I would prefer "witchcraft and science" to "the science of witchcraft."
More flexibility.They could also add a section on magical realism, from the literary perspective. I recall a major school of literature in Spanish, English etc associated with that brand. Nnedi Okarafor's Binti series comes to mind.
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2019 7:33:26 PM
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Conference Announcement
Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2019 7:33:26 PM
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Conference Announcement
wow.
very promising.
im writing an essay on this right now.
it wold be inspiring to know how such a stimulating idea, with such rich sub themes, was developed.
such a theme is quite broad, suggesting a global framing of witchcraft ideas, inviting synergies and distinctions, similar to Ronald Hutton's 2018 The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present.
This rich list of sub-themes suggests the following ideas to me-
On Conceptual Issues in Witchcraft
Such studies can be region specific or global, comparative, diachronic or synchronic, or all of these, on account of the centuries old history of witchcraft conceptions across the world, complexified by the 20th century development of witchcraft as a religion in the West.
so, in referencing witchcraft, one needs to clarify which witchcraft one is referring to and on what grounds one integrates various local conceptions of spirituality under the rubric of the English word 'witchcraft' particularly since the conception demonstrates significant changes amidst continuity in the history of ideas and sociations in the English speaking world.
one response to these qs is the notion of the unity of various ideas about spiritual power as inherent in the self rather than aided by external instruments, such as herbs and other ritual forms, an idea relevant to such conceptions as the Yoruba aje and the Benin azen and pre-modern Western witchcraft but not so for modern Western witchcraft which deals heavily with ceremonial magic, using physical instruments as symbolic ritual forms.
May the term "witchcraft" in a non-Western sense not be understood as a partly or largely heuristic conception, a convenient method of bracketing conceptions of spirituality which do not fall within established religion but in which not all of the bodies of ideas encapsulated by it are covered by all the most significant defining characteristics of this idea?
Philosophy/ies of Witchcraft
To what degree may one reference 'the philosophy of witchcraft' suggesting a monolithic philosophy rather than 'philosophies of witchcraft' indicating pluralities of views on what is being referred to as witchcraft ?
If philosophy here refers to ideas about the nature of witchcraft and its points of intersection with fundamental aspects of existence, what similarities are shared between the various forms of pre-modern and modern Western witchcraft and within various kinds of modern Western witchcraft, from the Gardnerian, as developed by Gerald Gardner to Italian witchcraft or Stregheria, as championed by Raven Grimassi to Satanic witchcraft as developed by Anton LaVey, among others and within ideas on African forms of witchcraft, such as within Nigeria with the Yoruba aje, the Benin azen and others referenced in the CFP, to similarities and differences between witchcraft theory in various parts of the world and the distinction between ideas about witchcraft held by those who believe in it, such as Gerald Gardner's pioneering work in creating modern Western witchcraft and ideas about witchcraft by whose who many not believe but study it, such as Evans Pritchard in Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande and Knowledge, Belief and Witchcraft by Barry Allen and Olubumni Sodipo on the Yoruba context and Ronald Hutton's classic work on modern Western witchcraft The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft and the borderland between these two extremes occupied by such scholars as Teresa Washinton in Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of Aje in African Literature and The Architects in Existence Aje : in Yoruba Cosmology, Ontology and Orature, who identifies with aje conceptions as a form of female empowerment.
Witchcraft in Literature[ and Film]
Central to my literary and filmic encounter with witchcraft and for many significantly exposed to European culture as children is with European fairy tales where the witch is often a woman, a bad woman, at times living in isolation in a forest, as in "Hansel and Gretel" or the wife of a king, as in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves", figures who continue to resonate in cinematic adaptations of these powerful stories.
More recently, artistic exposure to witchcraft ideas in the African context for me has been through Nollywood and Yoruba language films, both of which seem to portray these ideas in diverse ways. My experience has been that Nollywood, dominated by Christians, and specifically a Pentecostal brand of Christianity, presents witches as a totally evil danger that needs to be eradicated from the victim's life by the power of Jesus.
My exposure to Yoruba language films, however, is that aje, who, with some qualifications, may be called witches, are negotiated with, fought against when negotiation fails and are understood as a collective who may engender creation or destruction, a perspective in alignment with Yoruba aje conceptions, in which spiritual power is not understood as necessarily bifurcated into good and evil, as in Christianity.
The most influential work on witchcraft on me is Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, where she fuses a retelling of Arthurian narrative, a centuries old mainstay of European literature retold by various writers across the centuries , from a female centred perspective, the point of view of Morgaine Le Fay, the arch villain of Arthurian narrative, depicted by Bradley asa priestess of an ancient Earth centred, feminine focused spirituality deeply indebted to modern Western witchcraft as a form of modern Paganism, in the slant of some of its schools of thought in feminine valorisation.
The story is woven round the role of sacred landscapes as inspirational centers in Western Paganism, specifically Glastonbury, with its magnificent hill, possibly constructed by pre-Christian Britons, topped by a ruined church, suggesting Christianity was also drawn to the numinous possibilities of this space, the landscape associated with King Arthur, mythic British king, described as lying in sleep within Glastonbury ready to ride forth when Britain needs him.
The invisible realm of Avalon, where Arthur is held to lie at rest, a zone hidden within the visible landscape, is developed by Bradley into an enchanting evocation of the idea of the coexistence of multiple dimensions within the same space, an idea, that, incidentally, is particularly powerfully developed in Africana symbolism of the crossroads, abstracted in terms of the intersection of horizontal and vertical lines at a point evoking the nexus of dimensions, integrating matter and spirit, space, time and eternity, as Norma Rosen describes of the Benin Olokun symbol igha-ede in her magnificent article "Chalk Iconography in Olokun Worship", while the equivalent of such natural interdimensional portals in Yoruba and Benin witchcraft lore is trees, groves and forests, particularly Iroko trees.
After reading Bradley's book, telescoping a lifetime exploring ideas about unconventional human powers in the context of the intersection of forms of technology and myth in her Darkover novels series, such as The Heritage of Hastur and The Forbidden Tower, my favorites, I have never been the same again. I have become an initiate of the feminine.
I have also thoroughly enjoyed the Harry Potter series and hope to one day demonstrate how some of the innovative magical techniques in that fictional work, such as the Patronus spell, involving concentrating one's sense of the inspiring and the sublime into an image that one invokes, can be applied in real life.
The Science of Witchcraft
In what sense? Is witchcraft not understood as a spirituality, which itself shares a controversial relationship with science? Can claims of witchcraft be studied in a scientific manner? One of the most influential figures in Western esotericism, Aleister Crowley, described his aspiration as an occultist as developing a practice using the methods of science in pursuing the goals of religion.
Moving from critical study to practice, different but potentially correlative approaches to the subject, is it possible to develop witchcraft in an African context along similar lines? Pierre Verger's monumental compendium of Yoruba ifa herbalogy, Ewe: The Uses of Plants in Yoruba Society, presents a method for becoming aje, in terms of herbs which are mixed with powder on which has been inscribed one of the odu, symbols of the Ifa system of knowledge, both mixed in water and using a particular incantation, the aspirant bathes with it.
It would be wonderful for someone to try this simple method and give a public report of the outcome. I have posted the details of this method from the book online , on various social media platforms but I have not had any talkers yet. I aspire to apply the method myself, particularly since Lagos, where I now am, has a thriving Yoruba herbal industry.
Folklore of Witchcraft
The principal agent of evil in pre-modern Western witchcraft ideas was the Devil, whom the witch was believed to have entered into an alliance with and who branded the witch with his mark, a symbol of ownership or bonding. In Yoruba witchcraft lore, collaborators of destruction with aje are recognized, not masters served by aje, one of such collaborators being the Iroko tree.
In my explorations of Benin nature spirituality, Benin being rich in a culture of sacred trees, I cultivated relationships with some trees through admiring their beauty, spending time in their company, hugging them and trying to communicate telepathically with them.
I thereby discovered unusual things about these trees, becoming convinced that a particular Iroko tree was possessed of self consciousness, entering into another dimension through contemplating the enigmatic aura around a particular forest and took to avoiding looking at or thinking about a particular Iroko tree bcs an idea that emerged into my mind over a period of time as I thought about the tree was one I was convinced came from the tree and not from my own mind.
I came to conclude that some of the folklore around these subjects could be based on fact.
Witchcraft as an Art
The practice of witchcraft as art is well developed in the modern Western tradition through the use of artistic symbols. What examples may be drawn from the African context that could exemplify such an artistic dimension? Can one identify practitioners of witchcraft whose methods could be studied?
May one postulate an aesthetic dimension to the association of witchcraft in Southern Nigeria with such nature formations as trees, with the aesthetic quality of such forms, in the spirit of the Yoruba conceptions of relationships between beauty and essence of being,"iwa l'ewa", "inward being is beauty", be a platform for cultivating relationships leading to these natural formations activating unusual powers in the aspirant, in the understanding, expressed in a conversation with me by Osemwegie Ebohon, a man in Benin who publicly describes himself as a witch, that some trees are witches, and if I remember well, can initiate one into witchcraft, a movement from oju lasan, the primary, corporeal vision to oju inu inward vision penetrating to the essences of phenomena, enabling the perception and powers ofa witch, as suggested by Babatunde Lawal in "Aworan: Representing the Self and its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art?"
Gender and Witchcraft
Witchcraft beliefs have been a primary means of demonizing women in Africa and in pre-modern Europe, highlights from these developments have been the relatively recent phenomenon of the witchcraft village or villages in Ghana, if I recall correctly, where women accused of witchcraft are banished to.
In the pre-modern West such highlights include burning of women as witches of which the Salem Witch Trials are particularly infamous. The Malleus Maleficarum, The Hammer of Witches, was a standard text for recognition witches. Yvonne Owens,a contemporary Western witch who founded the 13th House Mystery School, a witchcraft school and who studied the text for her MA and PhD, states that the descriptions of witches in that book corresponds to the images of women in various stages of their biological and life cycles, making the text a misogynistic weapon rather an an actual tool of spiritual investigation.
Yoruba aje conceptions, while correlating the valoristic and the denigrative in relation to women, succeed in developing a powerful body of ideas about the spiritual potency of the feminine which may be mobilised for a spirituality devoid of the misogynisms associated with them, a task aje activists in the Americas are pursuing and which will form the subject of an essay I am currently writing, a task already achieved in modern Western witchcraft in such female centred witchcraft as in Starhawk's famous The Spiral Dance.
Etc etc etc
I look forward to hearing and reading how those intriguing topics in the CFP will be addressed by presenters.
On Tue, 28 May 2019 at 15:12, Chukwuemeka C Agbo <chukwuemekacagbo@utexas.edu> wrote:
--The B.I.C Ijomah Centre for Policy Studies and Research
University of Nigeria, Nsukka
Conference Announcement THEME: WITCHCRAFT
Metaphorically, "witchcraft" ("amusu" or "igbansi" in Igbo language, "Aje" in Yoruba, "Ohe" in Idoma, "Ifot" in Ibibio, "Pou" in Ijaw and "Opochi" or "enebe"in Igbira) has come to be associated with strange activities bearing on the supernatural, which affects the human world. Definitions of witchcraft differ from country to country and from community to community. Likewise, all cultures do not share a consistent pattern of witchcraft practice and beliefs. In Nigeria, for instance, the practice of witchcraft often intercepts with other concepts like magic, sorcery, esotericism, diabolism and even religion. From an interdisciplinary point of view, this conference seeks to find answers to pertinent questions such as: What is witchcraft? What factors influence witchcraft labelling in various communities? How does the practice of witchcraft affect society?
The conference sub-themes:
- Conceptual issues in witchcraft
- The philosophy of witchcraft
- Witchcraft in history
- Witchcraft in literature
- Folklore and witchcraft
- The science of witchcraft
- Witchcraft as an art
- Gender and witchcraft
- The Politics of witchcraft
- Secret cult and witchcraft
- Theology and witchcraft
- Sacred texts and witchcraft
- The economics of witchcraft
- Security and witchcraft
- Social work and witchcraft practice
- Witchcraft and social crisis
- Witchcraft in traditional African societies
- Witchcraft and governance
- Witchcraft and development
- Spirituality and witchcraft
- Witchcraft labelling
- And any other related topic.
Conference date: 28-31 October 2019
Interested scholars should submit an abstract of not more than 250 words to bicijomah.cps@unn.edu.ng and elizabeth.onogwu@unn.edu.ng not later than 30 August 2019 along with the conference registration fee of N15,000 (Nigerian scholars) and $100 (international scholars). Payment should be made to Fidelity Bank. Account Nos: 6060137833 (N) & 5090725652 ($) latest 30 August 2019. Acceptance of abstract is based on payment of conference registration fee. Information on hotels and other logistics will be shared later.Announcer: Prof. Dr Egodi Uchendu, AvHF, FHSN, FRDA Director, Prof. B. I. C. Ijomah Centre for Policy Studies & Research Contact telephones: 0803 612 0394 / 0803 961 7898
Chukwuemeka Agbo, M.A.
Doctoral Candidate in African History
Department of HistoryThe University of Texas at Austin128 Inner Campus DriveB7000 Austin, Tx, 78712-0220USA
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