- There are very strong collective beliefs among the Cochiti
indians about forces of good and evil. - These collective beliefs are based
upon the balance of these forces in some cosmic order governing the lives of
the Cochiti community, but this balance is very uneasy and often, forces of
evil break in and cause diseases. - Any earthly manifestation of these forces
is attributed to a divinity. - When a Cochiti is ill, the illness is supposed
to have a supernatural origin; on the other hand, a good rain is seen as a gift
of the forces of good.
II. Who can be considered as a witch?
- Witches are an earthly mediation of evil forces. - The
problem is that the word covers a wide range of situations. - Someone, in
either human or animal shape, who's able to enter into contact with
supernatural forces of evil is generally a witch. - But there's a problem with
human witches: people allegedly born with two hearts are supposed to be
servants of evil, but they're not the only ones: any person suspected of
practising sorcery is potentially a witch.
- Is a sorcerer any person who seems to be one (that is to say
possessing a witch's attributes, like owl feathers for example) - Thus, this
person can either be himself an active or passive witch, or at least someone in
league with the witches. - Accusing someone of witchcraft must be done with
care, for in Cochiti thinking it implies that all the matrilinear relatives are
witches. - Witches are exclusively concerned with illnesses that Cochitis don't
view as "natural" diseases. They provoke the diseases by two means: either they
steal the victim's heart, or they bring evilish objects into the victim's body.
III. Cures
- To struggle against these sorcerers, there are the
medicine-men, who are the only ones to possess the appropriate weapons for
dealing with witches: they possess specific, expert knowledge on the matter.
Thus they are able to get in touch with supernatural forces, just like their
evil rivals do. - Their struggle against the evil forces mostly take the shape
of a ritual which is the exact opposite of that performed by witches. - This
ritual is a performance which requires practical aspects and effects so as to
be perceived as symbolically efficient. - Subsequently, their aim in the fight
is either to get back the heart of the victim, or to suck the objects out of
his body.
IV. Comment
- We shall re-examine some the elements we've looked at and
we'll read them in the light of other works on witchcraft. - First of all, in
the Cochiti community, witchcraft implies very strong collective beliefs (one
of the three components of magic in Levi-Strauss' theory). This conception is
opposed to the belief in witchcraft in Mayenne which, as Favret-Saada has shown
in "Words, Deeds and Spells", is led by the principle of efficient cause (as
established by Hume): the evil spell has an earthly origin - thus a human
origin. On the contrary, Cochitis put it all on the account of the
supernatural. - In this community, the witch has two hearts; a biological,
physical distinction can therefore be made between those odd beings and mere
humans, as Pritchard had put forward in 1937, yet something could be said about
the uncheckable nature of such a characteristic. - As we said, the ritual
performed by medicine-men has to have a dramatic realization, because some
concrete elements must reinforce trust in the ritual and in its symbolical
efficiency against evil (cf. Quetsalid, Mauss).