Page 32 - Arabian Studies (I)

18 Arabian Studies /

possibly true but perhaps not, a man was being plotted against by his
mother and sisters who determined to ‘leave one of our hyaenas inside
the cave, and when the sun goes down it will go into the cows and
eat one every night.’ He was able to forestall their machinations with
the help of a jinmyyah who at night took the shape of woman and
rode a hyaena of her own.
Small wonder however with so many plots made by the women of
a family, that in Socotra the makoli looks for the witch first within a
man’s family or extended family. When he picks her out she may
have to undergo the trial by ordeal specific to witches. There was
such a trial just before we went to Socotra in 1967. The woman was
put into a sack with a heavy stone tied to her and taken a little way
out to sea. There she was thrown into the water. The theory is that
the water will not accept a witch and she will be thrown up out of
the water stones and all.23 An innocent woman will sink and will
have to be released by a diver. Mostly the accused do ‘jump up out of
the water’ and this is what happened, according to witnesses, in
spring 1967.
In Dhofar two witches ‘ate’ a man who did not die till some time
later. The Mehri account of this is interesting for its detail.24 The
witches (sew e her) each had a gold spear (remhat deheb). One stood
outside the victim’s house and one went in and woke him up and said
to him, ‘Do you want to give us your son to eat or do you want us to
eat you?’ The man told them: ‘Eat me’, and they struck him. 2S He
was still alive in the morning and ‘knew who the women were,’ which
may mean they were relations of some kind.
People said to them: ‘If you are innocent, take an oath; otherwise
you must accept trial by ordeal.’ They chose trial by ordeal rather
than take the oath. The women failed the trial by ordeal — what kind
it was is left unspecified — and they were killed.
Witches also ‘eat’ people in Socotra but here the metaphor is to be
taken more literally, since in one case at least a victim was saved even
after being cooked, by the good offices of a kind of benevolent fairy
called mektebo’oh.26 The excessive preoccupation with the devour­
ing of human flesh is however probably no more significant than
similar traditions elsewhere.
In Socotra witches used to be called zaleliten euphemistically,
since the word means literally ‘misguided women’. This word is no
longer used however except in its literal sense. Besides the word
di-neker which, however one interprets neker in terms of Semitic
philology, is hardly a euphemism, the word di-zahereh is current. The
slight modification of the radicals here may reflect a desire to avoid a
direct mention of such beings. 2 7