From: Tyagi@cup.portal.com (Tyagi Mordred Nagasiva)
Newsgroups: alt.pagan,alt.magick,alt.satanism,talk.religion.misc
Subject: The Terms 'Witch' and 'Witchcraft' as Malevolent Wonderworkers
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 93 13:09:35 PDT

931021


I think you'll find, if you do some basic research, that what is
called 'witchcraft' varies tremendously depending on what source you
use.  If you go to New Age and nouveaupaganriche sources, you are
likely to learn that 'witchcraft' means 'nature-worship' and
'channelling the power of the Goddess' or something similar.  If you
go to fundamentalist Christian sources you will learn that
'witchcraft' is 'the means by which the minions of evil work their
warping and twisting of God's way'.


If you go to the academic environment, however, you will learn that
the definition changes over time and that at many points in history it
has indeed meant 'malevolent wonder worker', especially among many
small indigenous societies.  They have their own hatred for these
wicked folk and their own stories about what witches are like.  Even
the people who themselves identify with the label tend to agree with
the definition.

What evidence is there?  Mountains.  I'll cull one bit from a book on
witchcraft I obtained recently from a used bookstore.  It is an
anthropological study of African witchcraft, its elements and
divination systems.  [My comments are in brackets].


"In many parts of the world people believe that it is possible for
human beings to cause harm to their fellows by the exercise of powers
not possessed by ordinary folk, powers which operate in a manner that
cannot be detected, so that the cause can only be recognised when the
damage comes to light.  The persons who are supposed to have these
powers are commonly called witches, and the powers, whatever they are
supposed to be, are called by a variety of terms.  'Magical' is one
that has a respectable ancestry, since it derives fom the name of the
wise men of the East; but it is nowadays used more often for esoteric
means of producing beneficial results.  'Supernatural' would satisfy
many of us, but purists argue that those people who take the existence
of witchcraft for granted regard it, along with good magic, as part of
the natural order of things.  Some people use the word 'non-empirical'
of phenomena the existence of which cannot be tested.
Evans-Pritchard, the leading anthropological writer on witchcraft in
Africa, the continent where contemporary witchcraft has been most
closely studied, prefers 'mystical', and this is the one I shall use.

"Folklorists are interested in the ideas that people have had about
the kind of sinister things that witches can do, and psychologists are
interested in ideas about the kind of sinister people witches are.
Historians, in our enlightened centuries, have tended to concentrate
on the absurdity of these beliefs and to ask why they were taken
seriously for so long.  Contemplating the trials of witches in Europe
for acts that are patently impossible, and the tortures by which many
were forced to confess to such acts, they have moved from indignation
at the injustice to astonishment at the credulity of men, the leading
intellectuals of their day, who could compile tracts on demonology as
a brance of science [a popular pastime to this day among many
ceremonial magicians].

"This book [from which I quote] is concerned for the most part with
the ideas of witchcraft held today by people who have little
acquaintance with modern science, and starts from the premise that in
a world where there are few assured techniques for dealing with
everyday crises, notably sickness, a belief in witches, or the
equivalent of one, is not only not foolish, it is indispensable....

"...Beliefs in witchcraft flourish in societies with inadequate
medical knowledge - where there may be a few simple remedies, but for
the most part those who fall ill must simply let the illness run its
course.  Anthropologists sometimes remark that the belief in
witchcraft is characteristic of small-scale societies, in which every
individual passes his life in the company of a limited number of
people personally known to him.  If this were taken to mean that there
is something in the nature of such societies particularly conducive to
the development of a belief in witchcraft, it might be misleading.
One might better say that it is the development of scientific
techniques - which include medical knowledge - that has brought into
being the large-scale societies of the modern world.  It is in the
absence of such knowledge that people *both* live in small, closely
circumscribed cummunities *and* explain sickness and misfortune by
witchcraft....

"A signficant part of witch-lore is that which attributes to witches
actions that make it plausible to ascribe sickeness to them.  They are
said to be greedy for meat, to want their neighbors to die so that they
can share the funeral feast.  But they do not wait for this to happen.
They can mysteriously consume the entrails of the living; hence the
feeling of weakness that a sick person has.  And since nobody has ever
seen a witch engaged in this vampire activity, they must be able to
make themselves invisible; and since suspected witches are not commonly
observed to be away from their homes at night, their spirits must be
able to leave their bodies and fly through the air to the homes of their
victims.

"What is particularly interesting about the beliefs attached to
witchcraft in Africa, where they are more prevalent and more
highly elaborated than at the present time in other continents,
is their close association with the idea that people should not
suffer unjustly.  This idea has presented a puzzle to all those
persons - the majority - who believe that the universe is divinely
ordered: that prosperity is, or should be, earned by right conduct
[cf. the many claims about 'karmic laws' and 'the will of the gods'].
The ancestors in most African societies are though to be concerned
that their descendants should live in amity together, the juniors
giving respect and obedience to the seniors [or Elders].  They may
intervene, it is believed, to punish people who depart from these
principles, or on their own account to remind their descendants of
their duty to offer sacrifices.  But it is not only disrespectful
young people who fall sick; indeed, for obvious reasons, old and
respected people often do.  The world is not wholly just, then; we
face the problem of evil or unmerited suffering....
  
"One or two African peoples believe in a kind of anti-god, or rather
a dark manifestation of god - not an independent adversary like the
Ahriman of the Persians.  The Lughara of western Uganda are among
these.  Their 'bad god' does not make it unnecessary for them to
ascribe their troubles to witchcraft, but they fear him, they picture
him as like a man sliced vertically down the middle, they think he is
the ultimate cause of death, though he may use witches and sorcerers
as his agents.  The Dinka of the southern Sudan have a 'black god',
Marcardit ('the great black one' [cf. Kali]), who, like witches,
as I shall show later, is associated with the uncultivated bush
where there is no moral or social order.  He is the final explanation
of misfortunes which cannot be interpreted as deserved punishments;
but since to accept a disaster as the work of Macardit means
accepting it as irremediable, Dinka do ascribe misfortunes to witches
also....

"Among the adherents of world religions, Buddhists ascribe their
misfortunes to unidentifiable transgressions of forgotten previous
incarnation.  The Chinese have a very wide variety of explanations
of misfortune, in which witchcraft does not play an important part.
Since the time of the Book of Job, Jews and then Christians have
believed that a just God might let his servants suffer to test the
strength of their faith.

"The witchcraft explanation rests on the boundless possibilities of sheer
human malevolence; it is easily acceptable because we all know the depths
of our own hearts.  Who has never said 'You'll be sorry one day' or 'I
wish you were dead'?  Although few well-educated city-dwellers would
ascribe a sudden attack of lumbago to a rival in some field of competition,
there are equally few who will genuinely accept their own inadequacy as
the reason for the greater success of their rivals; we prefer to blame it
on 'prejudice' or even 'jealousy' in the most improbably contexts - for
example, to account for adverse press notices of a theatrical performance,
though the critics are in no sense competitors of the actors.  Is this
so much less irrational than the belief that you can kill an enemy by
hating him? [a poor example, since some have said that those who cannot
do either teach or become critics ;>]...

"Witchcraft... is unambiguously evil.  It may well be motivated; it is
often ascribed to the ill-feeling generated in some quarrel, which is
remembered when one of the parties falls sick or meets with some other
misfortune.  But it is always held to be unjustified; the witch may have
had good cause for the anger, but if he had not had an evil disposition
he would not have expressed his anger in this way.  It follows, of course,
that the anger of a witch is by definition not 'righteous anger' [i.e.
not SOCIALLY-APPROVED, and thus the witch is a satanist].


"Witches and sorcerers

"It may be too late now to recreate from historical records a detailed
picture of a community in Europe where the belief in witchcraft was
an active force: to trace out the relationship between accused
witches and their accusers, and find just what events were most
frequently ascribed to witchcraft and what the persons accused had
done to invite the enmity of the accuser or general public hostility,
to see what actually happened when an individual was accused, and
how often those who were supposedly convicted were put to death
or otherwise cruelly treated, during all the centuries before witch-
craft began to be equated with heresy.  To see the process of mis-
fortune, suspicion, accusation and public reaction in its social
setting, as one, albeit a dramatic one, of the incidents of everyday
life, the enquirer must go to a society where witchcraft is still taken
for granted as a causal explanation; and he must live in close
contact with members of this society, speaking their language and
familiar with them as individuals each with his own interest, his
own friends and enemies, his own public reputation and personal
disposition....

"Evans-Pritchard was the pioneer in the study of witchcraft by this
method.  His work was done among the Zande of the Bahr-el-Ghazai in the
south west of the Sudan.  It is a paradox in the history of social
anthropology that the books which have contributed most to our understanding
of general principles of social behaviour have been based on the experience
of societies which later proved to be exceptional.  In this context the
Zande are exceptional because they think of witches as ordinary
persons, and have not elaborated an image of the witch as the
enemy of all good men and the epitome of evil.

"Zande beleive that witchcraft - the power to injure people without
material means - is a substance inside some people's bodies.
They are born with it; a man inherits his from his father, a woman
from her mother.  No one can know whether someone has this substance
unless his body is opened after he dies; least of all do the possessors
of it know.  Anyone may be a witch, therefore; and he witchcraft can
operate without the intention of its possessor.  Zande witches, then,
are not the objects of severe moral judgements, nor thought to be set
apart as a special kind of being....

"Evan-Pritchard gives the following list of events which might be ascribed
to witchcraft:

 If blight seizes the groundnut crop it is witchcraft; if the bush is
 vainly scoured for game it is witchcraft; if termites do not rise when
 their swarming is due and a cold useless night is spent in waiting for
 their flight it is witchcraft; if a wife is sulky and unresponsive to
 her husband it is witchcraft; if a prince is cold and distant with his
 subject it is witchcraft; if a magical rite fails to achieve its purpose
 it is witchcraft [interesting, eh?]; if, in fact, any failure or
 misfortune falls upon anyone at any time and in relation to any of
 the manifold activities of his life it may be due to witchcraft.

Not many peoples have been found to ascribe such a variety of events
to this cause.

"A number of other peoples on the left bank of the Congo share
this belief in witchcraft as an inborn physical quality.  Such peoples
make a clear distinction between witchcraft and sorcery, which
operates by the manipulation of substances.  A somewhat similar
belief is held by the Nyakyusa, whose ideas on the chilling breath
of moral disapproval have been mentioned.  The Nyakyusa believe
that a witch has a python in his belly, and that at night he flies
through the air, either in the form of a python or on its back, and in
this guise sucks the internal substance from people as they lie
asleep, or the milk from their cattle.  Righteous men who are able to
defend the village against witches have pythons too, which go out
and do nightly battle against the witch pythons; and when the head-
man of the village is installed, part of the ritual that is performed
to make him able to carry out his duties well is believed to give him
this mystical power of defence against witches [a fascinating similarity
to the Hindu's 'kundalini'].

"...some women are believed to have spirit familiars who bring them
riches and demand in return human lives, in the taking of which the
owner of the familiar has no direct interest.  The familiar may kill
its owner if it is not gratified with another life.  When the owner
dies it is believed to attach itself to her daughter or sister, a woman
who has no desire for such a relationship... [See the movie, 'The Kiss',
in which exactly this is portrayed, beginning in the Congo and showing
the familiar attachment from one woman to another in succession - the
movie stars Joanna Pacula, Meredith Salenger, Mimi Kuzyk and Nicholas
Kilbertus and was directed by Pen Densham, a Tri Star film rated R.]

"What I myself would regard as the essential characteristic of a
witch, the evil disposition that at least theoretically sets him
outside the pale of common humanity, is lacking in the beliefs of
the Zande themselves.  Many other peoples, including the Nyakyusa,
do draw this picture of a witch as the anti-model of approved
behaviour.... [Thus my association of it with the 'satanist' or
'one who is adversarial', sometimes simply 'counter-cultural' or
'anti-social'.]

"So it is impossible to specify that only persons with a particular
combination of qualities are to be called witches; the name would
have no usefulness.  Some would prefer to drop the name, or to use
the terms 'sorcery' or 'witchcraft' indiscriminately, or to invent
some new word that would subsume all the characteristics that have
been associated with both.  I would suggest that, even if it is rarely
practicable to divide supposed evil-doers sharply into witches and
sorcerers, it is still useful to distinguish types of evil-doing on
these lines.  The distinction I would make is a simple one - that the
sorcerer uses material objects and the witch does not.  It is by no
means significant, since it is possible to find evidence of sorcery,
and indeed many objects used for that purpose have been found when
people are accused, when people make voluntary confessions, and in
Europe sometimes in old abandoned houses.  But there can never be
evidence of witchcraft, and so accusations of witchcraft can only
be pursued by means as mystical as the supposed offence.

"Another reason for keeping apart the idea of causing harm by
one's mere disposition and that of causing harm by the use of
materials - even though many peoples do not regard these as the
attributes of different types of persons - is that those who have
knowledge of the properties of materials may know how to use them
for the benefit of their fellows, and particularly to cure disease.
An anthropologist would today use the term 'magic' to cover this
combined field.  One can certainly distinguish between the social
and anti-social uses of magic, though I have already mentioned the
possibility that harmful magic may be employed for purposes that
are socially approved.  If one person is held to possess the whole
range of magical knowledge there is no objective way of decidingg
whether he should be called a magician (good) or a sorcerer (usually
bad).  Where he will be classed by his fellows will be a matter of
circumstances.  Persons who hold ritual offices - the rainmaker,
the Leopard Skin Priest, the custodians of temples of dead kings,
the *laibon* whose blessing was required before the Masai warriors
set out on a raid - are generally assumed to be good.  Yet rainmakers
may be suspected of manipulating the weather to damage their enemies,
and the *laibon* is feared as coming from a line of powerful sorcerers.
More ambiguous is the position of the man who claims defensive powers
against sorcerers or witches; how could he know how to deal with them?
Such suspicions may be harboured even against the supposedly neutral
diviners who are called in to identify the cause of a sickness.

"The earliest Roman law made magic a crime.  But what was the crime?
Apparently the causing of harm to others, but not other ways of exercising
supposedly mystical powers.  The Roman world possessed a great body of
pseudo-medical lore in which materials were used according to principles
of what James Frazer in _The Golden Bough_ taught us to call sympathetic
magic.  But to the Romans this was accepted wisdom, not magic.  Magic
came into the picture if the practitioner was supposed to have acquired
his knowledge by occult means, and particularly through the power of
foretelling the future.  The famous second-century physician, Galen,
was accused of practising magic because of his accuracy in predicting
the course of a disease ('uncanny', his rivals thought it).  Galen
himself, reasoning much as we do today, dismissed as 'magical' the
treatments that he did not believe in, enumerating among them prescriptions
to make people barren, or strike them dumb when they were defending
themselves in court.  There were, of course, in the Roman empire many
purveyors of spells who did not profess to have medical knowledge.

"In early Christian days magicians were believed to get their power from
demons or evil spirits - not yet the Devil who was later to be thought
of as the master and consort of witches.  Christian authorities
distinguished magic from miracles, which were the work of God through
particularly holy men.  Prayers to God - sometimes answered by miracles -
took the place in Christianity of such activities as the rainmaking rituals
of paganism, and relics of saints in the custody of church authorities
had the wonder-working powers of the magician's medicines.  The word
magician in those days implied the claim to foresee the future through
horoscopes as did the eastern Magi [cf. 'prophet'], and this was thought
to be both fraudulent and subversive, since it could lead to speculations
on the death of persons in high places.  Apuleius the author of
_The Golden Ass_, when he was put on trial for practising magic, remarked
that the Magi were priests in their own country, and this brings home
the point that an activity which in one context has all the sanction of
authority may be treated as a crime if it is practised without this authority.
[This is why I claim that 'witchcraft' has been a form of satanism and that
this is traditionally a counter-cultural path which sometimes manifests its
extremes through the guises of various martyrs, later adopted by tradition.]
In rural England practitioners of folk medicine were sometimes
called 'white witches', with the implication that they got their knowledge,
beneficial as it was, from illicit sources, and if they were suspected of
harming others it was explicitly said to come from from the devil.  But
it was only during the centuries of persecution which the German scholar
Hansen called the 'witch-madness' (*Zauberwahn*) that it became the
official doctrine to link witches with the Devil.  Now witches, who had
made a compact with the Devil and promised to serve him, were distinguished
from sorcerers, who had learnt their arts from him but remained free agents
in the practice of it.

"The witches of Europe were not thought to achieve their ends by evil
wishes alone, far from it.  The evidence at their trials is concerned
as much with their familiars and the objects found in their homes as
with the supposed physical marks imprinted on them by the Devil.  But
they are depicted as being in their actions and dispositions everything
that was most abhorred by the society of that time.  In this respect
the image of a witch  as it is presented in the writings of the fifteenth
to seventeenth centuries parallels the image of the witch as it is
described in the folk-lore of non-literate peoples.  The striking
difference  between European and contemporary believers in witches is
that the former sought to prove that real human beings conformed to the
image.  In both contexts the accused person is a neighbour whom everyone
knows.  But the accusers in Africa today are content to ascribe some
particular injury to his witchcraft or sorcery; they do not also seek
to prove that his whole life violates every decency.  What Trevor-Roper
says of the Roman attitude applies to Africa too:

 Punishment could only be inflicted for harm done by witchcraft; merely
 to 'be' a witch was not enough....

"It is... in Africa, and particularly in eastern and central Africa,
that the anthropologists of the last thirty years [1940-70] have made
the most detailed observations, not only of ideas but of their
application: how witches are imagined, what people do to protect
themselves against witches, on what grounds they decide that they
have been bewitched, what action they take then, and in particular,
how they decide whom to accuse...

"Outside Africa the only full-length book [studying witchcraft] is
Kluckhohn's _Navaho Witchcraft_, which is a collection of statements
by informants that are hard to interpret adequately unless one already
knows a good deal about the Navaho Indians of the south-western United
States.

"The books on witchcraft in western Europe, in England and in colonial
America have nearly all been written by people who did not look for
parallels to contemporary witch beliefs outside Europe, if they knew
that these existed.  Most of the writers have been interested in rather
asking why persons in high authority persecuted witches than in asking
what ordinary people did about them.  One of them, Margaret Murray,
advanced a theory of the Black MAss and the compact with the Devil
that was specifically related to the history of Europe and had no 
general applicability...."

_Witchcraft_, by Lucy Mair, publ. by World University Library, 
 McGraw-Hill, 1969; excerpts from pages 9-32. [My comments in brackets.]
_______________________________________________________________________


I hope to show that here that while what some say is true within
THEIR worldview and usage of the term, it is far from widespread or
traditional among other cultures or elements of our own culture.
These alternatives are no more 'false' than the others.  There is
no ownership of the language, and where 'witch' and 'witchcraft' are
concerned, the meanings applied to these have ranged the full spectrum
during the history of their use.


Tyagi Nagasiva
Tyagi@HouseofKAOs.Abyss.com