Xiangxi Witchcraft

Author: Lu Qun / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-05-01
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It was still ten years ago, in the spring of 1995, when I led a group of students into a village in Danqing Township, Jishou City, a Miao ethnic minority area in Western Hunan, for field research. Something stunned me. A child, who looked over five years old, sat on the edge of the field, watching other children play. I remember leaving in the morning, and he was sitting like that. By the time I returned in the afternoon after my investigation, he was still sitting the same way. I asked him why he didn’t go play with the other children. He looked at me blankly and then averted his gaze, as if he hadn’t understood what I said.
“He doesn’t understand Mandarin!” one child told me.
“ He’s sick!” another child said.
I wanted to know what illness he had, but the children all said in unison, “He’s been bewitched!”
The three words “bewitched” struck me hard as if a hammer had hit my heart. How many years had it been since I’d heard those words? As a native of Western Hunan, I should say I wasn’t unfamiliar with it. I grew up surrounded by stories about “ghosts” and the fear of them. However, as I grew older and my knowledge expanded, especially after studying away for a few years, I had almost forgotten about it and stopped believing in it. Occasionally, when I thought about it, I assumed that with China’s long-term reform and opening-up, the spread of science and culture, and the significant changes in Western Hunan, such things would no longer exist.
Yet today, I saw a living, breathing person believed to be “bewitched”! A child who should have been growing up healthily! A pale face, vacant gaze, and a solitary, isolated demeanor—none of it belonged to a child! And his frail, thin figure, two years younger than his actual age!
“ He should see a doctor!” was my second thought. But after asking around, I learned that his family was poor and couldn’t afford a doctor. They had hired a shaman to help, but after taking a few herbal remedies that didn’t work, they gave up.
“ How can he get better? He’s been bewitched!” the shaman explained.
In folk belief, it’s known that those who have been bewitched are very difficult to treat unless the shaman forces the witch to withdraw the curse. But who is the witch? Everyone knows, but no one can provide evidence. If they report it to the government, but now it’s a new society, the government doesn’t believe in such things and won’t mediate. So they can only whisper among themselves and can’t do much about the witch.
If it were in the past, the villagers said, capturing and torturing the witch was common. Setting fire to the witch along with her house or letting her die in some private punishment would not have been unusual.
“ Even the officials used to capture witches and torture them. Some were even executed,” they told me, recounting a “official witchcraft case” that occurred in Fenghuang County during the Republican era: A Miao family had two sons who died, and they suspected a witch in their own village had bewitched them. They reported it to the officials, who sent someone to raid the witch’s home. Upon searching, they indeed found a pottery jar containing snakes, toads, scorpions, and other unclean things. The officials believed there was both human and material evidence, so they executed the witch.
Many people came to watch the execution, most believing the witch deserved to be punished for her witchcraft. The officials, meanwhile, acted as if they were righteous, seemingly ridding the area of a menace.
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