In 1916 an old woman, Rose Eudelle, deaf and bedridden, was convicted of practicing obeah. She seems to have been one of the few witch doctors who believed sincerely in the efficacy of their own practices. She had a great reputation, and boasted that she had killed one man and sent another to the asylum. Curiously enough, she practiced obeah mainly through correspondence, and when she was finally arrested, some fifty letters from clients in various islands, one of them in New York City, were discovered. There was great excitement in Nevis when she was arrested. As she had solemnly threatened the colored police sergeant who arrested her, the whole black population was confidently expecting that some dramatic misfortune would overtake him. Here there seemed to be something more nearly approaching primitive and African magic than in any of the other thirty-eight cases of which I obtained some sort of record.
Not only is the fashion in obeah different in the different islands, but interest in magic, which is said to be declining everywhere, is less modified in some islands than in others. In Barbados, though the practices still persist, prosecutions for obeah have almost entirely ceased. In the police station at Castries, St. Lucia, on the other hand, there are still preserved the heart and hand of a Negro boy who was killed some years ago to furnish an obeah man with the instruments of magic to enable him to open the vaults of the local bank and rob it of the treasure which was supposed to be amassed there.
The fact is, then, that the mentality of the black population of the West Indies, as that of Africa, is changing under the influence of contact with the white man’s culture, and particularly under the influence of the very energetic prosecutions which not only have made the profession less profitable, but by undermining faith in his supernatural powers, have robbed the obeah man of the terror which he at one time inspired.
Aside from the superficial changes in the original superstition and the gradual decline of interest and belief in magic, it seems as if certain more fundamental changes, reflected in these practices, were taking place. First, the obeah man tends to become, on the one hand, a sort of unlicensed physician, as in the case of Percival Duval, an obeah man who maintained regular office hours, wrote prescriptions, and prescribed medicines. Actually, Duval seems to have used a little less medicine and a little more hocus pocus than the average medical practitioner in our own country did a few years ago. But he was convicted, and upon appeal to the higher court his conviction was confirmed. Another obeah man in St. John’s, Antigua, was found to be dealing, along with the other instruments of obeah, very largely in patent medicines and homely household remedies. Among the instruments of obeah taken from his office when it was raided were the following: (1) Exhibit labeled “ground bones and ashes.” The sample consisted of a mixture of a calcium compound and probably lime, wood-ashes, and incense. The incense content was 26.3 per cent. (2) Exhibit labeled “ground glass and smith coal.” This sample consisted of a coarse commercial oxygen mixture. (3) Yellow powder. This consisted of a cheap, scented starch powder. (4) Supposed dog’s tongue. This consisted entirely of vegetable matter composed principally of starch cells. (5) Exhibit labeled “ashes and incense.” The sample consisted of incense, wood-ashes, and charcoal, earth, and small pebbles, with a small proportion of oxygen mixture. It contained 17.3 per cent of incense in lump and powdered form. (6) Exhibit “vial with yellow liquid.” The sample consisted of ordinary commercial oil of anise. (7) Vial with brownish liquid. The sample consisted of a solution of iodine in potassium iodine of approximately 15 per cent strength.
The fact is, the obeah man in the West Indies is in a way to become a quack doctor. This represents one direction in which change is taking place.
On the other hand, there is a disposition of the obeah man to become a sort of confessor and privy counselor in all the intimate and personal affairs of the common people. The black people—and not only black, but occasionally Portuguese, who are the traders in the smaller islands—go to him with affairs of business and of the heart. They write him long personal letters, and he sends them a magical prayer or incantation to cure them of bodily ailments, to protect them from dangers of travel, and to insure general good fortune. In an affair of the heart, the witch doctor frequently prescribed a magic powder, sweetly scented, to accompany and lend a delicate and stimulating fragrance to a love letter. In principle, this aspect of the obeah man’s practice is like Mr. Coué’s—“Every day, in every way, I am better and better”—only that the uses of obeah are more specific. In any case, there is here a very evident tendency of the practice to assume a form in which the ritual of obeah is merely a device, like the prayers of primitive folk, for magically re-enforcing the expression of a wish. So closely are the magical practices of the obeah man connected—in the mind of the ordinary black man—with religion that in one case, at any rate, he pretended to cure a boy of insanity by making believe that he was operating as the agent or proxy of the priest.
This, then, represents a second tendency to change in the practices of magic by the black man. If obeah in some instances seems to be taking the form of popular medicine, in others it tends to assume the form of a pagan religious ceremony, adapting itself to the forms and the ritual of the local church.
VI. THE PROBLEM STATED
In a recent volume, Studies in Human Nature, Mr. J. B. Baillie has suggested that the disposition and the ability to think abstractly, disinterestedly, and scientifically is not only a relatively recent acquisition of the human race, but at the same time is a local phenomenon.
This geographical limitation of science is indeed a remarkable fact, the importance of which our familiarity with the scientific mood and our insularity of mind constantly tend to obscure.... We should not forget that millions of human beings have no interest in the scientific mood at all, and seem by constitution to have no capacity for it.... Some individuals among these nonscientific peoples may, and do, assimilate the science of the West. But experience seems to show that such acquisition is at best a mere accomplishment, and leaves the racial structure and composition of their minds unaffected.... The nonscientific peoples take up science as they put on Western clothes. One may change one’s clothes, but there is no changing the skin. The fact is that the scientific mood arises from a peculiar attitude of the mind to the world found amongst certain peoples of the globe; and without this attitude science will always appear a curiosity or an irrelevance.[[68]]