Witch Doctor Quotes

I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the grammar of human problems, and the writers I've mentioned with the essence.

I saved a man's life once," said Granny. "Special medicine, twice a day. Boiled water with a bit of berry juice in it. Told him I'd bought it from the dwarves. That's the biggest part of doct'rin, really. Most people'll get over most things if they put their minds to it, you just have to give them an interest.

William Shakespeare: 'Close up this din of hateful decay, decomposition of your witches' plot! You thieve my brains, consider me your toy, my doting doctor tells me I am not!' Lilith: No! Words of power! William Shakespeare: 'Foul Carrionite specters, cease your show, between the points... ' [he looks to The Doctor for help] The Doctor: 761390! William Shakespeare: '761390! Banished like a tinker's cuss, I say to thee... ' [he again looks to The Doctor] The Doctor: Uh... [he looks to Martha] Martha Jones: Expelliarmus! The Doctor: Expelliarmus! William Shakespeare: 'Expelliarmus!' The Doctor: Good old JK!

Mr. Grace sounded like a very small child, helpless, hopeless. I had made him fuck himself with his own big tool, like one of those weird experiences you read about in the Penthouse Forum. I had taken off his witch doctor's mask and made him human. But I didn't hold it against him. To err is only human, but it's divine to forgive. I believe that sincerely.

Women saw everything, and they thought about everything. The result was wisdom. For men, this was a frightening state of affairs, which is why they insist on holding on to power.

psychoanalysis is not a science: it is at best a medical process, and perhaps even more like witch-doctoring.

Give me priests. Give me men with feathers in their hair, or tall domed hats, female oracles in caves, servants of the python, smoking weed and reading palms. A gypsy fortuneteller with a foot-peddle ouija board and a gold fish bowl for a crystal ball knows more about the world than many of the great thinkers of the West. Mumbling priests swinging stink cans on their chains and even witch doctors conjuring up curses with a well-buried elephant tooth have a better sense of their places in the world. They know this universe is brimming with magic, with life and riddles and ironies. They know that the world might eat them, and no encyclopedia could stop it

Sweet master doctor, learned master doctor, who ever heard of a witch that really died? You can always get them back.

Please consult your child’s Witch doctor before using this product. Diapers may cause severe allergies, internal bleeding, and irreversible sex change.

You see, even after decades of therapy and workshops and retreats and twelve-steps and meditation and even experiencing a very weird session of rebirthings, even after rappeling down mountains and walking over hot coals and jumping out of airplanes and watching elephant races and climbing the Great Wall of China, and even after floating down the Amazon and taking ayahuasca with an ex-husband and a witch doctor and speaking in tongues and fasting (both nutritional and verbal), I remained pelted and plagued by feelings of uncertainty and despair. Yes, even after sleeping with a senator, and waking up next to a dead friend, and celebrating Michael Jackson’s last Christmas with him and his kids, I still did not feel—how shall I put this?—mentally sound.

Whitefolks said he was a witch doctor, but they said that so they wouldn’t have to say he was smart. A hunter’s hunter that’s what he was. Smart as they come. Taught me two lessons I lived by all my life. One was the secret of kindness from white people –they had to pity a thing before they could like it. The other--- oh well, I forgot it.” Joe Trace

An assistant could be just what the witch doctor ordered.

Lucifer, why did so many human emotions feel like physical illness? It was a wonder humans didn’t visit the doctor on an hourly basis.

I cannot accept the proposition that the four-hundred-year travail of the American Negro should result merely in his attainment of the present level of American civilisation. I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now - in order to support the moral contradictions and the spiritual aridity of my life - expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse.

if I’d been hit with the same thing as Glenn, I probably had his doctor. The thought seemed about right when Glenn shrank back in his chair with a guilty expression. The tomato, too, was in hiding somewhere. I didn’t want to know where. I truly didn’t.

Women have always been healers. They were the unlicensed doctors and anatomists. They were abortionists, nurses and counselors. They were the pharmacists, cultivating healing herbs, and exchanging the secrets of their uses. They were midwives, traveling from home to home and village to village. For centuries women were doctors without degrees, barred from books and lectures, learning from each other, and passing on experience from neighbor to neighbor and mother to daughter. They were called “wise women” by the people, witches or charlatans by the authorities. Medicine is part of our heritage as women, our history, our birthright.

In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding—symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power. With this insight into a power process, our Imperial Security Force must be ever alert to the formation of sub-languages.

There is no trick of a magician or spell of a witch doctor, no drug or mesmerism or bribery or torture or coercion that can compare in power with the force for change unleashed in the human breast through the touch of love.

Science affects the average man and woman in two ways already. He or she benefits by its application driving a motor-car or omnibus instead of a horse-drawn vehicle, and being treated for disease by a doctor or surgeon rather than a witch.

Mumbling priests swinging stick cans on their chains and even witch doctors conjuring up curses with a well-buried elephant tooth have a better sense of their places in the world. They know this universe is brimming with magic, with life and riddles and ironies. They know that the world might eat them, and no encyclopedia could stop it.

If she’d been born in an African tribe she might have been a witch doctor.

Dreaming, investing, and changing the status quo takes courage; but the courage to melt an ice age does not grow in all cultural climates. Moribund cultures are fertile fields for fearful, fatalistic worldviews. Only astrologers, fortune-tellers, witch doctors, and sorcerers thrive on such glaciers.

Despite their authoritarian light show, those ice-cream trucks of death couldn't do any more for Perkus's murdered infatuation, his crushed crush, than could keening Greek chorus, or a moaning witch doctor.

All knowledge that takes special training to acquire is the province of the Magician energy. Whether you are an apprentice training to become a master electrician and unraveling the mysteries of high voltage; or a medical student, grinding away night and day, studying the secrets of the human body and using available technologies to help your patients; or a would-be stockbroker or a student of high finance; or a trainee in one of the psychoanalytic schools, you are in exactly the same position as the apprentice shaman or witch doctor in tribal societies. You are spending large amounts of time, energy, and money in order to be initiated into rarefied realms of secret power. You are undergoing an ordeal testing your capacities to become a master of this power. And, as is true in all initiations, there is no guarantee of success. [Magician energy]

There can be no emblem or parable in a village idiot's hallucinations or in last night's dream of any of us in this hall. In those random visions nothing – underline nothing (grating sound of horizontal stroke can be construed as allowing itself to be deciphered y a witch doctor that can then cure a madman or give confort to a killer by laying the blame on a too fond, too fiendish or too indifferent parent – secret festerings that the foster quack feigns to heal by expensive confession feasts (laughter and applause).

knew straightaway, from his smile, that he wasn’t a doctor; I’d already got the hang of the doctors’ smiles, firm and distancing, expertly calibrated to tell you how much time was left in the conversation.

What was the bug that got into me? My covenanting forebears had one answer, and the state-subsidised mindbenders and witch doctors have another. Let's ay that whateverer it was, it's got this world through some tricky situations to the present point, and without it we perish.

You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people’s privacy — being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler’s personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler’s worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler. Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous, the thinnest, most transparent monologuing. Little better than a license to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics, and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with Munchausen syndrome.

Six witnesses affirmed that Jacoba had cured them, even after numerous doctors had given up, and one patient declared that she was wiser in the art of surgery and medicine than any master physician or surgeon in Paris. But these testimonials were used against her, for the charge was not that she was incompetent, but that—as a woman—she dared to cure at all.

Oo ee oo ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang

Ngigi did not seem in the least surprised to find I was a doctor, and I remembered that there were women witch doctor as well as men. At least here I would have no battle to fight.

He said he was not afraid because years before a witch doctor gave him a charm against evil spirits. "Let me see that charm," I asked. "It's words," he said. "It's a word charm." "Can you say them to me?" "Sure," he said and he droned, "In nomine Patris et Filli et Spiritus Sancti." "What does it mean?" He raised his shoulder. "I don't know," he said. "It's a charm against evil spirits so I am not afraid of them." I've dredged this conversation out of a strange-sounding Spanish but there is no doubt one of his charm, and it worked for him.

He knew clearly enough that his imagination was growing traitor to him, and yet at times it seemed the ship he sailed in, his fellow-passengers, the sailors, the wide sea, were all part of a filmy phantasmagoria that hung, scarcely veiling it, between him and a horrible real world. Then the Porroh man, thrusting his diabolical face through that curtain, was the one real and undeniable thing. At that he would get up and touch things, taste something, gnaw something, burn his hand with a match, or run a needle into himself. ("Pollock And The Porrah Man")

If I had been born a man, they would have called me an apothecary. Perhaps even a doctor, if I’d had the training. But because I was born a woman, they called me a witch instead. To ignorant men, every gifted woman is a witch.” “But you know things my father doesn’t know,” said Augusta.

Lecturing the assembled publicists and stylists, my mom says that if any aboriginal peoples or primitive tribe still does not celebrate her acting, that’s only because those subjugated native cultures find themselves oppressed by an evil, fundamentalist form of religion. Their budding appreciation of her films is obviously being quashed by some devilish imam or patriarchal ayatollah or witch doctor.

Scientists, doctors, and trained ordinary citizens use drugs and torture to render children machines that do others' bidding. The commands these perpetrators put in the victims are called "programming". They take an isolated, barricaded piece from one stream in the mind and another and another and sometimes tie them together at the bottom and twist them together and tell them to act but not remember.

So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you’ll see the reading scores keep going down—or hardly going up—in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There’s a witch doctor remedy that doesn’t work.

The witch-burnings did not take place during the “Dark Ages,” as we commonly suppose. They occurred between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries– precisely during and following the Renaissance, that glorious period when, as we are taught, “men’s” minds were being freed from bleakness and superstition. While Michelangelo was sculpting and Shakespeare writing, the witches were burning. The whole secular “Enlightenment,” in fact, the male professions of doctor, lawyer, judge, artist, all rose from the ashes of the destroyed women’s culture. Renaissance men were celebrating naked female beauty in their art, while women’s bodies were being tortured and burned by the hundreds of thousands all around them.

All I ask,” the doctor said, “is that you keep in mind that all creations, all advances, all inventions, come with a price. They can be used for good or they can be used for evil. But in my philosophy, mine is not to determine politics or to decide if a certain advance should be created. Mine is to determine if it could be created. There’s no use in debating the morals when I don’t even know if something will work.

But I hear that tone in his voice, that calming tone that doctors put on because, after all, they are still part witch, part shaman. Their cutting and chemicals can only do so much, and the rest is a bolstering of the mind and spirit to support what healing the body can manage on its own.

Adrenaline poisoning,’ one of my doctors had called these surges of anxiety that had troubled me since childhood. The doctors explained that, for reasons they could not understand, my body seemed to think it was in a constant state of danger. One of the specialists my aunt consulted explained earnestly that it was a biochemical leftover from hunter-gatherer days. I’d be all right so long as I rid my bloodstream of the adrenaline load

He did everything. He studied hard. He went to Harvard. He got married. He had children. He worked. He dreamed big. He pulled his bootstraps all the way up from his humble beginnings to the presidency. He lived the American Dream. And he was called an African Witch Doctor. People asked for his birth certificate. A congressman shouted at him "YOU LIE!" He faced the most recalcitrant Republican Congress ever that was elected by a constituency that wanted to "take the country back."If a black man can be elected as guardian of the American empire, do exactly that, and still not be shielded from racism, what hope is supposed to be left?

The secret of the Witch Doctor’s power lies in the fact that man needs an integrated view of life, a philosophy, whether he is aware of his need or not—and whenever, through ignorance, cowardice or mental sloth, men choose not to be aware of it, their chronic sense of guilt, uncertainty and terror makes them feel that the Witch Doctor’s philosophy is true.

I am reminded of the belief of the ancient Sephardic doctor Isrealicus: that food must really be delicious if both disposition and body are to benefit.

Keep your head down, think small, look after yourself: these constituted the lessons of Leopold. The spirit, once comprehensively crushed, does not recover easily. For seventy-five years, from 1885 to 1960, Congo's population had marinated in humiliation. No malevolent witch-doctor could have devised a better preparation for the coming of a second Great Dictator.

Hitler is all the war-lords and witch-doctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with common sense does not really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked forward to as a civilising influence but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol of that fact. Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age.

You morons give up so easily," the Wicked Witch remarked. "DO YOU HEAR THAT SHRILL SOUND, MERRY MEN?" Robin Hood asked. "THE WITCH'S VOICE IS EVEN UGLIER THAN HER FACE, AND I DIDN'T THINK THAT WAS POSSIBLE." "Silence!" the Wicked Witch commanded. "I MEAN, LOOK AT HER," Robin continued. "THE WITCH IS SO UGLY, WHEN SHE WAS BORN, THE DOCTOR PROBABLY SLAPPED HER TWICE BECAUSE HE DIDN'T KNOW WHICH END WAS WHICH." "All right, that's enough -" "THE WITCH IS SO UGLY, SHE WENT TO A FUNERAL AND THE CORPSE GOT UP AND RAN AWAY!" "If you don't shut up, I''ll -" "THE WITCH IS SO UGLY, SHE WAS VOTED THE NATIONAL ANIMAL OF SCOTLAND!" The Wicked Witch tapped her umbrella on the ground, and a dirty sock appeared in Robin Hood's mouth. "I'm going to enjoy watching you die!" the witch declared.

Recently, a professor at Penn State told my son Joshua's class that during a trip to Africa, he had a mysterious encounter with a witch doctor of a tribe. He watched with horror as this witch doctor put a man into a trance and made the man put his face into burning coals and move them around with his nose on the ground. The man received no burns and wasn't even aware of the sensation of burning his flesh. The professor, being a committed naturalist, had no way to understand this obviously satanic phenomena. His scientific model didn't include any supernatural cause, whether it be godly or satanic. He admitted this fact to the class. He said that he saw what happened yet he did not believe it, because he couldn't fit it into what he called his scientific model . . . If their presuppositions rule out the supernatural, that is that! There is no more.

Relieved beyond measure, Sebastian spread his long fingers over the shape of Evie’s thigh. “Riddance,” he managed to mutter, as the door closed behind Hammond. Evie was obviously torn between laughter and tears as she looked down at him. “You stubborn ass,” she said, her eyes wet. “We’ve just managed to drive off one of the most renowned doctors in London. Anyone else we find is going to want to bleed you as well. Who should I send for now? A white witch? A shaman? A Covent Garden fortune-teller?” Using the last of his strength, Sebastian managed to drag her hand up to his mouth. “You,” he whispered, holding her fingers to his lips. “Just you.

The cultural forces that help politically sustain both the militaristic and the corporate function of the Deep State, however, are growing more irrational and antiscience. A military tradition that glories in force and appeals to self-sacrifice is the polar opposite of the Enlightenment heritate of rationality, the search for peace, and a belief in the common destiny of mankind. The warrior-leader, like the witch doctor, ultimately appeals to irrational emotionalism; and the cultural psychology that produces the bravest and most loyal warriors is a mind-set that is usually hostile to the sort of free inquiry of which scientific progress depends. This dynamic is observable in Afghanistan: no outside power has been able to conquer and pacify that society for millennia because of the tenacity of its warrior spirit; yet the country has one of the highest illiteracy rates on earth and is barely out of the Bronze Age in social development. p 260

There is a curious idea among unscientific men that in scientific writing there is a common plateau of perfectionism. Nothing could be more untrue. The reports of biologists are the measure, not of the science, but of the men themselves. There are as few scientific giants as any other kind. In some reports it is impossible, because of inept expression, to relate the descriptions to the living animals. In some papers collecting places are so mixed or ignored that the animals mentioned cannot be found at all. The same conditioning forces itself into specification as it does into any other kind of observation, and the same faults of carelessness will be found in scientific reports as in the witness chair of a criminal court. It has seemed sometimes that the little men in scientific work assumed the awe-fullness of a priesthood to hide their deficiencies, as the witch-doctor does with his stilts and high masks, as the priesthoods of all cults have, with secret or unfamiliar languages and symbols. It is usually found that only the little stuffy men object to what is called "popularization", by which they mean writing with a clarity understandable to one not familiar with the tricks and codes of the cult. We have not known a single great scientist who could not discourse freely and interestingly with a child. Can it be that the haters of clarity have nothing to say, have observed nothing, have no clear picture of even their own fields? A dull man seems to be a dull man no matter what his field, and of course it is the right of a dull scientist to protect himself with feathers and robes, emblems and degrees, as do other dull men who are potentates and grand imperial rulers of lodges of dull men.

The Book of Sand ("El libro de arena"), the character Eudoro Acevedo asks, "What happened to governments? "Tradition says they gradually fell into disuse. They would call elections, declare war, set tariffs, confiscate fortunes, order arrests and seek to impose censorship, but nobody on the planet obeyed them. "The press stopped publishing their contributions and pictures. Politicians had to look for an honest job; some found their talent in comedy or as witch doctors. The reality was very likely fuller than this brief account.

Ozroth’s chest was tight, and his stomach was starting to feel sour, so he turned and stalked out of the kitchen. Lucifer, why did so many human emotions feel like physical illness? It was a wonder humans didn’t visit the doctor on an hourly basis. Then again, Glimmer Falls was located in America, and news of the horrors of the American medical system had reached even the demon plane. “Admirable,” Astaroth had once said. “We could stand to learn a few things about ruthless manipulation and one-sided bargains from American healthcare insurers.

They don't deserve the truth. You called them rubes, and how right you are. They have set aside what brains they have—and many of them have quite a lot—and put their faith in that gigantic and fraudulent insurance company called religion. It promises them an eternity of joy in the next life if they live according to the rules in this one, and many of them try, but even that's not enough. When the pain comes, they want miracles. To them I'm nothing but a witch doctor who touches them with magic rings instead of shaking a bone rattle over them.

We who are here to-night are here as the servants of the guests of a great University, a University of knowledge, scholarship, and intellect. You do well to be proud of it. But I have wondered whether there may not be colleges and faculties of other experiences than yours, and whether even now in the far corners of the continents powers not yours are being brought to fruition. I have myself been something of a traveller, and every time I return to England I wonder whether the games of those children do not hold more intense life than the talk of your learned men-- a more intense passion for discovery, a greater power of exploration, new raptures, unknown paths of glorious knowledge; whether you may not yet sit at the feet of the natives of the Amazon or the Zambesi: whether the fakirs and the herdsmen, the witch-doctors may not enter the kingdom of man before you

DO YOU HEAR THAT SHRILL SOUND, MERRY MEN?” Robin Hood asked. “THE WITCH’S VOICE IS EVEN UGLIER THAN HER FACE, AND I DIDN’T THINK THAT WAS POSSIBLE.” “Silence!” the Wicked Witch commanded. “I MEAN, LOOK AT HER,” Robin continued. “THE WITCH IS SO UGLY, WHEN SHE WAS BORN, THE DOCTOR PROBABLY SLAPPED HER TWICE BECAUSE HE DIDN’T KNOW WHICH END WAS WHICH.” “All right, that’s enough—” “THE WITCH IS SO UGLY, SHE WENT TO A FUNERAL AND THE CORPSE GOT UP AND RAN AWAY!” “If you don’t shut up, I’ll—” “THE WITCH IS SO UGLY, SHE WAS VOTED THE NATIONAL ANIMAL OF SCOTLAND!” The Wicked Witch tapped her umbrella on the ground, and a dirty sock appeared in Robin Hood’s mouth.

Chad is a slim blond boy with a strange witch-doctor face that goes with his interest in anthropology and prehistory Indians, His nose beaks softly and almost creamily under a golden flare of hair; he has the beauty and grace of a Western hotshot who’s danced in roadhouses and played a little football. A quavering twang comes out when he speaks.

VISION OF A WISARD How many of you wish to be Wizards when you grow old? How many of you want to fly? I wished to become a dragon – he said And he looked at us with eyes filled with fire The Wizard of Earth’s Sea Descended to tell us a secret of ABRACADABRA Get to know – he said - God’s true name The word will initiate Power Gate keepers of Ancient Knowledge Will open their doors Mythological Archetypes will start their dance Leading you to your tribal clout Skeletons scattered over the burial grounds Ancestors with their weapons and spears Saints and Demons Doctors and Gypsies Healers and Witches Will join you to celebrate The Birth of Self Power of Mind over Body The Vision of the Dominion of Light

You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people’s privacy – being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveller is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveller’s personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveller’s worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveller.

Over two days, the remaining superheroic population of the Earth had heeded the call--by ship, teleport, magical portal, elemental transduction...the H-Man, Pangolin the Protector, Glass Tambourine, Omega-Mur, Hammer and Sickle, Jackdaw, the Infinite Wisdom, Doctor Mandragora, Czar and Tzar and Star, Kalamari Karl, Lightening Dancer, Doctor Chlorophyll, Jack Viking, Monomaniac, the Gin Fairy, the Holy Ghanta, the Bandolier, the Nuclear Atom, the Mysterious Flame, Moonstalker, Cataclysm and Inferno, the Skyguard II, Your Imaginary Pal, Dark Storm, the Hate Witch, Psychofire, Rabid, Riot, Fox and Hound, Hydrolad, Captain Fuji, Captain Cape Town, Captain Australia, Captain...Jeannie lost count, one uniform and one costume blurring into another.

It's my opinion he don't want to kill you,' said Perea - 'at least not yet. I've heard deir idea is to scar and worry a man wid deir spells, and narrow misses, and rheumatic pains, and bad dreams, and all dat, until he's sick of life. Of course, it's all talk, you know. You mustn't worry about it. But I wunder what he'll be up to next.' 'I shall have to be up to something first,' said Pollock, staring gloomily at the greasy cards that Perea was putting on the table. 'It don't suit my dignity to be followed about, and shot at, and blighted in this way. I wonder if Porroh hokey-pokey upsets your luck at cards.' He looked at Perea suspiciously. 'Very likely it does,' said Perea warmly, shuffling. 'Dey are wonderful people.' ("Pollock And The Porrah Man")

And this is as good a picture as any of how counterculture communities like the Haight took care of the war’s mangled souls: a doctor from a hippie clinic carrying a dying, emaciated soldier in his arms. For decades after the war, up to this very day, right-wing politicians and pundits have spread the libel about how peace activists and hippies greeted returning Vietnam vets with gobs of spit and contempt.

The doctor from the mainland came and went. Silence settled over the island again, like a displaced curtain falling back in thickened, heavier folds. For there was a different quality in the silence now. It had tasted something, rich food on which it had long been thinly rationed. Shadowy things were trooping up, called by that scent of blood, like flies that smell carrion. They were not strangers to the old house; they had been ill-fed and at a distance, now they were hungry and avid and near.

You men of science, you possibilitists, as my dear husband would say, can engage yourselves in the pursuit of the unknown around the clock and no one bats an eye. If a woman of social standing dares to speak of what can be felt but not seen, or unwittingly mutters to herself under her breath, why, it’s off to the doctor to have her head examined! I suppose by confessing my experiences to you I’ve given you my trust, dear doctor. I hope you’re the man I think you to be.” “What sort of man is that?” Dr. Brody asked. “A man who believes women.

Don't cure me, Mother, I couldn't bear the bath of your bitter spittle. No salve no ointment in a doctor's tube, no brew in a witch's kettle, no lover's mouth, no friend or god could heal me if your heart turned in anathema, grew stone against me. Defenseless and naked as the day I slid from you twin voices keening and the cord pulsing our common protests, I'm coming back back to you woman, flesh of your woman's flesh, your fairest, most faithful mirror, my love transversing me like a filament wired to the noonday sun. Receive me, Mother.

Second daughter walks outside where everything smells like a ghost. She leaves without her red cloak, without her father's ax, without breadcrumbs for the path home. She has only her proud virginity that clangs like a bell, her will to escape like an egg slipping free and her curiosity, that strange puss, the part of her brain hat claws toward the dark. In the night, in the black fringe of the forest, she could be anyone. She could be the witch sipping boy-blood, the doctor scraping lichen for his collection, the girl who runs and runs and runs.

DO YOU HEAR THAT SHRILL SOUND, MERRY MEN?” Robin Hood asked. “THE WITCH’S VOICE IS EVEN UGLIER THAN HER FACE, AND I DIDN’T THINK THAT WAS POSSIBLE.” “Silence!” the Wicked Witch commanded. “I MEAN, LOOK AT HER,” Robin continued. “THE WITCH IS SO UGLY, WHEN SHE WAS BORN, THE DOCTOR PROBABLY SLAPPED HER TWICE BECAUSE HE DIDN’T KNOW WHICH END WAS WHICH.” “All right, that’s enough—” “THE WITCH IS SO UGLY, SHE WENT TO A FUNERAL AND THE CORPSE GOT UP AND RAN AWAY!” “If you don’t shut up, I’ll—” “THE WITCH IS SO UGLY, SHE WAS VOTED THE NATIONAL ANIMAL OF SCOTLAND!

It seems obvious that throughout history, as one of the few professions open to women, midwifery must have attracted women of unusual intelligence, competence, and self-respect§. While acknowledging that many remedies used by the witches were “purely magical” and worked, if at all, by suggestion, Ehrenreich and English point out an important distinction between the witch-healer and the medical man of the late Middle Ages: . . . the witch was an empiricist; She relied on her senses rather than on faith or doctrine, she believed in trial and error, cause and effect. Her attitude was not religiously passive, but actively inquiring. She trusted her ability to find ways to deal with disease, pregnancy and childbirth—whether through medication or charms. In short, her magic was the science of her time. By contrast: There was nothing in late mediaeval medical training that conflicted with church doctrine, and little that we would recognize as “science”. Medical students . . . spent years studying Plato, Aristotle and Christian theology. . . . While a student, a doctor rarely saw any patients at all, and no experimentation of any kind was taught. . . . Confronted with a sick person, the university-trained physician had little to go on but superstition. . . . Such was the state of medical “science” at the time when witch-healers were persecuted for being practitioners of “magic”.15 Since asepsis and the transmission of disease through bacteria and unwashed hands was utterly unknown until the latter part of the nineteenth century, dirt was a presence in any medical situation—real dirt, not the misogynistic dirt associated by males with the female body. The midwife, who attended only women in labor, carried fewer disease bacteria with her than the physician.

I cannot accept the proposition that the four-hundred-year travail of the American Negro should result merely in his attainment of the present level of American civilisation. I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now - in order to support the moral contradictions and the spiritual aridity of my life - expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse. The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power- and no one holds power forever. White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being. And I repeat: The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks- the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind.Why, for example- especially knowing th3e family as I do- I should want to marry your sister is a great mystery to me. But your sister and I have every right to marry if we wish to, and no one has the right to stop us. If she cannot raise me to her level, perhaps I can raise her to mine.

Yet the homogeneity of contemporary humanity is most apparent when it comes to our view of the natural world and of the human body. If you fell sick a thousand years ago, it mattered a great deal where you lived. In Europe, the resident priest would probably tell you that you had made God angry and that in order to regain your health you should donate something to the church, make a pilgrimage to a sacred site, and pray fervently for God’s forgiveness. Alternatively, the village witch might explain that a demon had possessed you and that she could cast it out using song, dance, and the blood of a black cockerel. In the Middle East, doctors brought up on classical traditions might explain that your four bodily humors were out of balance and that you should harmonize them with a proper diet and foul-smelling potions. In India, Ayurvedic experts would offer their own theories concerning the balance between the three bodily elements known as doshas and recommend a treatment of herbs, massages, and yoga postures. Chinese physicians, Siberian shamans, African witch doctors, Amerindian medicine men—every empire, kingdom, and tribe had its own traditions and experts, each espousing different views about the human body and the nature of sickness, and each offering their own cornucopia of rituals, concoctions, and cures. Some of them worked surprisingly well, whereas others were little short of a death sentence. The only thing that united European, Chinese, African, and American medical practices was that everywhere at least a third of all children died before reaching adulthood, and average life expectancy was far below fifty.14 Today, if you happen to be sick, it makes much less difference where you live. In Toronto, Tokyo, Tehran, or Tel Aviv, you will be taken to similar-looking hospitals, where you will meet doctors in white coats who learned the same scientific theories in the same medical colleges. They will follow identical protocols and use identical tests to reach very similar diagnoses. They will then dispense the same medicines produced by the same international drug companies. There are still some minor cultural differences, but Canadian, Japanese, Iranian, and Israeli physicians hold much the same views about the human body and human diseases. After the Islamic State captured Raqqa and Mosul, it did not tear down the local hospitals. Rather, it launched an appeal to Muslim doctors and nurses throughout the world to volunteer their services there.15 Presumably even Islamist doctors and nurses believe that the body is made of cells, that diseases are caused by pathogens, and that antibiotics kill bacteria.

I have two children, both boys. I’m in and out of hospitals with them all the time, seeing doctors. You wouldn’t know if the older one was a boy or a girl. His little head is quite bald. I’ve taken him to professors, and to the wise women too. Whisperers, witches. He’s the littlest in his class. Can’t run or play. If somebody hit him by accident, he would bleed. He could die. He’s got a blood disease. I won’t even name it. I stay in the hospital with him and think, ‘He’s going to die.’ But then I see I mustn’t think like that or death might hear. I cry in the toilet. All the mothers do. Not in the wards, but in the toilets or the bathroom. I come back all cheerful: ‘Your cheeks are rosy pink. You’re getting better.’ ‘Mum, take me away from the hospital. I’ll die here. Everybody here dies.’ Where am I to cry? In the toilet? There’s a queue. Everyone is just like me.

At this point, another trope makes its appearance. It can be called the invention of anachronistic space, and it reached full authority as an administrative and regulatory technology in the late Victorian era. Within this trope, the agency of women, the colonized and the industrial working class are disavowed and projected onto anachronistic space: prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity. According to the colonial version of this trope, imperial progress across the space of empire is figured as a journey backward in time to an anachronistic moment of prehistory. By extension, the return journey to Europe is seen as rehearsing the evolutionary logic of historical progress, forward and upward to the apogee of the Enlightenment in the European metropolis. Geographical difference across space is figured as a historical difference across time. The ideologue J.-M. Degerando captured this notion concisely: “The philosophical traveller, sailing to the ends of the earth, is in fact travelling in time; he is exploring the past.” 46 The stubborn and threatening heterogeneity of the colonies was contained and disciplined not as socially or geographically different from Europe and thus equally valid, but as temporally different and thus as irrevocably superannuated by history. Hegel, for example, perhaps the most influential philosophical proponent of this notion, figured Africa as inhabiting not simply a different geographical space but a different temporal zone, surviving anachronistically within the time of history. Africa, announces Hegel, “is no Historical part of the world … it has no movement or development to exhibit.” Africa came to be seen as the colonial paradigm of anachronistic space, a land perpetually out of time in modernity, marooned and historically abandoned. Africa was a fetish-land, inhabited by cannibals, dervishes and witch doctors, abandoned in prehistory at the precise moment before the Weltgeist (as the cunning agent of Reason) manifested itself in history.

Sometimes I have thought I heard a Dwarf-drum in the mountains. Sometimes at night, in the woods, I thought I had caught a glimpse of Fauns and Satyrs dancing a long way off; but when I came to the place, there was never anything there. I have often despaired; but something always happens to start me hoping again. I don’t know. But at least you can try to be a King like the High King Peter of old, and not like your uncle.” “Then it’s true about the Kings and Queens too, and about the White Witch?” said Caspian. “Certainly it is true,” said Cornelius. “Their reign was the Golden Age in Narnia and the land has never forgotten them.” “Did they live in this castle, Doctor?” “Nay, my dear,” said the old man. “This castle is a thing of yesterday. Your great-great-grandfather built it. But when the two sons of Adam and the two daughters of Eve were made Kings and Queens of Narnia by Aslan himself, they lived in the castle of Cair Paravel. No man alive has seen that blessed place and perhaps even the ruins of it have now vanished. But we believe it was far from here, down at the mouth of the Great River, on the very shore of the sea.” “Ugh!” said Caspian with a shudder. “Do you mean in the Black Woods? Where all the--the--you know, the ghosts live?” “Your Highness speaks as you have been taught,” said the Doctor. “But it is all lies. There are no ghosts there. That is a story invented by the Telmarines. Your Kings are in deadly fear of the sea because they can never quite forget that in all stories Aslan comes from over the sea. They don’t want to go near it and they don’t want anyone else to go near it. So they have let great woods grow up to cut their people off from the coast. But because they have quarreled with the trees they are afraid of the woods. And because they are afraid of the woods they imagine that they are full of ghosts. And the Kings and great men, hating both the sea and the wood, partly believe these stories, and partly encourage them. They feel safer if no one in Narnia dares to go down to the coast and look out to sea--toward Aslan’s land and the morning and the eastern end of the world.

Well, Doctor Dillamond seemed to think they were in questionable taste, given the Banns on Animals Mobility." "Doctor Dillamond, alas," said Madame Morrible, "is a doctor. He is not a poet. He is also a God, and I might ask you girls if we have ever had a great Goat sonneteer or balladeer? Alas, dear Miss Elphaba, Doctor Dillamond doesn't understand the poetic convention of irony. Would you like to define irony for the class, please?" "I don't believe I can, Madame." "Irony, some say, is the art of juxtaposing incongruous parts. One needs a knowing distance. Irony presupposes detachment, which, alas, in the case of Animal Rights, we may forgive Doctor Dillamond for being without." "So that phrase that he objected to - Animals should be seen and not heard - that was ironic?" continued Elphaba, studying her papers and not looking at Madame Morrible. Galinda and her classmates were enthralled, for it was clear that each of the females at opposite ends of the room would have enjoyed seeing the other crumble in a sudden attack of the spleen. "One could consider it in an ironic mode if one chose," said Madame Morrible. "How do you choose?" said Elphaba. "How impertinent!" said Madame Morrible. "Well, but I don't mean impertinence. I'm trying to learn. If you - if anyone - thought that statement was true, then it isn't in conflict with the boring bossy bit that preceded it. It's just argument and conclusion, and I don't see the irony." "You don't see much, Miss Elphaba," said Madame Morrible. "You must learn to put yourself in the shoes of someone wiser than you are, and look from that angle. To be stuck in ignorance, to be circumscribed by the walls of one's own modest acumen, well, it is very sad in one so young and bright." She spit out the last word, and it seemed to Galinda, somehow, a low comment on Elphaba's skin color, which today was indeed lustrous with the effort of public speaking. "But I was trying to put myself in the shoes of Doctor Dillamond," said Elphaba, almost whining, but not giving up. "In the case of poetic interpretation, I venture to suggest, it may indeed be true. Animal should not be heard," snapped Madame Morrible. "Do you mean that ironically?" said Elphaba, but she sat down with her hands over her face and did not look up again for the rest of the session.

A witch doctor or wizard pretends that his main job is to solve problems in a village, town, or community. In most cases, his curses and spells are the cause of the problems he then cures. However, his real mission in these exchanges is to plant a lifeline between his god and the victim, which gives the victim and the god equal access to each other. Of course, the god knows his way to the victim, but the victim might not know until he is initiated into the craft. Again, without access to man, a demonic spirit remains powerless. Though God Almighty is the sole owner and Creator of earth, He has given the earth to man that they may take charge over it. Earth is reserved for the exploits of man, not spirits. When a spirit has access to man, however, it can legally function on earth. When a witch doctor gives the god access to a victim, the god can accomplish things through the victim. The apostle Paul said, “…it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me…” (Gal. 2:20). Paul said this because his education did not give him the extra abilities Christ gave him. Christ’s access to him accomplished what the Adamic nature had limited in man. A demonic spirit might not be able to work all things as Christ did through Paul, but it will work many things through the person it has access to. As Christ claims and protects you if you have accepted Him, so a spirit claims and protects the one who accepts him.

all expecting me to move, I really should move. She used to think the doctors who fainted at an autopsy were fools, really. How could such a thing affect one so physically? If you hit me with a baseball bat, I might pass out. Oh, God, what you don’t know about life is really just beginning to reveal itself in this room. And your mother is in that coffin. What did you think, that she would wait here, alive, until you came? Until you finally realized … Down here, in this strange land! Why, this is like another country, this. The white-haired Englishman came towards her. Yes, who are you? Why are you here? Why are you so dramatically and grotesquely out of place? But then again, he wasn’t. He was just like all of them, the inhabitants of this strange land, so decorous and so gentle, and not a touch of irony or self-consciousness or false sentiment in his kindly face. He drew close to her, gently making the handsome young man give way.

An axiom is a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge, a statement necessarily contained in all others, whether any particular speaker chooses to identify it or not. An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it. Let the caveman who does not choose to accept the axiom of identity, try to present his theory without using the concept of identity or any concept derived from it—let the anthropoid who does not choose to accept the existence of nouns, try to devise a language without nouns, adjectives or verbs—let the witch-doctor who does not choose to accept the validity of sensory perception, try to prove it without using the data he obtained by sensory perception—let the head-hunter who does not choose to accept the validity of logic, try to prove it without using logic—let the pigmy who proclaims that a skyscraper needs no foundation after it reaches its fiftieth story, yank the base from under his building, not yours—let the cannibal who snarls that the freedom of man’s mind was needed to create an industrial civilization, but is not needed to maintain it, be given an arrowhead and bearskin, not a university chair of economics.

Eventually it came to health care. Here a remarkable exchange took place among Cubans, while the Angolans listened in silence. It began when Rodolfo Puente Ferro, the able Cuban ambassador in Angola, said, “There are regions, provincial capitals, where really there is no medicine. The sick are given prescriptions, but then they have to go to the witch doctor, to the traditional healer, because there is no medicine. The mortality rate is high because of this lack of medicine.” The Cuban health authorities had tried to help, offering fifty-five types of medicine that were manufactured in Cuba, “that are really necessary and indispensable for the diseases that are found in Angola.” They had offered them at cost—$700,000 for a six-month supply. After months of silence, the Angolans had finally asked for twenty-nine of these medicines, but they had not yet been shipped because Luanda had failed to release the requisite letters of credit. Castro asked, “Can we manufacture this medicine for $700,000?” After Puente Ferro confirmed that this was possible, Fidel continued, “Well . . . then let’s do it and send it to Angola, and let them pay later. . . . We don’t want to make any profit with this medicine; we will sell it at cost. . . . If the situation is critical, we’ll send it on the first available ship, and let them pay later.” He insisted, “We cannot let a man die in a hospital, or a child, or an old person, or a wounded person, or a soldier, or whoever it may be, because someone forgot to write a letter of credit or because someone didn’t sign it. Besides, we’re not talking about large quantities. We won’t go bankrupt if you can’t pay. We won’t be ruined. If we were talking about one hundred million dollars, I would have to say, ‘Comrades, we cannot afford it.’ But if we’re only talking about $700,000 . . . We can handle it.

As had been true at Palin rallies, reporters at Tea Party events caught attendees comparing me to animals or Hitler. Signs turned up showing me dressed like an African witch doctor with a bone through my nose and the caption OBAMACARE COMING SOON TO A CLINIC NEAR YOU. Conspiracy theories abounded: that my healthcare bill would set up “death panels” to evaluate whether people deserved treatment, clearing the way for “government-encouraged euthanasia,” or that it would benefit illegal immigrants, in the service of my larger goal of flooding the country with welfare-dependent, reliably Democratic voters.

Throughout the long deep-state witch hunt—the doctored Minsk defecation video, the phony tax-evasion probe, the counterfeit porn-star diaries, the bogus Moscow skyscraper investigation, the hoax penile-enhancement scandal, the fake witness-tampering charges, and both fraudulent impeachment trials—the Potussies had remained steadfast, vociferous, adoring defenders.

The Book of Sand ("El libro de arena"), the character Eudoro Acevedo asks, "What happened to governments? Tradition says they gradually fell into disuse. "They would call elections, declare war, set tariffs, confiscate fortunes, order arrests and seek to impose censorship, but nobody on the planet obeyed them. The press stopped publishing their contributions and pictures. "Politicians had to look for an honest job; some found their talent in comedy or as witch doctors. The reality was very likely fuller than this brief account.

Witch-doctors are said to be very carefullest anyone should find out what plants they dig up for magical use. They remove their stalks and leaves and hide them in the bush some way from~here they have dug them up lest anyone should follow in their tracks and learn their medicines.

Witch doctors .are aware of one piece of reality which is unknown to the rest of their society

I have heard even witch-doctors themselves admit that not all members of their corporation are reliable and honest, but only those who have received proper medicines from persons qualified to initiate them.

Also, witch-doctors are part of the oracle-system.

A witch-doctor divines successfully because he says what his listener wishes him to say,

The witch-doctor also gets his listeners into a suitable frame ofmind for receiving his revelations by lavish use ofprofessional dogmatism.

At the beginning he selects to some extent the names of those persons about whom the witchdoctor is to dance, and at the end he supplies in part an interpretation of the witch-doctor's utterances from his own peculiar social circumstances and mental content. I think also that as a witch-doctor brings out his revelations bit by bit, at first, almost as suggestions, even inquiries, he watches carefully his interlocutor to observewhether his answer is in accordance with the questioner'S own suspicions. He becomes more definite when he is assured on this point.

A witch-doctor very seldom accuses a member of the aristocracy of witchcraft, just as a commoner does not consult oracles about them.

The witch doctor and his client consciously select between them a number of persons likely to have caused sickness or loss.

It is important to note that scepticism about witch-doctors is not socially repressed.

If we continue to pay "bad" for "bad", bad will never finish on earth.

You’ll understand one day, Susan. We can’t always be actors in the play. Sometimes, it is given to us merely to be the audience.

Remember – it is far better to let the guilty go unpunished than to make the innocent suffer.

died. She got the reputation of being a witch because of these ointments and potions she makes out of stuff she finds in the woods. To be honest, some of them work better than the medicines you get from the doctor, but everybody’s just a little bit afraid of her.

Oh yes, there are a lot of things that have been known for centuries before we had a scientific explanation for them. Medieval grimoires tell about witches using bee balm for people with heart disease and, of course, bee balm contains digitalis. It’s just what modern doctors use. Somehow the witches had learned empirically over millenniums of being village herbalists what herbs really work.

There are three things you need to know about me, son. One, I love my daughters and my granddaughter more than life itself. Two, I'm a medical doctor, and I know how to use a scalpel. And three, I'm not above cutting you up and using you for crab bait. Are we clear?

All men are fools when it comes to love,’ the doctor murmured.

In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding—symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power. With this insight into a power process, our Imperial Security Force must be ever alert to the formation of sub-languages. —LECTURE TO THE ARRAKEEN WAR COLLEGE BY THE PRINCESS IRULAN

In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding—symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power. With this insight into a power process, our Imperial Security Force must be ever alert to the formation of sub-languages.