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The same dichotomy between sorcery and witchcraft exists (sometimes more ambiguously) in the beliefs of many peoples throughout the world. Again, witches are typically seen as particularly active after dusk, when law-abiding mortals are asleep. According to traditional Navajo belief, when a witch travels at night, he wears the skin of a dead animal in order to effect a transformation into that animal. These “skinwalkers” hold nighttime meetings at which they wear nothing except a mask, sit among baskets of corpses, and have intercourse with dead women. In some African cultures witches are believed to assemble in cannibal covens, often at graveyards or around a fire, to feast on the blood that they, like vampires, extract from their victims. If they take the soul from a victim’s body and keep it in their possession, the victim will die. Like those in Western society suspected of child abuse and Satanism, African witches in the popular imagination are believed to practice incest and other perversions.

Sometimes, as in the Christian tradition, their malevolent power is believed to derive from a special relationship with an evil spirit with whom they have a “pact,” or they exercise it through “animal familiars” (assistants or agents) such as dogs, cats, hyenas, owls, or baboons. In other cases the witch’s power is thought to be based in his or her own body, and no external source is deemed necessary. Among the Zande of the Congo and some other central African peoples, the source of this evil-working capacity is believed to be located in the witch’s stomach, and its power and range increase with age. It can be activated merely by wishing someone ill and is thus a kind of unspoken, or implicit, curse. At the same time, the Zande believe that evil deeds can be wrought even more effectively by the manipulation of spells and potions and the use of powerful magic. In anthropological terminology this is technically “sorcery,” and thus, like the “witches” in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth who dance around a pot stirring potions and muttering spells, the Zande practitioners may more properly be termed “sorcerers” rather than “witches.”

In many African cultures witches are believed to act unconsciously; unaware of the ill they cause, they are driven by irrepressible urges to act malevolently. It is thus easy for those accused of witchcraft, but who are not conscious of wishing anyone ill, to assume that they unknowingly did what is attributed to them. This, along with the effects of suggestion and torture, in a world where people take the reality of witchcraft for granted, goes far to explain the striking confessions of guilt that are so widely reported in Africa and elsewhere and that are otherwise hard to comprehend. It is worth noting, however, that if witches believe they are unconscious agents, this is generally not the view of those who feel victimized by them.

Whatever the basis of their power and the means by which it is exercised, witches (and sorcerers) are regularly credited with causing all manner of disease and disaster. Sickness, and even death, as well as a host of lesser misfortunes, are routinely laid at their door. In many parts of Africa and Asia, epidemics and natural disasters have been interpreted as acts of witchcraft. For some unhappy candidates in many less developed countries, the same malign influence is cited to explain (at least in part) failure in examinations, elections, or difficulties in finding employment. Members of certain Afro-Brazilian cults, for example, believe that job loss is due not to economic conditions or poor performance but to witchcraft, and they participate in a ritual, the “consultation,” to counter the evil.

However, like their ancient and early modern European counterparts, modern Africans and Asians who believe firmly in the reality of witchcraft do not lack the power of rational reasoning. To suppose that these are incompatible alternatives is a common mistake. In reality pragmatic and mystical explanations of events usually exist in parallel or combination but operate in different contexts and at different levels. For example, anthropological research has demonstrated that African farmers who believe in witches do not expect witchcraft to account for obvious technical failures. If one’s home collapses because it was poorly constructed, no witch is needed to explain this. If a boat sinks because it has a hole in its bottom or a car breaks down because its battery is dead, witchcraft is not responsible. Witchcraft enters the picture when rational knowledge fails. It explains the diseases whose causes are unknown, the mystery of death, and, more generally, strange and inexplicable misfortunes.

There is thus no inconsistency in the actions of the sick African who consults both a medical doctor and a witch doctor. The first treats the external symptoms, while the second uncovers the hidden causes. Just as the sick African takes preventative measures prescribed by the medical doctor, he or she might also take steps against the supernatural. To protect against witchcraft, for instance, the patient might wear amulets, take “medicine” or bathe in it, or practice divination. Similarly, the Navajo protect themselves against witches with “gall medicine” or with sand paintings. If preventative measures prove ineffective for the Navajo, then the confession of a witch is thought to cure the evil magic, and torture is sometimes used to extract that confession. Moreover, like ancient and modern Westerners, people in modern Africa and other parts of the world who take the reality of witchcraft for granted usually also believe in other sources of supernatural power—e.g., divinities and spirits.

Witchcraft explains the problem posed when one seeks to understand why misfortune befalls oneself rather than someone else. It makes sense of the inequalities of life: the fact that one person’s crops or herds fail while others’ prosper. Equally, witchcraft can be invoked to explain the success of others. In this “limited good” scenario—where there is implicitly a fixed stock of resources and where life is generally precarious, with little surplus to distribute in time of need—those who succeed too flagrantly are assumed to do so at the expense of others less fortunate. The “witch,” therefore, is typically someone who selfishly wants more than he or she ostensibly deserves, whose aspirations and desires are judged excessive and illegitimate.

However, there is a narrow, ambiguous line between good and evil here. Among some African peoples “witchcraft” is intrinsically neither morally good nor bad, and among others the supernatural activities of “witches” are, according to their perceived effects, divided into good, or protective, and bad, or destructive, witchcraft. Traditional and modern African leaders sometimes surround themselves with protective “witch doctors,” and are themselves thought to be endowed with supernatural power. This is the positive charisma of which witchcraft is the negative counterpart. In the colonial period these ideas were extended to Europeans, who, in the Belgian Congo and British Central Africa at the time of independence, were feared as cannibalistic witches. This was somewhat ironic since colonial regimes, unlike their missionary predecessors, did not believe in witchcraft and made accusations of witchcraft illegal in most of sub-Saharan Africa—which has been largely reversed by their successor regimes.

This ambiguity between good and evil can also be found among the Mapuche, an indigenous people of Chile. They believe that young women take up sorcery and as old women become powerful witches who use “bad medicine” to obtain their ends. They are aligned with evil forces and use them to harm or gain advantage over others. Their training and use of plants and animals in their medicine is similar to that of the shamans who use “good medicine” and other magic against forces of evil.

The distinctions between good and bad supernatural power are relative and depend on how moral legitimacy is judged. This becomes clear when the spiritual power invoked is studied more closely. In a number of revealing African cases, the word that denotes the essence of witchcraft (e.g., tsau among the West African Tiv and itonga among the East African Safwa), the epitome of illegitimate antisocial activity, also describes the righteous wrath of established authority, employed to curse wrongdoers.

This essential ambivalence is particularly evident in Haitian Vodou, where there is a sharp distinction between man-made evil magic powers, connected with zombis (beings identified as familiars of witches in the beliefs of some African cultures), and benevolent invisible spirits identified with Catholic saints. This antithesis between witchcraft and religion, however, is always problematic: after death, the malevolent spirits or powers that an ancestor has used for personal benefit become accrued by that person’s descendants’ protective spirits (lwas). Magic has thus turned into religion (the converse of the more familiar process in which outmoded religions are stigmatized by their successors as magic).

So everything depends on the moral evaluation made by the community of the victims of misfortune: have they received their just deserts or is their plight unjustified? Witchcraft and sorcery are only involved in the latter case, where they provide a moral philosophy of unmerited misfortune. This is particularly important in religions that lack the concepts of heaven and hell. Where one cannot take refuge in the reassuring belief that life’s injustices will be adjusted in the hereafter, witchcraft indeed provides a way of shrugging off responsibility and of coming to terms with an unjust fate. According to these “instant” religions, the just should prosper and the unjust should suffer the consequences of their evil deeds here on earth.

The psychodynamics here are equally revealing. Those who interpret their misfortunes in terms of witchcraft will often use similar means to discover the source of their woes, which is often traced to the malice and jealousy of their enemies. In Africa and elsewhere, the bewitched person seeks help from a diviner to establish the evil person responsible. The diviner, often in a trance, uses a number of different techniques to discover the witch, including throwing dice or opening a Bible or Qurʾān at random. Another form of divination involves administering poison to a chicken and mentioning the name of a suspected witch. If the chicken dies, then the suspect is a witch. Whatever the process, the result is always the same, the bewitched “victim” finds the source of his woes among his rivals, typically neighbours, coworkers, or other competitors. Accusations often follow the lines of community conflict and incompatibility. In Chile, for example, the tensions between the Mapuche and neighbouring Chilean peasants are revealed in accusations that the Chileans use witchcraft to cheat the Mapuche and conversely that the Mapuche use it to harm the crops or livestock of the Chileans. Among the Navajo, competition over grazing lands and water rights or between jealous lovers is the source of witchcraft accusations. In some polygynous societies in Africa, these accusations are particularly prevalent between competing co-wives, but they are by no means always targeted at women. Ultimately, the effect of successful accusations is to call into question or to rupture an untenable relationship.

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