A Jamaican Physician's Account on Obeah, 1799

Benjamin Moseley served as a physician in Jamaica for almost two decades from 1768 to 1784. His book A Treatise on Sugar was first published in 1799 and went through several editions. In this excerpt, Moseley describes some of the aspects of how obeah was practiced in Jamaica. In his longer work, Moseley believe obeah to be the same as witchcraft and compared it to superstitions found in Europe. He also compared the practices of enslaved people in Jamaica to the "witches" tried a century earlier in Salem.

Obi, for the purposes of bewitching people, or consuming them by lingering illness, is made of grave dirt, hair, teeth of sharks, and other animals, blood, feathers, egg-shells, images in wax, the hearts of birds, liver of mice, and some potent roots, weeds, and bushes, of which Europeans are at this time ignorant; but which were known, for the same purposes, to the ancients.

Certain mixtures of these ingredients are burnt; or buried very deep in the ground; or hung up a chimney; or on the side of an house; or in a garden; or laid under the threshold of the door of the party, to suffer; with incantation songs, or curses, or ceremonies necromantically performed in planetary hours, or at midnight, regarding the aspects of the moon. The person who wants to do the mischief is also sent to burying-grounds, or some secret place, where spirits are supposed to frequent, to invoke his, or her dead parents, or some dead friend, to assist in the curse.

A negro, who thinks himself bewitched by Obi, will apply to an Obi-man, or Obi-woman, for cure.

These magicians will interrogate the patient, as to the part of the body most afflicted. This part they will torture with pinching, drawing with gourds, or calabashes, beating, and pressing. When the patient is nearly exhausted with this rough magnetising, Obi brings out an old rusty nail, or a piece of bone, or an ass’s tooth, or the jaw-bone of a rat, or a fragment of a quart-bottle, from the part; and the patient is well the next day.