Difference Between Witchcraft And Sorcery

Witchcraft and sorcery as a way of making sense of why bad things happen to human beings.
When bad things happen to human beings, they try to find reason for their misfortune. There are some societies where they do not believe in bad luck, everything happens because someone caused it and so witchcraft and sorcery are often used to make sense of misfortunes. Witchcraft can be said to be an expression of a malign power in a person’s body while sorcery is the use of a magical craft or knowledge of it to harm or benefit others. Witchcraft is often seen as a consuming force that eats life power of the victim (Steward 2004: 1). The definitions are however not dependable because people have their own of fitting ideas and practices together which means that a person might see something as sorcery that is witchcraft to another (Steward 2004:1).
The Zande people who were studied by Evans-Pritchard use ideas of witchcraft to explain misfortune that is difficult to explain in other ways. For example, a man who wanted to find out whether or not his ill wife would die and who was responsible for her sickness consulted the oracle Benge and a ritual is done where a question is asked and a sort of poison is fed to a chick and depending on whether or not it dies, it will answer the posed question. When a person has been identified as a witch the accuser asks them to cool their witchcraft by blowing on a chicken’s wing (Steward 2004: 2). The Zande people believe that witchcraft works best