Why is Obeah considered the most dangerous magical system?

Part of the reason is that most people who identify themselves as “white” either don’t believe in it, or believe their thought policing religion protects them from it.

What they don’t know is that most things classed as “Obeah” or “Voodoo” (African or other indigenous practices that have begun to be called this in the English speaking parts of the world) are mostly indigenous spirituality, folk medicine, and science that the west just hasn’t bothered to test yet. It’s based on very sound, repeatable experiments, psychology, and chemistry.

Proof: in the early 1990’s I had a friend who started having really severe gastrointestinal problems. Long story short, the symptoms were very much like “snakes in the stomach”, a well known “Voodoo” curse. When it was just him I thought he had just angered someone and they put that work on him but then almost his whole town in New Hampshire came down with the same symptoms.

Turns out it was from the same chemicals that the curse recipe comes from, due to decaying reptiles and amphibians that had been caught in their water system.

Saying “Voodoo doesn’t work” or “magic doesn’t exist” is illogical because it is heavily dependent on a western definition of “magic” and because like racists they are dismissing a whole block of science and medicine just because they don’t know how it works.

So one of the reasons Obeah and “Voodoo” are considered the most dangerous is that most westerners don’t take them seriously. A whole town could be sick and die, and if one African person didn’t inform them (me) and one Latino person didn’t medicate them (Papa Jim) they would have perished of arrogance failing to even look for an obvious toxin.


Buy Respectful African Spirituality Centered Art

About K. Sis. Nicole T.N. Lasher

Sis. Nicole T. Lasher (Sheloya) is the female king of Ile Baalat Teva, an African diaspora spirituality group in northern Israel.

Comments are closed.