The cultural evolution of witchcraft beliefs

Witchcraft beliefs are historically and geographically widespread, but little is known about the cultural inheritance processes that may explain their variation between populations. A core component of witchcraft belief is that certain people (‘witches’) are thought to harm others using supernatural means. Various traits, which we refer to as the ‘witchcraft phenotype’ accompany these beliefs. Some can be classified as ‘symbolic culture’, including ideas about the typical behaviour of witches and concepts such as familiars (witches’ magical helpers), and demographic traits such as the age and sex of those likely to be accused. We conducted an exploratory study of the cultural evolution of 31 witchcraft traits to examine their inferred ancestry and associations with historic population movements. We coded a dataset from ethnographic accounts of Bantu and Bantoid-speaking societies in sub-Saharan Africa (N = 84) and analysed it using phylogenetic comparative methods (PCMs). Our results estimate that while some traits, such as an ordeal to test for witchcraft, have deep history, others, such as accusations of children, may have evolved more recently, or are limited to specific clusters of societies. Demographic and symbolic cultural traits do not typically co-evolve. Our findings suggest traits have different transmission patterns, and these may result from benefits they provide or from universal psychological mechanisms that produce their recurrent evolution.