Exploring the ancestry of witchcraft beliefs

– by Sarah Peacey

‘Witchcraft’ has a variety of associations, from pointed hats and broomsticks to the nature-focused, neopagan religion of Wicca. The oldest and most universal definition is the darkest: the idea that people – perhaps members of your community including relatives and neighbours – are secretly working harmful magic to hurt you. In communities where they exist, these beliefs can create fear and mistrust, and can lead to horrific harm coming to those suspected of witchcraft.

But how did belief in witches and the folklore and imagery surrounding them become so widespread? My co-authors and I examined the ancestry and transmission of the ‘witchcraft phenotype,’ or the collection of ideas and beliefs about witches, in linguistically and culturally-related societies in sub-Saharan Africa.

Our study population consisted of Bantoid and Bantu-speaking societies. Bantoid languages are spoken in parts of Nigeria and Cameroon, and approximately 5,000 years ago, people from this region began migrating and settling in places throughout central, eastern and southern sub-Saharan Africa, and started speaking Bantu languages. This vast population movement was a key event that significantly changed Africa’s cultural and biological landscape. As they settled in varied locations, the cultures retained ancestral traits but also began to diversify.

We created our sample of 13 Bantu and Bantoid witchcraft traits by coding information from historical records dating from the 19th-mid-20th century. If there is a linguistic phylogeny (an evolutionary tree showing how languages are historically related to one another like biological species), then cultural traits can be mapped on to the tips. We could then trace their likely patterns of evolution backwards over several thousand years. How were these beliefs transmitted between societies? Were they present in the more ancestral groups or did they arrive more recently?

Belief in witchcraft is widespread in these groups and many have similar words for harmful magic, suggesting an ancient origin. In line with this, witchcraft beliefs were present in all 84 societies which we could acquire data on. The idea that witchcraft belief is globally ancient is echoed by recent archaeological research from Australia, that was able to match artefacts from a ‘witchcraft ritual’ dating back 11,000-12,000 years to a description from the 19th century.

Every society with these beliefs has its own ‘witchcraft phenotype’. In our sample, some hold women are more likely to be sorcerers than men, although others believe witchcraft is a predominantly male undertaking. The elderly may be accused, or the young, as in the disturbing phenomenon of ‘child witches’. Some communities believe witches have familiars (magical helpers) – hyenas and aardvarks in Tanzania can be seen as having the same role as toads and cats in England. Societies often have tests or ordeals for whether an individual is guilty of causing harm through magic. Many societies in our sample had a poison ordeal, where the suspect was given a drink with a noxious substance in it. Guilt was determined by how they responded: the drink itself could kill them or they might suffer ill effects and then be executed. Only those who were not seriously affected were deemed innocent.

The traits we examined were almost all ‘successful’ in cultural evolutionary terms: the results suggest some lasted for hundreds of years in multiple societies, although others appeared to be more recent. It might seem likely beliefs would spread between neighbouring cultures, through trade or other contact, but geographic proximity alone largely couldn’t explain similarity in beliefs between societies. Instead some traits, such as the poison ordeal and belief in familiars, seemed to be passed down from generation to generation, following the divergence of Bantu societies along the tree.

Exceptionally, the evil eye belief may have been transferred between neighbouring societies. It is related to the concept of witchcraft: the idea that a single glance in someone’s direction can cause them mystical harm. We found no evidence that it was ancestral or that its distribution fitted the structure of our tree. An explanation may lie in the fact it was present in societies such as the Kikuyu in Kenya and others who live near groups of Nilotic-language speakers, among whom belief in the evil eye is more prevalent.

Some groups viewed witchcraft as a physical substance in the body, often described as having a greyish appearance and being found above the liver or the heart. This trait had a unique distribution. Our results suggest it has a deep ancestry and was present before the Bantu migration. But at a later point when Bantu populations split again, with one group heading east and another west, the trait disappeared. Why this happened can only be speculated on, but its sudden disappearance is striking.

Who is targeted in accusations probably depends on multiple factors including the structure of relationships within societies.  Where an accusation can free up resources, it may be more beneficial to accuse individuals from some groups than others. It is not that accusations are necessarily cynical, as fear of witchcraft is often deeply held, but they may be associated with various forms of competition. We found that accusations of children appear comparatively recent, which aligns with other research indicating that this has developed in parts of Africa since the late 20th century. Perhaps surprisingly, accusations of men appear not to have been present ancestrally. Even some of the most well-known, stereotypical traits of witches – being elderly and female – appear neither ancestral nor inherited from society to society intergenerationally. Patterns of accusation may change quite rapidly in response to socioecological factors. This appears to have been the case in modern Tanzania and in the European witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries, where accusations increased during periods of poor harvests.

So what does our study suggest overall about the cultural transmission of witchcraft beliefs? Some traits appear to have a deep ancestry and were stable enough to exist in societies for hundreds if not thousands of years. Some may evolve independently in numerous cultures: this may be because they produce fitness benefits in certain environments. Some (such as the recurrence of familiars) can perhaps best be explained as appealing to pre-existing cognitive processes, while others appear to be preserved and passed down from generation to generation. Therefore the diverse traits in witchcraft phenotypes appear to differ in their patterns of evolution and their likely functions: further research may provide deeper insights into this.

Read the original article: Peacey, S., Wu, B., Grollemund, R., & Mace, R. (2024). The cultural evolution of witchcraft beliefs. Evolution & Human Behavior, 45(5), 106610.