Snake Oil and Other Misused Miracles

Quantum Witchcraft and Occult Acupuncture









This is a clinical review of the 1937 publication: Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande by Pritchard Evans. The significance of the publication date is that this material is speaking to an audience that would have, almost one hundred years ago, considered the Azande something of a unevolved human being or sub human. With that in mind the book wasn’t crude or offensive in the author's manner of language. To me that is the most significant aspect of this dated but valuable material. While the Azande are as evolved as  you or I they enjoyed a primitive lifestyle similar to one that might have been lived by an indo-European just a couple of thousands of years ago. With this in mind I approached the book with the perspective that the phenomenon known as Witchcraft to the Azande is available to any other being in possession of a soul as that seemed to be the only pretext to either doing or hexing witchcraft. Possessing a soul myself I attempted to understand the Zande’s sensory contribution as someone fortunate enough to be viewing this information seventy-six years in the future with a Twentieth Century education to rely on.
    Evans did a fantastic job in his book at collecting objective data without a subjective bias towards the Azande. He never once took the easy way out and suggested that the Azande were ignorant in relation to their Western counterparts. Civilized and Uncivilized were used as classification but were in no ways a slander towards the Azande. Evans never dismissed witchcraft as something that did not exist. Instead he investigated witchcraft as something that the Azande were privy to as a sensory experience. Evans said; “We shall give a false account of Zande philosophy if we say that they believe witchcraft to be the sole cause of phenomena” thus allowing for the Zande to possess Logic and Reason as a faculty.
    The Azande of eighty years ago could delineate between a natural ill, death or misfortune and one that they perceived as supernatural. Evans stated;  “Zande belief in witchcraft in no way contradicts empirical knowledge of cause and effect. The world known to the senses is just as real to them as it is to us. We must not be deceived by their way of expressing causation…Witchcraft explains why events are harmful to man and not how they happen.” In this way Evans is showing us that to the Zande there is a sixth sense of perception governed by its own logic and reason. By this point it had become clear to me that the Azande were embodying the function of Numinous. Numinous is defined as denoting being, or the act of the divine. The Azande were experiencing as explained
Further into the text Evans states that the Azande informed him that witchcraft is normally only viewed while unconscious; ...notion of witchcraft is incompatible with our ways of thought. But even to the Azande there is something peculiar about the action of witchcraft. Normally it can be perceived only in dreams. It is not an evident notion but transcends sensory experience.” This dream-sensory experience is the basis of the work of psychoanalyst C G Jung and his definition of the Numinous, “...either a quality belonging to a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence that causes a peculiar alteration of consciousness.”
More importantly the Azande were making an embodiment of the Numinous as Evans wrote; “...the difficulty of discussing the subject of witchcraft with the Azande...for their ideas are imprisoned in action and cannot be cited to explain or justify action.” The Azande were taking the Numinous into their daily lives and as such it had become a second nature to them. The Numinous is traditionally only experienced by Westerners as trance states. From the meditation craze that swept the nation,  made the cover of Time magazine last year to any number of teenage dance clubs whose synthetic rhythms and drugs replicate the effects of trance. Trance as a type somasomatic perception is experienced as a higher state of consciousness according to religious and secular scholars alike.  
Witchcraft according to the Azande was multiple things and non-things that were governed by the tribal Prince and his seers called the Poison Oracle(s). Unfortunately, Evans did not get into the secret activities of these individuals who were able to access the unconscious realm and interpret Witchcraft. Evans did not investigate the Sorcerers that the Azande mentioned either, who were said to be able to send out their souls to enact witchcraft. Infact, the soul played such an important role in Azande life that they used a word with Evans; “mbisimo”, which meant, the soul of a thing. In this way the Azande ensouled all natural things. In this way the Azande redefined the experience of the ontonic.
I cross referenced this book with the supplementary reading material from the paper,The Effectiveness of Symbols in Murngin Rite and Myth by Nancy D. Munn. In that week’s reading Munn wrote;  “the shaman is able to manipulate the patient's illness through activities at the "mythical" abode of a malevolent spirit, because this abode is metaphorically equated with the patient's body. The shaman works upon subjective experience by "working upon" events in a mythically constituted reality that is an objectification of the patient's own bodily experience.“ In this way I felt that the Azande were accessing the same, mythic or Unconscious realms that Jung spoke of and were there finding their “witchcraft” both as a community and as Munn wrote, subjectively. This may also account for the moments that Evans reported where an individual felt that witchcraft was at work while others scoffed and disagreed even if only privately.
I feel that I learned a lot from the Azande and Evans. I will look further into the avenues that I have discovered through my reading and relation to this book. As a whole I feel that it is immeasurably important to both the human experience and anthropology that this data has been collected, recorded and preserved. If the Azande people had preserved a sixth sensory perception, that unmolested by the synthetic nature of our modern world, is able to estimate the irrational nature of the unconscious it is because of scientific rigor and humane empathy displayed by Evans.