Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 18, 2025
"Kill me! kill me!" ejaculated she; "it was I that did it! Obeah is great he has saved you. Kill me, and I shall die happy, now you are safe do kill me!" I listened to these frantic exclamations with perfect calmness. When she was a little more composed, I desired her to rise.
The enlightened inhabitants of Europe may, perhaps, smile at the superstitious credulity of the negroes, who regard those ignorant beings called Obeah people with the most profound respect and dread; who believe that they hold in their hands the power of good and evil fortune, of health and sickness, of life and death.
And when Jamaica subsided into a British colony, and peace was made with Spain, and the children of Cromwell's Puritan soldiers were beginning to grow rich by importing slaves for Roman-Catholic Spaniards, the Maroons still held their own wild empire in the mountains, and, being sturdy heathens every one, practised Obeah rites in approved pagan fashion.
I became so unaccountably, and lethargically drowsy, that, in spite of every effort of mine to the contrary, I fell fast asleep in the midst of a most animated harangue of the good Manuel, upon the various perfections of his lovely daughter a strange subject for a lover to sleep upon; but so it was. Had Josephine's nurse and the Obeah woman anything to do with it? perhaps.
But of Hayti I shall be silent; having heard more of the state of society in that unhappy place than it is prudent, for the sake of the few white residents, to tell at present. The same missionary told me that in Sierra Leone, also, Obeah and poisoning go hand in hand.
"Yes, sir," he replied. "I found it pinned to the door here." "And what did you think it meant?" "I thought it was a joke, sir not a nice joke by someone who knew Cuba." "You know the meaning of Bat Wing, then?" "It is Obeah. I have never seen it before, but I have heard of it." "And what did you think?" said I, proceeding with my breakfast. "I thought it was meant to frighten."
He raised his eyes and stared grimly at the Colonel. "I should not like to suppose that a man of your courage and culture could subscribe to such a belief." "I do not, sir," declared the Colonel, warmly. "No Obeah man could ever exercise his will upon me!" "Yet, if I may say so," murmured Harley, "your will to live seems to have become somewhat weakened." "What do you mean?"
At this time the chief of the Maroons, Cudjoe by name, was a dusky dwarf, sable, ugly, and uncouth, but shrewd and wary, and fully capable of discounting all the wiles of his enemies. No Christian he, but a full Pagan, worshipping, with his followers, the African gods of Obeah, or the deities of the wizards and sorcerers.
Thus, may I ask, are we not fascinated by the ghost story because, no matter what may be the scientific or skeptical bent of our minds, in our inmost souls, secretly perhaps, we are as full of superstition as an obeah man only we don't let it loose? Who shall say that he is able to fling off lightly the inheritance of countless ages of superstition? Is there not a streak of superstition in us all?
The total of his losses, in the course of about fifteen years preceding the discovery, and imputable solely to the Obeah practice, he estimates at least, at one hundred negroes." Esther, an old Koromantyn negress, had obtained by her skill in poisonous herbs, and her knowledge of venomous reptiles, a high reputation amongst her countrymen.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking