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Sorcellerie et harcèlement moral : formes de la violence insidieuse

Eds. Erwan Dianteill, Serena Bindi, Thierry Lamote

The role of intention in witchcraft and bullying

Fiona Bowie, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography
University of Oxford

Introduction
One angle from which to investigate witchcraft and bullying is that of intention. Intention has
three parts, (1) the subject with the intention, (2) the object of attention and (3) the plan or
aim to achieve a particular goal. Witchcraft can be regarded as conscious or unconscious, but
there is an assumption that it reflects something about the heart or desires of the witch
towards a person, object, or situation. When negative psychic energy is directed towards this
object of attention there will be a corresponding negative effect upon the target unless
remedial action is taken. In a circular process, the aggressor might also be a victim of psychic
attack, as protective actions can cause violent intentions to rebound. The role of negative
intention and the energy it generates in human society and in individuals will be examined
briefly in three ethnographic contexts. In Paul Stoller’s (1987) work on sorcery in Niger, West
Africa, witchcraft/sorcery is culturally normative and part of everyday discourse.1 Specialists
in sorcery are well-known figures within their communities. In Jean Favret-Saada’s (1980,
1981, 2015) studies of witchcraft accusations among peasant farmers in northwestern France,
witchcraft is generally hidden and referred to obliquely. Its full workings are only apparent to
those ‘caught up’ in it. In the third example, Fiona Bowie’s work among spirit release
practitioners and health professionals in the United Kingdom, notions of witchcraft, sorcery,
possession and psychic attack are culturally marginal and their intrusion into people’s lives is
generally shocking and unexpected. Contrasting these three examples allows us to explore
the role of cultural discourses concerning witchcraft in relation to the processes, techniques
and outcomes for aggressor and victim. Where witchcraft beliefs and practices are normative
there are generally established healers/anti-witchers and recognised means of dealing with
psychic attack. Where it does not form part of the wider cultural discourse, the victim has to
work harder to find meaning and a context for their experience, and to find support in dealing

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with it. Both witchcraft and bullying are forms of violence in which relationships are central
and in which victims and aggressors almost always know each other. The moral harm that
results reflects relationships that have gone wrong in some way.
The term ‘intention’ is used in Western medical texts for the healing of a wound. In a
social setting good intentions and a good heart play an important part in psychic healing,
along with an emphasis on community and the importance of sociality. Edith Turner’s (1992)
work on healers in Central Africa illustrates very nicely the importance of the community and
the social element in healing, while preserving the ontological reality of the phenomenon in
question. When Turner took part in an Ihamba ‘tooth ritual’ for a sick woman, it was only
when the community had gathered and given expression to their feelings that the setting was
ripe for healing to take place. The healing itself was more than just a nice feeling of unity re-
established – Turner saw a healer remove the troublesome spirit from the woman’s body – it
had an observable physical form, a grey blob that exited her body and was ‘captured’ by
Singleton, the lead healer.2 I draw these elements together in a longer case study of a dispute
between neighbours in northwest France. The term ‘witchcraft’ might not seem appropriate,
but the study has all the hallmarks of psychic attack – a directed attention to harm – aided by
bullying, with recourse to both legal and spiritual specialists to further or to counter the
attack. This example illustrates some possibly universal features of human sociality when it
comes under pressure, and the ‘bricolage’ nature of the tools used in a struggle between
former friends, chosen according to circumstance, culture, individual experience and
structural constraints.
We are reminded of Bruno Latour’s attempts to replace the dichotomies of primitive
(archaic/traditional) and modern with ‘a hybrid world made up at once of gods, people, stars,
electrons, nuclear plants, and markets’ (1999:16). We should not be surprised at the wide
range of spiritual, ritual, psychic, and more prosaic practical, psychotherapeutic and legal
resources that so-called modern, rational, post-Enlightenment Westerners continue to draw
upon. There are many parallels and continuities in this case study with Favret-Saada’s
ethnographic data on witchcraft in the same region of France fifty years earlier. In neither
case would any party declare themselves to be a witch. However, finding oneself the victim
of another’s intention to harm them (possibly imagined in Favret-Saada’s cases although
there is some ambiguity here), had demonstrable physical and psychological effects - as does
being the victim of bullying. When narrating their story to different audiences it was

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sometimes the legal and social aspects of the case were highlighted, and on other occasions
it was the psycho-spiritual elements that were given most salience, although it became clear
that both were seen and experienced by those involved as aspects of their entwined legal and
economic situation.

Attention and intention

One way we can address the issue of comparison between witchcraft and moral harassment,
or bullying, is through the lens of intention. Intention involves the act of attention but is not
the same action. Attention involves the concentration of the mental powers upon an object;
a close or careful observing or listening. Intention involves a course of action that one plans
to follow. From these definitions, we can see that attention takes place in the present,
and intention concerns itself with the future. The evil eye, as understood in Greece and other
parts of Europe, involves attention (Dundes, 1981, Roussou, 2021), and the consequent
transmission of energy to other human beings. It may be unintentionally cast on an infant
simply by complementing the mother on the health of the baby. It is enough to pay attention
to the infant without malign intent for harm to occur. Witchcraft or sorcery, on the other
hand, often involve planning and forethought. Some effort is involved in attacking someone,
and there is a definite intention to cause injury to or gain something from another. There is
an apotropaic element to both the evil eye and sorcery – amulets, charms and verbal formulae
are used to deflect the harm and protect the victim. In practice these terms cover a wide
variety of different ethnographic situations and there are many nuances and exceptions.
Eugenia Roussou in her contemporary study of the evil eye in Crete and Greece, for example,
describes a long-standing cultural belief that the feelings nurtured in the soul are activated
in social situations, particularly, but not only, through visual, verbal and aural contact
(2021:3). The negative results of such interactions derive from an element of choice on the
part of the individual who casts the evil eye, as he or she has allowed such jealous and angry
thoughts and feelings to corrupt their character, thereby endangering others.
Institutional harassment or bullying has parallels to all three of my examples, and here
too the discourse is usually generated by the victims rather than those who are accused of
moral harassment. Those accused of bullying most often deny acting in a way that is
intentionally harmful. Nevertheless, harassment, whether it comes from an organisation
wishing to control or demean others, from a poor management style or from a disturbed

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individual, appears to depend upon systematic planning and the targeting of the victim. It
may well be experienced as a psychic as well as an economic or social assault. Intention can
work to heal as well as to harm – both individuals and groups or institutions can use the power
of intention to create positive and negative effects, and as moral individuals we are
continually faced with choices as to how we direct and use our intentions. This may result in
a moral struggle, as Favret-Saada (1980) noted for those who thought themselves bewitched
in Mayenne. A parallel may also be noted in the case of the expatriate British couples that
form the basis of the case study presented here, in which at least one couple appeared to
regard themselves as engaged in a zero-sum battle with winners and losers. This raises the
question of how far an individual is prepared go to protect themselves or to achieve their
aims, as can be seen in Francis Young’s recent work on the role of magic and the occult in
British politics. Young (2022:297) notes the extent to which the notion of ‘magical will’ was
central for twentieth century practitioners. The term ‘magical will’ appears synonymous with
‘intention’, described as ‘the projection of the individual’s will bringing about changes in
events’. A moral choice as to how to use this power of intention is illustrated by Young in his
example of Violet Firth, better known as Dion Fortune, founder of the Society of Inner Light.
In 1939 Fortune instructed her followers to use their ‘magical imaginations’ to construct an
‘astral cave’ beneath one of England’s most sacred sites, Glastonbury Tor in Somerset. The
cave was then filled with both mythical and religious figures such as Arthur, Merlin and the
Virgin Mary who by tapping into the national will were utilised to aid Britain’s war effort.
Fortune, however, apparently refused a request from someone in France to launch personal
psychic attacks on Nazi leaders who she believed were targeting her personally, on the
grounds that this would make her as bad as her enemies (Young 2022:296-7, referencing
Richardson 1985:231-233).

Sorcery in Niger
The first example, from West Africa, involved American anthropologist Paul Stoller (1987)
who was apprenticed to several Niger sorcerers. This opened Stoller to a world of psychic
energies, used for both good and evil purposes, which had a profound effect on his life, both
during his fieldwork and subsequently. Stoller found himself the object of jealousy that led to
a psychic attack by another sorcerer, a competitor of one of his teachers. He felt that his life
was being threatened through this psychic attack and fled back to New York. The threat

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continued for several decades, even after the death of his primary teacher, Adamu Jenitongo.
Stoller believed himself to be the victim of the malign intentions of Jenitongo’s children who
were jealous of his closeness to their father, of the secrets he had been taught and the powers
they contained.
In Niger the discourse of sorcery is widely accepted culturally and provides a readily
understood explanation for certain forms of illness and misfortune. There are specialists who
can use and manipulate these psychic energies, often by ritual and material means, for both
positive and negative effects. There are also individuals who are publicly identified as
sorcerers. They can use their powers to help or to harm others. This is true among many
peoples in Africa where witchcraft is perceived as an ambivalent force that can be harnessed
for good or ill. Far from being a fixed phenomenon witchcraft can be seen as a flexible and
dynamic way of responding to social and psychological pressures. Rosalind Shaw (2002), for
example, demonstrated how the experience of the slave trade in Sierra Leone gave rise to
new and enhanced cultural responses, often framed in terms of witchcraft, in ways that
continue to resonate today. J.F. Bayert (1993) made a persuasive case linking contemporary
Cameroonian political discourse to notions of witchcraft as a form of ‘eating’ the force of
one’s opponents. Alice Armstrong (2016) showed how contemporary Internet fraud in Ghana
is linked to a form of witchcraft known as sakawa. According to Armstrong, ‘Sakawa boys are
rumoured to appear as normal, sat in front of a monitor whilst their spirit possesses multiple
foreign fraud targets’ (2016:78). The extraordinary physical powers and appetites attributed
to witches are realised in the fraudsters’ multiple Internet identities and their ability to trick
their victims into sending them money.
Where Stoller’s ethnographic experience and writing differs from many similar
accounts of sorcery or witchcraft in Africa is in the extent of his engagement with the subject,
firstly by becoming a sorcerer’s apprentice and then by becoming the victim of psychic attack
himself. Unlike many Western-trained anthropologists Stoller did not attempt to explain his
experience to himself or others in purely psychological or cultural terms – it had a psychic and
physical reality that he felt he had to take seriously and address in his ethnographic writing.
In this example it is very clear that there was (1) an actor or aggressor with an explicit
intention to harm – a sorcerer; (2) an object of attention, the victim, Paul Stoller and, (3) a
plan of action. Stoller understood this plan to be to kill him and although on this first occasion

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the attempt failed, some years later Stoller attributed a life-threatening illness to the
continued effects of sorcery.

Witchcraft in France
There are some similarities between Stoller’s experience and my second example, Jean
Favret-Saada’s work on witchcraft among peasant families in the Bocage (‘hedge country’) of
Lower Normandy and neighbouring Mayenne (which is part of the Pays de Loire Region) in
northwestern France, based on fieldwork undertaken between 1969-1972. In Witchcraft in
the Bocage (Les Mots, La Mort, Les Sorts), (1980) Favret-Saada describes how she started her
fieldwork by asking about words for illness. She gradually became aware of a discourse of
witchcraft behind the explanations she was given. The real breakthrough in her research came
when she became the victim of misfortune. Favret-Saada had a car accident that was
attributed by some of her interlocutors to the effects of witchcraft. A world that had been
almost hidden revealed itself to her as she was introduced to a dewitcher (désorceler)
referred to as ‘Madame Flora’ and, like Stoller, Favret-Saada became her apprentice,
privileged to witness first-hand the way people interpreted their misfortune within the
discourse of witchcraft. Favret-Saada learnt the appropriate ritual actions a peasant family
could take to protect its members, their property, and their reputation. The analysis was
largely sociological and psychological, drawing on the structural and psychological difficulties
of disinheriting one’s siblings and taking over the family farm, and the ways in which taking
control of their lives through the ritual actions recommended by a dewitcher enabled
individuals to improve their psychological and practical circumstances. Favret-Saada
concluded in Deadly Words (1980) that while there were no witches there was witchcraft. The
lived experience of witchcraft and the words used to express it were real and had real, even
deadly, affects. As Favret-Saada put it in the title of her second work (1981), it was the case
of a ‘body for a body’ (corps pour corps). As in Niger, Bocage witchcraft was seen as a potential
fight to the death between the witch and bewitched victims, and between the dewitcher who
took on their cause and the witch.
There are parallels and differences with the Niger example. In both cases there was
an assumption of planned and intentional psychic attack which were countered through
technologies of dewitching. This often involved putting a psychic barrier between a witch and
victim. This had the effect of sending spells back to the witch as they hit the barrier and

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rebounded – a very common, perhaps universal way of dealing with psychic attack. This
meant that there was always the suspicion that the victim of witchcraft was the victim of their
own attack; the harmful spell sent by the witch had been deflected and ‘caught’ them in turn.3
This ambiguity – that the victim might also be the aggressor, is not dissimilar to the child who
is bullied subsequently becoming the bully, and perhaps some of the same psychological
mechanisms are in place. A weakness in personality or circumstances can induce a degree of
paranoia and a tendency to perceive oneself as a victim, projecting one’s own shortcomings
or misfortunes onto external individuals and circumstances. There were certainly ritual
specialists in the Bocage, the priest and the dewitcher, and plenty of victims, but Favret-Saada
did not find individuals who admitted to being witches or of wishing to harm their neighbours.
If Favret-Saada was right and the intention to cause harm was presumed rather than real, it
was the presumption rather than the actual malign intention of an external individual which
was sufficient to unsettle the victim, but this presumption could be sufficient to spur a family
into action if things were going badly.4 According to Favret-Saada’s social analysis any actual
jealousy and ill-will directed at the victims came from disinherited siblings rather than the
person singled out by the dewitcher or identified by the bewitched. The discourse of
witchcraft was available to the family as an alternative to their own bad luck or
mismanagement, or their inability to deal with the jealousy of kin. Favret-Saada attributed
witchcraft to the structural situation of these small-scale rural enterprises, in which one son
would take over a farm and dispossess his siblings. Bullying too can often be the result of
structural factors that are not recognised as such. It is then seen as a matter of the individual
behaviour of both the bully and victim, rather than the working out of relationships in the
context of particular external constraints and organisational imperatives. In Favret-Saada’s
accounts the agent, the witch, is illusive, but the victims and the remedies are gradually
revealed to those involved in the narrative discourse surrounding witchcraft. Francis Young
(2022:344), like Favret-Saada, is somewhat sceptical when it comes to the ontological reality
of magical/occult powers, but similarly concludes that the belief in such powers can have far-
reaching effects. An individual who believes that they, or their nation, are magically or
supernaturally protected may fall ‘into the torpor and complacency of magical quietism’ and
fail to act with clear-sighted precision. The opposite can also be true. We see individuals who
believe that they have a supernatural right or access to magical powers that enable them to

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dominate others and to take what does not belong to them, whether this is a neighbour’s
farm, their vital force, or an entire nation state.

Spirit release in the United Kingdom

My third example concerns the practice of spirit release in the United Kingdom. The notion
that malevolent or simply lost spirits, whether of the dead or other non-human entities, can
attach themselves to the living also seems to be universal, and many cultures have well-
developed means of identifying and dealing with such entities. These include shamanic
techniques of soul retrieval and releasing the spirits of the dead, and Spiritualist or Spiritist
techniques of de-obsession, highly developed within Kardicism and in the mediumistic cult of
the Vale do Amanhercer in Brazil, for example (Pierini, 2020). In the United States and the
United Kingdom, as well as other parts of Europe, there is a developing network of spirit
release or releasement practitioners, drawing on ideas and practices that date back to the
Nineteenth Century. The sources are eclectic, relating to Spiritualism but also to Western
esoteric notions of the afterlife, Indian notions of subtle bodies and energy fields,
psychological notions of the split personality as a result of childhood trauma, and Western
ideas of ghosts and haunting (Bowie, forthcoming; Shushan, 2022).
Although one can trace many sources and ideas that circulate through spirit release
literature and conferences, it is important to note that the experiences described are direct
and personal, not generally the result of any conscious drawing upon these sources. While
the dominant culture in the United Kingdom does not reflect the language and understanding
of psychic attack, this does not seem to lessen its occurrence, nor the generation of victims
seeking help. Psychological models and treatments are the normative response to hearing
voices, suffering a poltergeist attack or haunting, illnesses such as schizophrenia (which has
no single neurological cause or correlates), or dissociative personality disorder. Many people
report that they are the object of unwanted psychic attention, or that someone does not wish
them well and is seeking to harm them. Some victims try conventional treatments and find
them wanting before seeking less conventional help, others turn first to mediums or to spirit
release specialists. For the distressed victim the effects of these less conventional treatments
can on occasion be quick and impressive. At a conference in London organised by the Spirit
Release Forum5 in 2017, Terence Palmer, described a spirit release treatment performed for
a former soldier who had suffered from hearing voices for many years. He had tried

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conventional psychological therapies without success. In one public twenty minute
demonstration Terence Palmer, using a form of ‘hypnotic telepathy’ on the patient,6 was able
to identify the spirits of deceased comrades of the veteran. As the young men had died
suddenly and hadn’t been prepared for death, they were confused at finding themselves
outside of their bodies, and without any particular malign intent they had attached
themselves to their surviving companion. Palmer was able to release the spirits by talking to
them and explaining what had happened, then helping them to move on to their next stage
of existence. The voices stopped, never to return. The intention here on the part of the
deceased men was simply to stay close to what they knew and was familiar. Their intentions
were not to harm their former companion even though the effects were negative and
distressing for him.
The range of maladies that someone like David Furlong, Director of the Spirit Release
Forum and a spirit-release practitioner, deals with are quite broad. One area of spirit release
that shows parallels with sorcery in Niger and witchcraft in North West France is curses. On
the Spirit Release Forum website David Furlong gives some examples of historical curses, such
as the Grand Master of the Knights Templar who cursed King Philip of France in 1314 as he
was burned at the stake. A few days later King Philip fell from his horse and died. Furlong also
gives examples of contemporary curses that he himself has dealt with. In one example a client
had tried for five years to sell his house, but each time the sale fell through. Furlong believes
that he successfully lifted the curse from the man who then received an offer on his house
and completed the sale within six weeks.7
At the conference on Spirit Influence on Mental Health in 2017 I also heard a much
more dramatic account by a nurse who worked for the National Health Service in the UK. As
a (white) English woman the idea of spirit possession was not a notion that she had been
culturally familiar with. She had suffered for years from what she believed were psychic
attacks from an ex-partner. Her mental and physical health had been very badly affected and
there appeared to be no release from these attacks. She eventually sought help from David
Furlong and over many sessions he unravelled a long history of attack by the same individual
over several different reincarnations, dating back to a curse in the distant past. The principle
of lifting a curse is that firstly the victim needs to understand that they have a right to be
released and not to remain a victim, then they need to access the power to release the curse.
That could come from within themselves or their Higher Self. If they are unable to release the

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curse themselves by drawing on their own divine light they might need the help of a specialist
practitioner who understands what they are dealing with. In the case of the nurse, the curse
was released and sent back to the aggressor, not out of revenge, but by the process described
by Favret-Saada in which the barrier of protection for the victim deflects the curse. The curse
will automatically rebound on the one who sent it, following the existing energetic trail it has
already created. In this case the aggressor had a change in his fortunes and was considerably
weakened, while the victim began to recover her health and her general circumstances
improved.
Here then we have an identified aggressor (the ex-partner), a victim (the nurse) and
plan of attack that had apparently persisted over many lifetimes. We also have the specialist
who has the understanding and techniques to remove the curse (David Furlong). It raises
questions concerning the power of intention – a curse is an extreme planned attack on a
victim, but this is probably on a continuum with the curse at one end and mild but intentional
bullying and harassment or the inadvertent casting of a jealous (evil) eye at the other. The
intention to harm the victim is common to both cursing and bullying. Both can have very real
effects on the victim. In the UK the discourse around cursing and psychic attack is not
culturally developed but is certainly present, and growing in visibility with increasing numbers
of trained spirit release practitioners, thanks in part to the Internet and the growth of
publications on the subject, as well as numerous film and TV offerings (although the later are
tilted towards the more dramatic and theatrical notion of exorcism rather than spirit release,
which is often low-key and quite matter-of-fact).

Case study: Bullying and spirit possession in the Bocage

This account concerns a recent case from my fieldwork in rural France, in the same Bocage
country that featured in Jeanne Favret-Saada’s study of witchcraft in Mayenne. Like Favret-
Saada, I started with an interest in alternative healers in the area, who seem to be well-known
to both the local French population and to some more embedded members of the ex-patriot
community. The case is close enough to Favret-Saada’s ethnographic experience to draw out
some parallels and differences. The Anti-Witch, (Désorceler, published in English translation
in 2015) is Favret-Saada’s third book on her fieldwork on Bocage witchcraft. In it she reflects
on the process of fieldwork and the transformation that takes place in the ethnographer as
she becomes immersed in the lives of her informants. The book blends psychoanalytic

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revelation and ethnographic theory in an unusually direct manner as she continues to digest,
reflect upon and process subsequently her experience. Near the beginning of Chapter One of
The Anti-Witch, Favret-Saada admitted that accounts of people being bewitched,

filled me with scarcely controllable dread. For the core theme of witchcraft narratives,
their basic material, is a struggle to the death between warring partners: bewitcher
and bewitched, bewitcher and dewitcher. These struggles may well be merely
metaphorical, but they almost invariably have very real effects, including death’ (196
– kindle edition).

When Favret-Saada’s main informant, a dewitcher (désorceler) she called ‘Madam Flora’,
asked her to name people who might wish to harm her, she could not do so. While she did
not believe that giving Madam Flora any names could lead to their death, Favret-Saada was
aware of an inhibition which suggested that rational belief sits within the totalizing
ontological reality of witchcraft. This is a useful observation as it is all too easy to project
beliefs in the irrational and magical onto the native Other, while reserving the epithet of
rational inquirer for the more cosmopolitan, sophisticated academic. What fieldwork close to
home and careful observation of her own reactions taught Favret-Saada was that we are
probably all a mixture of rational and irrational. What is deemed rational or irrational is highly
culturally determined, and what is experienced somatically or psychologically may be at odds
with beliefs or with post-hoc interpretations of a situation. There may be no single resolution
in what is a process of understanding and revelation. A certain playfulness and curiosity enters
into the reflexive process of translating experience and data into narrative texts and theories.
Favret-Saada posits that the kind of witchcraft beliefs and practices that she observed
in the Bocage in the 1970s no longer exist, at least not in the same form. At that time some
forty five percent of the population of the area still lived and worked on family concerns,
engaged in mixed farming – polyculture and stock rearing, on small plots of rented or owner-
occupied land. With no system of primogeniture there was often rivalry and jealousy
concerning the parental inheritance. The son who took over the farm (the reprenant) did
considerably better than his brothers, and certainly better than his sisters. According to
Favret-Saada, the strength of character needed to dispossess one’s siblings and to claim the
family farm created the psychological tension that gave rise to accusations of witchcraft –

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although an accusation was deflected onto a neighbour rather than being directed at a family
member. The dewitching process was analysed by Favret-Saada as a form of therapy, in that
it gave permission and the psychological tools needed by the farmer and his family to take
full control of their lives and their means of livelihood. There has been a move over the last
few decades to larger units based almost exclusively on stock rearing, with much of the
agricultural land given over to the production of maize, the main food source for the cattle.
There has also been a considerable influx of urban French and foreign residents moving to
the countryside. In Normandy, Brittany and the Mayenne region the British are the largest
group of foreign-born incomers, thanks to the area’s proximity to the United Kingdom as well
as many cultural and historical connections. Unlike the urban French and Germans, who
congregate in villages and the smaller towns of the region, the British tend to favour the
privacy of these relatively isolated, often abandoned, rural hamlets.
In her Preface to The Anti-Witch, Veena Das comments that while Favret-Saada’s study
has many specific socio-cultural elements, a similar interplay between psychic, magical,
energetic, political and corporeal phenomena can be found in India, and may well be
universal. The parallels that can be drawn between the forms of witchcraft described by
Favret-Saada in the 1960s and 1970s and this case study from 2021, may therefore involve
both geographical and cultural continuities and universal features. My case involves two
couples from the United Kingdom who, like thousands of their compatriots, have been
attracted to rural France by the lower property prices, French lifestyle and desire to escape
‘Brexit Britain’.8 The two couples bought a rural property consisting of four houses near a
village I will call Saint-Germain-de-Bocage, in Mayenne. It was purchased en indivision, that is
as a joint venture, each owning an equal share of the whole site. It appears that the two
couples did not know each other very well and the plans had been rather hastily made with
little detailed discussion prior to the purchase. Both couples are in their sixties. One couple,
referred to here as the Browns, are early retirees with occupational pensions. The second
couple, who I refer to as the Smiths, are slightly younger and were under greater pressure to
earn a living in France. The Browns were my chief informants. While I had some conversations
with the Smiths during the earlier part of my research as relations between the two couples
deteriorated my access to the Smiths became limited. They assumed that I was ‘on the
Brown’s side’ and declined to respond to any further requests for information. I was able to
speak to people who knew both couples and some friends of the Smiths, but my chief

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informants were the Browns themselves and some of their friends and acquaintances, both
in France and in the United Kingdom.
The Browns had planned to move to France since the Brexit vote in June 2016 as they
placed a high value on being citizens of the EU. By 2020 they were both semi-retired and
despite Covid restrictions on movement realised that they need to move quickly if they were
to take advantage of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement transition period, which ended on 31st
December 2020.9 While they were in the process of selling their home in the UK, the Smiths,
a couple they had first met over forty years previously, unexpectedly (re)entered their lives.
The Smiths had been experiencing relationship and financial difficulties and saw a move to
France as an opportunity for a new start. First Mrs Smith (who was at that point separated
from her husband), and then Mr Smith, asked to join with the Browns in a joint purchase. The
Browns later described this as a huge mistake and considered that they had been overly
trusting and naïve. Their intention when moving to France was to buy somewhere with
enough space for their extensive library, with room for their animals and adult children to
visit, and space to offer hospitality to guests seeking somewhere for healing and retreat. They
were open to running courses with a generally spiritual/alternative theme (something they
had done in the past). The Smiths had initially appeared to be in agreement with these aims,
and were able to offer complementary skills and experience that had the potential to enhance
a joint project. It was mutually agreed that the Smiths would manage the pre-existing summer
gite bookings, and that for the rest of the year both couples would develop various courses
and retreat options along the lines envisaged above.
In November 2020 the Browns visited France, during a brief relaxation of the Covid19
travel restrictions, in order to view a gite complex consisting of a new building occupied by
the English vendors and three older houses used as holiday lets (gites). The Browns put in an
offer for the property and both couples moved there, initially renting houses, in December
2020. As soon as the purchase was complete in March 2021, however, the intentions of the
Smiths either changed or had not been sufficiently transparent. They declared that they only
intended to run a gite business and that it could not possibly support two couples. The Smiths
assumed the right to live in the previous owners’ house and to use two, or preferably all three
of the gites for their holiday business, as the previous owners had done. The Browns had
assumed that in buying the property as a joint-venture (en indivision) there would be a sense
of community with shared resources, but the Smiths declined to share any of the profits from

14
the holiday lets, while insisting on sharing the costs. The Smiths attempted to confine the
Browns to the smallest and oldest of the houses, telling them to put their books and
belongings into storage on the grounds that they would need all the gites, additional
workshop space and outbuildings to run their business. They became increasingly controlling,
threatening and bullying towards the Browns. This extended to making numerous formal
complaints about them to the local gendarmerie, filing a civil case at the local tribunal claiming
unpaid costs for the upkeep of the site, and accusations that the Browns were trying to
prevent them from running a legitimate business. When the Browns returned to the UK briefly
in Summer 2020 (in order to earn some money by letting their cottage) the Smiths attempted
to get long and short term tenants into all the houses, other than the one in which they lived
themselves, so as to prevent the Browns from accessing the property. The Smiths appeared
surprised and angry to see the Browns when they returned at the end of August 2020, and
Mrs Brown became a particular target of their aggression, especially when her husband was
absent. There was a developing narrative displayed in the Smiths written and verbal
communications with the authorities, guests and neighbours, in which they were the ‘real’
owners and rightful occupants of the whole site, while Browns lived in the UK. The Browns
were treated at best as unwanted tenants who refused to pay their dues, rather than as equal
co-owners.
Another line of aggression from the Smiths was a campaign of phone calls and emails
to mutual friends of the two couples in the UK, in particular to a religious community to which
Mrs Brown Mrs Smith both had links. Senior members of this community had been
particularly interested in the psycho-spiritual dynamics of the affair, rather than the legalities
which they were in no position to evaluate. They identified a ‘spirit of discord’, which was
related to the idea of a devil or the Devil, and they questioned Mrs Brown (online and by
telephone) on her understanding of the spiritual state of both parties. Mrs Brown told me
that she didn’t find the black and white notion of good and evil or the Devil helpful, and that
her intuition was that the Smiths could be manifesting self-created thought-forms (an idea
developed in Theosophical thinking, but also widely accepted in other forms of Western
esotericism),10 or manifesting a pre-existent personality disorder. The introduction of both
religious and psychic elements is also something common to the neighbourly and family
disputes described in Favret-Saada’s work on Bocage witchcraft, here combined with more
contemporary psychological ideas.

15
 The Browns soon realised that there was no way of making the relationship work and
told the Smiths that they wished to sell the property and move on. The Smiths initially refused
to contemplate either selling or dividing the property, but after some months and with the
involvement of a legally appointed conciliator, agreed to buy out the Browns at rather less
than the price they had just paid. In French law the default position if conciliation/mediation
fails is that the courts are asked to end an indivision, and the property is sold a discounted
price at auction, a lengthy and expensive process in which all parties lose out. At the time of
writing, after several months of delay during which the Smiths appeared to have convinced
themselves, and sought to convince others, that they already owned the whole site, the
Browns were hopeful that the Smiths would proceed with the purchase. The Smiths were
throughout at pains to demonstrate to others their credentials as good Christians, including
giving prominence to their faith in their Airbnb host profile, introducing themselves as
practising Christians to guests, and attending Sunday Mass at a local Roman Catholic church.
In some WhatsApp exchanges and emails I was shown by the Browns, the Smiths accused
them of failing to acknowledge God’s will in the current situation – which seemed to amount
to the Browns giving the Smiths their money and leaving them the property. The Browns
found the extreme anger and hatred directed towards them and anyone the Smiths perceived
as being on ‘their side’, unsettling and, given the impossibility of engaging in rational
conversation, difficult to combat. Friends of the Browns began to avoid visiting the property
and made it clear that they did not want the Smiths to know where they lived in case they
too became targets of their aggression.
There are elements that are intriguing in that they highlight several unexpected
similarities with Favret-Saada’s work, as well as differences due to time, culture and individual
personalities and circumstances. Here we have a modern case that involves a personal and
legal dispute with emotional, spiritual, psychological and physical/embodied dimensions. The
role of intention is once again highlighted, firstly through the misunderstandings (deliberate
or other-wise) that led to an initial joint purchase, and then through the time and energy put
into managing the situation by both couples. As in Favret-Saada’s work, third parties become
involved, playing the roles of the priest and ‘anti-witch’ or désorceler. A Roman Catholic priest
friend of the Smiths in the UK was instrumentalised as part of their attack on Mrs Brown, and
Mrs Brown turned to a neighbour who was a retired Anglican to help counter the attack. The
Anglican priest, who was trained in spiritual counselling, asked the Browns whether they

16
thought the troubles they were having had something to do with the energy of the place itself
or came from the Smiths. They provisionally decided that the negative energy came from the
people and not the place, but the priest expressed a willingness to re-consecrate, if not
exorcise, the property at some future date in recognition that a change of energy was needed.
He suggested that if the Smiths were intent on harming the Browns they would find any such
intervention uncomfortable and might even choose to leave. This parallels Favret-Saada’s
notion of the désorceller putting an apotropaic barrier between the witch and victim, such
that any malign intent or spells would rebound on the witch. In Favret-Saada’s descriptions
of witchcraft the geographical areas involved were the limits of the farm, whereas in my case
study the accusations and action were played out in the United Kingdom and in France. In
both cases ties of relationship remain central to the action and the physical territory over
which the battle is fought, part of a small (former) farming hamlet, is the same. I could not
but wonder whether this particular site had been ‘caught up’ in witchcraft at some point in
the past, allowing the energy to run along ready-worn grooves. Some notion of the interaction
of energy and intention might have been behind the priest’s offer to cleanse and reconsecrate
the site. We might even borrow the language of Tim Ingold’s more philosophical attempts to
understand the environment we inhabit by describing it as simultaneously a meshwork and
an atmosphere. The mesh is ‘woven by the myriad lines of living beings as they thread their
ways through the world’ and the atmosphere ‘an aerial domain suffused with light, sound and
feeling’ (2022:51). Both metaphors point to the intimate connection of interior and exterior
realities across time and space – not empty space but, as Ingold prefers (referencing Bergson,
1922:125), ‘folds in the plenary fabric of the ever-worlding world’ (202:56).
In The Anti-Witch (2015:237-340), Favret-Saada observed that, ‘The bewitching
primarily affects the legal person (in possession of those capacities proper to an owner) and
only secondarily the psychological person (the private individual with his biographical
particularities, personal traumas and intrapsychic conflicts)’. This was also the case here.
Although the origins of the behaviour of each couple, their intentions and reactions to one
another, had a personal idiomatic character, the primary disagreement was greatly
exacerbated by the joint purchase of the property and by the fact that both couples had
invested most of their financial resources in the venture. The resolution was also framed
legally in terms of the sale of the property. As in local Bocage witchcraft, both the supposed
witch and the victim or bewitched party were not so much individuals as a unit that included

17
the husband-wife pair, the various houses with their furniture and fittings, the land on which
they stood, the livestock (in this case their pets), and the social capital or reputations of the
individuals involved. While the Browns had initially regarded the boundaries as fluid and the
venture as a shared enterprise, the Smiths enforced firm boundaries around what they
perceived to be ‘their’ house and its immediate surroundings, as well as other parts of the
property, such as the potting shed, to which they laid exclusive claim. In this respect they
acted like Favret-Saada’s victims of attack, as they were the ones defending ‘their’ territory
and attempting to dismiss any rival claims on the property. According to the Browns, the
Smiths used a variety of means, including verbal and legal violence and bullying to reinforce
these claims. To this extent they acted, at least as far as the Browns were concerned, as the
aggressors rather than as victims. The Browns responded by also drawing up (invisible)
boundaries that needed to be defended. Tensions arose over the various houses and their
usage, along with their adjoining terraces, lawns, vegetable plots and orchard, and shared
items of garden furniture and appliances. Even Mrs Brown’s recovery of a pot plant that had
been taken by the Smiths from her terrace resulted in the threat of a complaint by the Smiths
to the local gendarmerie. Above all there was tension over the costs of maintenance and
distribution of income (or lack of distribution) from letting the gites, with the Smiths claiming
all the income for themselves, reminiscent of the inheriting farmer determined to dispossess
his siblings in order to survive financially.
In Favret-Saada’s descriptions the supposed witch and victim were seldom immediate
neighbours (on whom farmers depended for reciprocal labour and to whom they might well
be related). In a battle with a witch, the one with the greatest ‘force’ would vanquish the
other, draining the life force out of one unit and using it to reinforce the wealth and vitality
of the other. In my case study the two units, the couples living in their respective jointly-
owned houses, faced each other across a small area of lawn and a swimming pool. They were
close enough to engage in the close observation of one anothers’ demeanour, actions and
movements, something that Favret-Saada also described. The mood of one couple seemed
to rise as that of the other fell. When the body language of one couple indicated depression
or defeat the other couple would apparently feel more secure and buoyant, only for the tide
to turn with some legal or circumstantial twist of the plot in their uncomfortable and
increasingly litigious relationship. The cosmology of witchcraft is a zero-sum game with a
winner and a loser, and the winner takes all. This is certainly how the Browns perceived their

18
situation – or rather how they thought the Smiths perceived it and then projected it onto
them. No equitable outcome that satisfied all parties seemed likely as their motivations and
intentions were incompatible. The Browns believed that their common interest lay in ending
the indivision by selling the property a good market price and going their separate ways, but
the Smiths apparently seemed incapable of recognising any needs or views other than their
own and generated an alternate reality in which they were entitled to whatever the Browns
possessed.11
When talking to some of the members of the religious community in the UK about this
case they admitted that their spiritual resources were inadequate to deal with the situation
and they could only envisage a legal solution. This was often the case for families in the
Bocage who approached the parish priest. If he was not skilled in local ways and familiar with
the culture of witchcraft, he would most likely dismiss it or offer a blessing or some other
remedy that was not sufficiently powerful or targeted to deal with the situation. It was at that
stage that the skills of a dewitcher might be sought. It is possible that the psychological
mechanisms that drove the betwitched farmers to seek the services of the dewitcher were
very similar to those of the Browns when they sought out a local priest-counsellor, Christian
friends and even a Medium. The Catholic Bocage families were ambivalent about engaging a
dewitcher, knowing that it could result in a fight to the death - something that contradicted
their self-image as good Christians. Similarly Mrs Brown expressed a deep ambivalence when
it came to engaging with the Smiths and their actions psychically if it could lead to the Smiths
being harmed, as it conflicted with her own spiritual practice oriented towards harmony and
healing and the Christian imperative to love one another. She was, however, taught how erect
a protective barrier of prayer and light that would reflect any maleficence back towards an
aggressor, which she put to use in this instance. One of thes hardest aspects of the case for
Mrs Brown was the seeming impossibility of rebuilding close or even cordial relations with
Mrs Smith, someone she had known for many years and had regarded as a trustworthy friend,
and the failure of any idea of building a loving, supportive and welcoming community
together with the Smiths.
In descriptions of Bocage witchcraft Favret-Saada noted that for the bewitched farmer
and his family any contact with the witch was regarded as fatal. The witch’s abnormal force
could result in terrible consequences for the victims and, alongside the intervention of the
dewitcher, they were prescribed a series of rituals aimed at resealing their boundaries –

19
physical, topographical and psychic. As David Napier (2016:12) has observed, ritual ‘makes it
possible to orchestrate one’s local world symbolically, to develop concrete connections with
one’s immediate environment, to orchestrate innovative responses to moments of
uncertainty, and in short, to manage one’s daily world creatively’.12 Complete avoidance of
the Smiths by the Browns, or vice versa, was hard to achieve given their physical proximity,
but they did minimise contact as far as possible. Both couples resorted communication via
WhatsApp messaging when strictly necessary, until this too broke down. Mr Brown described
how he felt compelled to circumnambulate the house the Smiths were living in on more than
one occasion, drawing a boundary of light between the Smiths and the Browns and sealing
the Smiths and their house in as a form of containment and protection. Mr Brown was
sufficiently disturbed by his experience of the Smiths to describe the sensation, both
intellectual and physical, as one of ‘meeting pure evil’.13 The whole experience had
manifested itself to him as a working out of something that derived at least in part from the
Smith’s habitual reactions to situations and people.14 One positive outcome of the
experience, Mr Brown claimed, was that it had awakened and strengthened emotional and
psychic aspects of his personality needed in order to be able to deal with it, although this was
increasingly replaced by an overwhelming desire to get as far away from the Smiths as
possible. Mrs Brown also expressed a desire to look for positive spiritual and human lessons
in the situation, not least in the moral choice between harming none and seeking redress, or
at least standing up for their right to live at the property. It sounded very similar to the choice
facing the bewitched farmers – did they wish to defend their family and farm at the expense
of the witch or, or were they to reject this path as being unchristian but risk losing their
livelihood? Were the protective actions that would deflect any aggression enough or would
they prove insufficient? Mrs Brown described finding a refuge in meditation, which helped
her to reduce levels of stress.15 She certainly did not regard her meditation and energy
healing as being in league with the devil (as suggested by the Smiths) and appeared bemused
and somewhat disturbed that her religious community in the UK had, at the suggestion of the
Smiths, found these practises sufficiently threatening to turn them into scapegoats.
A final similarity I wish to draw attention to between Bocage witchcraft and this case
study is the element of secrecy and partial narration. Each couple chose different
interlocutors, with some overlap. The Smiths appeared keen to draw as many people as
possible into their narrative, the Browns were more circumspect and selective in deciding

20
with whom to discuss their misfortunes and its remedies. There was the obvious element of
embarrassment for the Browns at having to admit to making a mistake that called into
question their judgment of people and situations. They also described not wanting to perceive
themselves or be seen by others as victims, while at the same time recognising that they were
under attack and needed help. In Favret-Saada’s fieldwork the narratives she obtained were
from dewitchers and those who believed themselves to be bewitched. Suspected witches
might be well aware of the accusations made against them as they would find themselves
shunned and their presence unwelcome. They would not, however, mention the topic to
others, and if asked directly would dismiss the accuser’s claims by stating that they did not
believe in witchcraft, thereby ‘disqualifying’ their narration (2015: 417). It appeared that the
various people approached by the Browns, whether friends, part of the French legal system,
or ritual and religious specialists of various types, were by and large compartmentalised, so
few people were aware of the range of activities in which they were engaged.

Conclusion
What this story shows is that in North Western Europe in the 2020s, as in the 1960s and
1970s, forms of witchcraft and psychic attack still form a part of some people’s lives. The
cosmology of witchcraft Favret-Saada described has many elements of psychic and spiritual
resonance with the case study presented here, even though my informants had a language of
psychology at their disposal alongside that of witchcraft, religion and more New Age (and
scientific) concepts of psychic energy. It has been suggested that as human beings there are
common elements of our psychic make-up that have a universal dimension.16 There are
historical and cultural continuities between this part of North Western France and the United
Kingdom that could account for some similarities, and the demands of living in close proximity
to others can lead to similar stresses and strains. Dependency on the land to earn a living
(whether from farming or tourism), are common to both the peasant farmer and professional
incomer. I have even hinted at the notion that certain activities can leave a latent ‘groove’ in
the fabric of a place that might facilitate repetition over time.17 This study brings together
notions of psychic attack – for personal and financial gain – with bullying and harassment.
Intention seems to be crucial in understanding the connections and consequences of this
process. The Browns described ‘reading’ the intentions of the Smiths on more than one
occasion, through observation of their moods and actions but also through the atmosphere

21
or energy generated. For the Smiths, a process of inversion took place in which their own
fears, insecurities, and anxiety appeared to lead to their negative intentions being projected
onto the Browns. This might well be why the Browns became hyper-aware of their co-owners’
moods and intentions. The psychic force and effects of intention permeate Favret-Saada’s
descriptions of Bocage witchcraft but she takes her narrative in a different direction,
emphasising the functional role of witchcraft as therapy. Instead, this study looks at the often
under-represented effects of intentional activities of various types, the conscious directing of
energy, thoughts, prayers and malign actions towards a particular end, and recognises the
profound effects they can have on others. As Francis Young (2022) notes in his description of
witchcraft and politics in Britain, you do not need to adopt a particular ontological view of
psychic activity for it to have a real affect, but neither do I wish to rule out the possibility of
‘genuine’ psychic activity as belief and intention are intimately related to our physiological
and social well-being (Robson, 2022, Bowie 2020).
As mentioned above, both witchcraft and bullying are concerned with relationships
as well as intention, and in most cases the victim is someone known to the aggressor.18
Witchcraft in Africa has sometimes been interpreted as an attempt to maintain right
relationships, whether by bringing down those who try to elevate themselves at the expense
of others, or by maintaining a sense of morality and community by policing those who
threaten social harmony (Pool, 1994). Of course there are negative consequences of such
beliefs and practices, particularly for those accused of witchcraft. The power claimed by
witches and anti-witchers is used to harm victims as well as to protect or enhance the well-
being of those who wield it. Witchcraft, like any power, is often highly ambivalent,
perspectival and contextual. Even in the world of curses and possession in Western contexts,
healers often claim that at some unconscious level the victim has permitted the negative
relationships. This can lead to victim-blaming, or more positively can enable those who feel
or find themselves victims of material or psychic attack to use the situation for learning and
spiritual growth if they can grasp the opportunity.
One way of integrating these ideas and of thinking about some of the relationships
between the political, social, therapeutic, religious and psychic phenomena discussed above
is to follow the trajectory proposed by Tim Ingold. Ingold takes inspiration from William
James’s (1909) notion of a ‘pluriverse’ or ‘multiverse’ which emphasises the connections
between people and things, rather than their separation. A connected multiverse is both

22
singular and plural, never complete, open rather than closed, with an ‘overflow of relations’.
There is an interpenetration of everything without loss of particularity (Ingold 2022:360).
Such a view is presented as preferable to a still dominant perspective in which everything
that does not fit into a neatly ordered universe, ‘that flies in the face of universal reality’, is
‘simply written off as an instance of belief, and mistaken belief at that’ (ibid. 361). Ingold
writes approvingly of Arturo Escobar’s (2011) reintroduction of William James’s ‘pluriverse’
into anthropological discourse, suggesting that the world is ‘propositional not conjunctive’
that is, made up of ‘with, with, with’, rather than ‘and, and, and’ relations. We are not
separate beings, like actors with the earth as our stage, but part of a single, emergent world
of interaction and differentiation. Or, as Ingold would have it, ‘the world is a conversation; it
is not the object of our conversation. In the conversation lives twist around one another as
they go along, both answering and being answered to’. Ingold adopts the term ontogénèse,
the ‘becoming of being’ to describe this conversation in which there are questions rather than
answers, and in which ethnography is less an extraction of information about the other than
multiple ‘voices in a conversation’ within a shared world (2022:362). The present essay has
focused on some of the negative effects of witchcraft and bullying and the dynamics
concerned within a social context. It would be remiss of me not to point out that the converse
is also the case – positive emotions lead to greater physiological coherence and emotional
and physical well-being, and are generated by acts of kindness and compassion towards
others and qualities such as appreciation and generosity.19 While we cannot necessarily
control our circumstances we do have a choice in how we choose to react to them, both
personally and in terms of generating structures of society and cultivating relationships that
help reduce the tensions characteristic of both witchcraft and bullying.

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1
E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1937), in his classic study of Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande in Central
Africa, followed the Zande distinction between a witchcraft, an inherited psychic ability with physiological
features that could be detected by a diviner, or after death by means of an autopsy, and sorcery – a technical
operation that involved the intentional manipulation of objects with malevolent intent. There are many
variations and terms for witchcraft/sorcery in sub-Saharan Africa. Some peoples make a similar distinction to
the Azande, others do not. Among the Bangwa of South West Cameroon, for example, there is no linguistic
distinction between witchcraft and sorcery, but rather a range of behaviours and abilities that overlap with but
are not identical to those described by Evans-Prichard (Bowie 2000). In the French ethnography of Jeanne
Favret Saada (1980) a single term, sorcellerie translates both terms in English. As my ethnographic examples
are taken from Francophone Africa and France I have in this essay used the terms ‘witchcraft’ and ‘sorcery’
synonymously.

27
2
In earlier ethnographic texts from Africa, Singleton would have been referred to as a ‘witchdoctor’.
3
The Carmena Gadelica, a collection of Nineteenth Century Gaelic language hymns, incantations, prayers, and
songs from the Scottish Highlands and Islands contains many such examples and resonances with Favret-
Saada’s work. It is full of both blessings and curses, with ideas concerning vengeful and possessing spirits,
jealous kin and envious neighbours with psychic powers, framed within Christian language. Mary mother of
Jesus, Jesus himself, or the Holy Trinity are often invoked as protection against the evil eye and malignant
forces, including invocations to ensure that curses rebound on their sender. The unit under attack and in need
of defence from harm is generally not the individual but, as Favret-Saada describes in northwest France, the
farming family unit with its animals, crops and material goods.
4
In The Expectation Effect (2022:2-3), David Robson gives numerous examples of the ways in which
expectations and beliefs can shape reality. Among these is ‘Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome’
among Hmong refugees from Laos living in the USA in the 1970s. Otherwise healthy young to middle-aged
men started dying in their sleep in significant numbers. Medical anthropologist Shelley Adler (2011)eventually
solved the mystery. Sleep paralysis, which is universal and seldom dangerous – and which also featured in Paul
Stoller’s sorcerer’s attack, was regarded by the Hmong as an assault by an evil demon. In Laos victims would
have a range of remedies to ward off an attack by the dab tsog, including wearing amulets and performing
sacrifices and the intervention of shamans. Without these protections a case of sleep paralysis became so
terrifying that it could exacerbate a heart arrhythmia, leading to cardiac arrest.
5
https://www.academia.edu/31338487/Spirit_Influence_on_Mental_Health_pdf_version
6
Palmer describes this technique at length in his book The Science of Spirit Possession (2nd edition 2014).
7
http://www.spiritrelease.org accessed April 2021. The Spirit Release Forum was founded by David Furlong in
2011 and is based in Malvern in Worcestershire, UK. The SRF grew out of the Spirit Release Foundation,
founded by NHS psychiatrist, Dr Alan Sanderson, who was prepared to breach the usual taboos within
conventional medical circles in the UK to talk openly about the possibility of spirit possession and release. See,
for example, some of Sanderson’s papers on spirit release : https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/docs/default-
source/members/sigs/spirituality-spsig/sanderson_19_11_03.pdf?sfvrsn=a9662a53_2, and
https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/docs/default-source/members/sigs/spirituality-spsig/the-third-transformation-
alan-sanderson-x.pdf?sfvrsn=e3b10fbe_21
8
See Michaela Benson (2020), Brexit and the British in France, http://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/28222
Some minor details have been changed for the purpose of anonymity.
9
The significance of this date is that those resident in France before the end of 2020 were treated in some
respects more like EU citizens, thus easing the bureaucratic transition process.
10
See Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater’s book Thought Forms, first published by the Theosophical
Society in 1905. A thought form is a denser desire-body (or astral body) formed from lower emotions such as
fear, anger, jealousy, or selfishness, that can take on a separate form that appears independent of its
originator. A thought-form can sometimes be mistaken for possessing spirit or some kind of demon.
11
This supposedly justified the Smiths increasing hatred of their former friends and their repeated attempts –
stated verbally and in writing – to destroy them (see Shragai 2021:108-9 for a psychological description of such
behaviour). Lamote and Hamon (2016) make the point, in discussing cults in particular, that attributing too much
power to a cult leader runs the danger of not only victimising cult members but of absolving them of appropriate
responsibility for their actions, and that diagnostic labels for certain personality types can make categories
appear more substantive than they really are.
12
Mrs Brown described how soon after the purchase of the property she suggested a new moon ritual in
which each of the four of new joint owners could express their hopes and dreams for their future in Saint
Germain de Bocage. The other three did not appear enthusiastic and the ritual never took place, which she
regarded as a prescient sign of the lack of common purpose and commitment to a joint enterprise.
13
Mr Brown linked his brush with evil to the experience of the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt (1963) who
coined the term ‘the banality of evil’ (referring to the Nazi regime and in particular Rudolf Eichmann), based on
‘holes of oblivion’ that reflected a disconnect from reality. Arendt argued that evil is ‘banal’ as it has no depth,
no grounding in reality. To maintain a narrative that is not grounded in reality requires effort and can lead to
paranoia if others are not similarly persuaded of its truth (cf. Donald Trump’s preposterous ‘alternative facts’

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and Vladimir Putin’s false narratives). Evil is shallow, without a demonic dimension, but nevertheless can
spread ‘like a fungus’ on the surface of the world. Mr Brown was not comparing the Smiths to the Nazi regime,
but he was trying to express the sense of an underlying logic to the ‘thought-defying’ properties of evil that
characterised both his experience in Saint Germain de Bocage and Arendt’s descriptions of Eichmann.
14
Mr Brown referred to the work of American psychiatrist M. Scott Peck (1998), in which he describes
apparently normal and successful individuals who attack others, particularly those in their power, rather than
dealing with their own failures and inadequacies.
15
See Goleman and Davidson (2018) on the physical effects of meditation.
16
See David Hufford (1982), who referred to a common core of universal experiences – although subject to
different cultural interpretations. Hufford’s prime example was sleep paralysis, but core experiential
phenomena include forms of mediumship and shamanism, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences,
after-death contacts, and various psychic abilities such as telepathy. See also Latour (1993), who argues that
‘we have never been modern’, i.e. the idea of a complete break between pre-modern (unscientific) and
modern thinking is not born out be the facts.
17
Ingold (2022:268-9) plays with ideas of the material world as continually reinvented and novel but at the
same time bringing forth ‘nothing that was not already there’. See also Rupert Sheldrake (2009) on morphic
resonance, which draws on the idea that nature is habitual and that all animals and plants, including human
beings, ‘draw upon and contribute to the collective memory of their species’, and that ‘cosmic evolution
involves an interplay of habit and creativity’ (xi). According to Sheldrake’s hypothesis morphogenic fields can
produce ‘probability structures’ that aid learning or repetition of specific behaviours. A morphogenic field is
not limited to a specific topographical space, but at the same time is somehow related to the materiality of a
site.
18
Theoretical physicist and author, Carlo Rovelli, describes in Helgoland (2021), a deceptively simple and
beautifully written account of quantum theory, how reality is made up of relations, not objects. Properties are
not intrinsic qualities but relational interactions. It would be too much of a digression here, but there is
considerable scope for comparative discussion between relationality as it is understood in quantum mechanics
and in human sociality.
19
My thanks to Peter Fenwick for these references on the links between physiological coherence, mindfulness
and well-being: McCraty and Zayas (2014), Jones (2019). See also Schwarz (2008) for scientific studies on the
role of intention and its external effects.

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