In which British military intelligence promotes skepticism in Ireland by lying about black magic

Richard Jenkins has just published a book, Black Magic and Bogeymen, showing how a British military intelligence division deliberately fabricated evidence of black magic and satanism for the purpose of social control and to vilify Irish paramilitary organisations.

The tactics seem to have involved:

1. Tapping into pre-existing beliefs in the local population. Without this vulnerability to exploit, the attempt would have come across as merely comical.
2. Planting false evidence of witchcraft or satanist events and rituals. In itself, this is little better than schoolkid pranking, but they were able to back it with authority (see below).
3. Leaking false stories of black magic or satanic rituals or beliefs to the press. I suppose they were able to get away with this because the press treated them as a trustworthy source, and the public were willing to trust the press!
   
   There's a moral here: certainly, these are slanderous, exploitative means and I doubt they justify the end, but until such time as they can be curtailed, skepticism seems like the only defense.

PS: It's sad that having had its five minutes of fame, Black Magic and Bogeymen has quite a few accessibility faults: it's expensive, there are no previews and no electronic versions. I think I'd rather enjoy reading it if some of that could be fixed.

Other stories about malicious fabrication of supernatural incidents:

In which Pastor Ezeugwu uses an angel to promote witchcraft belief in Nigeria.

In which Pastor Ezeugwu slanders an angel, though this is the least of his sins

This story should start in the proper place, with a rather beautiful artwork by Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. It's a fibreglass angel fallen to the ground, shown at the Saatchi Gallery in London in 2009, though there have been other versions in other places:

Not very Nigerian looking, not very female looking and not very witchy, I think you'll agree. Pastor I.C. Ezeugwu, has a whole different angle on the thing, quite literally.

Frame it so the face is hidden, darken the skin a bit, and write a little story underneath it, and lo and behold, you have a dead Nigerian witch on your hands. Pastor Ezeugwu provides the little story (emphases mine):

On the eve of the crusade, I had a revelation where three elderly women came to me and told me to cancel the crusade. On the morning of the crusade, I held a brief counselling session. An elderly woman who came for counselling on a white robe told me that "her members don't want me to hold the crusade". That was what her interpreter told me as she couldn’t speak English. I asked why? She said because they rule the land. I told her interpreter to tell her that they don't rule the land, JESUS rules the land. She said they'll kill me and I told her I'll kill them first hence the crusade was titled "Operation Kill the Witches". The crusade was meant to hold for 4 days but later lasted for 7 days as a result of the testimonies the people were sharing.

Eight days after I went back to my base, I received a telegram from the leader of the organising committee informing me that the head of the witches was dead after suffering a partial stroke for 2 days.

Note the little details, the white robe and the allusion to the death of the 'head witch' intended to help the inattentive link the story with the picture without going quite so far as to assert they are one and the same. I won't tell you to note the fact that this believer in Jesus is going around threatening elderly ladies with murder, I'll trust you to notice that for yourselves.

This debunking of this piece of maliciousness was brought to us by Richard Bartholomew who apparently heard about the whole thing from Leo Igwe, and passed it on to Ophelia Benson, from whom it reached me. It's a pretty pathetic and dangerous scam. I mean come on, if you want to believe in witches, believe in this, by the same artists:

That is an amazing piece of art I would have loved to have seen. And this is only a tiny part of it. It's called Dear and was shown at the Galerie Perrotin in Paris.

Other stories about malicious fabrication of supernatural incidents:

British military intelligence lie about black magic among Irish paramilitary organisations. 

'I'll believe in evolution when I see a cat turn into a dog'

Well, here you are then.

This post is dedicated to the spotted hyena, the most liminal mammal alive, just because I'm into liminality at the moment. Hyenas have often been compared to wild dogs, wolves, jackals and other members of the canine family. Everyone agrees they kind of look and behave like dogs, but they're actually more closely related to cats. They belong in a taxonomic sub-order with the pretty name of feliformia which includes hyenas, cats, civets and mongooses.


"Hyena Standoff" by Maureen Lunn - Hyena StandoffUploaded by Mariomassone. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

But spotted hyenas don't stop there. They blow our minds still further by being full-on gender-benders at least if they're female. Not only is their clitoris enlarged into what looks like a penis, they even have a fake scrotum. Copulation is a bit fiddly for them, birth even more so, since they have to do all that stuff via the long pseudo-penis. They do pay a price for it, with a rather high maternal mortality and first pups who are more likely to die than not. Even if two pups survive birth, one sibling will often kill the other. On the other hand, surviving female pups of the most masculinized (and agressive) females rise to the top of the group hierarchy, get the most mating rights, generally boss everyone around and have lots of masculinized female pups in their turn. Males tend to do better in the mating market by behaving submissively.

Humans have often responded to this boundary-breaking by despising hyenas. Many African societies have not thought highly of them, European big game hunters found them too ugly to bother with (good survival trait there!). Not many people like their habit of eating anything they can kill or find, starting with human corpses. Being obvious 'hermaphrodites' makes matters worse, but at least no one paid much attention to the cat/dog thing until recently. With all that negativity, it's nice to find one positive appraisal:

Among the Korè cult of the Bambara people in Mali, the belief that spotted hyenas are hermaphrodites appears as an ideal in-between in the ritual domain. The role of the spotted hyena mask in their rituals is often to turn the neophyte into a complete moral being by integrating his male principles with femininity.

'His' male principles, huh? Could it be that being a 'complete moral being' is a guy thing with the Bambara people? Since I have no clue, I'll have to give them the benefit of the doubt for now. And that would be about enough of hyenas, except the Tanzanian ones are irresistible.

In the culture of the Mbugwe in Tanzania, the spotted hyena is linked to witchcraft. According to Mbugwe folklore, every witch possesses one or more hyenas, which are referred to as "night cattle" and are branded with an invisible mark. It is said that all hyenas are owned by witches, and that truly wild hyenas are non-existent. Lactating female spotted hyenas are said to be milked by their owners every night to make hyena butter, and are further used as mounts. When a witch acquires a hyena mount, he rides it to distant lands in order to bewitch victims and return safely home before morning.

You might be interested in:
How witchcraft belief in contemporary Africa is not nearly as fun as that sounds
The Norse god Loki and liminality of various kinds

Gender transgression, magic and warfare in Norse society

We're seem to be having a binge on Norse mythology in our household. After seeing the Thor movies, we couldn't resist picking up Joanne Harris' The Gospel of Loki and after that I had to get something less well-known: Midnight and Moonshine by Lisa Hannett and Angela Slatter.

In the process I've learned more about a topic I touched on a few days ago: gender in traditional Norse culture. In that post, I said I thought Norse cultures might be fairly inflexible in their approach to gender. Completely by accident, I discovered the ancient Norse term of abuse for effeminate men: ergi. Ergi is what one man called another when he wanted to challenge him to a duel. More specifically, it implied homosexuality in the (allegedly) feminine passive role but not the active one and also, to my surprise, the practice of magic. Loki is the ultimate ergi, untrustworthy, canny, given to sexual liaisons with both males and females and practically magic incarnate.

"Faroe stamp 428 The Prophet".
Licensed under Public domain
via Wikimedia Commons.

Magic was unmanly, and while female völva were respected, male practitioners were regarded with suspicion and persecuted. Völva were often older women who had already raised families before taking on the role. They were skilled in prophecy, performed sacrifices and seductions, went into trances using drugs, music and dance. They performed war magic, either at home or on the field of battle. They used staffs or wands, symbolically linked to the distaff used in weaving which was another female province, and also to the phallus. In the hands of the völva, spells could also be woven during the acts of spinning and weaving themselves.

Norse sorcery was eventually persecuted into extinction by the Roman Catholic church. The skeptic in me notes that while women's role as sorceress involved doing nothing dramatically (except exerting power and influencing events due to be respect accorded them), the intervention of Christianity left them without much of a role at all (except spinning and weaving clothes and sheets of course). Unfortunately, the conjoined aspects of this pattern of cultural takeover are quite common.

Norse legends and mythology also feature women taking on the more masculine role of warrior. They don't seem to be disrespected but there's debate over the extent to which such women existed historically. There is certainly far more archaeological evidence for völva than shieldmaidens. Reading between the lines I suspect women often fought when their communities were under attack and a handful may have joined war parties as active fighting members (as they always have, everywhere). Norse groups might have male or female leaders, but it looks like those people often found it effective to stick to traditional gender roles. Male leaders were warriors, ideally with a magically competent spouse, female leaders were sorceresses, ideally with a son or other subordinate male in the warrior role.

You might also be interested in:

Thor and Gender
We have Always Reclaimed our Stories, about Kameron Hurley's Hugo Award winning essay. It links to a bunch of other posts on gender and women warriors.
One Who Walks with the Stars, a Lakota woman warrior

Debunking godmen

After Leo Igwe's talk on Witchcraft Belief, Misogyny and Murder in the 21st Century, Babu Gogieni gave a short presentation of witchcraft issues in India. He said victims of witchcraft accusation in India are frequently members of the Dalit (untouchable) caste and they are sometimes tortured and put to death in horrific ways.

Then he switched to a somewhat different issue - the astonishing powers over nature claimed and used as a way of making a living by 'godmen'. As part of the movement to debunk them, Indian skeptics, including Narendra Nayak stage demonstrations of such magic arts as walking across beds of burning coals, lying on beds of nails, pulling trucks with hooks passed through the skin of one's back, the idea being to relate the science behind the superstition. I could relate to this technique and I'm not surprised it gets a lot of attention... and I'm curious to know how well it works.

Here's Nayak at work on News 24 India. You might need to turn on the captions (bottom right buttons).Oh, and part 1 wouldn't work when I looked so we're starting with part 2: How to Become Heatproof Using Scientific Trickery.

Leo Igwe on Witchcraft Belief, Misogyny and Murder

Leo Igwe spoke last night at a talk arranged by London Black Atheists and the Central London Humanist Group, on Witchcraft Belief, Misogyny and Murder in the 21st century. I expect the talk may be posted in due course, but in the meantime, my impressions...

He discussed some aspects of witch culture in Nigeria, the effect on victims of witchcraft accusations and the social forces that support witchcraft belief. We've heard quite a lot lately about child victims of witchcraft accusation, but last night, Igwe focused on elderly women, no longer wanted by their families and frequently excluded to 'witch camps'.

The important thing is, how do we stop people hunting witches in Nigeria? After listening to the talk and discussion, I think the bad news is it will probably require a major extension and reform of educational, legal and medical infrastructures, and massive reductions in socio-economic inequality. In the absence of magic wands for getting from here to there, Igwe suggested some more immediately achievable tactics.

He called for programs to support victims of witchcraft accusation and, especially for westerners, attempts to block the expansion of Nigerian witch-hunters, exorcists and witchcraft belief encouragers into the west. This not only keeps them away from fresh victims but blocks their access to a potential source of status. UK activists seem to have had some success in this field in 2014, against witch-hunter Helen Ukpabio, after protesting to her venues and to government authorities.