On the nature of the demonic: African zaitch,ery ON THE NATURE OF THE DEMONIC: AtrRICAN WITCHERY BY E,VAN M. ZUESSE Meadville, Pennsylvania I. INTRODUCTION The problem of witchcraft has been generally treated as peripheral to the phenomenological study of religion. Indeed, it has often been explicitly excluded from serious consideration as mere "magic" without genuine "expressive" content. It is one aim of this essay to demonstrate the "expressiveness" of witchcraft practices, and to show that they not only are directly related to the essential realities of the religious life, but that they disclose new meanings and aspects in those realities. At the same time, I think, one cannot help but misunderstand witchcraft if one applies to it traditional phenomenological methods and categories. It is not merely a matter of the inanity of the intellectualistic term "magic", which so effectively separates knowing from doing. It is a part of phenomenological method itself to locate the unitary "essence" behind all historical appearances of a phenomenon. This in itself is valuable, and this es'saywiil attempt much the same thing, but it has no been sufficiently understood how easily this approach tempts the researcher to ignore actual cognitive contexts, and to separate insight from action, "religion" from life. The result has been that the researcher is quick to disregard the unique contexts shaping and determining such a phenomenon as witchcraft in order to assimilate it to some other more "spiritual" or congenial "essence" as its perversion, degeneration, or meaningless "application". The whole problem of "survivals" has not yet been adequately dealt with in the research into the history of religions, due to this manner of understanding essence. The same basic structures can express many "essential meanings": this does not mean that only one of them is "the true one" and the others are "degenerations"; each must be understood on its own terms from within the particular structure or patterned meaning it creates or sustains. Witchcraft can be shown, for example, to possess structures 2TI relating closely to the most archaic hunting-and-gathering religions known to us, and again to such explicitly religious phenomena as divination or ancestorreverence.Yet these essentialcontributory structures do not "degenerate" into witchery or lose meaning, but take on quite different and profound meanings in their new context. The conterf determines meaning, and it may be the context is so meaningful, so well understood,it needsno consciouslyphilosophic or "spiritual', indigenous interpretations. This is the case with witchcraft, which integrates such intimately experienced realities as sexuality and ingestion, bodily exuviae and human social existence, into a meditation on ultimate matters concerning Self and Other, freedom and evil, and the limits of the human condition. A11 this is likewise so basic to us that we, too, ignore it while reactualizing it constantly. witchcraft ideologies have deeply affected the West. It has been estimated that over one million "witches,', most of thern women, were killed between r5oo and r1oo, the vast majority in Germanic lands, using methods quite simiiar to those adopted by the Third Reich against the Jews and Gypsies.1) Country and mountain folk in the U.S. and Europe still cling to witchery practices, and various youth cults in America center on a Romanticized .,witchcraft" . But the most penetrating studies of witchery hat e been done in Africa, to which this studv turns. II. AFRICAN WITCHERY A. Fwnctionali,sticI nterpretations There are many African societiesin which witchcraft, or zuitchery, a word I use to include both sorcery and witchcraft, z) is practically non-existant or quite unimportant. There are many others where such ideas have profound consequences. Most of those who have studied witchery in Africa are British t) Cf. Adolph Leschnitzer, The Magic Background, of Anti-Semitisz, (N. y.: lnternational Universities Press, 1956). z) The distinction between sorcery and witchcraft first made by E. E. EvansPritchard merely for the Azande inhis witchcraft, oracles and Magic among the Azand,e (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), was extended into a dogma by later social anthropologists, but is now admitted to be inapplicable in many .ur".. s.., for example, victor Turner, Tke Forest, of Symbols: Aspects of Niemhu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 19167), pp. rr8-24. 2r2 Evon M. Zuesse social anthropologists, and their interpretations have tended to explain such differences between various cultures through'sociological factors. A by now traditional axiom of this school is that if a given trait exists in a society, it must serve a useful purpose, even if not evident to those who assign "manifest" meanings to it within the culture. The social function of a cultural trait is even its real "latent" meaning. Foilowing this line of reasoning, many anthropologists have devoted considerable ingenuity to proving the social excellence of witchcraft and sorcery beliefs, where they appear.As the American anthropologist, Anthony tr. C. Wallace has stressed in his recent work, Religi'on: An Anthropological Vi,ew (N.Y .: Knopf, t966): ". . . the practise of witchcraft, and the fear of it, tend to curb precisely those trespasses which the social structure fails to prevent." 3) Working with such theories, these researchers har.e agreed that witchcraft accusations reflect social tensions and probably increasewith progressive acculturation (this link has not been irrefutably demonstrated), and that they arc basicaily positive attempts to deal with such tensions when no other approved methods are available.+) This last assertion is, however, problematic and paradoxical, if not self-contradictory. If one thing is certain about witchcraft beliefs, it is that it encourageshatreds, i Op. cit., pp. r96f. This view coincidesremarkably with Wallace's view of religion in general, as a method of overcoming gaps in the social structure, or tying up the loose ends of logic and behavior left dangling by the social process From this viewpoint there is little to choosebetween worship and witchery. Warlace's view is clearly inadequately elucidated, though we too shall argue for a similarity and even identity between witchery beliefs and religious ones. +) For an extensive bibliography (which if presented here would too greatll' expand these footnotes), cf. ibid,.,pp. 196ff. and the referencesthere; also see a similar discussionwith references and bibliography in the excellent "Introduction" by John Middleton and E. H. Winter to the important volume edited by thern, Witchcraft and, Sorcery in East Afri,ca (N.Y. and London: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1963), pp. 'r-26 (hereinafter this work will be referred to as Witchcraft and Sorcery); the thorough discussionof the literature by M. G. Marwick in his article, "The Social Context of Cewa Witch Beliefs," Africa, XXII (1952), esp. pp. rzo3o, and.the annotated bibliography at the back of his Sorcery in lts Social Setting (Manchestet: Manchester University Press, 1965), pp. 3o5-2o. For a statistical "scientific" approach to the subject, see also Guy E. Swanson, The Birth of the God,s: The Origins of Primitive Beliefs (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 196o), pp. 137-52, a work not mentioned in the above discussions. See also the critical review of the material on witchcraft and the theories by Edward Norbeck, Religion in Prirnitizte Society (New York and Evanston: Free Press, 196r), pp. r88-ztz and elsewhere.Also seeLucy Mair, Witchcroft (N.Y.: McGraw-Hill Book Co., rq6q). On the natu,reof the d,emonic:African zaitchery 2r3 spreads suspicions and divisiveness, often culminates in murder of suspectedwitches and even of widespread purges, frequently brings social process to a total halt, a paralysis of fear and terror, and often results in the splitting off of large groups in an atmosphere of enmity. 5) We may wonder whether or not, in fact, the functionistic method in general is no subjected to a red,wcti'oad, abswrdwm here, a product of a fanatical insistence that whatever occurs in society, and thus is a social fact, is by that same facticity at base merely social, and so necessarily positively functional. Therefore we find the assertion that sorcery suspicions in some societies "help break up" family groups or villages or cians becausethese groups had become "dysfunctional": they must have been too dense, too competitive, or what not' But this can win our assent only if we refuse to beg the ob'vious question: "Why dysfunctional?: is density as such, or co'mpetition, always to be found as a social wil, or is not in fact the lack of functionality merely presumed by the presenceof divisive witchcraft ?" ldor is it proven by the functionalists that witchcraft is really the only or the necessarymethod for expressing and resolving social strains, that other lessterrifying methodswere not availableto the co lective imagination of the culture if it had looked for them. There is something of Dr. Pangloss' "Whatever is, is right" in such assertions' The root of rvitchcraft beliefs canniotbe merely social, nor merely for the benefit of society, but lie at a deeper, spiritual level. 5) Accounts of periodic witch-purges which grip entire cultures and bring all rvork to a halt have been recorded from all parts of Africa, and such movements, l,hich often revealed in the colonial period definite anti-Western elements, have received the general name of "witch-finding movements"; for some representative articles specifically on such crtlts, see Aubrey I. Richards, "A Modern Movement of Witch-Finders," Afri,ca, VIII (1935), 4+B-6t:.M. G. Marwick, "Another Anti-Witchcraft Movement in East Central Africa," Afrtca, XX (tqSo), '7(x:-12i P. Morton-Williams, "The Atinga Cult among the South-Westeln Yoruba: A Sociological Analysis of a Witch-Finding Movement," Inst. I;ranEais Afri. Noire, Bull., SeriesB (rqS6), 315-34;Barbara E. Ward, "Some Observationson Religious Cults in Ashanti," Africa, XXVI (rgS6), 47-fu; Paul Bohannon, "Extra-Proces sual Events in Tiv Potitical Institutions," in Cultures and, Societies i'n Africa, ed. Simon and Phoebe Ottenberg (N.Y.: Random }fouse, t$o),328-4r; and the stimulating cultic approach of Mary Douglas, showing that witch-finding movements had a periodicity and a cultic importance going back to pre-colonial times that proves them to be traditional, in her essay, "Techniques of Sorcery Controi in Central Africa," 1n L4/itchcraft and' Sorcery, op. cit., pp. r23-r4r, and her analysis, "Witch Beliefs in Central Africa," Africa, XXXVII# t (Jan''t967), 7z-8o. Eztan M. Zuesse On the nature of the demonic: African zaitchery One thing, for example, that is notable about witchery beliefs is that they often represent severe but submerged, and even if one likes subconsciously projected, criticisms of the society in which they appear. The anthropological studies themselves often dernonstrate this. For example, Monica Wilson has shown that amongst the Pondo of" Zambia, where family groups cluster in exclusive territories and so make the incest taboo and the exogamous norm strongly conscious inhibitions, witches are conceived of especially as persons indulging in incestuous relations, often with their animal familiars who are their alter egos of the opposite sex: this classifies their incest as synonymous with sexual'bestiality. On the other hand, Wils'on shows that among the not far distant Nyakyusa of Malawi, where exogamy is not such a heavy burden since village life is highly heterogenous, and rich and poor clans live in close proximity, witches tend rather to be conceived of in terms of miserliness: they are individuals so greedy for their own produce, milk and meat (especially human meat or flesh), that their lust for flesh drives them to feast cannibalistically on relatives and neighbors. Despite wealth differentiation, it is a Nyakyusa norm to invite neighbors to feasts. Yet neighbors are not kinsmen, and often are excluded from each other's meals. This social irresponsibility and the very fact of mysterious differences in wealth are rationalized in witch ideology. 0) In other words, the pan-African conception of witches as incestuousand cannibalisticbeings receivesvarying emphases in particular societiesin accordancewith the strains within each. The sex image of witches may be similarly understood, according to another British social anthropologist, S. F. Nadel. In an essay entitled "Witchcraft in Four African Societies: An Essay in Comparison," z; Nadel followed up Wilson's article by demonstrating that the sex most commonly associated with witches in the societies he studied reflected sexual tensions felt by them: among the Gwari, where marriages were harmonious, witches could be of either sex, but among the Nupe, a Nigerian people otherwise culturally similar, women were independent of the men, and male resentment and helplessness expressed itself in emphasis on female witches. Useful and interesting as such conclusions may be, however, the very sociological emphasis given these constructs limits their insightfulness, as I shall attempt to show later in dealing with the ,sexual image of witches. One is always left, after reading such studies, with the nagging question of what has been left out. 8) 2r 4 6) "Witch Beliefs and Social Structute,"Ameri,canJournal of Sociology,LYI (rgs,r),3o7-r:. in Africa, op. cit., pp.4o7-n. 7) In Culturesand Soci,eties 2 t5 But it cannot be denied that witchery beliefs do in some manner become involved with conflicts implicit in given social systems, if only because 'such conflict-oriented belief s involving real people necessarily have social consequences. But witchery, too, involves the divine order which is the pattern of life, the web of norms and actions that go together to constitute the way of iife handed down from the Creation. o) Approaching witchery frorn the perspective of the divine order, as a religiows not magical apprehension of man's position in the cosmos, discloses an internal logic to witchcraft and sorcery beliefs not accessibleto a functionalistic analysis. 8) For example, Nadel relates the economically independent and dominating position of Nupe women in the market-place directly to their being charged often with witch activities. But it is possibleto assert that it is not the power of the women vi,s-d,-visthe men which is at issue here, but the symbolically ambivalent significarrceof tradi,ng and market-places in West Africa and beyond. The market-place is cosmologically a dangerous point where incompletely controlled alien forces penetrate our society, our divine order: it is a center for transactions par ercel' lence, but where we may well be victimized by aliens and our very substance cheated from us. We may be hypnotized by a smiling stranger into utter failure. Witches and demonic beings are often believed in West Africa to haunt marketplaces, or to have compact with the strangers who come there (cf. Geoffrey Parrinder's remarks concerning the lbadan, Nigeria market plaza in Witchcraft: European and African (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 163), p. r95). This attitude throws a revealing light on the slaughters of the Ibo tradesmen throughout Nigeria but especially in the Hausa north in ry67, and which helped drive the Ibos into proclaiming themselvesindependent; the ferocity of the war with Biafra can only be understood in such a light. But such conceptions should least of all surprise Westerners : the medieval stereotype of Jews as usurers, the witches of the market-place, was fed by the fact that in economically backward Europe, the Jews were the most prominent and even the only traders in many places. Such suspicions1ed to all too recurrent bloody massacres,and, to judge from Nazi stereotypesof 'wealthy Jewish Iinanciers,' profoundly influenced modern history. The slaughter of the Chinese in Indonesia had similar roots, for there the Chinese were not only the main tradesmen in the area, but were hated for it by many. 9) I am indebted to Hans Schlrer's penetrating applications of the concept of the "Divine Order" in Ngal'u Religion: The Conception of God among a South Borneo People (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), for much of my own understanding of the concept, though rnodified and deepenedthrough contact with the thought of Mircea Eliade. 21 6 Eaan M. Zuesse B. Reli,gi,ousH omologies: Shatnani"stn There are a number of important similarities between the fundarnental structufes of witchery symbolisms and clearly religious structures and rituals among hunting-and-gathering cultures, for example' The symbolisms of shamanic flight, to give one instance, are constantly predicated of witches: they can leave their hut or house at night and fly through the sky magically, or even transform themselves into owls or other carrion birds and sail through the night swiftly, silently and with evil intent to their assemblies far out in the dark bush, on sorne secluded mountain top, or in a deserted grave-yard. Such symbolisms, so familiar to us, are widespread in Africa, too; they are indeed world-wide, indicating a pervasive necessity for such structures. Everywhere we find witches linked with the wild and the dark "outside" world, though resident amongst us in the human form, outwardly a member of human society. Witches, with their animal familiars (likewise practically a pan-Af rican conception), have peculiar links with the animal realm. The Temne o{ Sierra Leone link together the witch's familiarity with the forest realm and with animals, the witch's ability to assume rnany shapes (just as shamans are often reputed to do), and the demonic character of witchery: they say bush demons coopelate with witches in their mutual hatred of and hunt for human beings, and that at the moment of bewitching the witches' faces turn into those of animals. 10) Like shamans, the witch everywhere can wield the power of invisibility, and only the special eyesight of the "witch-doctor" can see such a witch, or detect a witch-person in the day-time in a crowd. The witch is often believed to be specially immune to heat, indeed the witch's element is fire, and he can often be seen at night in the bush as a ball of fire floating through the air. Contrast all this with the typical attributes of shamans: according to Eliade, Becauseof his ability to leavehis body with impunity,the shamancan,if he so wishes,act in the mannerof a spirit; e.g.,he flies through the air, he becomes invisible, he perceives things at great distances, he mounts to }leaven 11) or descends to Hell, sees souls and can capture them, and is incombustible' ro) James Littlej'ohn, "The Temne House," ln Myth and Cosntos: Readings in Mythology and, Syrnbolisrn, ed. John Middleton (Garden Citv, N.Y.: The Natural History Press, 1967, p. 338. rr) Rites and Symbols of Ini,tiation: Birth and Rebi'rth (N.Y. : Harper and Ro'n', 1958), p. 95. On the nature of the demonic: African witchery 2r 7 The shaman is distinguished by his closenessand familiarity with the animals (he knows their languages and can talk with them, etc.; can assume their shape and generally has animal familiars or alter egos); from this cornes his control over hunting. The shaman too is "hot" and can even handle burning coals. His initiation takes place often in the bush, far removed from human society, where he attains unity with the non-human sources of reality. He thus becomes a mernber of a larger shamanic society which sometimes mysteriously convenes far away; the gathering of shamans in a village is an aweso'me a"nd frightening thing for those who live there. The initiation of a shaman may involve his being torn apart or eaten ali.zteby divine beings, or by ancestral shaman spirits, and thus assimilated to the divine and to the shamanic circle. rz) In witches' circles, we may see the memory of this, and its inversion, through the dismemberment or slow devouring of the zi.cti,tn'sbody by the witches; a novice witch must often provide the victim for this initiation from among his olvn kinsmen, his own "flesh". Through this feast he joins the witch society. That there is a strange similarity between witches as commonly imaged and sharnans, may be accepted, but what is the meaning of this ? In the passagecited just above, Eliade goes on to isolate the essential motivation of the shaman, which determines all his modalities and symbolic powers: They all expressa breakwith the universeof daily life. The twofold purpose and the freedom that are of this break is obvious: it is the transcendence obtained,for example,through ascent,flight, invisibility, incombustibilityof the body.. . . The desire for absolutefreedom-that is, the desire to break the bondsthat keep him tied to earth, and to free himself from his limita' tions-is oneof man'sessentialnostalgias.And the break from planeto plane effected by flight or ascent similarly signifies an act of transcendence; flight proves that one has transcended the human condition, has risen above it, by transmuting it through an excess of spirituality. ls) We may anticipate ourselves by saying that it is the d,enoonicand negatiae ospect of this nostaigia for absolute freedom that witchery is the meditation on. The fu1l significance of this will be suggested later, in our concluding remarks. But it is already clear that witchery symbolism embracesa deep-rooted desire to achieve the status of the rz) See the full discussionby Eliade inhis Shamani'sm: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Bollingen Series LXXVI; N.Y. Pantheon Books, I9r54). ri Op. cit., p. ror. 218 Exan M. Zuesse Other which confines man, limits him and masters him. The witch is one with that threatening Other, in the popular conception' If the shaman represents the Otherness which infiltrates humanity in its benevolent aspect, the witch represents Otherness in its resolutely antihuman mode, despite its penetrati,on of the human cosmos. The problem of freedom involves a dialectic between the personal will and the cosmic order which, in witchery, realizes mankind's worst nightmares. C. Rel,i.gi,ousH om,alogies: Divination That witchery belongs to that same Other that presents shamanism as a possibility is proven by the genetic similarity of their symbolic structures. The same can be shown for the relationship between divination and witchery. There is relatively little shamanism in Africa in the classic forms defined by Siberian, Amerind and Australian religions. This is doubtless at least partly due to the prevalence of agricultural religions and cultures all over the African continent; the shamanic structure which achieves its full form only in hunting cultures is refracted into various priestly and mediumistic specialties in agricultural religions; witchery, which is relatively little developed as a specific form in the most archaic hunting-and-gathering societies but which is often pronounced among agricultural peoples, is no doubt one of these refractions, as we have seen. Divination is another, and is widely spread in Africa and is even brought to extremely philosophical heights in many societies.Like witchery, divination involves a dialectic between personal will and the cosmic order. In a brief formulation, divination resolves a crisis in the divine order by submitting the personal will to the cosmic ordained pattern, i.e., by discovering Destiny. This discovery of Destiny is not a merely passive process, but a creative one, in which one actively changes one's lot in life by conforruing it) to the divine order: divination allows one to experience anew one's inciusion in a larger process which sustains the whole of the universe. Events which before seemed disintegrative, meaningless and random are now disclosed as meaningful, the result of a hidden and now revealed Demand being made on one, and so even part of a healing process when the remedies of divination are applied. Witchery, on the other hand, is a response to crisis which retreats from any Demand hidden in the divine order, into personal desires, and which refuses to rejoin the flux and reciprocity controlling the cosmos.Divination is On th,e nature of the demonic: Af rican zaitchery 219 practically universally brought to a close with a sacrifice from the client, in which he reestablishes harmonious contact with the powers which are now known to govern his life or this moment in it. 1a) Witchery, however, centers on a sacrifice in which the client (that is, the witch, who like the divinatory client is seeking redress for "bad fate") immolates, so to speak, his enemy, while giving up nothing of himself. Witchery pulls away from the ongoing change and mutuality of things, and insists on the necessity of personal will and passion. Only on its own terms will it relate to the divine order. Yet one of the striking things about divination is the frequency with which it is connected with witchery in many cultures. Both procedures involve the same dialectic; divination gone wrong can easily become witchcraft. Often the diviner is suspected of being a witch by his clients, and this is even one of the reasons that they come to him: if he knows how to curse powerfully, he must also know how to lift the curse of others; he who can harm can also heal. The same powers are involved in both the diviner's and the witch's art. One sees this often in African cultures. The Mbugwe of Tanzania, lor example, have over each of theilsub-tribes a rain-chief, who is both political leader and spiritual intermediary and diviner for his people. By the power innate in him, as well as by learned skills, he causes the rain to fall on the fields of his people, but by the same token deprives rival groups of the heaven-sent waters. The rain-chiefs compete each year for the rains. By his own group the rain-chief is regarded as a beneficent and powerful diviner and "witch-doctor"; by other groups he is thought to be a sorcerer, or witch. rs) Similarly, as Robert LeVine remnrks, for the Gusii of southern-western Kenya The diviner groups seems to be a socially accepted version of the witch group, or, conversely stated, the conspiratorial witch group may represent a deviant dangerous and perhaps fantastic version of the actually functioning group of diviners. 16) r4) So intimately linked is divination with the act of sacrifice that often sacrifice is the whole of the divinatory session: from the entrails of the victim, the cracks in its heated bones, or even the manner of its staggering and fall, the verdict of Destiny and the Divine is "read". r5) Robert F. Gray, "Some Structural Aspects of Mbugwe Witchcraft," in lt[/itchcraft and Sorcery, op. cit., pp. r43 1., t46, t541., r7o. 16) "Witchcraft and Sorcery in a Gusii Community," in ibid., pp. 4z t. Etan M. Zuesse On the nature of the demoni,c: African zaitch,ery Among the Gusii, however, diviners were not themselves considered witches. A closer and even more striking rapproachment is evident among the Azande, where occasionally one finds diviners (or "witchdoctors") who are commonly regarded as witches, and thus credited with even more power to effect cures; Azande whisper that certain diviners may act in collusion with witcheslT). There are many reasons the Azande might have such suspicions. It is known by them, for examp1e, that witches have within them mangw, witchcraft substance, which they inherit but increase in power through their cannibalistic initiation and regular diet of human flesh. Part of the initiation of the ztti,tchdoctor, however (and a climax to it), is the physical transfer of the master's tnangu to the initiate his novice, through the process of coughing up lhe m.angw like phlegm, and forcing the novice to eat it. 18) Afterwards the new witch-doctor must continue to feed his mangw with strong medicines, for it is very much due to his internal power of nrangw that he ef fects cures, and not merely by external manipulation of charms. Periodically the witch-doctors gather in a private place to celebrate the feeding of their tno,ngui like the Zande witches who reputedly convene in sinister covens out in the bush or near graves to eat human flesh which they boil in cauldrons with curses and spells, the witch-doctors too cooperate in stirring the cauldron of their "hot" medicines, uttering charms and spells which direct the medicines to intensi{y their powers. In these spells the doctors name as kinsmen only animals, very much as the witches have animal familiars; but Evans-Pritchard explains that these medicines are so powerful that they demand the life of the kinsmen of the cooks: thus the doctors name animals. But at such moments they may also name rivals or personal enemies, who will surely be afflicted in consequence."I dance, a man dies," goes their traditional initiation song, recaliing to us the obscene dance Zande witches are said to make in the dark of night in the compounds of their victims before blighting them and their household with death and disease.1e) r7) Evans-Pritchard, [,Vitchcraft, Oracles op. cit., pp, rg2fl., zz5. t8) Ibid., pp. 221-9. ry) Ibid., pp. 2o7 and zz8. and Magic among the Azande, 227 D. Religi,owsHomologies: Nemesi,sand, the Ancestors Analysis of the sources of the Zande witch-power indeed leads to the sources of the witch-docto,r's power; both have the s.ame root in the High God, Mbori. The medicines which both use are said to grow under the special care of the Supreme Being, for example, and the diviners are able to use these herbs with Mbori's mandate to counter the excessesof the witches. 20) The Mandari, a tribe to the north of the Azande, in the Sudan, say likewise of witches that: 'They are God's creatures,like lions and other preying animalswhich harm people,and their natureis to spendtheir time harming'.Although said to be 'God's servants in bringing death', they are also said to be hated by God. 'Because they harm good people, their end is planned, and after a time thel' o1e.'-) The implication is that they should only harm bad people. The destructiveness given witches, though it is random in its maliciousness, is not entirely arbitrary, for many peoples believe that witches serve the larger purposes of Deity in singling out as victims those who genuinely erred, who through excessivepride or selfishness have elevated themselves over their fellows, for example, or who have otherwise violated divine norms. Widespread through West Africa is the belief that there are certain of the most powerful witch-medicines that refuse to harm an innocent person; if a witch attempts to misuse in this way such a medicine, its malificent powers will recoil in full strength upon the sender. In a recent study of the Cewa of Zambia, we read: As to victims of sorcery,two-tiirds of the rr8 casesinvolving beliefs in those of vengeance on sorcerers-\\'ere sorcerl'-including orle in which anti-social or socially inadequate behaviour was attributed either: to the victim or to someone closely associated with him. . . (that were) . . . violations of widely accepted Cewa norms, including those violated by the sorcerers in the sampl e.22) Among the Nyakyusa of Malawi one of the most powerful sanctions for moraiity and harmonious participation in the social order is the widespread fear of "the breath of men", i.e., witchcraft.23) Witches m) Ibid., 36, zr5-r7, 3go, 44r f. zt) Jean Buxton, "Mandari Witchcraft," ia Wi,tchcraft and, Sorcery, op. ck, p. Io2. zz) Marwick, Sorcery in its Social Setting, op. cit., pp. 245f. z3) Monica Wilson, Good Corupany: A Study of Nyakyusa Age-Villages (Boston: BeaconPress, rg5r), pp. gi-r2o. Evan M. Zuesse pick out those who offend them personally, of course, but such offenders have very likely harmed many before occasion brought them into contact with a witch; the very randomness of the resentment of witches insures the "objectivity" of their hatreds: considerations of friendliness, personal favor, or even family blood, will not stand in the way of a witch's ferocious and spontaneous (even quite involuntary) vengeance.Among the Shilluk of the southern Sudan, the witch is often known as such from birth, and is avoided by others throughout his life, but the power that is innately his is thought to come from Jwok, rGod, and thus to have a certain justice in its application; these black magicians are said to make the following tormented prayer at night before commencing their spells: You who are God (Jwok) give me this personto kill. Why was I createdthus if it was not that I was to kill?24) In this way the witch plays a role amongst many African peoples that in Greeceis representedby the power of nemesis,whose agents were the dread hags, the Eri,nyes. For the Nuer, neighbors of the Shilluk, to break a taboo is to act to destroy the divine order i'n which Kwoth, God, directly participates. The result is nueer'. God blasts the one who causesthe knot in the flow of Divinity through the cosmos.Lightning doesnoi strike randomiy, according to the Nuer and many other African peoples, but selectsparticularly the houses of the prosperous who are fu11of wealth, who have refused to share their bounty with others and haye otherwise violated the basic divine norms. zs) In the same way the sometimesquite invo untary power of witches and of the evil eye can fall upon those who refuse in general to share things with others, especially with the witches or hexers themselves (but since these are often unknown before the event, one ought to share with all). In such matters the witches seemsto perform for the gen.eralsociety, between neighbor and neighbor, what the ancestors do for the family group, between kinsman and kinsman. There are further similarities between the ancestors and witches. The ancestors of a kinship group generally intervene actively in the human order only when one of their z4) Rev. D. S. Oyler, "The Shilluk's Belief in the Evil Eye-The Evil Medicine Man," Sudan Notes and,Records, IIffz Apri| rgrq), r3r. z5) E. E. Evans-Pritchard,, Nuer Religi,on (London: Oxford University Press, 1956),pp. r8z-95. On th,enoture of the demonic: African witchery 223 descendentshas transgressed a norm of family life, threatening the collapse of its structure. Then, using spiritual powers received from their participation in the divine order, they can cause the illness or even death of the victim, or those close to him, unless restitutio,n is made to the ancestors and through them to the divine order, just as one can release oneself fro'm witchcraft by obtaining from the witch his forgiveness and establishing a mutuality and reciprocity with him (signalled by the witch blowing water on a fowl's wing, from the victim's domestic fowl, or having him share a feast with one, or otherwise). Joining in a communal meal with the witch is especially similar to the communal sacrifice with the ancestors. Ancestors and witches are both "Other" to the day-time world of mankind: they inhabit the night, and may embody themselves in animals, often of the same species: lions, leopards, snakes. Evil ghosts, that is, rejected'ancestral shades, may go further and feast on corpses, cast spells on night travellors, and haunt secret places in the bush, all just like witches. F,. Witchery as Negati.veOtherness But while it is important to stress parallelism between witches and the more benevolent religious levels of Otherness in the cosmos, in order to demonstrate the fact that we must understand witchery in terms of a spiritual logic, and not merely as sociological nor as mereiy magical "degenerations", it would be a clear travesty of the facts to leave the matter there. For witches, for example, are quite evil and repulsive, while the ancestors are benevolent; witches attempt finally to destroy the divine order, and if their activities occasionally work for its support it is, so to speak, in spite of the witches themselves.The witches belong to a separaterealm of the cosmic order apart from the ancestors,or perhaps we can say that the witches belong finally quite outside the cosmic order. The honored dead, for example, who will becomeancestor,sand assure for their descendentsthe fertility of family fields and of the women of the clan, who will constantly work for harmony and peace in the family, are buried in a consecratedplace; the witches are thrown into the bush, or buried with'out rites far off in the wilderness, near or under a stream perhaps that shall eternally wash their polluted bodies and souls far away, "cooling" the land. Nor do the witches work even when alive for anyone's fertility; rather do they continually cause universal sterility and barrenness. While the On the nature of the demonic: African witchery Etan X[. Zu,esse oc 225 ^ ancestofs are so closely and intimately linked with the cultivated, ,,purified" land that Earth and ancestors often seem rnodalities of it is each other in many African cultures (in Bantu Africa especially and spirits often impossible to make a valid dichotomy between nature ancestor spiril, zo) the witches are the enemies of the cultivated Earth, a and many witch-ordeals (tests to single out the gui{ty witch from repEarth with the suspects group of suspects) involve confronting resentatives. Widespread in West Africa, for example, is the use of iron-smiths as witch-finders, for iron is iinked with the Earth, and the Smith has the secret of transforming the alien natural substance into a humanized one, and getting it to work for man' Witches and iron therefore are antipathetic; the witch will not touch iron, or inrn will burn the witch, etc. The Smith is in actuality an Earth-priest, and of often leads the ordeals. Many societies shared with the LoDagaa Ghana, to mention but one specific rite, the traditional practice of forcing a suspected witch to drink a mixture of soil and water at the Earth-shrine; a true witch's body would so rebel against the mixture his beily would immediately begin to swell up, finally causing death, while the innocent suffered no harm. 27) The witches do not love the cultivated Earth, but the wild and chaotic Bush, the non-human side of Earth. Their sphere is the forest or jung'le, darkness, all that is anti-human and threatening within the general category of the Other; they isolate in themselvesthis horrible aspect of the non-human otherness, and represent it among men. They form the inversion of the divine order, and thus their mirroring of the ancestors,of the diviners, and even more archaically, of the shamans, is by way of reversed image and antithesis. The very similarity of the structures we have outlined, however, points to a further important conclusion.T'he witches too obtain their powers from the same sources as the benevolent forms of the divine order do, but they turn those powers backwards upon that order. Witches are conceived of as parasitic, gaining their power from the very divine flow they block and reverse' One of the most striking images of this symbolic status of witches can be found in medieval Europe: the central rite of the witch-covens, held on distant 4) Cf. olaf Pettersson, "The Spirits of the wood," in supernotttral Owners of' Natwre, ed. Ake Hultkrantz (Stockholm, Uppsala: 196r)' z) Iack Goody, Death, Property and' the Ancestors (Stanford and London: Stanford University Prcss, tSz), p. 64. mountain tops in the darkest hour of the night, was the recital of the Latin Mass-backwards. witches relate to the inversion of holiness. In a certain sense wilches mwst be more pious than we are' for it is the token of their satanic holiness that it is so intense it becomeseven unholy and anti-human, removing witches from the ranks of true (and mere) humanity. Witches are so given over to their own reality, in the popular conception, that they are "obsessed" with evil, they are "compelled" to do evil, it is even "involuntary" with them: it is this very pi,ety which so de-humanizes them that they loose contact with mankind and so can no longer be argued with, but must simpily be either avoided or killed. The pattern of inversion and of assimilation to a structure of "negative Otherness" mirroring in reverse image "positive Otherness" can be shown to hold throughout African religions, and to explain many puzzhng features of witches in Africa. For example, witches belong to the "Outside": they are marginal, come from an alien background, or live far off. It is as an alien that they penetrate the divine order of good humanity. As John Middleton first systematicallydemonstrated for the Lugbara of Uganda-Congo, the divine order of humanity is establishedin the center of a field of social structure and traditional patterns, beyond whose horizon all relationships and powers become inverted: In the centre of the field, relations and persons involved in them are 'good'; the further from the centre the more 'evil' and inverted they become. In other words, orderly relations of authority, unchanging from the time they and the founding ancestors, are 'good'; relations were created by Divinity pureh of force are 'evil'.28) But witches are not merely the inversion of the divine order through their use of force; their inversion is systematic and thorough-going. Normal people are active in the day but sleep 'the sleep of the just' at night. Witches are active at night, quiescent by day' Normal peoplq, good, people, marry exogamously, eat foods other than human flesh, kill the enemies of their village in warfare, work to increase the crops or improve hunting, wear clothes, walk on their two feet, and so on and on. Witches, however, commit incest, eat human flesh, kill their own z8) John Middleton, "Witchcraft and Sorcery in Lugbara," in l4/itchcraft and Sorcery, op. cit., p. z7z; also seeidem, "some Social Aspects of Lugbara Myth," Africa, XXIV (r95a). Nuuar XVIII r5 226 Evan M. Zwesse kin and their own neighbors (and may band together in a 'conspiracy' with enemy viilages' witches to feed on their own kith and kin); they blight the crops and ruin hunting, go about at night quite naked, stand on their heads and even walk upside down on their way to bewitch victims, rest dangling like bats from trees, eat salt when thirsty, transform themselves into animals in order to devour their victim or to sneak into his compound, cause nightmares, disease and death. 2e) Ordinary people walk to their destination, but witches have everywhere the power to overcome space and fly, either in the form of a carrion bird or on an animal familiar like the proverbial "nightnare" , or on some object like a filth-collecting broom (another memory and parody of the shaman's drum or aris rnwnd,i,tent-post 'on which he makes his ecstatic ascent, perhaps). Witches therefore construct an antithetical order. We might again think of the frequent African motif (found widely elsewhereamong highly localized peoplesso) of the land of the dead being patterned precisely the reverse of life here below, but the difference is that the latent ambiquity in this reversal is in the case of the witches made explicit: the witches are pure evil. tr. I'l/rtchery as Isolati^on This reversal of the divine depends above all on one thing: the breakdown in the divine flow through the cosmos. The fertile women must be made barren, the fecund land blighted and the crops "magically" stolen. At points of transformation in the divine order the witches cluster and focus their withering hate. Initiates, while in the delicate liminal stage of their training, are especially vulnerable to witches, who will seek to bewitch and damn up the budding sexual generativity of the initiate. Newly-weds are similariy especially vulnerable, and like pregnant women are especially surrounded by restrictions and safe-guards to protect them from the envious witch's curse or evil eye' The favorite prey of the witches are a hated person's infant children and fertile z9) See above note; also E. H. Winter, "The Enemy Within : Amba Witchcraft," in Witchcraft and,Sorcery, op. cit., p.42, and other essaysin this volume. :o) The term "'highly localized peoples" replaces here the prejudicial use of "primitive peoples", "natives", or worst, "savages", still commonly found. "Nonor illiterate cultures" is unsatisfactory since in point of fact certain cultures of Aftica and elsewhere have scripts or the equivalent of hieroglyphs, generally reserved for religious and divinatory purposes just as in early Sumer, Egypt, ancl China. On the naturc o7 tl te dentoni c : A l ri c an i J tc her]' 221 wives, the open cultivated fields and the herds, for in these the victim has continued creativity and strength, in these the hated person shares himself with the cosmos.This sharing must be broken or twisted. At the root of the symbolism of witcherl, one can even 'say, is a meditation on the significance of shari.ng.A very basic concept found amongst highly localized peoples all over the world is that the universe is built up through sharing: that through the intenningling of divine forces, through economic exchange, through wife-giving and marriage, through ritual sacrifice and the very act of eating, through the initiatic transformation of a family's child into an adult whose work and creativity will be shared with the whole society, the entire cosmos is continually being regenerated anew. And corresponding y, almost all the casesof witchcraft in the literature, not only in Africa but also elsewhere, can be understood as centering on a break-down in the flow of reciprocity; the actions and prediiections of witches can be understood also as an extension of this symbolism of aborted reciprocities. It is jealousy that drives a man to witchcraft, the Lugbara say, and it springs from the refusal of neighbors to share their feasts with one, or from envy when another more seductive man draws all the eligible girls to him, leaving one alone, or when another is prosperous and one has nothing. 31) It is the person who keeps to himself, withdrawing from the social round and refusing to "share himself with others", who is everywhere suspectedof hidden resentmentsand dark tendencies.Very many sorcery accusations spring up within the family circle when it appears that the inheritance and power will not be equitably shared. The barren co-wife, who willfu'lly withholds herself frorn sharing her fecundity with the household,who at the same time resents the fertility of others, is a prime suspect as a witch. All these figures recur again and again in the witchery symbolisms of African cultures. It is the co-wife's "evil eye" that kills the other women's children, and the youngest son's sorcery that causesthe eldest son's inheritance to come to ruin.32) The witch is one who has been isolated and pained, but who takes malicious umbrage at this isolation. and attempts to make 3r) Middleton, "Witchcraft and Sorcery in Lugbara,', op. cit., pp. z6zff. 3z) It is not hard to see in such ideas the symbolization of guilt feelings felt by the fertile co-wives, or the eldest son, who contrast their own successwith their {ellow's misfortune uneasily, and who with the coming of bad fortune to themselvesaccusethe fellow as almost a self-exonerationand iustification, i'228 On the natu,reof the d,etnonic:African witchery Eaan LI. Zuesse that one share that painful excommunication from the divine order a be can the witch has felt. Or, as we have already seen, the witch his powerful medicine-man, a rainmaker or a chief, who does not share power equitably with those who are dependent on him' G. Bodity Il[etaPhors of WitcherY this In the same way the actions and rituals of the witch repeat ways symbolism of aborted transformations. The two most intimate the and eating is by themselves beyond people relate to the world witch fui{ the of signs characteristic .e*,r"l act. But perhaps the most The symbolism are the persistent canni.balisti,cand incestwot'tsmotifs. meat' witch does not assume full humanity through eating non-human refuses rather he turns on his own kind, and der,nourshuman flesh. He He incest. his of is true same The other. true the encounter with the wichery of transmission the of reads mates with himself. One often power through an incestuousact, The Nso of the west cameroons are and trrr,rruul im that they clearly distinguish between witches of incest wirches of cannibalism. The first are called'witches of the sun or day', and are innocuous enough; only the kin suffer. Any incest warrants the appelationwitchcraft. But 'witchcraft of the night" ztirinove vitsa'4, will is the completely malicious type, whose cannibalistic practioners witch African stop at nothing in their lust for human flesh.33) The however, is above all a spiritual cannibal' Among very many peoples his cannibalism is not understood to be physical as such; the witch devours the ,sotil bit by bit, and as the meal proceeds through the days is no and weeks, the victim visibly weakens and sickens, until there sa) vampire the The image of more life left in him and he utterly dies. is the same lust that drives It tales. horror to European limited is not feast, too, is however ghoulish this corpses; the witch to exhuming undisturbed by entirely appear may grave often a spiritual one, and the e3lpfrvffi.M.Kaberry,"WitchcraftoftheSun,"inManinAfri'ca'ed'Kaberrv 1969),pp' r75-q5;the Douglas(Lonion, N.Y.: TavistockPublications, ^rrl"it"ty J"rrg", to the liinspeoplefrom the incestof a pair is very real to the Nso: "It is it i,sas thoughthe culprits uere eating one like ,witchcraft of the night' because go mad but in another and they would, unless action were taken, not only die or compound inthe of members other and children their to death bring cases some revolting or as . but . dreadful. . or bad.. , as volved. It is describednot merely disgusting (ko,oi, a term also applied to a cofpse found in decayed state, to excrement,suicide,and leprosy." Ibid'.,p. r79 (italics mine)' cit', pp' 47ft' 3D it. Parrinder, Witchuaft: EwroPeanand'African, op' 229 the light of day. Often only the medicine-man can "see" the macabre activities of the witches. The preference of the witch for animal bestiality and other forms of sexual perversity is also proverbial through Africa. For the witch belongsin essenceto the animal world; such acts are like incest for him. Even in his eating habits is the witch animalistic or bestial, for he sides with the animals in making man his prey. Thus in the most bodily kinds of metaphors the witch announceshis rejection and hatred of the human pattern of social interchange and sharing. The same kind of symbolism informs witchery spells and ritual. Witches fasten their attention on other people's eating and sexual relations, and, gaining access to their victim's inner spirit during precisely these vulnerable moments of interchange and transformation, seize the "life" of the person or blight it. One of the most reliable symptoms of a society deeply concernedwith witchcraft anxieties is a multiplication of taboos around the act of eating; among the Mbugwe, for example, It is thought that 'r'\'itches cast the evil eye on a victim's food just as it is about to enter his mouth.. . The only reliable precautionagainst the evil eye is to eat privately or only in the presence of absolutely trustworthy people' The Wambugwe actually try to safeguard themselves in this manner, by maintaining meticulous privacy in eating. Meals are always taken inside the house, even in the hottest weather. Chrildren commonly eat first while a parent stays outside to watch for intruders; then the parents eat while the children stand guard. 35) Moreover, vomit, hair, the great importance toe-nail permeated with parings, the victim's of exuviae excrement, (blood, menstrual sweat, urine, blood, sweat, etc.) in the making clothing of charms, ef figies, or potions to be used against the victim, can also be understood in terms of such symbolism. Exuviae provide the most potent medicines of the witch. They are the symbols and the very evidence of man's mortality and submission to change, his constant entry into the ongoing transformation of things. These are the very signal of man's involve- ment in time. The witch uses these same elements of transformation against the victim, forcing them back on him and stopping up, so to speak, the channels of ebb and flow that permit man to live in the the witch places the victim's exuviae back in his food, world. Often 35) Robert F. Gray, oP. cit., p. ,1$3. 230 Etan XI. Zu,esse or buries it under his threshold or in the thatch of his compound. The the victim entirely from this world. exuviae wo'rks then to d,i.ssoci'ate The witch, it is often said in Africa, comesin the dark of night to one's hut area, and there he or she dances naked a wild obscene dance until blood comes out of the anus, or vomit appearc. This blood'or vomit is the medicine; many witches defecateat the door-way of their enemies, or in their compounds - even if they bury the exuviae to hide it, the power in it works to kill the victim.36) In the same way, exuviae are generally the absolutely necessaryprerequisites to the shaping of an effigy, 'sincethey most securely anchor the ef figy to the victim's soul. Spells and chants may dupiicate or replace this use of "contagious magic", but the underlying intention is the same. The victim is through the use of such techniques torn from his inclusio,n in the divine order and isolated under the power of the witchsorcerer. Such concepts are dramatically embodied in the belief in the "zombie" or soul-slave,who is subdued to the will of the hexer through the use of an effigy in most instances.For example, the Gi of Ghana declare that the sorcerer does much the same thing in each of the following three methods: he can call up through spells the victim's swurnct (soul), making it appear in a bowl of water, and there he impales it, causing pain or death to the victim; or the sorcerer can tie the victim's A/o (1ife-essence)with string, thus withdrawing the victim from the cosmic order and causing the victim's withering away; or the sorcerer can draw the hla, into a miniature of the victim lying on a tiny sleeping mat through concentration, then "nurse" the figure through its "illness", enacting an unsuccessful cure, finally 36) For a convenient series of references demonstrating the pan-African belief in the above tcchniques,see,for East and Central Africa, Witchcraft and,Sorcery, op. cit., pp. 66, roof., 165, rg7, 2271., and' 44 etc.; for South Africa, see the survey, by A. Winifred Hoernl6, "Magic and Medicine," in The Bantu-Speaking Tribes of South Africa, ed. Isaac Schapera (London: George Routledge & Sons, rg3D, pp.z4tfl.; no single adequatesurvey of West African usagesis available, but for the purposesof this brief note it is sufficient to refer to Geoffrey Parinder, West African Religion (znd. ed.; London: Epworth Press, 196r), pp. 163f. For the importance of exuviae for the Ge of Ghana, whose use of effigy sorcery is discussedin the next paragraph of our tex! seethe vivid description in Margaret J. Field, Religion and. Medicine of the Ga People (London: Oxford University Press, rg37), p. r28i this work is, together with the same author's Search for Securit5t (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 196o),our best West Africancentered ethnological rescription of witchery. Also see H. Debrunner, Witchcraft in Ghana(Kumasi: 1959). On the nature of the demonic: African zuitchery 23r burying it-and as this ritual is dragged out, the victim simultaneously sickens, worsens, and dies.3?) A very similar ritual to this latter one is enacted amongst the Central African Rotse peoples o1f Zambia. Witches there are believed to seek always to increase the number of "familiars" they have working for them. One common way of getting such servant souls is to steal the soul and body of a villager, making him into a true zornbie, while replacing the absent villager with a charm that seems to all his neighbor,sto be the person. This "person" sickens and dies, is buried, and finally the charm is dug up by the sorcerer; meanwhile, the real victim is forced into utter spiritual slavery.38) In such rituals, the effigy and the victim are interchangeable. The entire significance of such practices is to isolate the victim from his normal participation in the cosmos, and so to reduce and master him. H. Witchery and Hunting Symbolisrus We might ask, where did such practices come f rom ? We must not be surprised that the answer is, from the same hunting-and-gathering milieu that we know shamanism's home to be in. It has been well established that at least a certain percentage of Paleolithic ,cave paintings were the product of a kind of belief in effigy sorcery: by depicting the game, and perhaps going so far as to ritually spear it after it had been drawn (numerous such pitted figures remain to us), the ancient hunters achieved power over their prey.3e) The parallels with modern hunting-and-gathering peoples are too numerous for us to mention more than a few raadom examples. In Siberia, for example, we find that the Tungus carved figures of the game they sought and take these with them on hunting trips; like the Ostyaks, Voguls and many other Siberian tribes, they believe the effigy to carry the soul 37) Field, Religion and Med,icine of the Ga People, loc. cit. 38) C{. Barrie Reynolds, Magic, Diaination and l,l/itchcraft alnong the Barotse of Northern Rhod,esia(Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, rS6:), pp.33-4; also see the more detailed accounts in Frank H. Melland, 1z Witch-Bound, Africa (London: Seeley, Service & Co., tg4), pp. 2t4-r7. 39) See the extensive recent discussionby J. Maringer, The God,sof Prehistoric Man (N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 196o), pp. rro-52; a critical review of modern evaluations of such cave art is given in Peter J. Ucko and Andrde Rosenfeld, Paleolithic Cazte Art (World University Library; N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, t6il, pp. 123-37,et passim. Also see K. J. Narr, "Interpretation altsteinzeitlicher Kunstwerke durch vd,lkerkundliche Parallelen," Anthropos, L (1955), 513-45. 232 Eaan M. Zttesse of the quarry and place it under the hunter's power. Rituals involving the ef figy are not uncommon. +o) Rock paintings remarkably similar to Paleolithic art and perhaps genetically related to such southern European art has been found in a wide arc through Africa from the once-greenSahara down along East Africa to the desert hi1lsof the Kalahari, where ritual painting was still practiced by the Bushmen within living memory.41) Clear-cut effigy hunting ritual has been reported of the Pygmies of the Congo, and indeed practices that in other cultures are clearly "witchery" are again and again repeated in a fully religious context by the Congo Mbuti, often as part of rituals linking mankind and the Suprem'e Being n:Jing the forest and all the gam e .4 2 ) L Wi,tchery atcd the Female Im'age It is important to stress again the religious structure that we find at the roots of witchery beliefs. The forms that we find in outright witchcraft symbolism are still, therefore, a meditation on fundamental questions of human existence, even if here as in other ways an inversion of the normal. It is well to remember this also in connection with the persistent linkage of witchery to women. Again, we can do little more here than throw an undoubtedly too rapid light over a vast field of evidence. It has long been noted as a curiosity that among hunting4o) Ivar Lissner, Man, God and Magic (N.Y.: G. P. Putnam's Sons, r96t), p. 245; also see detailed accounts in Eveline Lot-Falck, Les Rites de Chasse chez les peuplesSibdriens (Paris: Gallimard, t953). 4r) The subject has been well-documented.See Sonia Cole, The Prehistory of East Africa (N.\.: New American Library, 1963), pp. zzn-44and' the bibliography; for a recent discussion,see J. Desmond Clark, The Prehistory of Africa (N.Y.: Praeger, tgTo), pp. r8z-84. The remarks of H. Baumann are perhaps historically too su'eeping a unification of the Bushmen with the European Paleolithic, but much is still obscure: see Baumann, Les Peuples et les Ciailisations de tAfrique (Paris: Payot, tgTo), p. to4. 4z) Leo Frobenius' report of elaborate ef{igy hunting ritual is, however, still unique: Das (JnbehannteAfrika (Munich: Oskar Beck, r9z3), pp. 34-5. But obviously similar, and here emphatically religious, practices are related by Colin Turnbull, Wayward, Serztants (Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press, 1965), pp. r3o f., r55; also see Paul Schebesta,Die Bambuti-Pygmiienvom ltttri (Mem. Inst. Roy. Col. Belge, Sect. Sci. Mor. et Pol., Co1l.-in-4'; Bruxelles: Georgesvan Campenhout,rg+r &'rg5o), t. II, fasc. r, p. rr3, and t. II, fasc. 3, pp. rro-r. These discussionsmust be viewed together with such rituals of the chief game animal, the elephant, as are related by No€l Ballif , Tke Dancers of God (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1955),p. 166. On the nature of the d,emonic: African uitch,ery "JJ and-gathering peoples,and indeed, among very many agricultural peoples too, hunting taboos often weigh more heavily upon the wife of a hunter than upon the hunter himself. In the u,sual collections of taboos made by ethnographers, long lists of such taboos are often given, from widely dispersed societies from the far north to the densest tropical jungles, always torn out of context and advanced as evidenceof "magical" thought and "savage" non-rationality. Sir James Frazer, for example, in his always useful compilation The Golden Bowgh, notes that In Laos when an elephanthunter is starting for the chase,he warns his wife not to cut her hair or oil her body in his absence;for if she cut her hair the elephantwould burst the toils, if she oiled herself it would slip throughthem.... Elephant-hunters in East-Africa believethat, if their wives prove unfaithful in their absence,this gives the elephantpower over his pursuer,who will accordinglybe killed or severelywounded.. . . An Aleutian hunter of sea-ottersthinks that he cannotkill a single animal if during his absence from home his wife shouldbe unfaithful or his sister unchaste. Many of the indigenoustribes of Sarawakare firmly persuadedthat were the wives to commitadulterywhile their husbandsare searchingfor camphor as) in the jungle, the camphorobtainedby the men would evaporate. What is striking in these examples is the clear symbolic equation made between women and the natural realm of forest and game; what one does effects a change in the other. This is apparently especially true in regard to women's sexuality and fecundity: the unfaithfulness of the wife is immediately expressed in a simi{ar "unfaithfulness" of the animals who are truly engaged with the hunter in a li.ebestod.That this equation goes deeper than a "mere" homology of woman and game animals is seen in the last instance given involvtng cam'phor: somehow women and the enti,re realm of the natural divine order equally confront man as Other; both women and the forest are metaphors for each other. Both are a spiritual reality above all, with which man must necessarilybe joined in a dialectic which involves life out of death, food out of a "penetration". That women and forest however ate noit the satme symbolic reality is shown in the clearest possible manner by the insistence amongst such hunters of a preparatory chastity between husband and wife before the hunt commences: such a prohibition affirms that the relation of hunter to wife is similar to, 4) The Gold'enBough, Abridged Ed., r vol. (N.Y.: Macmillan, 196o),pp. 26-27 llf 'J'i EYan M. Zuesse On the nature of the demonic: African uitcltery 235 and therefore must not interfere with, the relation of hunter to prey. The separation of women from animals is, after all, the guarantee of human culture. We have not here a "pre-logical" identification of women with the game, but, precisely by the taboos, a recognition of the distinctions between nature and culture which establish the human condition. Taboos deal not with a literalism but with ,symbolism. At the same time, it is very significant that it is precisely the witch who is thought to confound the symbolic and physical through her bestiality: for the witch the animals are mates and true society, while mankind is the prey. The witch is given over entirely to the Otherness of life; she belongs to the wild and hates society. It is also no doubt for this reason at least partly that witches are so often conceptualizedas female. We have seen that the forest and the feminine are closely associated in the thought of the hunting peoples who first develop the structures later cultures relate to witchery. But just as, for so many agricultural peoples, the forest and the wild beyond the cultivated fields are revalorized as demonic and populated with dark, evil beings, from which not food but only death comes,44) so too the link between women and the wild is in the witch figure wholly dark and negativelv complementsthe positive meaning of the feminity of the food-producing cultivated Earth. Hunting-and-gathering peoples seldom develop the witchery conceptsthat so often pervade agricultural societies,it would seem; the splitting of the religious Other into a clearly demonic and clearly benevolent realm is perhaps part of a general increased complexity of cultural forms amongst farming peoples.4s) Women possess a natural creative power denied to men, a power of fecundity absolutely necessary for the continuance of the culture; their lifegiving powers are also clear in their close associationwith the domestic fire and the cooking of food. But this natural generative power so essential for sustaining the divine order is in some ways uncontrollable, despite the masculine attempt to guide it ritualily, and so it may break out of cultural boundaries and even act to destroy the divine order. As L6viStrauss has ,shown, culture has built itself up out of a complex fabric of wife-exchange. But if the inexplicably creative and divine power within women refuses to cooperate,the entire pattern of sharing and social transformations is destroyed at the root. (Nor has this anything to do with merely patrilineal'ly-caused fears of the stranger women who marry into the clan from "outside": some of our most striking descriptions of female witches come from matrilineal societies.a6) 44) The difference in cultural valuations of the forest comes out strikingly in Turnbull's description of the views of the village patrons of the Mbuti Pygmies, and those of the Mbuti themselves: see, for example, Turnbull, "The Mbuti Pygmies of the Congo," in Peoples of Africa, edited by James L. Gibbs, Jr. (N.Y.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961;),pp. 288 f. 4.5) Turnbull stresses that the Mbuti do not practice outright sorcery or witchcraft themselves; cf..ibid'., p. 3o4, or id'em, Wayward' Seruants, p.zg7; H. Trilles, L'Ame du Pygmie d'Afrique (Paris: rg45), writes: "I1 importe de noter clue les Pygm6es de race pure ne connaissent pas les sorciers" (p. rz8). Yet the data amassedby Paul Schebesta(see specific references in the earlier citation from Schebesta)show at least some such practices among the Mbuti, which are according to Turnbull village Bantu influences. Lorna Marshall, the major authority on the lKung Bushmen, writes that their medicine men are not sorcerers nor witches, but solely devote themselves to curing and work together without rivalry: "The lKung are not a witch-ridden people": "The lKung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert," in Peoplesof Africa, op cit., p. 27r.yet H. Baumanninsists in his earlier cited work that both the Pygmies and the Bushmen practise sorcery to some degree, and it is remarkable that the use of "projectile" sorcery, u.idespread throughout Central and South Afric4 has been traced to Bushmen hunting usages; "magic" borvs and arrows are used by the Bushmen both for love charms and against rivals: the sl"rnbolic homologies between sexual polarities, man-animals, and man-inimical Other, are striking. See Reynolds, op. cit., pp. 39-4r, 59, 79-U, etc., and Isaac Schapera, The Khoisan Peoples of South Africa (London: Geo. Routledge & Sons, rg3o), pp. rgs-ur:r. The archaic homology between women and the natural animal realm for hunting peoples is brilliantly demonstrated by A. Leroi-Gourham, Les Reli.gi,onsde la Prdhistoire (Pal6olithiqtr,e) (Paris:- 1qf,4), and id'em, Treasures of Prehistori,c Art (N.Y.: Abrams, n.d,. ltqf7l). 46) See, for example, B. Malinowski's remarks concerning the matrilineal Trobriand Islanders' "flying witches", in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (N.Y. : E. P. Dutton, 196r), pp. 461f.; also see the discussionof the matrilineal Navaho views, in tlre classic by Clyde Kluckhohn, Naztaho Witchcraf t (Boston: Beacon Press, rg44, 1967). The women, apparently passive and dominated (in most matrilineal societies,too), are felt to be for that very reason dangerous, for it is their formidable and largely involuntary powers which culture harnesses for its own perpetuation, which can so easily turn against all culture and humanity. Added to that is the weaker position of women, for that in itself draws in its train condemnationsof witchery. Again and again in human culture we note that the weaker are suspected of hidden powers of resentment and hatred. The very passivity of nature itself before man, a passivity which seem'sto increase with improving technology and the development of agriculture, makes it a demonic and 46 On the nature of the demonic: African witch'ery Evan M. Zuesse untrustworthy realm: in the bush foam foul demons and ghosts always ready to leap upon or seize travellors or wanderers in the night' But, in any case, it is now clear how identical are the accusation's everywhere leveled against witches that they commit incest (or sexual bestiality) and cannibalism. Sexual and hunting perversions are modes of each other. Both practices abort proper life-giving and -sustaining transformations. In incest as in cannibalism, and in the sheer malice witches are supposedto have, man turns away from the proper reciprocity with the Other which sustains the cosmic order. The relations of man and animal, culture and nature, village and forest, day and night, and man and woman, are broken and turned back on themselves, creating the various forms of witchery symboli,sm.Instead of marrying the truly other, the witch commits incest or has relations with animal familiars. Instead of eating the not-Self, the witch has a lust for human flesh. III. CONCLUSION: THE NATURE OF THE DEMONIC It is for this reason that witchery is the expression of the demonic, not simply becauseof the anti-social tendency of the symbolism' The clemonicis the attempt to define man only by himself, an incestuous, cannibalistic urge. In breaking the fundamental taboos of culture, the rvitch exults in the isolation, freedom and power that this reversal of clivine norms gives him. The witch is thought to accept and desire this inhumanity, and so is not destroyed by it; but his victims are. In this way we can explain the efficacy of many witchery practices' As we have seen,one common way of bewitching a victim is to siip some human flesh or bodily exuviae into his foocl, or even into the area of his hut compound.Flesh or exuviae are forced back on the victim, "stopping up" his life, so to speak.aea)Thus the sameway that constitutesthe delight of the witch destroys the ordinary human being whose life is woven into symboltsms, +6a) So powerful and deep-rooted are these and other witchcraft that moclern languages still vividly retain them in "obscenities". We know without needing or wanting it to be fully conscious that in them we are in effect uttering \,vitche;y accusations or curses; such expressions as "Eat shit," or "Fuck yourself," have the same rudimentary pow-er and symbolism. "Up your ass" condemns the victim to an utterly severed and inhuman life to the same degree as "Motherfucker;,' since in the first curse all defecation is prevented or is associated with perverted sexuality, while in the second the victim-witch is cursed with incestuous isolation from humanity. 237 mutuality. Breaking the taboosreleasesa terrific force which can destroy the ordinary person. But for him who can absorb this power, the result is an intensification of life. Thus the divine king also inaugurated his reign almost everywhere in Africa (and often elsewhere), with a ritual marfiage with his sister. This ritual incest immediately raised him above the common lot of humanity, bestowing upon him a terrific blighting power which he could also turn to good; but this power affected his essencehenceforth, and isolated him frorn the common run of mankind. a7) It is a consequencefrom all the above that the same order of divine power which sustains and shapes human society is also the order that bestowspower on the witches and sorcerers.Witches feed o'n the normal by turning it back on itself, inverting it, and refusing to permit the interflow of the divine order to continue. Above all the witch refuses to allow his personal inclusion in the reciprocities of the divine order. The Wholly Other is rejected, and the confrontation with that Otherness is avoided by the witch's own obsessivedrive to reduce all beings to his own finite and isolated position. To succeed in his own self definition, the witch must reduce especialiythose who in their successful integration into the cosmic flow have obtained wea'lth, fecundity, and prestige, and also those who are in the midst of a liminal transition to a heightened, more divine stage of the cosmic order, such as initiates, pregnant women, newly-weds, and so on. A11these threaten the witch's own freedom and self-determination by their integration into an order 47) Cf. the penetrating comments by Jan Vansina, Le Royaume Kuba (Annales, Mus. Roy. de L'Afr. Cent., S. in-8', Sci. Hum., f 49; Tervuren: 196-1),p. rrr. For a review of these and other forms of African divine kingship, with bibliographic references,see V. van Bulck, "La place du Roi Divin dans les circles culturels d'Afrique Noire," in The Sacral Kingship (Studies in the History of Religions, Num.en Spl. IV; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1959),pp.98-134. The following passageis interesting from this perspective: (concerning the Cewa ol Zambia) "Some informants assert that a sorcerer does not achieve any power until he had sexual intercourse with his sister. . . . In preparing his 'medicines', the maize-sorcerer is said to make use of activating agents ... such as the caul from his sister's child or his mother-in-law's loin cloth .. . Similarly, some owners of muzzle-loaders are believed to increase the accuracy of their shooting by persuading their sisters to sleep with their bullets in contact with their private parts. These practices are referred to as ufi.ti, (sorcery)." Marwick, Sorcery in lts Social Setting, op. cit., D. 8o. The bullet gains in its ferocity of penetrative power, its phallic power, by its participation in its owner's symbolic incest with his sister who links him with the wild. 48 Etan il[. Zu'esse larger than and independant of the witch. They must be brought low. One recalls the figure of the lawyer-Satan in Camus' La Chwte' The witch exults in a perverse but totatr freedom to break all boundaries, to permit any impulse no matter how chaotic. But this very need to break boundaries destroys the witch's freedorn, for he is always dependent on those noffns he violates to define his isolation anew. He is reduced, that is to say, to an obsessive perversion of norms, a frozen refusal to enter into the mutual interaction with the Otherness of life which the norms modulate and the divine order fepfesents. Those impulses in the witch that lead to fruitful relationships with the Other of life, with marriageablewomen, with non-human foocl, etc., the witch must refuse, for these impulses make him conditioned by that Otherness, and ultimately liable to failure and death. Again and again we afe told that witches must offer up their own kin, even their own children, in their initiations and subsequent feasts in their covens.Witchery is a willed and desperatefinitude which does not stop at assaulting all moments in the universa{ transformation of things in order to preserve itself and its intentions eternally invio ate. This finitude is achieved through the construction of an antithetical orcler and the inversion of the normal, in order to sustain the abnormality of it,.e1f.There can be permitted no true Other in such a system. To give the matter a paradoxical twist, the witch is demonic precisely becausehe is so resolutely fincte, banal, self-determined, and even, as \ve have seen, free. His freedom is the freedom of obsessionand deniai, based on a continual hatred of the beyond'quality of existence. It is an old paradox that true freedom and spontaneity can be won only by the submission to the commandmentsof the divine order which spring out of and express the Otherness of life. Otherwise man remains self-defined and self-determined, locked into personal and ultimately destructively obsessivefinite systems.It is that very refusal to recognize the controlling power of Otherness which is at one and the same time the extreme of banality and the extreme of demonic evil. The striking thing about the symbolism of witchery that we have just finished reviewing, is that these structures have without question not sprung from any organized religious movement, and so have not their source in any kind of preliminary historical facts: this complicated and profound structure has evolved spontaneously out of the very structures of consciousnessitself, as a kind of fantasy and meditation On the nature of the demonic: African witclt,ery 239 on the limits of finitude and on the nature of the relationship between self and Other. This "fantasy on evil" is deeply ingrained into the human awareness as is shown not only by its structural indebtedness to the earliest forms of hunting religion and symbo ism, not only bv its appeal to rudimentary libidinal experiences, but also by the amazing similarities in witchery symbolism in all stages of later history and in the most varied cultures. The evidencewe have concerning confessed witches (that is, accused witches who are brought to "confess" their crimes, often sincerely 48)), is that far from being convinced adherents of any cult, whether in medieval Europe or elsewhere,these unfortunates are as much victims of a universal psychosis as are their accusers who project their own spiritual rejection of the human condition onto them. The witches are scapegoats for our universal gui'lt. 48) For some remarkable confessions along this line, see the works cited in an earlier note by Margaret J. Fields. A study of medieval witch trials will also disclose a number of such documents, many extracted under extreme torture. Yet as Fields' work shows, some accusedwitches could genuinely come to believe in their own guilt. My remarks above also indicate my rejection of the thesis of Margaret Murray, The Witch Cuh in V[/estern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, rgzr), and other works by the same author, that European witch-cults actually existed continuing genuinely positive pre-Christian pagan cults in a Christian environment. Those pre-Christian pagans also believed in witches who did much the same negative things as medieval witches. It is there that the continuity must be sought, if anywhere. See Parrinder's comments, [.1/itchcraft, op. cit., passim,.