Anthropological Concepts of Sorcery and Witchcraft
Anthropologists distinguish between sorcery and witchcraft. Sorcery is a system of beliefs and practices whose goal is to manipulate nature in order to bring about specific changes that benefit the sorcerer or her or his clients. Witchcraft is the belief that certain members of society are inherently able to harm others. Sorcery involves a set of skills that can be learned; witchcraft is usually thought to be inborn and inherited. In practice, however, sorcery and witchcraft beliefs often exist side by side, and it is sometimes difficult to separate the two.
The simplest forms of sorcery involve the performance of one action in order to bring about another, such as performing sexual intercourse in a sown field to assure a good harvest, or putting pins in an image to cause injury. However, sorcery often goes beyond the performance of magical acts and invokes the help of spirits. In order to cure illness, a Guatemalan sorcerer may perform rituals invoking the aid of San Simon, a Catholic saint who has absorbed the characteristics of an indigenous Mayan deity. If a member of the Lugbara tribe of Zaire and Uganda were injured, he might appeal to the shrines of his dead ancestors for help. This type of magic has much in common with prayer: both magic and prayer attempt to assure a spirit’s assistance. However, while prayer usually implores a deity’s cooperation, magic sometimes attempts to compel the gods to collaborate.
Sorcery implies an underlying belief system in a coherent universe in which all parts are interrelated, and influencing one part can affect another. In such a universe, relationships exist linking human beings with stars, plants, minerals, animals, and other natural phenomena, as well as supernaturals, such as gods, nature spirits, and angels. This belief system is known as the “magical worldview.” Its thought processes are intuitive rather than analytical, but they have their own internal logic, and are thus not inherently irrational. They can arise out of an emotionally charged experience: for example, if in a rage you curse someone who has offended you, and shortly afterwards this person dies, you may feel both guilty and powerful, and henceforth assume that certain powers are available to you. Empirical science ignores such events because they cannot be verified through experimentation, but societies whose worldviews are not exclusively empirical regard them as direct and convincing evidence of a coherent, magical universe.
Almost all societies have some form of sorcery; in many, it plays an important function. In cultures without access to medical technology, sorcerers may function as healers. Even when medical cures are available, people may still resort to sorcerers to heal certain kinds of illnesses that do not respond readily to pharmaceutics or surgery. Healers, medicine men, and so-called witch doctors are sorcerers who by definition have a positive function in society, for their work is to cure victims of the effects of witchcraft or malevolent magic. Individuals may consult healers to obtain relief from disease or other misfortunes attributed to witchcraft or sorcery; tribal and village authorities may summon them to combat drought or other public calamities. Dances and other rituals serve to detect and repel witches and evil spirits. Such protective sorcery assumes special social importance in times of famine, war, or severe stress in the community.
In some cultures, sorcery and religion come together: a priest or priestess may perform ritual acts to make rain, ripen the crops, procure peace, or ensure victory in war. When such acts are performed publicly, for the public good, they are generally viewed as benevolent and have a positive social function. But when they are performed privately and for the benefit of a few individuals, they are often regarded with suspicion. The distinction between public and private magic often becomes the distinction between “good” and “bad” magic. Both Vodou and Santeria, Afro-Caribbean religions in which elements of magic exist within a religious framework, make formal distinctions between public religious ceremony and private sorcery done against certain individuals; the latter is condemned. Private sorcery provides the poor, the weak, and the powerless with a tool of resistance and revenge. During periods of great social tension, such as plague or warfare, recourse to sorcery tends to increase and intensify, as more individuals feel powerless at the mercy of larger forces.
Periods of social strain are also characterized by a rise in witchcraft accusations. Unlike sorcerers, witches do not actually have to perform any actions to harm their victims. The Azande of southern Sudan believed that witchcraft was a psychic act; it required no magic spells or actions, and could even be done involuntarily. Witchcraft was inherited from the parent of the same sex. Witches were believed to possess mangu, a substance thought to be lodged in the intestines and to confer the spiritual power to harm. Witches were also believed to be able to send their spirits out at night to eat the souls of their victims, causing them to sicken and die. The Azande often blamed any kind of misfortune, from cracked pots to serious illness and death, on witchcraft. Their suspicions fell first upon neighbors with whom they had a disagreement. In order to identify whether witchcraft was responsible for their problems, they would consult oracles. If the oracle’s response indicated that witchcraft was to blame, the Azande would confront the alleged witch and ask him to blow water over an offering in order to “cool” his emotions towards the victim. This act alone was usually enough to undo the witchcraft and mend social relations. Only in severe cases would disagreements result in the trial and execution of the witch.
The Navajo Indians of the American Southwest believed in witches called skinwalkers who would transform into wolves or coyotes at night in order to stalk their victims. Skinwalkers were said to assemble secretly in order to concoct a poison made from corpses that they used to kill their enemies. They were thought to fly through the air at night to blow the corpse poison into the smoke holes of their victims’ hogans (a hogan is a Navajo dwelling). Both the Azande and the Navajo had healers who specialized in curing cases of witchcraft; however, among the Navajo, these specialized healers sometimes became suspected of witchcraft themselves. This occurs in many societies where sorcerers are enlisted to undo witchcraft, because it is assumed that those who have the power to heal can also use that power to harm.
Cultures with a belief in witchcraft often imagine witches as the very opposite of everything considered right in society. A witch is someone who disregards social rules, flouting even the most basic rules regarded as standards of decency in a particular society. Witches are often said to commit murder and incest, to engage in cannibalism and indiscriminate orgies, to have the ability to transform into animals, and to eat or otherwise abuse corpses. In other words, witches are people who violate the most basic rules in human society. Because the basic rules that maintain social order are similar cross-culturally, witches tend to be imagined in similar ways. It follows that individuals who flout other kinds of social rules, or who appear anomalous in other ways, stand a chance of being accused of witchcraft. For example, among the Azande, those who did not behave as good neighbors, who had many quarrels within the village, or who had a history of violent behavior were more frequently accused of witchcraft. Among the Navajo, those who appeared greedy, selfish and refused to share with their families, or who were marginal to the community and lived in peripheral areas were vulnerable to witchcraft accusations. Belief in witchcraft thus serves as a form of social control, reinforcing sanctioned behaviors and creating a threat against those who violate social norms.
Witchcraft beliefs also function as an attempt to explain the reasons behind otherwise unexplained negative events: illness, calamities, natural disasters, and death. Some anthropologists have argued that witch beliefs disappear once more scientific explanations for illness and natural phenomena are available. But even when humans understand the physical causes of a misfortune, the question remains: why does it strike some people, but not others? When a granary collapsed, killing a man inside it, the Azande were perfectly capable of understanding that it had given way because it was in a state of disrepair and weakened by termites. Still, the question for them remained: why had it collapsed at that very moment, and why when that particular man was inside? It is this question, the question why things happen as they do, that witchcraft beliefs attempt to tease out.
Witchcraft beliefs may also serve to explain the unexplainable. In all human cultures there are some experiences that are difficult to explain. These include experiences as diverse as sleep paralysis, near-death experiences, and dissociative states that produce very strong physical sensations that can lead believers to interpret them as signs of a spiritual reality that is contiguous to our material reality. Such experiences figure prominently in folklore about witches and witchcraft. In Newfoundland, for example, people often attribute the experience of sleep paralysis to being “hagged” or “hag ridden,” believing that a malevolent witch sends her spirit out at night to torment them in their sleep. Because sleep paralysis often produces a physical sensation of a weight on the chest or a presence pressing down on the sleeper, the belief that witches cause this phenomenon may have arisen as an attempt to explain it.
Unlike sorcery, witchcraft beliefs are not true universals; that is, they do not occur in all cultures. They are most often found in small-scale agricultural societies with a stable settlement pattern, where neighbors have intimate knowledge of one another and social relationships are intense and multilayered. They also tend to be more frequent in cultures with little access to Western scientific knowledge and technology. Witchcraft beliefs are rare in large-scale societies with a great deal of social mobility. But similar phenomena, or so-called witch-hunts, do occur in developed societies with excellent access to information and scientific knowledge, for some of the same reasons they occur in small-scale societies: the desire to effect social control and to blame others for factors causing social tensions.