Politicians suspect opponents of using witchcraft when they lose an election. Religious people of every faith take care when cutting hair or nails not to leave the remains lying around, so that they will not be taken by a witch for use in a spell.
Witchcraft beliefs are said to be typical of prescientific, low-technology societies, where there are few rational explanations for illness and misfortune. Why, then, have they persisted even in cities, where the .
alternative of Western rationalism is available to many? These age-old beliefs, some researchers argue, give an answer to the fundamental problem of evil. And to many Africans, they do so more convincingly than the Western worldview.
Though witchcraft beliefs are thought to be stronger in Africa than on other continents, they are not specifically African. Witchcraft beliefs exist "from Africa to the South Seas and from Asia to America," notes Philip Mayer in Witchcraft and Sorcery. In Europe, hundreds of thousands of people, mostly women, were burned as witches in witch-hunts that lasted for 300 years; the last burning of a witch in Europe took place as late as 1782, in Switzerland. Even apparently unrelated phenomena, such as McCarthyism in the United States, have been likened to witch-hunts.
What are witches like? According to the beliefs of various African peoples, witches can fly. They dance naked in the cemeteries & graves at night, dig out corpses and eat the flesh. They copulate with animals, commit incest, and eat their own children. They may walk backward and on their hands, eat salt when thirsty, and hang by their feet from a tree when resting. They may come at night, take a victim's head, use it as a ball in a game, and return it in the morning without the aggrieved's noticing anything.
They are a society's collective nightmare, a personification of its fears and forbidden desires. But in real life, those accused of being witches are not the terrifying creatures of nightmares.
Intro One morning in late February 1998, Carly Hudson, Erika Allison and Daniel Booher were contacted by Special Agent John Ciccone of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) of the Los Angeles division Group II. With us was Special Agent William Queen. Ciccone knew that Quee...