obeah

A form of folk magic, medicine or witchcraft originating in Africa and practised in parts of the Caribbean.

Noun

  1. A form of folk magic, medicine or witchcraft originating in Africa and practised in parts of the Caribbean.
    • Although lacking a self-perpetuating institutional structure, Obeah was a crucial element of Afro-Caribbean religions everywhere from Suriname's Maroon societies (communities of runaway slaves) to the Leeward Islands'...
    • However, quite often it is also applied to protect from obeah spells which the client feels himself or herself to be suffering from. Since obeah can also cast protective spells (e.g., against other obeah spells), it is...
    • Obeah—a set of hybrid or creolized beliefs dependent on ritual invocation, fetishes, and charms—incorporates two very distinct categories of practice. The first involves "the casting of spells for various purposes, both...
  2. A magician or witch doctor of the magic craft.
    • […] but he went down to death, with dusky dreams of African shadow-catchers and Obeahs hunting him. - 1860 November, R[alph] W[aldo] Emerson, “The Story of West-Indian Emancipation”, in M[oncure] D[aniel] Conway,...
    • A Jamaican Christian came to me for counseling. […] I asked him if he had been charmed as a child by an Obeah. Obeahs are the magicians of the Carribean^([sic]) islands. - 1986, Kurt E. Koch, Occult ABC: Exposing Occult...
    • Although Adair suspected that obeahs often employed poisons, he emphasized that the diseases induced by obeahs resulted from "depraved imagination, or a powerful excitement or depression of the mental faculties." -...

    Synonyms: mage shaman spellcaster archmage archmagician bewitcher charmer conjurer illusionist Karcist magic user magus obeah sortileger spellbinder spellmaker thaumaturge theurgist whizz whiz witch doctor wiz wonderworker

  3. A spell performed in the practice of the magic craft; an item associated with such a spell.
    • Mr. M. J. Walhouse then read a paper on "Some Indian Obeahs", and exhibited some photos of Kurumbars, and a piece of the bone of an elk and an iron cock's spur, with which a man had been murdered, both of which had been...

    Synonyms: enchantment makutu wanga cantrip chantment charm craft dwimmer hex incantation magic magic spell mojo obeah pishogue rune spell spellword

Origin

Uncertain; apparently from a Caribbean creole, probably ultimately from a West African language. The Oxford English Dictionary points to Igbo abià (“knowledge, wisdom”), obìa (“doctor, healer”). Cognate of Aukan obiya, Saramaccan obia, and Sranan Tongo obia.

Forms

obeahs obe obea obi obia oby

Derived

obeah doctor obeahism obeahman

Verb

  1. To bewitch using this kind of folk magic.
    • Sometimes an egg is boiled hard, and laid in the middle of the road, surrounded by a circle of plantane bark; at others, pieces of hair, cats' teeth, cocks' feathers, and bits of glass, broken amber, and snakes' skins,...
    • [I]f any negro from that time forward should be proved to have accused another of Obeahing him or of telling another that he had been Obeahed, he should forfeit his share of the next present of salt-fish, which I meant...
    • A negro takes a dislike to a negro or negroes, either upon the same estate with himself or upon another; he goes to the Obeah woman and tells her that he will give money or something else as payment if she will Obeah...

    Hypernyms: bewitch enspell hex bechat becry beglammer bespell conjure enchant englamour ensorcell forspeak glamour jinx maleficiate mojo spell spellbind spellcast witch

Forms

obeahs obeahing obeahed obe obea obi obia oby