ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the beginning, when witchcraft or sorcery sets in and exposes social relations and powers that lie beyond people’s control. The words ‘sorcery’ and ‘witchcraft’ are deceptive in this regard, since what they label and thereby pull out from a context is merely the idea that all relations can be potentially destructive and dangerous. The presence of inhuman sentiments and practices already transports society to another version of itself, and people interpret the shift between this world and the other world as happening. An invisible spirit world is combined with the Christian axiom that the individual body is the seat of good and bad and that the moral world is contained internally in the person. In the ‘spiritual warfare’, the Christian warriors move into a house, a village or other ‘sites of evil’, which they divine through prayer, spreading holy water and even assaulting and torturing suspected witches who are made to speak.
