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Sacred Correspondences
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Accusation Today, and the People It Is Made Against

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Accusation Today, and the People It Is Made Against

The two articles above concern the word and the history. This one concerns the present, because accusations of witchcraft and sorcery are still being made and people are still being killed after them.

The documentation is not folkloric. In 2021 the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks. UNICEF has published field research on children accused in central and west Africa, where accusation leads to beating, forced exorcism, expulsion and abandonment. The United Nations mandate on the rights of persons with albinism records mutilation and killing driven by beliefs about body parts in charms. In Papua New Guinea researchers and government use the term sorcery accusation related violence. India's national crime statistics record murders under a witchcraft motive, and several Indian states have specific legislation against witch-hunting.

The single most important thing to say is the same thing the European record says. The people harmed are, overwhelmingly, not practitioners of anything. They are older women, widows, orphans and stepchildren, people with disabilities, people with albinism. An accusation of occult harm becomes a licence to act against someone who has no way to refuse, and research repeatedly finds material pressure underneath it: drought, displacement, poverty, and disputes over land.

None of that is a survival of the European trials, and none of it belongs beside modern Pagan witchcraft, which is a different subject entirely.

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