Article  The universal belief in witches reveals our deepest fears

#1
C C Offline
https://aeon.co/essays/the-universal-bel...pest-fears

EXCERPTS: . . . To say that witches are universal doesn’t mean belief in them has been recorded in all cultures, or that, where recorded, widespread public accusations, witch-hunts or moral panics ensue. Whereas recent accusations of satanism in the West, including Pizzagate, evidently do reveal these features, witchcraft in non-Western societies often does not. For instance, the Hopi people of Arizona never openly accused people of being witches, for fear of retribution. Instead, they believed the evildoers would be punished in the afterlife.

Anthropologists have also described a few societies as being unfamiliar with witches altogether – at least at the time they were being investigated. Or they were familiar with witches but didn’t feel particularly threatened by them, perhaps because they thought they were sufficiently protected by counter-witchcraft magic or the security of benevolent gods. An example are the Tallensi of Ghana, in whose world view the anthropologist Meyer Fortes judged witchcraft to be ‘remotely peripheral’. That is, the Tallensi do not, for the most part, believe that misfortune derives from the wickedness of other people but from the actions of just and all-powerful ancestors, so that illness and death are interpreted as rightful punishment for human wrongdoing.

What the universality of witchcraft does reveal, however, is our persistent and enduring tendency to imagine the existence of evil people, either next door or somewhere in the next valley, who constantly strive to harm us by supernatural means. Thus, the same ideas crop up time and again in places that are otherwise culturally different and geographically distant

[...] Anthropologists, who have studied witchcraft from the early days of their discipline, strive to explain the phenomenon by focusing on social systems. Do accusations of witchcraft reveal social relationships that are ill-defined and likely to give rise to tension? Do they play a role in political or economic rivalry (including among co-wives in polygamous marriages)? Have they been invoked to explain why some people suffer misfortune while others do not?

The inspiration for this approach goes back to the work of E E Evans-Pritchard on the Azande of Central Africa. In his book Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande (1937), E-P (as he was known to students and colleagues) treated accusations and confessions of witchcraft as essential elements of Zande cosmology and a way of maintaining an orderly social life.

Zande witches were said to embody an evil substance with the supernatural power to harm a person whom the witch, consciously or unconsciously, disliked. Unlike witches in many other cultures, the Zande variants attacked by purely mental means. They simply had to harbour ill will against another, and did not, for example, need to recite spells or deliberately send invisible projectiles to injure a person as is common among witches elsewhere.

Suffering an illness or other misfortune, especially one that afflicted only themselves and not others (eg, snakebite or another ‘accident’), a Zande man or woman (or their relatives, if the misfortune was fatal) would then suspect the work of a witch who had it in for them; with the help of a diviner, the suspect’s identity could be confirmed. Claiming they were not conscious of causing harm, the accused often confessed. The two parties were then reconciled, and the victim no longer regarded the accused as a witch. In this way, Evans-Pritchard saw belief in witches as a way of explaining why bad things sometimes happened to people, including good people. Since accusations and confessions could reveal strains in relations between people, this was a way to promote and maintain social harmony as well... (MORE - missing details)
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#2
Magical Realist Online
I was introduced, somewhat traumatically, to the terror of witches at a very young age watching the Wizard of Oz. Every child I reckon gets initiated into the realness of the old Crone at about that time, if they haven't already heard tell of her in fairy tale books. Even though we quickly outgrow our fear of such a fictional character, the sense lingers of her mere lurking possibility in the unconscious landscape of the human psyche. Something deep and visceral is touched in us by the archetype of the wicked witch, the Devouring Mother, enough to keep her alive and menacing in Halloween costumes and decorations as well as in the occasional horror flick. This is demonstrated in the well known and universal sleep phenomenon known as the Old Hag syndrome where we are paralyzed in bed whilst she lands on top of us suffocating us and sucking out our lifeforce. Curiously, while science quickly dismisses this experience as a mere quirk of the dreaming brain, no account is made as to why the dreaded oneiric figure is typically and almost universally some kind of evil old hag. Is she in some sense objectively real, some unidentified parasitic entity feeding off the fear energies of sleeping humans?

"Newfoundlanders call her the Old Hag, but scientists call it sleep paralysis. One name is a lot spookier than the other, but neither can compare to the feeling of terror that comes from waking up to find her crouched on your chest and leering over you in the darkness.

Newfoundland is home to many legends and fairy stories that connect it to the Celtic vein that runs through the rock. But while many of its traditions are whimsical and beautiful like will-o’-the-wisps, this one is sinister and spoken of only in hushed tones even by people who don’t believe in ghost stories. Because, despite what science may call it, it’s undeniably strange that so many people in one geographic region report identical experiences.


Starting in the 1890s, when a small piece mentioning the Hag in Newfoundland appeared in the Journal of American Folklore, the world became aware that a strong belief and superstition had taken root in the province. Over the years, the Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Archive (MUNFLA) has collected people’s accounts of their experiences with the Hag and the ways they rid themselves of her.

David J. Hufford, an employee of MUNFLA from 1971 to 1974, wrote a book dedicated to his research around the Hag. She is described as a witch-like, wrinkled, and withered old woman with long hair. She can appear in doorways, be next to the bed, or even crawl on top of people and sit on them or pin them down. The legend is so pervasive that locals have turned to using her name as a verb to describe their experience: “I was hagged last night,” “the hagging happened two nights ago,” or “I got hag-ridden.” Hufford reports that people thought they could summon the hag by reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards and kill her by sleeping on their backs with knifes or boards with upright nails against their chests designed to stab her when she sits on them. One victim of the Hag even accused another person in the community of “hagging him” (summoning the Hag to haunt a third party) out of jealousy."---- https://nuvomagazine.com/culture/canadia...Q5iYqkdgm_
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