Obeah

Image of a 19th-century illustration of an obeah figure of a seated figure confiscated from a black man named Alexander Ellis

Illustration of a figurine confiscated from Alexander Ellis, an accused Obeahman in Morant Bay, Jamaica in 1887.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Obeah, also spelled Obiya or Obia, is a broad term for African diasporic religious, spell-casting, and healing traditions found primarily in the former British colonies of the Caribbean. These practices derive much from West African traditions but also incorporate elements of European and South Asian origin. Many of those who practice these traditions avoid the term Obeah due to the word's pejorative connotations in many Caribbean societies.

Central to Obeah are ritual specialists who offer a range of services to paying clients. These specialists have sometimes been termed Obeahmen and Obeahwomen, although often refer to themselves in other ways, for instance calling themselves "scientists", "doctors", or "professors". Important in these ritual systems is engagement with the spirits and the manipulation of supernatural forces. A prominent role is played by healing practices, often incorporating herbal and animal ingredients. Other services include attempts to achieve justice for a client or to provide them with spiritual protection. Cursing practices have also featured in Obeah, involving the making of objects to cause harm or the production of poisons. There is considerable regional and individual variation in the nature of the rituals that practitioners of Obeah have engaged in.

Amid the Atlantic slave trade of the 16th to 19th centuries, thousands of West Africans, many Ashanti were transported to Caribbean colonies controlled by the British Empire. Here, traditional African religious practices assumed new forms, for instance being employed for the protection of Maroon communities. Enslaved Africans also absorbed British influences, especially from Christianity, and later from the Hinduism and Islam introduced by indentured South Asian migrants. The colonial elites disapproved of African traditions and introduced laws to prohibit them, using the term Obeah as a general label for these practices from the 1760s on. This suppression meant that Obeah emerged as a system of practical rituals rather than as a broader communal religion akin to Haitian Vodou or Cuban Santería. After the British abolition of slavery in the 1830s, new laws were introduced against Obeah, increasingly portraying it as fraud, laws that remained following the end of imperial rule. Since the 1980s, Obeah's practitioners have campaigned to remove these legal restrictions, often under the aegis of religious freedom.

The term Obeah has been used for practices in the Caribbean nations of the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Virgin Islands. Caribbean migrants have also taken these practices elsewhere, to countries like the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom. In many Caribbean countries Obeah remains technically illegal and widely denigrated, especially given the negative assessment towards it evident in religions like Evangelical Protestantism and Rastafari.

Definitions and terminology

Obeah incorporates both spell-casting and healing practices, largely of African origin,Template:Sfn although with European and South Asian influences as well.Template:Sfn It is found primarily in the former British colonies of the Caribbean,Template:Sfn namely Suriname, Jamaica, the Virgin Islands, Trinidad, Tobago, Guyana, Belize, the Bahamas, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and Barbados.Template:Sfn Aside from the common use of Obeah, other spellings that have been used include Obiya,Template:Sfn Obey,Template:Sfn Obi,Template:Sfn and Obia, the latter common in Suriname and French Guiana.Template:Sfnm

The term Obeah encompasses a varied range of traditions that are highly heterogenous and display much regional variation.Template:Sfn The Hispanic studies scholars Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert defined Obeah as "a set of hybrid or creolized beliefs dependent on ritual invocation, fetishes, and charms",Template:Sfn while the historian Diana Paton termed it "a very wide range of practices that, broadly speaking, invoke the ritual manipulation of spiritual power".Template:Sfn For the historians Jerome Handler and Kenneth Bilby it was "a loosely defined complex involving supernatural practices largely related to healing and protection".Template:Sfn The historian Thomas Waters called Obeah a "supernatural tradition",Template:Sfn and described how it "blended West African rituals with herbalism, Islam, Christianity and even a smattering of British folk magic".Template:Sfn The term was originally used by Europeans, according to Handler and Bilby, as "a catch-all term for a range of supernatural-related ideas and behaviours that were not of European origin and which they heavily criticized and condemned."Template:Sfn

Throughout history, the term Obeah has rarely been used as a self-description of a person's own practices.Template:Sfn In the Caribbean, practitioners of folk healing traditions are often reluctant to publicly describe what they do as Obeah;Template:Sfn there are some people who will privately describe what they do as Obeah, but used other words publicly.Template:Sfn Historically, those who were accused of practicing Obeah in criminal court rarely used that term itself.Template:Sfn Some practitioners instead refer to it as "Science",Template:Sfnm or as working, doing a job, doing some good, practicing, clearing.Template:Sfn In Jamaica, another term for Obeah is "iniquity," probably deriving from the repeated Protestant admonitions that Obeah was an iniquitous practice.Template:Sfn

Relations with other religious traditions

Paton noted that, in encompassing a broad range of supernaturally-oriented practices, the term Obeah served a "roughly equivalent" role in the Anglophone Caribbean to the terms conjure and root work (or Hoodoo) in the United States and the Template:Ill of Francophone Caribbean islands Guadeloupe and Martinique.Template:Sfn Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert suggested that Quimbois was essentially "a variation of Obeah".Template:Sfn Obeah has both similarities and differences with other Afro-Caribbean religious traditions such as Haitian Vodou or Cuban Santería and Palo.Template:Sfn Unlike them, it lacks communal rituals or a system of liturgy,Template:Sfn and in contrast to the followers of these traditions, there is little evidence that Obeah's practitioners have regarded it as "their religion".Template:Sfn Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert took the view that Obeah was not a religion per se, but is a term applied to "any African-derived practice with religious elements".Template:Sfn Obeah exists at the borders of what both Christians and social scientists have typically recognised as "religion,"Template:Sfn and as such it has historically often been classified not as religion but as "magic," "witchcraft," "superstition," or "charlatanism."Template:Sfn

Across much of the Caribbean it is common for individuals to practise multiple religious traditions simultaneously.Template:Sfn Many practitioners of Obeah attend Christian church services and do not see their practice as being at odds with Christianity.Template:Sfnm In Trinidad, various Obeah practitioners are also involved in the Orisha religion.Template:Sfn In parts of the West Indies, South Asian migration has resulted in syncretisms between Obeah and Hinduism.Template:Sfnm In places with large South Asian communities like Guyana and Trinidad there are records of some Obeahmen being brahmins who also served as Hindu priests.Template:Sfnm

Etymology

Obeah is often used as a general term for Afro-Caribbean religion as a whole.Template:Sfn Bilby noted that in these cases it was "a monolithic signifier for African or neo-African forms of religiosity or spirituality still existing in the Caribbean".Template:Sfn However, throughout the Caribbean, there is "considerable disagreement" about the meaning of the term obeah;Template:Sfn the term is malleable,Template:Sfn and as Bilby notes, it has no "single, essential meaning".Template:Sfn It has instead often been used in reference to several different things.Template:Sfn

It is not known exactly how and when the term obeah came to be used in the Anglophone Caribbean.Template:Sfn The earliest unambiguous use of it in the region was in a letter from Barbados from 1710, where it appeared as "Obia", and the term was more widely extant in Barbadian English by the 1720s and 1730s.Template:Sfn In contemporary scholarship, there is general agreement that the word obeah is of West African origin, although there remain different arguments as to which language it derives from.Template:Sfnm Paton noted that the exact origins of the term were "unlikely to be definitively resolved".Template:Sfn One argument is that it stems from Twi, one of the Akan languages. In this case, it may derive from obayifo, a Twi term generally translated as "witch", or from bayi, the term for the morally neutral supernatural force employed by the obayifo.Template:Sfn<ref>Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, Obeah: Magical Art of Resistance. In Afro-Caribbean Religions: An Introduction to Their Historical, Cultural, and Sacred Traditions (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 231.</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> In support of this origin is the fact that the term obeah proved prominent in the British Caribbean colonies, Suriname, and the Danish Virgin Islands, all areas where large numbers of Akan speakers from the Gold Coast were introduced.Template:Sfn

A second possibility is that the word obeah comes from the Efik language. If so, it could derive from the Efik word for "doctor,"Template:Sfn or alternatively from the word ubio, often translated as "fetish".Template:Sfn A third option traces it to the Igbo language, where a dibia was a ritual specialist involved in healing and other practices.Template:Sfnm<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Other proposals trace the word obeah to the Edo language obi, often translated as "poison", or the Yoruba language obi, a term for a type of divination.Template:Sfn In support of these non-Akan origins is the fact that captives taken from the Bay of Biafra constituted a major part of the population in those parts of the Caribbean where the term obeah is earliest attested.Template:Sfn<ref name="rucker">Template:Cite book</ref>

In many parts of the Caribbean, the word Obeah is reserved only for destructive ritual practices and regarded as a synonym for sorcery or witchcraft.Template:Sfnm In other places, the term is used in a fairly neutral manner to describe a form of spiritual power.Template:Sfn This is the common understanding of the term among Maroon communities in Suriname and French Guiana, for example.Template:Sfn Bilby noted that in this context, obeah was a concept akin to the Yoruba religious notion of aṣẹ, which is also found in Santería and Candomblé.Template:Sfn He suggested that the positive use of the word obia here was because these Maroon communities had remained largely outside of European cultural domination.Template:Sfn These Surinamese did believe in the negative use of supernatural power, but they called that wisi, a term derived from the English "witch".Template:Sfn

Variants of the term Obeah also appeared among African-Americans in the South Carolina Lowcountry prior to the American Civil War.Template:Sfnm The term obeah seems to have been unknown in Francophone societies during the 17th and 18th centuries,Template:Sfnm but began to appear among French speakers in Martinique by the early 19th century.Template:Sfn

Beliefs and practices

During the period of enslavement, Obeah was primarily directed to goals that the enslaved people would have deemed beneficial, such as healing, locating missing property, protecting against illness and misfortune, and targeting the slave owners.Template:Sfn Obeah revolves around one-to-one consultations between practitioners and their clients.Template:Sfn Common goals in Obeah include attracting a partner, finding lost objects, resolving legal issues, getting someone out of prison, attracting luck for gambling or games, and wreaking revenge.Template:Sfn

Spirits

Central to Obeah is the relationship between humans and spirits.Template:Sfn Unlike other Afro-Caribbean religious traditions, such as Haitian Vodou and Cuban Santería, Obeah does not strictly centre around deities who manifest through divination and the possession of their worshippers.Template:Sfn These spirits and deities can be "called" or summoned to assist the Obeah practitioner but are not worshipped.Template:Sfn These spiritual forces are often deemed essentially morally neutral.Template:Sfn

In various Caribbean cultures, it is believed that a spirit can attack someone either on its own initiative or because it has been sent to do so by an Obeah practitioner.Template:Sfn In some contexts, the colour red is explained as countering the presence of duppies.Template:Sfn

Obeahmen and obeahwomen

Obeahmen and obeahwomen are deemed able to bewitch and unwitch, heal, charm, tell fortunes, detect stolen goods, reveal unfaithful lovers, and command duppies.Template:Sfn The historian Diana Paton referred to them as "spiritual workers" and "ritual specialists".Template:Sfn Obeah is practiced by both males and females, typically referred to as obeahmen and obeahwomen respectively.Template:Sfn However, various practitioners avoid calling what they do obeah.Template:Sfn In the Bahamas, commonly used terms for a practitioner is Bush man or bush doctor;Template:Sfn in Jamaica an iniquity worker,Template:Sfn and in Trinidad a common term is Wanga man.Template:Sfn In Grenada they are sometimes called Scientists,Template:Sfn and in Guyana as Professor, Madame, Pundit, Maraj, and work-man.Template:Sfn Historical terms found in Jamaica include "doctors," "professors," "one-eyed men," "doctormen," "do good men," or "four eye men."Template:Sfn Practitioners of Quimbois are referred to as quimboiseurs, sorciers, and gadé zaffés.Template:Sfn A number of the favored terms, such as "science-man," "scientist," "doctor-man" and "professor", emphasise modernity.Template:Sfn

In Obeah tradition, it is typically believed that practitioners will be born with special powers; they are sometimes referred to as having been "born with the gift".Template:Sfn It is taught that possession of these powers may be revealed to the individual through dreams or visions in late childhood or early adolescence.Template:Sfn In Caribbean lore, it is sometimes believed that an Obeah practitioner will bear a physical disability, such as a blind eye, a club foot, or a deformed hand, and that their powers are a compensation for this.Template:Sfn

Being an Obeah practitioner is often believed to pass hereditarily from a parent to their eldest child.Template:Sfn Alternatively, someone may become a practitioner following a traumatic event.Template:Sfn Once they have decided to pursue the practice, a person typically becomes the apprentice of an established obeahman or woman.Template:Sfn According to folk tradition, this apprenticeship should take place in the forest and last for a year, a notion that derives from older African ideas.Template:Sfn In practice, apprenticeships can last up to five or six years.Template:Sfn

A practitioner's success in attracting clients is usually rooted in their reputation.Template:Sfn Older obeahmen/women are usually regarded more highly than younger ones.Template:Sfn They do not normally wear special clothing to mark out their identity.Template:Sfn In many cases, they have practiced in secret, allowing them to operate even while their practices are illegal.Template:Sfn In Trinidad and Tobago, 21st-century Obeah practitioners often advertise their services in the classified advert columns of newspapers.Template:Sfn

Relationship with clients

Clients will typically pay for the services of an Obeah practitioner, the size of the fee often being connected to the client's means.Template:Sfn This exchange of money for ritual services is long embedded.Template:Sfn Part of this fee will be used to buy items necessary for the intended rituals, such as candles, rum, and fowl.Template:Sfn There are a few examples of monetary payment being charged during the era of slavery.Template:Sfn In an 1831 account from Jamaica, for instance, a slave named Polydore requested two dollars, a cock, and a pint of rum to heal a man he had made ill with his curse.Template:Sfn Further evidence for the monetary nature of these transactions comes from the period after emancipation.Template:Sfn

Among the Trinidadian cases regarding Obeah recorded from 1890 and 1930, the main reason clients approached a practitioner was work-related worries and aspirations; this was followed by attempts to deal with physical suffering, court cases, and relationship issues.Template:Sfn Discussing the situation among Jamaicans and British Jamaicans in the 1970s, Venetia Newall noted that "respectable middle-class people" generally shunned Obeah but would sometimes turn to it during "times of stress".Template:Sfn

Healing and herbalism

Obeah is often used for protection rather than for harm.Template:Sfn The main social function of an Obeah practitioner is often as a herbalist.Template:Sfn To assist with healing a client's ailments, the obeahman/woman will often utilise baths, massages, and mixtures of various ingredients.Template:Sfn "Bush baths" are often applied to relieve fevers and involve a range of different herbal ingredients placed within hot water.Template:Sfn These often rely on a knowledge of the properties of various animal and herbal ingredients.Template:Sfn Graveyard dirt may be employed to access the spirit world.Template:Sfn

In Obeah traditions, plants are believed to absorb cosmic properties from the sun, moon, and planets.Template:Sfn

At a 1755 trial in Martinique, there were reports of amulets incorporating incense, holy water, pieces of the Eucharist, wax from an Easter candle, and small crucifixes.Template:Sfn

Obeah bottles are much like the witch bottles used in early modern and modern Britain.Template:Sfn

In various cases, Obeah rituals are performed to try and affect the outcome of a court case.Template:Sfnm A Jamaican case recorded in 1911 for instance involved the ritual specialist turning a key in a padlock while saying the name of an individual they wanted to prevent speaking in court.Template:Sfn Another element of lore, recorded in 1978, maintained that holding a nutmeg in one's mouth while speaking on oath in court will help a person secure legal victory.Template:Sfn

These religious practices can also be used in times of war. Various Maroons turned to them amid the Surinamese Interior War of the 1980s.Template:Sfn Obeah has also been used by organised crime. When London gangster Mark Lambie was put on trial for kidnap and torture in 2002, both his victims and fellow gang members suggested that his powers of Obeah had made him "untouchable".Template:Sfn

Divination

One recorded method of divination in Obeah entails placing a key inside a Bible, tying and binding the book to a thread, and then observing how the book turns while Psalm 50 is read.Template:Sfn This is very similar to the Bible and key divination method used in Britain since at least the 17th century.Template:Sfn In Guyana, South Asians have added chiromancy or palm reading to the divination styles employed by Obeah practitioners.Template:Sfn

Harming and poisons

In various cases, a sudden death has been attributed to a bad spirit being set upon the deceased through Obeah.Template:Sfn A common harming method in Obeah is spiking a person's food.Template:Sfn One recurring notion is that a woman can win a man from her love rival by placing her own menstrual fluid in his food.Template:Sfn In the Caribbean, love spells such as this are often deemed immoral as they are intended to deny a person their free will.Template:Sfn

One method of lifting an Obeah curse, recorded from the Caribbean, involved a person crossing themselves and stating: "Bless the mark, and cross if off."Template:Sfn Also reported in various 18th and early 19th-century sources was the notion that Christian baptism provided protection from Obeah.Template:Sfn

A continuing source of anxiety related to Obeah was the belief that practitioners were skilled in using poisons, as mentioned in Matthew Lewis's Journal of a West India Proprietor. Many Jamaicans accused women of such poisonings; one case Lewis discussed was that of a young woman named Minetta, who was brought to trial for attempting to poison her master.<ref>Matthew G. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, 1815-1817, Edited with an introduction by Mona Wilson (London: G. Routledge & Sons Ltd., 1929), 149–150.</ref> Lewis and others often characterized the women they accused of poisonings as being manipulated by obeahmen, who they contended actually provided the women with the materials for poisonings.<ref>Sasha Turner Bryson, "The Art of Power: Poison and Obeah Accusations and the Struggle for Dominance and Survival in Jamaica’s Slave Society," Caribbean Studies 41, no. 2 (2013): 63.</ref>

They claimed that Obeah men stole people's shadows, and they set themselves up as the helpers of those who wished to have their shadows restored. Revivalists contacted spirits to expose the evil works they ascribed to the Obeah men and led public parades, which resulted in crowd hysteria that engendered violent antagonism against them. The public "discovery" of buried Obeah charms, presumed to be of evil intent, led on more than one occasion to violence against the rival Obeah practitioners. Conflicts between supposedly "good" and "evil" spiritual work could sometimes be found within plantation communities. In one 1821 case brought before court in Berbice, an enslaved woman named Madalon allegedly died as a result of being accused of malevolent obeah that caused the drivers at Op Hoop Van Beter plantation to fall ill.<ref>Randy M. Browne, "The ‘Bad Business’ of Obeah: Power, Authority, and the Politics of Slave Culture in the British Caribbean," William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2011): 451.

</ref> The man implicated in her death, a spiritual worker named Willem, conducted an illegal Minje Mama dance to divine the source of the Obeah, and after she was chosen as the suspect, she was tortured to death.<ref>Browne, 469-73.</ref>

History

Origins

Obeah practices largely derive from Ashanti origins.Template:Sfn The Ashanti and other Twi-speaking peoples from the Gold Coast formed the largest group of enslaved people in the British Caribbean colonies.Template:Sfn Obeah was first identified in the British colonies of the Caribbean during the 17th century.Template:Sfn

Enslaved Africans who were transported to the Caribbean during the 17th or 18th centuries came from societies where spiritual power played a prominent role.Template:Sfn Although there was considerable variation in the religious beliefs and practices of these African societies,Template:Sfn all generally shared a belief that ancestors and spirits could act on the physical world and thus should be respected and cared for.Template:Sfn All these African societies also had ritual specialists, individuals who engaged in divination and were deemed to have knowledge of powerful substances that could be used to either heal of harm other people.Template:Sfn The West Europeans who oversaw Atlantic transportation also believed in an unseen world that could influence humanity, but typically divided it more strictly along ethical lines, adhering to a Christian belief in good forces aligned with God and evil forces aligned with the Devil.Template:Sfn Early modern Europeans had also inherited the idea of the witch as a spiritually evil person.Template:Sfn Paton noted that these European notions of witchcraft framed "European understandings of African spiritual work and ritual specialists in the Caribbean".Template:Sfn

In British colonial communities, aside from referring to the set of spiritual practices, "Obeah" also came to refer to a physical object, such as a talisman or charm, that was used for evil magical purposes. The item was referred to as an Obeah-item (e.g. an 'obeah ring' or an 'obeah-stick', translated as: ring used for witchcraft or stick used for witchcraft respectively).<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Obeah incorporated various beliefs from the religions of later migrants to the colonies where it was present. Obeah also influenced other religions in the Caribbean, e.g. Christianity, which incorporated some Obeah beliefs.<ref name="Psy">Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Growing legal proscription

The notion that Obeah might be a force for generating solidarity among slaves and encouraging them to resist colonial domination was brought to the attention of European slave-owners due to several events in the 1730s.Template:Sfn In Jamaica, the First Maroon War saw British forces fail to suppress the Jamaican Maroons, free Africans who employed spiritual protection as an important part of their fighting strategy.Template:Sfn Obeah ritual specialists had played a prominent role within these Maroon communities;Template:Sfn one of the best known was the Akan woman Nanny of the Maroons described as an old 'witch' and a 'Hagg' by English soldier Philip Thicknesse in his memoirs.<ref name="Long">Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Philip Thicknesse, Memoirs and anecdotes of Philip Thicknesse, late lieutenant governor of Land Guard Fort, and unfortunately father to George Touchet, Baron Audley (Dublin: Graisberry and Campbell, 1790), 77.</ref> Colonial sources claimed she could quickly grow food for her starving forces,<ref>Kenneth M. Bilby, True Born Maroons (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 253.</ref> and to catch British bullets and either fire them back or attack the soldiers with a machete.<ref>Bilby, 211.</ref> Meanwhile, in Antigua in 1736, an alleged slave conspiracy to attack Europeans was exposed, its ringleaders arrested, and 47 people executed. Interrogations revealed that the conspirators engaged in religious ceremonies and offered religious oaths, in at least one case administered by an "Obiaman" named Quawcoo.Template:Sfn According to this account, Quawcoo had also used divination to determine an auspicious time for the uprising.Template:Sfn In various cases, Obeah rituals might encourage "courage and morale" during such rebellions.Template:Sfn

Fearing that Obeah's practitioners might incite anti-colonial rebellions, European colonial authorities increasingly saw Obeah as a threat to the stability on their plantations and criminalised it.Template:Sfn In 1733, Governor Philip Gardelin issued a clause to the Danish West Indian slave code proscribing various ritual practices; rather than referring to this as Obeah, he used the word towernarye, probably derived from the Dutch word tovernery.Template:Sfn It was in the aftermath of Tacky's War, a rebellion against the colonial authorities, that the Jamaican Assembly first passed laws that banned Obeah in 1760.Template:Sfnm This law took the term Obeah, which was previously rarely used, and gave it a legal definition.Template:Sfn During the rebellion, Tacky is said to have consulted an Obeahman who prepared for his forces a substance that would make them immune to bullets, which boosted their confidence in executing the rebellion.<ref>Danielle N. Boaz, “‘Instruments of Obeah:’ The Significance of Ritual Objects in the Jamaican Legal System, 1760 to the Present,” in Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic, ed. Akinwumi Ogundiran and Paula Sanders (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 145.</ref> The European colonial fear of Afro-Caribbean traditions was furthered following the successful Haitian Revolution, in which various revolutionaries were allegedly practitioners of Vodou.Template:Sfn

Early Jamaican laws against Obeah reflected Christian theological viewpoints, characterising it as "pretending to have communication with the devil" or "assuming the art of witchcraft."Template:Sfn Negative assessments, often reflecting racist attitudes, were also apparent in 18th century writings that discussed Obeah, such as Edward Long's History of Jamaica (1774) and Bryan Edward's History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793), which also emphasised the notion that it was not religion but witchcraft or magic.Template:Sfn The practice of obeah with regards to healing led to the Jamaican 18th and 19th century traditions of "doctresses", such as Grace Donne (who nursed her lover, Simon Taylor (sugar planter)), Sarah Adams, Cubah Cornwallis, Mary Seacole, and Mrs Grant (who was the mother of Mary Seacole). These doctresses practised the use of hygiene and the applications of herbs decades before they were adopted by European doctors and nurses.<ref>Christer Petley, White Fury: A Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 88–9.</ref>

As the British Empire expanded through the Caribbean during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, so the term obeah was diffused through these colonies.Template:Sfn This colonial suppression eradicated the African-derived communal rituals that involved song, dance, and offerings to spirits.Template:Sfn In the British Caribbean, communal rituals oriented towards deities only persevered in pockets, as with Obeah in Jamaica and Orisha in Trinidad.Template:Sfn The historian Diana Paton has argued that the laws introduced to restrict African-derived practices contributed to the developing idea that these varied traditions could be seen as a singular phenomenon, Obeah.Template:Sfn

Afro-Caribbeans often concealed Obeah from Europeans.Template:Sfn There were nevertheless Europeans who believed in Obeah's power;Template:Sfn there are records of some plantation owners getting Obeah practitioners to cast spells over their fields to deter thieves.Template:Sfn

Post-emancipation

File:Ann Tuitt et Cornelius Jarvis.jpg

Two imprisoned Obeah practitioners in Antigua, part of a group photographed in 1905.Template:Sfn

After the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, Europeans in the West Indies continued to be troubled by the influence of Obeah within Afro-Caribbean communities.Template:Sfn Existing laws against Obeah had typically applied only to enslaved people and so new laws to proscribe the practice were required.Template:Sfn Between 1838 and 1920 a new raft of measures against Obeah and related practices appeared throughout the Caribbean.Template:Sfn In Jamaica, for example, new legal proscriptions against Obeah, which was to punished with hard labour and the lash, came in 1856.Template:Sfn

These new laws largely downgraded the severity with which Obeah was punished but also expanded the scope of what would be considered part of it;Template:Sfn as Forde noted, Obeah became "an extremely inclusive and amorphous criminal category".Template:Sfn In some cases authorities also prohibited the publication or circulation of written material pertaining to Obeah.Template:Sfn Several of these laws, including those in Trinidad and Tobago, British Guiana, Barbados, and Jamaica, emphasised the idea that Obeah would be regarded as fraud.Template:Sfnm This contributed to the notion of Obeah practitioners as fraudsters and charlatans that became dominant among European-Caribbean elites.Template:Sfn This approach was influenced by ongoing efforts in Britain to suppress fortune tellers and astrologers there;Template:Sfn such prosecutions were thought to weed out "superstition" and thus seen as part of the empire's civilising mission.Template:Sfn

The trials of those prosecuted reveal that in this period, clients were typically approaching Obeah specialists for assistance with health, employment, luck, or success in business or legal entanglements.Template:Sfn In various cases the police used entrapment to arrest practitioners of Obeah.Template:Sfn There is also evidence that the prosecutions were often assisted by those outside the police;Template:Sfnm according to recorded Jamaican cases, at least half of arrests for Obeah practice resulted from co-operation with non-police.Template:Sfn These individuals may have felt cheated by the Obeah specialist, believing that the latter failed to deliver as promised or had overcharged them, and so turned them into the police.Template:Sfn The accused repeatedly defended themselves by maintaining that what they practised did not constitute Obeah.Template:Sfn In some cases, such as that of Montserrat-based Charles "Tishum" Dolly, who was convicted five times, the prosecutions served to provide them with greater publicity for their services.Template:Sfn

The work of police and other state officials often provided much of the evidence used by early scholars of Obeah.Template:Sfn An exhibition of material obtained from convicted Obeah practitioners was for instance included at the Jamaica International Exhibition in Kingston in 1891.Template:Sfn This material was used as a partial basis for May Robinson's 1893 article on Obeah in Folk-Lore, which in turn influenced the research of Martha Beckwith and Joseph Williams in Jamaica in the 1920s.Template:Sfn

Hundreds of thousands of South Asians, and a smaller number of Chinese, arrived in the Caribbean largely as indentured laborers. They brought with them their own religions which also fed into Obeah.Template:Sfn

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there is evidence that many Obeah practitioners had travelled between different Caribbean islands.Template:Sfn Given certain similarities between Obeah and the Cuban religion of Palo, it is possible that Obeah practices were introduced to adherents of the latter system amid Jamaican migration to Cuba from 1925 onward.Template:Sfn

Post-colonial history

File:Seaga at AFB Andrews (cropped).jpeg

Jamaican Prime Minister Edward Seaga described Obeah as part of the Caribbean's cultural heritage

Obeah came more into the open with the waning of British colonialism in the Caribbean.Template:Sfn Around the 1940s, Jamaican prosecutions for Obeah began to reduce.Template:Sfn Two years after Jamaica became independent, in 1964, the country saw its last conviction for Obeah.Template:Sfn Reflecting changing attitudes, Jamaica's Prime Minister Edward Seaga described Obeah as a form of faith healing and a part of Caribbean cultural heritage.Template:Sfn In 1981, Jamaica's formal gift for the wedding of Britain's Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer was an obeah-influenced painting by Mallica Reynolds.Template:Sfn

The late 20th century saw growing migration from the West Indies to metropolitan urban centres like Miami, New York, Toronto, and London, where practitioners of Obeah interacted with followers of other Afro-Caribbean traditions like Santeria, Vodou, and Espiritismus.Template:Sfn Some communities of Obeah practitioners are trying to develop communal rituals.Template:Sfn

Since the 1980s there have been efforts to decriminalise Obeah practices throughout many Caribbean countries.Template:Sfn These calls have sometimes emphasised the idea that Obeah should be permitted under the aegis of freedom of religion, although critics have objected by maintaining that Obeah is not a religion.Template:Sfn Paton noted that Obeah lacked the "self-confident promoters and interpreters" to advance its case that had been found within Vodou, Santería, and Candomblé.Template:Sfn The decriminalisation movement has nevertheless had successes; Anguilla removed proscriptions against it in 1980, Barbados in 1998, Trinidad and Tobago in 2000, and St Lucia in 2004.Template:Sfnm However, as of the early 21st century these practices remain widely illegal across the region,Template:Sfnm including in Jamaica.Template:Sfn Enforcement is often lax and usually only when Obeah practitioners have also infringed on other laws.Template:Sfn Most prosecutions center on accusations of charlatanism against Obeah practitioners who have charged large fees and not produced the promised results.Template:Sfn

Demographics

Practitioners of Obeah are found across the Caribbean as well as in the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom.Template:Sfn It is difficult to ascertain the number of clients who employ Obeahmen and Obeahwomen.Template:Sfn In contexts like London, not all of those employing the Obeah specialists are of African-Caribbean background.Template:Sfn

Trinidad had fewer cases of people practicing Obeah than Jamaica. In Trinidad, there was discrimination of what was a religion practice or what was considered Obeah. The reason was the cultural differences of the blacks and East Indian races living in Trinidad and Tobago .<ref name=":0">Template:Cite journal</ref>

Reception and influence

File:Captain Mayne Reid, The maroon, A tale of vodoo and obeah.jpg

Cover of an 1883 edition of Thomas Mayne Reid's The Maroon: A Tale of Voodoo and Obeah

Written accounts of Obeah in the 19th and 20th century were largely produced by white visitors to the Caribbean who saw the tradition and its practitioners as being sinister.Template:Sfn As Paton noted, "for a long time obeah was the ultimate signifier of the Caribbean's difference from Europe, a symbol of the region's supposed inability to be part of the modern world."Template:Sfn

Official views of Obeah throughout the Caribbean have been consistently negative,Template:Sfn while many people in the Caribbean regard Obeah as a dangerous and hostile phenomenon.Template:Sfn Ongoing stigma surrounding Obeah is partly due to the opposition of Protestant Evangelicalism.Template:Sfn Also hostile to Obeah are Rastafari, who regard it as a reflection of the oppressive and un-Godly forces that they term "Babylon".Template:Sfn For these critics, Obeah is deemed fundamentally immoral,Template:Sfn and often explicitly Satanic.Template:Sfn Attempts to repurpose the term Obeah in a more positive fashion have come largely from academia and from culturally nationalist politics.Template:Sfn

In various Caribbean countries, singers and musical groups have adopted the term "Obeah" in their name.Template:Sfn An early example of this was the Bahamian singer Tony McKay, who cultivated the nickname "Exuma, the Obeah Man" after the title of his 1970 song.Template:Sfn Bilby argued that in these cases, the use of the term was a "gesture towards reclaiming ancestral power".Template:Sfn Elsewhere in Caribbean music, Obeah has been used as a theme for the humorous exploration of gender relations, as in Mighty Sparrow's 1966 song "Obeah Wedding,"Template:Sfn or has been denounced as harmful, as in The Ethiopians' 1977 reggae song "Obeah Book".Template:Sfn

See also

• Obeah and wanga

References

Sources

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Further reading

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External links

• obeahhistories.org