Witch doctors, shamans, curanderos, traditional healers, and medicine men remain practitioners of some of the world’s oldest professions. Before modern medicine, indigenous medical practitioners provided all types of healing treatments and spiritual guidance to members of their community. Besides needing treatment for common illnesses and fevers, patients sought traditional healers for social, psychological, and spiritual problems, such as having bad luck, marital disruptions, lost items, spirit hauntings, and infertility. In Western society in general, and in American lore in particular, the witch doctor is generally portrayed in strongly negative terms as a scantily clad African man decorated in an elaborate headdress, bone jewelry, and staff while chanting and carrying out ritualistic dances and ceremonies.
In remote rural villages across the world, indigenous people believe supernatural entities to be responsible for afflictions of illness, misfortune, poor harvest, and bad behavior. In this respect, traditional healers are known by the term “witch doctor” out of a conviction that witches are the cause of an illness that the traditional healer has been summoned to help cure. Furthermore, community leaders consult with their local shamans on topics of warfare, epidemics, or community-wide problems. They also oversee the spiritual aspects of initiation ceremonies for rites of passage, births, adulthood, marriage, eldership, and funerary rites.
These figures are held in high regard and are seen as the spiritual protector of the community; they are thought to be the only person who can communicate with the spirits on one’s behalf. Living and practicing within their local communities, they are dependent on patients for their livelihood. If they are found to be untruthful, or their treatments or advice are not found to be effective, they soon earn the title of charlatan, losing the respect of the community. Their homes typically have an altar displaying deities and effigies of saints of their religion.
Before beginning a session, the witch doctor will prepare an offering for the spirits. An offering can include an animal sacrifice, herbs, or charms. The healer will prepare for the ritual by rubbing medicinal herbs on his skin, then lighting candles to make the environment sacred.
As part of the initial diagnosis or divination, patients must reveal everything, similar to Catholic confession to a priest. The witch doctor, then, is sworn to secrecy. It is believed that if a person holds information back, such as the past breaking of a taboo, the witch doctor will not be able to discern an accurate diagnosis. The witch doctor’s challenge is to make prayers and offerings to the right god or spirit, depending on the situation.
For a patient suffering from pain, for example, the witch doctor might rub a freshly laid egg over the painful area. The entity is thought to enter the egg, which is then broken into a bowl of water to read the lines, spots, or colors within. Upon identifying the culprit, the traditional healer will then go about preparing for a healing ceremony and offerings to cure the patient.
The healing ceremony also might include sacred items, bells, charms, prayers, chanting, and dancing in a ritualistic series of events. The shaman typically goes into a trance to negotiate with the spirits on the individual’s behalf. For this type of service, the witch doctor often uses a carved wooden effigy as a centerpiece to communicate with spirits. Upon being asked questions by the witch doctor, the spirit will respond by moving the centerpiece. Sometimes the spirit is thought to possess the witch doctor and talk through him in glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, while his assistant translates. For tribal members seeking the luckiest day to go hunting or spiritual protection during warfare, the shaman might toss an ensemble of bones, shells, rocks, or charms in a diagram on the floor. The spirits decide how the objects land; it is up to the witch doctor to interpret the arrangement for the needed information.
The effectiveness of the witch doctor’s methods is considered by skeptics to be determined by the placebo effect. Sometimes receiving personal attention from the doctor is enough to evoke a psychological response in the patient, triggering the body’s own healing processes, which is enough to relieve some symptoms.
Although they are held in high regard within their community, witch doctors are not generally wealthier than most of their neighbors in traditional societies, although they usually have their own property, livestock, and gardens for sustainability. Some patients pay the doctor for services on a donation-only basis, while on other occasions the witch doctor and the patient negotiate the cost of the treatment. Sometimes the patient will pay a fourth of the agreed-upon amount up front, paying the rest after he or she successfully recovers.
Not just anyone who wishes may become a witch doctor; instead, one must be “chosen” by the spirits. A candidate must be adept at seeing visions and phenomena, or have other abilities brought to the attention of the local healer, who will take the individual on as an apprentice. If the spirits want an individual to become a diviner, the spirits will try to drive the person to a healer by giving them bad luck, headaches, or other problems.
Apprentices are required to leave the life they once knew behind, including social status, friends, and family. For years they learn about their duties, rituals, songs, herbs, the spirits, and how to conduct oneself as a traditional healer. Sometimes the profession is passed down from male to male through the matrilineal line.
The Yoruba Ifa diviners are called “fathers of the secrets.” The knowledge of these diviners to see and call spirits and to conduct themselves is taught only to those who are chosen, as the power can be dangerous in the wrong hands. Secrecy guards the knowledge by making answers metaphorical and intentionally ambiguous, relayed through stories, songs, or riddles.
Once the apprentice is ready to become a full-fledged practitioner, witch doctors from neighboring communities come together to take part in the initiation ceremony and help test the apprentice’s skills. The initiation takes several days; tests are performed to see if the individual can not only see the spirits, but communicate with them, and ultimately get them to perform duties. Another test involves hiding objects that the apprentice has to find, and a purification ritual is also done at a river or lake. An animal is sacrificed on behalf of the student, to ask the spirits to accept the new member.
On the final day of the initiation, the apprentice’s family is invited to see dances, feast on sacrificed animals, and help confirm the new status of their family member as a witch doctor. The dances performed symbolize the death of the previous person and the birth of the new protector of the community. Finally, the new healer can be presented to the family and community at large in his new regalia. These traditional healers tend to have a unique appearance; some have scarification, specific hairstyles, or beards.
Today, witch doctors are alive and well, still practicing around the world. Many medical communities are making an effort to integrate traditional healing practices with modern medicine. In American popular lore, “witch doctor” is a pejorative and often racist term for the superstitious magical beliefs of so-called “primitive” societies. In American folk practices, however, the witch doctor abides in the “Hoodoo” rituals of traditional African American culture, as well as in the person of such figures as Hispanic or indigenous curanderos and Appalachian grannies and dowsers. In recent years, as various alternative medical practices have become widely popular, such practitioners have gained more and more mainstream appeal.
René Fox Small
See also Folk Medicine; Good Luck Charms; Shamans; Superstitions; Voodoo
Further Reading
Allen, Benedict. 2000. Last of the Medicine Men. New York: DK.
Deloria Jr., Vine. 2006. The World We Used to Live In: Remembering the Powers of the Medicine Men. Golden, CO: Fulcrum.
Harner, Michael. 1990. The Way of the Shaman. New York: HarperOne.
Kalweit, Holger. 1987. Shamans, Healers, and Medicine Men. Boston: Shambhala.
Trotter, Robert T. 1981. Curanderismo, Mexican American Folk Healing. Athens: University of Georgia Press.