Obeah, Race and Racism
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Obeah, Race and Racism

Caribbean Witchcraft in the English Imagination

Eugenia O'Neal

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eBook - ePub

Obeah, Race and Racism

Caribbean Witchcraft in the English Imagination

Eugenia O'Neal

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In Obeah, Race and Racism, Eugenia O'Neal vividly discusses the tradition of African magic and witchcraft, traces its voyage across the Atlantic and its subsequent evolution on the plantations of the New World, and provides a detailed map of how English writers, poets and dramatists interpreted it for English audiences. The triangular trade in guns and baubles, enslaved Africans and gold, sugar and cotton was mirrored by a similar intellectual trade borne in the reports, accounts and stories that fed the perceptions and prejudices of everyone involved in the slave trade and no subject was more fascinating and disconcerting to Europeans than the religious beliefs of the people they had enslaved. Indeed, African magic made its own triangular voyage; starting from Africa, Obeah crossed the Atlantic to the Caribbean, then journeyed back across the ocean, in the form of traveller's narratives and plantation reports, to Great Britain where it was incorporated into the plots of scores of books and stories which went on to shape and form the world view of explorers and colonial officials in Britain's far-flung empire.

O'Neal examines what British writers knew or thought they knew about Obeah and discusses how their perceptions of black people were shaped by their perceptions of Obeah. Translated or interpreted by racist writers as a devil-worshipping religion, Obeah came to symbolize the brutality, savagery and superstition in which blacks were thought to be immured by their very race. For many writers, black belief in Obeah proved black inferiority and justified both slavery and white colonial domination.

The English reading public became generally convinced that Obeah was evil and that blacks were, at worst, devil worshippers or, at best, extremely stupid and credulous. And because books and stories on Obeah continued to promulgate either of the two prevailing perspectives, and sometimes both together until at least the 1950s, theories of black inferiority continue to hold sway in Great Britain today.

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Year
2020
ISBN
9789766407612

CHAPTER 1

Strange Encounters

CHRISTIAN CAPTAINS AND AFRICAN FETISH MASTERS
OBEAH IN THE WEST INDIES WAS A product of the culture, religion and experiences of enslaved Africans brought over on the Middle Passage, and the reaction to it in the United Kingdom reflected the culture, religion and experiences of Britons. Europeans were just then emerging from the dark Middle Ages, but superstition and belief in magic remained strong. It was, in fact, this mindscape – strewn with good-luck charms, the bones of saints and the words of scripture – which formed the fertile ground on which the fear of Obeah and of black people was planted, and flourished. As we will discover in this chapter, Europe’s theological and other writers had, over the centuries, prepared their readers to identify black people, and especially the black man, with the Devil and to view him with fear and loathing. This was the narrative that found its full expression during the encounter between Africans and Europeans on the “Dark Continent”, and it was to inform the reactions of Britons to Obeah.

FAMILIAR MAGICKS

If Africa had not existed, Europeans of the Middle Ages would probably have had to invent it, if only as a way to escape the upheavals and uncertainties afflicting the continent. Famine and war were common, life expectancy hovered around age thirty, and diseases such as the Black Death and bubonic plague carried off millions as they swept through the unhygienic towns and cities. To save themselves, people turned to magic and religion. Indeed, some religious practices of the time, such as the veneration of relics, looked a lot like magic. The church condemned the man who placed a magical stone or written charm on his chest as a cure for his persistent cough but blessed the woman who used a phial of holy water or a quotation from the Bible in the same way and for the same purpose.
Each year, thousands of people crisscrossed Europe on pilgrimages to the cathedrals, abbeys and priories which made a brisk business of selling relics: bits of bone, hair and nails said to come from various saints and guaranteed to cure whatever ailed the faithful pilgrim. Sick true believers placed the Gospel of John or a relic under their bed in the expectation that they would wake up healed the next morning. And these religious articles were not just expected to have curative properties; they were also thought to be able to protect their owners from fire and floods, to assure the safety of their crops and animals, to bring them safely home from the sea and to assist in the recovery of lost or stolen valuables. In fact, the demands placed on religious relics were much the same as those placed on the charms provided by Europe’s witches and wise men and wise women.
If the herbs and charms of the wise woman did not work, believers simply used another weapon from the medieval arsenal. For example, “the priest of Ramsholt in Suffolk tried to cure his daughter with ‘charms and medicines’ before appealing to the spirit of [Thomas] Becket. Such charms were freely used along with herbs and semi-precious stones, sometimes self-applied or tied round the neck of the sufferer – often by a parent.”1 But the church (for most of the Middle Ages this meant the Roman Catholic Church) was quick to stamp out any rivals to its supremacy, and it did not often see any differences between folk-healers and witches. To the church, someone versed in herbal lore was probably also a spell-caster, a shape-shifter, a storm-maker, a diviner and maker of poisons.
Belief in magic permeated the society, affecting not just the poor but royalty too. Queen Elizabeth I, for example, employed the services of John Dee, who, whatever his contributions to astronomy and mathematics, was also a firm believer in divination and the potency of crystal balls. Though nothing was ever proved against her, Madame de Montespan, the courtesan, was famously associated with Catherine Monvoisin, also known as “La Voisin”, who was alleged to have given her love philtres aimed at attracting and keeping the affection of Louis XIV. Meanwhile, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II employed several alchemists and astrologers in his court.
But, according to the church, where there was magic there could also be found witches and sorcerers acting in concert with the Devil, their master:
A renowned midwife, Amy Simpson, affirmed that she in company with nine other Witches... the Devil their Master being present, standing in the midst of them, a Body of Wax shapen and made by the same Amy Simpson, wrapped within a Linen Cloth, was first delivered to the Devil, who after he pronounced his Verdict, delivered the said picture to Amy Simpson, and she to her next neighbour, and so round about, saying, this is King James the Sixth, ordered to be consumed at the instance of a Nobleman, Frances, Earl Bothwel.2
James VI was not the first or only member of royalty to suffer the murderous attentions of witches. The nobles of sixth-century France were scandalized when one of their number was accused of obtaining poisons from Paris witches to kill King Chilperic’s infant son. In 1419 Henry V of England accused his stepmother of attempting to kill him by witchcraft. Two decades later, the Duchess of Gloucester was prosecuted for trying the same thing with his son, Henry VI. Sometimes the assistance of witches was required for other purposes. In 1483 Richard III charged his sister-in-law with seducing his brother into marriage with the aid of witchcraft. And so it went. Every screech owl was a witch in disguise, and everyone who was not a witch was busy buying either love potions or poisons, and sometimes both together!
As we have seen, the fear of witches was real and present at all levels of society. Everyone knew that witches could spoil crops, kill children with a glance, poison water and milk and generally ruin the lives of anyone who incurred their ire. It was agreed in many quarters that witches ate children and had access to diabolical poisons. If somebody died in mysterious circumstances or was suddenly afflicted with a strange sickness, witchcraft was inevitably blamed. The hysteria of the witch hunts that took place in most European countries between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries heightened the fear. Witches did not act alone but served their master, the Devil, church leaders said, and anyone who had not been afraid before trembled. A belligerent old crone living on her own in a wretched hut could be avoided or ignored, but not so the Devil. And it was this alleged concourse between witches and the Devil that most occupied the men obsessed with rooting out witchcraft.
“Satan’s prevalency is most clear in the marvelous number of Witches abounding in all parts. Now hundreds are discovered in one shire; and (if fame deceive us not) in a village of 14 houses in the North are found so many of this damned breed”, claimed one bishop.3 Most (but not all) of the people imprisoned or burned at the stake for witchcraft were women. Women were feebler in body and mind, more credulous and more given to carnal lust, wrote the inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger in their landmark work, the Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of Witches”). “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable”, they wrote. Like Eve, women were sinful and weak, vulnerable to temptation – so the church leaders said, and everyone hearkened to their words. Naturally it followed that women, prone to infidelity, ambition and lust, were also highly susceptible to superstition and witchcraft. “Those women are chiefly apt to be witches who are most disposed to such acts”, Kramer and Sprenger thundered, and their voices resounded down through the ages.4
Adulterers and whores were not the only ones who faced the rack; old women were another favourite target for accusers. Poverty-stricken women living alone and long past their childbearing years were often the first to be identified as witches, not least because, in an age of early mortality, the long-lived were inevitably suspect. The anonymous author of Poems Chiefly on the Superstition of Obeah includes a poem about an Irish witch who goes out to “meet the Devil upon the Western hill”. When they meet her on the road, “old men bless themselves and children run from her”, but the poet argues that she was probably nothing more than a “lonely, alienated, scorned and isolated old woman”.5
Briggs contends that “many old women levied blackmail on their neigh-bours; and where they bore a grudge, the terror of their charms produced the evil they desired; or if these failed, poison was often at hand”.6 In fact, according to the Malleus Maleficarum, witches were so depraved that they deliberately provoked others to hostility in order that they might have a reason for working witchcraft on them.
Quarrelsome old women who had outlived their husbands and perhaps had no other living relatives, far from inspiring kindness, could hope for nothing better than neglect. They were a burden on communities and families struggling to feed themselves, their very wretchedness a reproach. Friendless and thus justifiably grudgeful, at least to the medieval mind, they were highly blameable if someone’s baby died of no apparent cause, if a sudden tempest destroyed crops or if a valuable farm animal sickened.
People were not entirely without recourse, however. “Salt consecrated on Palm Sunday and some Blessed Herbs... enclosed together in Wax and worn around the neck” was a remedy against the illnesses and diseases caused by witches, while sprinkling holy water and invoking the Holy Trinity and saying a Paternoster could protect dwellings. “But the surest protection for Places, men or animals are the words of the triumphal title of our Saviour, if they be written in four places in the form of a cross: IESUS † NAZARENUS † REX † IUDAEORUM †. There may also be added the name of the Virgin MARY and of the Evangelists, or the words of S. John: The Word was made Flesh.”7
If all of this failed and the witch was still able to wreak havoc or, at the very least, to annoy her neighbours, she could be brought to trial and, upon conviction, burned at the stake. Thousands were. The following account of a Martinique witch trial in 1657 is fairly typical, for all that it took place in the West Indies, far from the European theatre of operations.
It was almost impossible to doubt of her guilt; for they proved, that the moment she touched infants, they became languid, and died in that state! That she sent a sort of unknown caterpillar to the houses of those with whom she quarrelled, which destroyed the best of every thing they had, while none of the neighbouring houses suffered any injury from these insects, and other similar things! The judge having put her in irons, to get the truth from her, had her examined, to see if she had any mark, such as they say that the devil puts upon all sorcerers, but not finding any he resolved to try if the remark which, he said, he had read in several authors worthy of credit, was true: it was that sorcerers never cry while they are in the hands of justice! He therefore begged one of our fathers without discovering his design to him, to go and see this poor unfortunate, say every thing the most touching that he could, to make her sensible, and weep for her fault.
This good priest did not fail to go, and in the guard-room, which served her for a prison, he said every thing he could to affect her, but in vain. The judge, having now this further proof, had her conducted to a magazine, where he requested the same priest to speak to her again; but scarcely had he opened his mouth when she began to cry, and shed so many tears, that she made all those who saw her cry likewise. The judge, not satisfied with this proof, followed the counsel of a Mr Jacques, a surgeon, an Italian by birth, and called the Roman, who told him that he had seen the trial by water practised in Germany and in Italy, and he was allowed to use it. This “good man”, without taking the advice of the Jesuit fathers, or ours, condemned this poor wretch!
The next day, they carried her to a tolerably deep river near the “Carbet”, where they stripped her. M. Jean, who upon this occasion acted more like an executioner than a surgeon, tied her two thumbs to her two great toes, and having fastened a great rope round her waist, which was across the river, she was pushed into the water, and hauled to the deepest part, where she floated like a balloon, without their being able to sink her, although she herself made several efforts to go to the bottom! More than 200 persons were present at this sight, and would have gone away sufficiently convinced; but this Roman sent a little boy to swim to her, who, having fastened a sewing needle in her hair, she sunk, like a piece of lead, to the bottom: in the space of a good “miserere”, they saw her motionless: and w...

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