The Witch

In Kĩsêdjê cosmology the witch is not primarily a practitioner who learns spells but a kind of person who carries a lethal, transformative substance within. This inner anomaly permits action at a distance, nocturnal travel and the sending of sickness, and it is to witches, rather than to impersonal misfortune, that nearly all serious illness and death is attributed. The witch is the dark counterpart of the moral, fully social person: where proper Kĩsêdjê life is oriented to collective song and the plaza, the witch's power turns inward, secret and antisocial. Because the condition is understood as innate and difficult to control, accusation, ordeal and the killing of suspected witches historically shaped village politics. Sources treat the figure both as a social type and as a cosmological principle of anomalous, deadly transformation.

Domains

• witchcraft and sorcery
• death and the dead

Powers

• causes illness and death
• sends out a nocturnal double

Sources

• The witch is a person carrying an abnormal, lethal substance, held responsible for most death and misfortune; accusation and execution of witches structured Suyá politics.: Seeger, A. 1981. Nature and Society in Central Brazil: The Suyá Indians of Mato Grosso. Harvard University Press. (secondary)
• Witchcraft, hearing and the boundaries of moral society are central to Suyá cosmology and to the interpretation of anomalous power.: Seeger, A. 2004 [1987]. Why Suyá Sing. University of Illinois Press. (secondary)