Murder by Magic

written by Matthew Gorman

Search the world over and in every corner you will find powerful practitioners of the magical arts. Sorcerers and shamans, witch doctors and Wiccans, the globe is rife with those who are able to commune with and wield the energies of the unseen world. For many cultures magic is an integral part of their native religions; magical rituals are preformed to make contact with divinity. Magical spells are employed for benevolent purposes such as healing and protection. But there are those who follow darker paths into the unhallowed realms of black magic, magic that is used for personal gain or far more sinister motives. Certain forms of black magic allow a magician to control the power of life and death, casting a devastating spell or curse that can send them to their very graves. Let us examine a few such cultures where even today someone can actually be murdered by magic.

Among the Yanomamo peoples of Venezuela, the concept of "magical death," wherein a shaman sends dangerous spirits called hekura to attack his enemies, is a part of everyday life. The hekura are said to be hungry spirits that dwell atop the mountains and will travel down invisible pathways when called into action by a skillful sorcerer. The Yanomamo magician will first ingest hallucinogenic drugs in order to become a conduit for the energies of the hekura. In essence, he "becomes" the ravenous spirit or spirits themselves. Next, in an intriguing display of sympathetic magic he will establish a connection with his intended victim, adopting the victim’s persona and acting out the suffering that will soon befall that unfortunate. The Yanomamo magician rolls around within a pile of ashes symbolic of the burned and decimated soul of the victim (as the hekura consume by means of magical fire). Within a very short time, the unhappy target or targets of such magic, unless they are able to cast a spell of counterattack, are most often found dead. In a 1973 documentary film entitled Magical Death, filmmakers Timothy Asch and Napolean Changon chronicle a sorcerer’s battle between a Yanomamo shaman called Dedeheiwa and his enemies in a neighboring village.

In Australia, the Aborigine sorcerers are known as nangarri and carry long bones extracted from the carcasses of giant indigenous lizards. When these "death bones" are pointed at a person and a curse is recited by the nangarri, that person will fall very ill and typically die within days or weeks. Before death occurs, the victim will exhibit a host of symptoms that appear to be oddly homogenous from one case to the next. Their cheeks take on the pallor of death, their eyes glass over and their features become twisted in agony. Many victims will also begin to choke and to froth at the mouth. Then at last, the person who had been in perfect health just a short time before, will mysteriously meet their death through no apparent physical cause.

Physicians studying magical death in Australia posited a strange but scientifically plausible explanation for the phenomenon. First encountered among soldiers returning from the western front in World War II, who would die inexplicably soon after their return. It had been determined that extremely traumatic events could lead to an over stimulation of the sympathetic-adrenal system causing the body to shut down in fatal shock. In layman’s terms, it was basically death by fear. The shock of having a death bone pointed at one’s self, said the Australian physicians, could be further compounded by what psychologists refer to as a "giving up / given up" complex. This is an established theory wherein the victim, convinced of his or her imminent demise through the power of suggestion, actually facilitates his or her own death by a psychosomatic process which leaves him or her far more susceptible to the contraction of a pathogenic disease. However, this does little to explain such cases of death in which the victims are completely unaware that deadly magics have been enacted against them.

Perhaps the most widely known phenomenon within the province of magical death dealing is that of the "Voodoo doll." This is a doll that is made into the rough likeness of someone the magician wishes to have power over, and while they can be used for beneficial purposes they are mostly used to inflict some form of harm. The dolls can be made from almost anything such as wood, clay, beeswax or rags. Dolls are considered generally more effective if they contain something taken from the magician’s target such as blood, sweat, hair, nail clippings, clothing, or treasured artifacts.

While the familiarity we may have with such dolls comes to us typically through the vehicles of Hollywood horror films and folklore, such evil dolls really are used by cultures throughout the world to bring suffering and death to the victims in whose image they have been created. In the book, Faces In The Smoke, author Douchan Gersi recounts an experience from his childhood in Africa in which the night watchman of his family’s estate, an African man named Moduku, employed a magic doll to destroy one of his enemies. Gersi had befriended Moduku and often spent the evenings with him by the campfire listening to the older man’s tales of African wildlife and tribal customs. One morning, Moduku asked Gersi to bring a small, live, black chicken to his hut that evening. Moduku planned to use it in a black magic ceremony to kill a man who had slashed him across the ribs with a machete a year before. That night, in his hut while Gersi watched, Moduku begin to recite strange incantations. Next, the African man slaughtered the chicken that Gersi had brought him and covered a doll made of rags and grass with its feathers and blood. After thrusting the doll into the smoke that billowed from a calabash, Moduku thrust three long thorns into it, one into the head, another into the heart, and a third into the navel. At this point, Gersi, terrified by Moduku’s frenzied manner and by inhuman faces that he saw manifested in the smoke, fled from the sorcerer’s hut and did not return that evening. In the morning, Moduku and all his possessions were gone. It was also quickly learned that the watchman of the local sawmill had been found dead, still standing upright, leaning against the wall of his tiny hut. This had been Moduku’s enemy, now dead by means of the magical doll.

The term, "Voodoo doll," is erroneous for two major reasons. First, as previously mentioned, the use of magic dolls is not limited to a single tradition. In fact, magic dolls have existed for many millennia, most likely for as long as magic has been practiced by the peoples of the world. They were used by the ancient Egyptians and by both the Mayas and the Incas of South America, as well as by numerous tribes of the African continent long before the birth of Haitian Voodoo. Secondly, Voodoo is a peaceful and positive religion that strengthens people and communities, and a true practitioner would never use a magic doll to inflict pain or death upon another person. One must actually be a devout Catholic to be initiated into the Voodoo religion! There is, however, a sinister side to the magics of Haiti, where dark powers can spell certain doom for those unlucky enough to be afflicted by such means. Unfortunately for followers of the true faith, this dark side is often called Voodoo as well.

Voodoo was born and slowly evolved in Haiti during the slave trafficking of the sixteenth century. Slaves that had been brought to the island nation from western Africa, predominately from such countries as Nigeria and Dahomey (which is now modern-day Benin), began to combine their native practices with those of the indigenous Arawak Indians, Catholicism and elements of European occultism, Freemasonry and Cabala introduced by the French who had settled there. Voodoo, despite common misconception, is, in fact, a monotheistic religion, as its followers believe in but one true God, like any good Catholic. However, the rituals of Voodoo are based around the loas, or spirits, who are the divine intermediaries between God and humanity.

The houngan (Voodoo priest) and the mambo (Voodoo priestess) have the power to call up the loas to aid the congregation of his or her houmfort (Voodoo temple). These spirits manifest by possessing the priests and priestesses as well as their followers during ecstatic ceremonies of drumming, chanting and dancing. While true Voodoo practitioners only summon forth the "sweet loas," there are those known as bokors, black magicians who deal with the "bitter loas," who are more inclined towards negative or destructive activities (as no loa can be considered truly good nor evil). It is from these individuals that true Voodoo, sometimes called Rada Voodoo to distinguish it from the Petro "Voodoo" of the bokor, gets its unfair reputation. In truth, only 5% of Haitians practice the unholy Petro rituals.

The Petro rituals are named after a heretical eighteenth century Catholic priest named Don Pedro. Don Pedro broke from the teachings of Catholicism and true Voodoo, using the loas and the cosmic force for his own devious ends. It is the Petro rituals of the bokor, such as the making of evil charms and dolls, necromancy and the creation of zombies, with which we have been made familiar through such works as Wade Davis’ anthropological classic, The Serpent And The Rainbow.

Like the Yanomamo sorcerer and the Australian nangarri, the bokor too, has the power to kill. The bokor is adept at concocting death powders (a different substance from the zombie powder which produces a death-like state) for use as evil charms, the main ingredient of which are the pulverized bones of infants and toddlers who died before they could be baptized. These powders are infused with evil curses and poured upon the paths or near the homes of their victims, and seem to work with chilling efficacy. Don and Karen Davis, missionaries who live near the Haitian city of Cap Haitien, tell tales of bokors leaving two gourds full of death powder on either side of a path, and when the victim passes through them he or she falls down dead on the spot instantly! The bokor usually conducts such magical assassinations for profit, as no one would willfully make a personal enemy out of a bokor.

This is only a brief smattering of the numerous traditions in which magic can be unleashed with deadly results. These and many more still exist right now. Even such notable persons as Harry Houdini and Bruce and Brandon Lee have met their makers through what many have considered to be magical means. So keep this in mind, the next time that you go making enemies of someone. They might be a powerful sorcerer and you might be murdered by magic.