The Witch.
The position of the witch has been so clearly stated by Sir A. Lyall, that his remarks deserve quotation. “The peculiarity of the witch is that he does everything without the help of the gods. It begins when a savage stumbles on a few natural effects out of the common run of things, which he finds himself able to work by unvarying rule of thumb. He becomes a fetish to himself. Fetishism is the adoration of a visible object supposed to possess active power. A witch is one who professes to work marvels, not through the aid or counsel of the supernatural beings in whom he believes as much as the rest, but by certain occult faculties which he conceives himself to possess. There is a real distinction even in fetishism between the witch and the brother practitioner on a fetish, or between the witch and the Shaman, who rolls about the ground and screams out his oracles; and this line, between adoration and inspiration, vows and oracles on the one side, and thaumaturgy by occult, incomprehensible arts on the other, divides the two professions from bottom to top. Hence, the witch, and not the man who works through the fetish, is proscribed. Hence any disappointment in the aid which the aboriginal tribes are entitled to expect from their gods to avoid averting disease or famine, throws the people on the scent of witchcraft.”[2]
Again, “The most primitive witchcraft looks very like medicine in the embryonic state; but as no one will give the aboriginal physician any credit for cures or chemical effects produced by simple human knowledge, he is soon forced back into occult and mystic devices, which belong neither to religion nor to destiny, but are a ridiculous mixture of both; whence the ordinary kind of witchcraft is generated.”
And he goes on to show how “the great plagues, cholera and the small-pox, belong to the gods; but a man cannot expect a great incarnation of Vishnu to cure his cow, or find his lost purse; nor will public opinion tolerate his going to any respectable shrine with a petition that his neighbour’s wife, his ox, or his ass may be smitten with some sore disease.” This, however, must be taken with the correction that, as we have seen already, the deities which rule disease are of a much lower grade than the divine cabinet which rules the world. The main difference then between the hedge priest and the witch is, as Sir A. Lyall shows, that the former serves his god or devil, whereas the latter makes the familiar demon, if one is kept, serve him.