The following is a short essay with the assistance of research to explain more deeply and culturally what witchcraft is and its relation to the spiritual and very real consumption of others.
This is scholarship and research compiled in a book published by Cambridge Press and other resources concerning the historic understanding of this evil practice.
Across many cultures, witchcraft is deeply associated with the symbolic or supernatural consumption of the inner body—a concept referring not to the physical body as seen in medical terms, but to an invisible, spiritual interior where vital essence, life-force, and soul-substance reside. This inner body is often imagined as the seat of one’s vitality and identity, and as such, it becomes the target of invisible or magical assaults carried out by witches or sorcerers. These attacks may not leave any visible trace, yet they are believed to cause real harm, such as illness, mental deterioration, misfortune, or even death.
One of the most vivid examples of this belief is found in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, where witches are portrayed as insatiable beings who feed on the internal organs of both humans and pigs. As one source notes, "Witches are figures of unmitigated hunger or greed. At night, they feed on the internal organs of persons or pigs, eating livers, hearts, lungs, and brains. They may feed on the recently deceased so participants in funerary proceedings are therefore suspicious of persons who loiter near grave sites." This portrayal clearly illustrates a belief in spiritual cannibalism—the act of consuming another's inner body in a way that is both symbolic and invisible.
A related theme appears in other accounts from New Guinea, where cannibal witches are said to place human flesh into water sources, causing people to consume human remains unknowingly. The quote, “The grease or fat from the human meat was tasted … turning people into cannibals,” reveals a deep anxiety around contamination, spiritual vulnerability, and involuntary complicity in acts of symbolic cannibalism.
These beliefs are not limited to Melanesia. In Central Africa, the Azande people also maintain a sophisticated concept of witchcraft that centers on the inner body. According to E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s seminal study, the Azande believe that witches carry a witchcraft-substance (mangu) inside their bodies, typically near the liver. This substance enables them to harm others by consuming their internal essence—often during the night, while the victim sleeps. The act is unseen but results in gradual weakening or sickness. In this context, witches are understood to “eat the life power” of their victims rather than physically attack them. The victim may appear physically unharmed, but their internal, spiritual self is being consumed.
These kinds of afflictions often occur in dreams or altered states. In West African traditions, for example, victims might dream of being eaten by an old woman or wild animal, only to wake up with unexplained pain or illness. Such dreams are interpreted as real spiritual attacks—where the dream-world serves as a battleground for invisible violence against the inner body. These dream-state attacks reinforce the idea that witchcraft operates in an intermediate space between the physical and spiritual, the conscious and unconscious.
Crucially, the consumption of the inner body does not always aim at immediate death. Often, it functions as a slow drain on vitality, or as a way to symbolically express social conflict, envy, and fear. In many communities, witchcraft accusations are tied to resentment and perceived imbalance. A person who is too successful, healthy, or fortunate may be suspected of being the target—or perpetrator—of such invisible acts. In these cases, the notion of “eating” another person’s inner body becomes a metaphor for social or emotional cannibalism. One might say a jealous relative is “consuming” another’s success, leading to misfortunes that are seen not as coincidence but as spiritually engineered attacks.
In summary, the belief in witches eating the inner body represents a complex symbolic framework for understanding suffering, inequality, and invisible harm. Whether through dream attacks, spiritual consumption of organs, or symbolic cannibalism rooted in envy, these traditions offer a powerful explanation for misfortune that blurs the lines between physical and spiritual health, body and soul, and reality and supernatural experience. Far from being irrational, these beliefs reflect a deeply structured worldview in which the inner body is not just biological—but sacred, vulnerable, and socially significant.
This is all possible through surveillance and practiced by some on a constant or near constant basis. I will die before I take this statement back or rather just reword it.
This is a feature of witchcraft - extreme envy culminated by consumption - which is its climactic and deeply evil fruit. How is this possible, you may ask. I would ask the same. However technology has become so advanced that it is impossible to grasp at every stage of advancement how changes occur - however, being watched and survilled by others is already a form of witchcraft that is seen in the prayer of St. Patrick of Ireland, a saint of the same era as St. Krikor Lusavorich.
Surveillance enables every kind of evil, spiritually and also even physically with technology. For example, atoms travel through space and time as waves and particles, traveling even through light. Sound waves are known to carry significantly more atoms and particles through space. There is formidable scientific research on this - accepted fully by all. Further, if particles may travel through sound waves, they may also travel through radio waves. Or rather if this transfer of bodily substances is not physical, but spiritual, then it is simply by looking at one through surveillance that one can consume spiritual innards and inner body, culminating with the eventual eating of the physical body - though it maintains its form but not the matter, as St. Thomas Aquinas would mark the distinction, explaining why the body would fail and deteriorate over time and not in an instance upon consumption of certain parts. The form remains but the matter is displaced.