch’ because ‘there is no avoiding them’.41