THE MYTHIC ETIOLOGY OF LAKOTA SORCERY (Hardcover)

Fear and fright are the progenitors of monsters and witches. In confronting overwhelming natural or social convulsions, pre-industrial man attempted to make sense of them by projecting his trepidations onto comprehensible categories of entropy. In his study on the witch hysteria in sixteenth- and seventeen-century Europe, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper contended that beliefs in sorcery were essentially inseparable from the ideology of the time (1956). For the illiterate peasantry, the fear of the existence of witches as embodiments of Satan worship had the coercive force of a social fact. Such convictions may have reflected the remnant of a pre-Christian animistic substrate that held on stubbornly in European folk culture. In any case, biblical admonitions against black magic were clear. The Old Testament, in Deuteronomy 18:11, in no uncertain terms prohibits casting spells, acting as a medium or spiritist, or consulting the dead, and the directive in Exodus 22:18, "[t]hou shalt not suffer a witch to live," was widely interpreted by mobs as a mandate for the execution of suspected practitioners.
Also rooted in sacred texts, traditional American Indian notions of sorcery seem to have been, however, less concerned with sanctions than with explanations of misfortunes and catastrophes, especially in the form of illness. As recorded by ethnographers of the turn of the twentieth century, traditional Lakota affirmed that