The Holy Spirit against witchcraft

One Sunday morning I was called by a friend, Tom,Footnote ⁴ to come to his home. His brother's young son had fallen seriously ill with an affliction that had caused him to suddenly and inexplicably lose the use of his arms and legs. The local hospital had been unable to diagnose his condition, and nobody knew how to treat him. In addition, Tom, who rode a motorcycle-taxi for a living, had been feeling sporadic chest pains over recent months, and had told me several weeks earlier that he suspected his family had been attacked by jwok (witchcraft).Footnote ⁵ Not only were these physical ailments cause for suspicion, but he had also found himself struggling financially, a complaint often associated with jwok. First, he had begun to find that he was earning less than usual from his trade, and in the weeks in which he made good money, he would invariably find that one of his own children would fall ill, forcing him to spend all his earnings on medical treatment. Then, his problems were compounded when the owner of the motorcycle that Tom rented recalled the bike following a dispute, leaving Tom jobless and struggling for money.

Tom had called me because a prayer team affiliated with a local Anglican chapelFootnote ⁶ was on its way to his home to search for, and remove, the witchcraft substances (yat) suspected of having been hidden by an unknown person intent on causing harm to Tom, his brothers and their families. The family were inviting friends, relations and neighbours to attend the ceremony. A Catholic family, they had first gone to the Catholic priest and asked him to pray, but, having seen no immediate improvement in their situation, and fearing for the health of Tom's nephew, they chose to pay for the prayer team, which, like many Charismatic Christian groups across Uganda and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa since the 1980s, had become well known in the local area for their healing and anti-witchcraft abilities, but charged a rather hefty rate of 100,000 Ugandan shillingsFootnote ⁷ for an afternoon's work.Footnote ⁸

When I arrived at Tom's home, his brother had gone to collect the prayer team, but they did not arrive for several hours. On the phone, Tom had insisted that I bring with me the bottle of cider, brought back from a recent trip to Kampala, which I had promised him some time earlier. Despite it being a Sunday morning, in his eagerness to try the cider, Tom opened the bottle immediately and invited me to drink it with him while we waited for the prayer team to arrive. As we shared the cider and chatted, several of Tom's relations began to complain, and one of the women rather sternly told Tom that he should not be drinking alcohol because the prayer team was about to arrive. While not usually opposed to alcohol consumption (even on Sunday mornings), they worried that, as teetotal ‘Protestants’, the prayer team would be angry to find us drinking before the ceremony. Once they become filled with the Holy Spirit, she argued, they would know that we had been drinking and would begin ‘quarrelling’ with us. Tom half-heartedly laughed off the protestations of his relatives, and continued to finish the bottle. By the time he had finished, however, their worries had begun to play on his mind, and he got up and told me that we needed to go back to the trading centre to find some sweets to cover the smell of alcohol, fearing that, if we were caught out, we could jeopardize the ceremony. The offending bottle was taken away to be hidden, and we rode back to the nearest trading centre in search of chewing gum.

A couple of hours later, the prayer team, made up of about a dozen people, arrived. Before proceedings began, their leader addressed the ever increasing crowd. He told everybody that they must remove any jewellery they were wearing and put it on the makeshift altar that had been erected in front of him. As I moved to remove my necklace, though, he stopped me. Seeming not to want to inconvenience me, he remarked that, as I was a visitor to the area, he would explain this to the Holy Spirit so that I would be allowed an exemption.

Following this, one of the members of the prayer team, accompanied by a drummer, began singing songs of praise, and everybody else (by now a large crowd of relatives, neighbours and friends had gathered) was quickly up on their feet, dancing, clapping and singing along. Before long, a loud hooting sound came from one of the young women of the prayer team. Apparently filled with the Holy Spirit, she began moving her arms awkwardly, stretching and pointing, before her left arm flew into furious circles around her shoulder. After a minute or two, she began moving slowly around the compound, following her outstretched right arm, which seemed to be showing her where to take her body, before suddenly bursting into a sprint in and out of the huts of the compound and through the surrounding gardens. A group of the assembled onlookers peeled off from the singing to follow her, occasionally gathering around as she stopped and knelt over a piece of ground or a tree stump to examine the place with her hands. Meanwhile, two other members of the prayer team had also fallen into a trance – a young man and another young woman – each behaving in a similar manner to the first woman: stretching, leaping, bounding and sprinting, then occasionally stopping to examine a piece of ground with their hands. Each, like the first, was followed by a small crowd, which included another member of the prayer team carrying a plastic bottle filled with blessed water, one or two men carrying hoes to dig up whatever yat (medicine/charm) were found, and some plastic bags for containing these materials. The ‘things’, as Tom called them, were not visible to anybody until the person possessed by the Holy Spirit put their hand over them, at which point they became visible to everyone.

After another two or three hours, each of the possessed members of the prayer team had returned to a state of normal consciousness, and four bags of yat had been amassed for inspection. As we crowded around to watch, the leader of the prayer team poured out the contents of the bags, revealing several dirty bottles, two large shells, some loose sticks and twigs, and a bunch of twigs tightly wrapped in a mesh material, which Tom carefully prised open with a stick, fearing to touch it with his hands. Most of the bottles and the shells contained a mixture of sticks and soil, tightly packed, and some also included bits of material that seemed to have come from pieces of clothing. One of the other bottles contained a clear liquid of unverifiable substance or origin. After a brief examination, the contents were taken to the edge of the compound to be burned, some prayers were said, and then the gathered crowd prepared to eat the goat meat that had been prepared by the family for the occasion, before gradually drifting off home.

You don't know my heart: indeterminacy and deception

What struck me as most remarkable about this prayer gathering was that it was apparently possible to use deception to get around the fact that the Holy Spirit might not help us were our alcohol consumption to be discovered. Tom and his family were worried that, if our Holy Spirit-filled guests discovered we had drunk alcohol, the Holy Spirit would fail to help find and remove the substances that were harming them. Yet they also thought that it was possible to hide the evidence and prevent the prayer team and the Holy Spirit from knowing of our alcohol consumption.Footnote ⁹ To explain this, we must first understand the role of deception in social relationships in Buluya, relationships developed in an indeterminate social landscape, often with pragmatic ideas about security and practical gain at their heart.

The following extract, paraphrased from an interview with a young man named Daniel, demonstrates something of this indeterminate social landscape, in which the intentions, motivations and ‘heart’ of other people can never truly be known:

As this narration of demonic advice passed from friend to friend shows, people in Buluya acknowledge that one should not take perceived good intentions at face value, nor trust others without hesitation, because one can never know the true nature of other people, the spiritual forces driving them, or their intentions towards you.

Such sentiments are documented by anthropologists working in Eastern Africa and across the continent. Evans-Pritchard drew attention to the notion in the 1930s, highlighting the Azande proverb that ‘one cannot see into another man as into an open woven basket’ (Evans-Pritchard Reference Evans-Pritchard1937: 117), and many anthropologists have picked up similar themes since, in discussions of secrecy, social remoteness and (dis)trust (for example, Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff2001; West Reference West2005; Reynolds Whyte Reference Reynolds Whyte1997; Evans-Pritchard Reference Evans-Pritchard1937; Ferme Reference Ferme2001; Sarró Reference Sarró2009; Archambault Reference Archambault2013; Piot Reference Piot1993; Geschiere Reference Geschiere2013). To take one example, Comaroff and Comaroff (Reference Comaroff and Comaroff2001) expand on a similar idea to that contained in Evans-Pritchard's proverb, which alludes to the notion that people do not fully open themselves up to others. They argue that there is a sense among the Tswana in Southern Africa that individuals never reveal their whole person; instead, they reveal and conceal certain aspects at certain times to certain people (ibid.: 275–6). In Buluya, a similar idea prevails: it is assumed that people do not reveal themselves fully to others, and that one can never truly ‘know’ (ngeo) another person, or even oneself.Footnote ¹¹ One friend from a nearby town who had spent time in Europe told me, by way of explanation, that his European friends surprised him with the amount of detail they revealed to each other about themselves and their thoughts.

In Buluya, where ‘full’ knowledge of and intimacy with another person is deemed impossible, distrust is thus a common and openly expressed characteristic of almost every interpersonal relationship, and deception is a commonly used tool for the concealment of certain knowledge (cf. Gilsenen Reference Gilsenen2016 [1976]; Simmel Reference Simmel and Wolff1964). Just as Gilsenen has argued that, among Lebanese villagers, lying ‘is the product of, and produces in turn, basic elements and contradictions in the social structure’ (Reference Gilsenen2016 [1976]: 497–8), in Buluya this indeterminate social landscape both informs and is informed by the prevalence of distrust and deception. In a social context where people know that they cannot fully know others, and that they themselves cannot be fully known (and do not wish to be), people both expect to be deceived by others and strategically use deception themselves. Two common refrains used by my informants to explain the prevalence of deception are ‘we are all liars’ and ‘we are all corrupt’. One teenage informant, Matayo, named his guard dog You Don't Know My Heart, alluding to the common notion that you must never trust anybody, not even those closest to you, because however long you spend with them, you will never know whether their heart (cuny) is good or bad, or what their intentions are towards you.

The notion that you should not trust anybody, and should actively expect people to deceive you, runs deep even in the most intimate relationships. As Reynolds Whyte has noted among the Nyole in eastern Uganda, ‘relations to kin, neighbours, and spirits are at once the source of security and danger’ (Reynolds Whyte Reference Reynolds Whyte1997: 227; see also Geschiere Reference Geschiere2003; Reference Geschiere2013). Stories are told warning of men who secretly bring witchcraft (jwok) into their households to enhance their prosperity, with fatal consequences for families as the jwok seeks blood from the man's relations as payment for its work, and of seemingly good spouses who murder their partner or infect them with HIV. In a patrilineal society where sons all live on shared ancestral land inherited from their father, suspicions of witchcraft instigated by female in-laws jealous of their husbands’ brothers’ families are similarly common. Meanwhile, night-time thefts of goats, cattle, sheep, crops, bicycles and motorcycles are a perennial hazard, with the thieves rarely caught but usually assumed to be among the people the victim interacts with every day – and even among one's own family and clan members. One interviewee, David, quantified his distrust by telling me that he would never trust another person ‘more than 50 per cent’, because you ‘never know what they might do’. ‘You know,’ he concluded, ‘people here in Africa, they are very tricky.’

Practical relationships

However, while the sentiments discussed above draw attention to the malevolent side of dishonesty and distrust, in Buluya deception is often seen as necessary, normal and acceptable: a pragmatic strategy for survival. Many accusations and suspicions of dishonesty were not grounded in a belief that the deceiver was acting maliciously.Footnote ¹² Here, I wish to turn to the many relationships forged in Buluya that are driven by the need for practical gain – material, economic and social advancement and security – and in which deception is accepted as normal and carries little negative moral connotation.

Zigon highlights the ways in which people who see lying and deception as immoral nevertheless justify such behaviour in specific contexts. Using the case of two Russian women, he shows how they conceptualized their work colleagues as being outside their everyday rules of sociality in which lying was unacceptable. Instead, lying falls within ‘the rules of the game’ of workplace relationships (Reference Zigon2009: 271). Other scholars show how, in certain contexts, the ability to lie well is a skill that is necessary and even prized. For example, Murphy has argued that among the indigenous Brazilian Mehinacu, lying and the ambiguity it creates are vital to the existence and continuation of society (Reference Murphy1972: 227–8); Gilsenen shows how, in a Lebanese village, lying is ‘a positive, enabling element in the everyday world’ that makes possible the coexistence of a strict, unambiguous honour code and the messy realities of everyday life (Reference Gilsenen2016 [1976]: 521); and Asad writes about Kababish men in Sudan who present themselves as ‘liars, thieves and deceivers’, in recognition of the fact that the only resistance they can ‘offer to the absolute power of their rulers consists in varying degrees of evasion’ (Reference Asad1970: 242). Meanwhile, the trickster is a figure celebrated for his cunning and deceitfulness (Basso Reference Basso1987). In the Old Testament, for instance, Jacob is a trickster figure operating at the centre of a network of deception, acting as both deceiver and deceived, in which deceit is rewarded by increased fortune and status (Nicholas Reference Nicholas2009).

Here are contexts in which deception can be a positive, and even essential, act. Similarly, as I have suggested, in Buluya, deception often does not carry connotations of immorality and there was no sense among my informants that a relationship in which deception was known or suspected was inauthentic. Rather, in the context of forging practical relationships in indeterminate and often precarious social surroundings, deception is a necessary strategy to ensure one's economic and social security – an essential part of ‘playing the game’ – and it is frequently openly encouraged.

As across much of Eastern and Southern Africa (see, for example, Scherz Reference Scherz2014; Shipton Reference Shipton2007; Ferguson Reference Ferguson2013), each person in Buluya exists within a web of dependence relationships, often acting simultaneously as patron and client in different contexts. At the top of the hierarchy, big men (and some big women) – government officials, priests, successful businesspeople – use their connections and resources to help others up the economic, educational and political ladders, accumulating ‘wealth in people’ as they do so (Miers and Kopytoff Reference Miers and Kopytoff1977; Scherz Reference Scherz2014). Young people seek alliances with wealthier and more powerful acquaintances in order to advance. And poorer parents seek favour with wealthier relations and in-laws in the hope of encouraging these relatives to finance their children's education. On the death of a wealthy brother-in-law who had paid for her son's education, one informant expressed her sadness at the fact that now she could not ask him to pay for her daughter's education too. The economic focus of her expression of grief emphasized the fact that much of the importance of her relationship with her brother-in-law lay in his potential to provide financial support. On the other side of this coin, wealthy relatives commonly want to fund the education of selected nephews and nieces, in order to cement their ‘big man’ status and secure the later reciprocal funding of their own children and grandchildren in the event of their own death or retirement.

Most relationships that are built around practical gain, however, are not between ordinary people and big men. Even outside the networks of the big men, many relationships are built and maintained with an open and explicit understanding that one of their primary purposes is for each party to further their goals regarding economic prosperity and social security. The Kumam word that most closely translates as ‘friend’, nya wota, can be used to refer to a range of people, from those with whom one shares an intimate bond of mutual affection, to those who might have provided some form of support without one ever having met them. People would often talk, for instance, of ‘white friends’ from Europe or North America who would provide financial assistance or material goods. In the case of those who had a ‘white friend’, often they had never met. In one instance that typifies how people thought about what it was to be a friend, the owner of one of the small garages in the trading centre asked me to be his friend. He immediately followed up the request by explaining that he was confident that my education would ensure that I would become rich, and if he gave me a chicken now, I would remember this gift in the future and buy him a car. Whatever our friendship might grow into – and it must be stressed that the pragmatic basis on which many relationships are built and maintained in Buluya does not preclude the possibility or likelihood of a sincere and affectionate friendship developingFootnote ¹³ – his desire for it to come into existence was based on the potential help that we could provide one another.

The pragmatic basis on which relationships are struck up, alongside the indeterminate social landscape in which they are forged, provides a certain amount of social distance that allows deception to be normalized within such relationships (cf. Simmel Reference Simmel and Wolff1964: 313). Such relationships are understood in much the same terms as the work-based relationships Zigon (Reference Zigon2009) describes, with people aware that lying is part of the ‘game’ of getting on. In a precarious economic environment, people see it as necessary to deceive others if it will help them to prosper or protect themselves from harm, financial or otherwise. When Tom tried to raise money for his driving licence, for example, he asked me to come with him to ask his father for a loan, instructing me to give credence to the lie he would tell his father to try to convince him. When his father said that he had no money, Tom later told me he had no idea whether his father was telling the truth. Without help from his father, he decided to go ahead and get his driving licence through the ‘back door’ in Kampala, promising an office official that he would send her some money – money that he could not afford – within the next week, if she would help him get the licence. He then spent the following weeks answering her phone calls with numerous false explanations about family sicknesses and other misfortunes to try to explain away the money he had promised her. Simultaneously, he was chasing a businessman whom he had spent a couple of days taking around local villages on his motorcycle to look for cattle to buy. The payment for the journeys amounted to around 100,000 shillings (around £25), money Tom simply could not refuse, but the man could not pay up front and promised to pay him later, but he never did and soon stopped taking Tom's calls.

Tom's example illustrates how people are frequently caught up in webs of deceitful relationships, both intimate and distant, and acting as both deceiver and deceived. Tom was reluctant to cast moral judgement on those whom he suspected of lying to him, and was not morally uneasy about using the same tactics himself.

Deception, then, forms a common and relatively accepted aspect of many social relationships, the building and maintaining of which often centre on pragmatic concerns for security and well-being. Just as there is a sense that everyone working in high-level institutional settings in Uganda must use some element of deception to be successful, so too do people see deceit as necessary in these more mundane everyday relationships. People accept that they use deception to get on, and they expect others to do the same.

A limited Holy Spirit

Having suggested that many relationships in Buluya are based on a hope of future security and prosperity, and that deception is a normal and legitimate component of such relationships, I now turn to the question with which this article began. How can it make sense for Tom and his family to deceive the Holy Spirit and still get what they wanted from it? How does this prevalence and expectation of distrust and deceit in relations between people extend to relationships between humans and the Holy Spirit? I argue that the answer to this lies in the way in which the Holy Spirit is understood by many Catholics in Buluya, understandings more akin to the nature of traditional spiritual beings than to formal Catholic doctrine, as well as its relationship to key mediators who operate within these same networks of practical relationships.

There is no clear consensus among Catholics in Buluya on the nature of the Holy Spirit, its role in people's lives, or its abilities. While some people's notions of the Holy Spirit largely match official Catholic doctrine, others claimed that they knew and understood little about it. Most people fell somewhere between these two extremes, offering various descriptions and explanations, and often stressing their uncertainty or qualifying their assertions by pointing out that they were just things that they ‘had heard from people’. It is these varied alternative accounts that I attempt to briefly summarize here, to give a picture of the context from which Tom and his family drew their own conception of the Holy Spirit as a limited being.

Uncertainty surrounding the nature of the Holy Spirit stems from several factors. Most people learned about Catholic doctrine from poorly trained catechists who often deviated from ‘official’ theology themselves, and most families had limited access to written texts due to illiteracy and/or an inability to afford the cost of a Bible or other religious texts. Moreover, as the ethnographic example above demonstrates, people commonly fluctuate between different denominations, each with differing perspectives on the Holy Spirit. For this Catholic family, a Charismatic prayer team associated with an Anglican chapel was called in to help them with this specific problem, and other Catholics frequently turned to Pentecostal, Charismatic Catholic and Protestant healers in similar circumstances. Similarly, attending different churches for weekly Sunday services was not uncommon among my informants, nor was conversion for a multitude of spiritual and non-spiritual reasons.

Since the late 1980s, when President Museveni relaxed restrictions on non-mainstream Christian churches in Uganda, the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement has taken hold,Footnote ¹⁴ forcing a response from the Catholic Church in the form of the Charismatic Catholic Renewal to maintain its membership. Thanks to the increasing influence of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal and its similarities with Ugandan Pentecostalism and Anglicanism (in its performance and style of worship, and in its role in fighting witchcraft and providing spiritual healing), the boundaries between different denominations are often of little importance to lay people in Uganda (Behrend Reference Behrend2011: 95), thus allowing for the kind of religious fluctuation that is common in Buluya. The permeability of the boundaries between different denominations and forms of worship and healing has allowed for multiple readings of the Holy Spirit. As is evident from the ethnographic example presented above, this fluctuation means that sometimes the Holy Spirit is conceived of differently in different contexts by the same people. For Tom, a Catholic, the fact that we had been drinking alcohol would not have been concerning had the prayer team in question not been abstinent Anglicans.

As we shall see, many Catholics in Buluya spoke of the Holy Spirit as a limited being, rather than having the omnipotent, omniscient nature it is afforded in official Catholic doctrine. This conceptualization resonates with pre-Christian cosmologies of various ethnic groups inhabiting eastern and northern Uganda. Historically, these cosmologies have comprised large numbers of different spirits and deities, most of which have limited capacities, and many of which appear to operate under the direction and guidance of powerful mediator figures. Among the ethnic groups speaking Luo languages similar to Kumam (most notably the Acholi, Lango and Jopadhola in Uganda, the Luo of western Kenya, and the Dinka of South Sudan), the spiritual world has traditionally been based around numerous different spirits called jok (plural: joggi) (Baines Reference Baines2010; p'Bitek Reference p'Bitek1963; Finnström Reference Finnström2008; Hayley Reference Hayley1947; Lienhardt Reference Lienhardt1961; Shipton Reference Shipton2007; Tosh Reference Tosh1978; Mogensen Reference Mogensen2002). Among the Acholi and Lango, several different types of jok exist, with many different joggi within each type, each with its own specific role, powers and characteristics (p'Bitek Reference p'Bitek1963: 27–8). Although among some ethnic groups, such as the Dinka, there appears to have been an overarching creator jok (Lienhardt Reference Lienhardt1961), among the Acholi and the Lango, the Kumam's closest Luo-speaking neighbours, no such creator being is said to have been conceived of until missionary attempts to introduce the Christian God in the early 1900s (p'Bitek Reference p'Bitek1963).

Although comparable historical data are not available on the introduction of Christian spiritual beings to the Kumam language, the way in which God was introduced to the Acholi in northern Uganda by the Catholic Comboni missionaries demonstrates the plausibility of the Christian God or Holy Spirit being accepted as something other than omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. Citing Father Crazzolara, a Comboni missionary, on his evangelizing endeavours in Acholiland in the first half of the twentieth century, p'Bitek (Reference p'Bitek1963) argues that the Christian God came to be known as Rubanga through misunderstanding. In Acholi, Rubanga was a feared and dangerous jok ‘held responsible for tuberculosis of the spine, and cause[ing] hunchbacks’ (ibid.: 24), and Acholi cosmology did not conceive of a single jok responsible for the creation of humanity. The Comboni missionaries, however, sought to discern from the Acholi which jok was responsible for creating humans, in order that they could equate the creator jok with the Christian God. Such questions only drew puzzlement from Acholi people, who insisted that they did not have a creator jok. To Father Crazzolara and his colleagues, such answers were unsatisfactory, and they pressed on until, p'Bitek tells us:

Thus, in the Acholi case, God came to be equated with a spirit that was far removed from the missionaries’ omnipotent and omniscient creator.

In Buluya, one way in which the Holy Spirit was frequently spoken of as being limited was in relation to the fight against ‘witchcraft’. According to Behrend, European missionaries in Uganda opposed fighting witchcraft to avoid the kind of condemnation attracted by the Catholic Church for its role in the Inquisition and the witch hunts of fifteenth- to seventeenth-century Europe (Behrend Reference Behrend2011: 94–5; see also Green Reference Green2003). Maintaining the legacy of an earlier Catholic policy that resisted the battle with witchcraft, some informants suggested that it would be useless to call on the Holy Spirit to fight against witchcraft (jwok) as it would not be able to counteract it; the only way to remove jwok is to appeal to the ajwok (‘witch doctor’) who sent it to you, or to another ajwok of similar or greater powers. As one informant put it when asked if a priest could help overcome a witchcraft attack:

In this conception, the work of priests, God and the Holy Spirit is entirely removed from the realm of witchcraft removal, and witchcraft is instead seen as something that can be countered only within its own realm, by an ajwok or a traditional healer (emuron).

For others still, the Holy Spirit falls instead into a local cosmology of tipo. Literally meaning shade or shadow, as in other areas in East Africa, this word refers not only to the shadows of physical objects, but also to the part of the person that, after death, might return to disturb the living. The Holy Spirit has been translated into Kumam as ‘Tipo Kacil’ – literally, the ‘clean’ or ‘white’ spirit. As a result, some Catholics have incorporated the Holy Spirit into their world view as a being who specifically operates in the realm of tipo. In this conception, several Catholics explained that a dead person's tipo will only linger and disturb the living if the deceased was not a faithful Christian. If they were filled with the Holy Spirit in life, as opposed to a bad spirit (tipo karac), then their spirit will not disturb their relatives. In this understanding, Tipo Kacil is in competition with other types of tipo – tipo karac and tipo me jo oto (spirits of the dead) – for a place within a person's body, in a way that is sometimes expressed in terms of the ‘spiritual battle’. Unlike the more common Christian ‘spiritual battle’ narrative,Footnote ¹⁵ however, with the Holy Spirit conceptualized as a form of tipo, for many Kumam Catholics it has entered their cosmology not so much as being in battle with satanic ‘demons’ (jwogi) for the human subject, but in battle with tipo karac (bad spirits), limited to the realm of tipo. In turn, while some Kumam Catholics see tipo karac as just one form of ‘demon’, for others they are entirely removed from what is seen as a totally separate demonic sphere.

More in line with understandings of traditional spiritual beings, then, the Holy Spirit is often viewed as limited: excluded from, or confined to, particular realms of operation. It is still conceptualized as a powerful being, but its power is limited to certain domains. But while this is important for understanding the extent to which the Holy Spirit is seen as limited, in the case that I have outlined above it was not so much the power of the Holy Spirit to battle witchcraft that was in question, but its omnipotent, omniscient status more generally. Both the prayer team members and Tom's family expressed confidence that this event could rid the afflicted families of their misfortune. What was clear, though, was that, while the Holy Spirit may have been perceived to have the power to heal the family of its afflictions, if it were to do so it would be as a limited being, with humans attempting to guide and control its operations. And, like the prayer team, it was not conceived as all-seeing and all-knowing, but as a being from whom things could be concealed.

Fallible mediators

Among the precolonial Basoga in eastern Uganda, Tuma (Reference Tuma1973) suggests that not only were deities and spirits regarded as limited in what they could do, like many of the joggi among the Luo-speaking peoples, but also the religious ‘system’ and its actors were unstable. The power of deities was dependent on their mediums’ influence over the chiefs. Certain divinities were so limited in their power that they and their mediators could be cast aside altogether and replaced by new ones:

In such a cosmology, in which divinities can be cast aside altogether, the power of the mediator is crucial. In Buluya, something similar is evident. In the events that unfolded at the prayer gathering discussed above, the leader of the prayer team took on the role of mediator in chief. As we saw, it was his duty to explain to the Holy Spirit that I need not remove my necklace because I was a visitor to Buluya – a signal that the Holy Spirit was conceived of neither as omniscient nor as being in control of proceedings. Rather, the prayer team leader would attempt to provide knowledge and guidance to the Holy Spirit. In giving the prayer team leader the main role in directing proceedings and the Holy Spirit a secondary role – powerful, but apparently in need of direction – the event played out in a similar manner to descriptions I had been given of the work of jo-jwogi (literally, ‘devil people’; singular: ajwok), who cause harm to others using jwok.

The main reasons given to me for people visiting jo-jwogi were to protect their property, to grow prosperous, or to harm others. The person would go to the ajwok and pay a large sum of money in return for a ‘charm’ (yat) that they must then plant in their homestead if it was designed to protect them or make them rich, or in the homestead of the victim if they wished to attack another person. Within the charms are contained evil spirits (tipo karac), which, having been instructed by the ajwok’s spells, work towards having the effect requested by the client. In this conception of tipo karac, although the spirits themselves are powerful, they are dependent on human mediators to direct them. It is humans, in the form of jo-jwogi, who manipulate and direct these spirits in order to cause harm to others, or provide protection to the client's property. And, until recently, it was primarily the role of the ‘benevolent witch doctor’ (emuron) to undo such witchcraft, using similar methods to the ajwok who sent the charms in the first place.

It is into this kind of system of client–mediator–spirit relations that the Holy Spirit appears to have fallen in the cosmology of Catholics such as Tom, as Christianity and older ideas continue to merge with and refashion Buluya's cosmological space. In the relative absence of priestly guidance on the nature and capacities of the Holy Spirit as taught in official Catholic doctrine, for many of my informants, including Tom and his family, the Holy Spirit has found a place in which it operates as a powerful yet limited entity, seemingly reliant to some extent on the direction of its mediators, formerly malevolent jo-jwogi and benevolent ‘traditional healers’ and latterly Christian priests and prayer warriors.

These mediators are seen as people with access to coveted goods in a social context dominated by relationships based on practical assistance. Thus, when people in Buluya appear to be attempting to deceive the spiritual mediators in order to gain the help of the Holy Spirit, they are doing so within a framework that sees the mediators of the Holy Spirit as the most important actors in accessing its power, and accessing the assistance of the Holy Spirit was treated in the same manner as accessing other people, goods and services necessary to achieving some level of social and economic security and prosperity. Just as a person might try to acquire a driving licence through the ‘back door’ by promising a bribe that they may not be able to pay, people could seek to deceive spiritual mediators into getting what they needed from the Holy Spirit, by pretending to have prayed or by hiding evidence of alcohol consumption. The mediators themselves are as deeply embedded and incorporated as anybody else in this system of practical relationships, relationships in which deception is normalized, expected and accepted as inevitable.