According to Leviticus 19:26,
Ye shall not eat any thing with the blood: neither shall ye use enchantment, nor observe times.
The Berkeley Version renders it thus:
Eat nothing that contains the blood. Make use of neither fortune-telling nor witchcraft practice.
The ban on eating blood is closely related to what follows. Blood is equated with life, “For the life of the flesh is in the blood” (Lev. 17:11). Eating blood was often used as a means of gaining life and power from other creatures, and, among the ancient Zabii, the blood of sacrifices was offered to demons in order to please them by this gift of life, and to fraternize with them.178
Our concern, however, is with the aspect of this law which prohibits fortune-telling and witchcraft. Fortune-telling is closely associated with gypsies, and it is very revealing to know that gypsies themselves will have nothing to do with having their fortunes told: it is something done for outsiders only. Fortune-telling is done exclusively by gypsy women, never the men. It is done both because it pays very well, and because it provides good information about whatever community they are in at the moment, and its moods during their current visit. Jan Yoors gives us a summary of the comments of a young gypsy woman on fortune-telling:
In essence Keja said that the avidity for fortune-telling came from an inability to cope with one’s anxieties. Instead of satisfying, it created a self-perpetuating greed for prophecy, akin to compulsive gambling, only more harmful since one lost not money but insight. It blinded one to the causes of one’s problems, and this was “madness.” It was a vain and self-defeating search for expedient solutions to problems of moral integrity, and was caused by an unwillingness to face life as it was. Most people consulted fortune-tellers primarily to seek the confirmation of their fears, more often than of their hopes. Fears could become father to a wish, for many subconsciously wanted to have happen that which they said they fear most. Keja said that fear impoverished, while the acceptance of sorrow could enrich. The Lowara said, “Without wood the fire would die,” disclaiming guilt. Seen from a practical point of view, the tangible substance of fortune-telling was the ability to listen with endless patience to every human folly. To this they added some vague generalities into which specific and personal meanings could be read. Keja talked for a long time and with great openness.
She told me about a country squire in Serbia, long ago, who imagined that he had a dreaded, incurable disease. He consulted a physician in Sarajevo who reassured him and emphatically denied his fears. The squire rushed to see other physicians, all of whom agreed with the first doctor. He went to Nish and to Belgrade and to Sofia in Bulgaria. In despair, he went to see a soothsayer, who immediately confirmed his fears, proving the medical authorities wrong in the eyes of the squire. After a protracted and costly treatment he managed to save the squire— from an imaginary illness!179
Whereas fortune-telling is a desire to know the future, and is a self-defeating, self-fulfilling desire, witchcraft, equally lawless and ungodly, is a desire to force the future to conform to man’s will by means not allowed by God’s word. Witchcraft has a long history of association with murder, and some have held that the meaning of witch in the Bible is poisoner. In essence, the attempt of witchcraft is to play god and to force man’s lawless will on to man, God, and nature.
Both fortune-telling and witchcraft are thus attempts to bypass God’s law. According to the law, as summed up in Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26, man can know the future and predict and establish it only by obedience to God’s law. The Lord declared to Ezekiel, “And I gave them my statutes, and showed them my judgments, which if a man do, he shall even live in them” (Ezek. 20:11). All other attempts to establish or to know the future are illegitimate. Man, created to have dominion by means of righteousness, holiness, and knowledge, can study, act, and develop in terms of a command of ideas and things which will enable him to determine and to govern the future under God. All such legitimate activities capitalize man and society. Fortune-telling and witchcraft decapitalize a society radically.
Both these lawless activities, instead of seeking godly knowledge and power, seek an ungodly and destructive knowledge and power. Yoor’s report on gypsy views of fortune-telling makes clear the essentially suicidal nature of such an interest. To probe into the future in such a way is to separate the future from man’s will. It is determinism or fatalism, an external ordination of man’s life, whereas predestination asserts the coincidence of God’s determination and man’s determination. God’s eternal decree is the primary determination, but man’s secondary determination, while a secondary cause, is no less real. When Saul went to the witch of Endor to seek knowledge of the future by necromancy (1 Sam. 28), he was at the same time refusing to repent or to change. He was in effect saying that his wretched plight was not his own doing but an imposition on him, and he was inquiring as to what further vicious events would be imposed on him. Saul was both indicting God and declaring implicitly that he was an unfortunate and much imposed upon man.
Those who seek lawless and unsanctified knowledge about the future are both masochistic and environmentalistic. They invite disaster and judgment and relegate their sins and stupidity to the environment. By their abdication of the requirement to exercise dominion by means of God’s law and godly knowledge, they decapitalize themselves and society.
The devotees of witchcraft want to dominate the future lawlessly. Russell’s study of medieval witchcraft makes clear how closely allied witchcraft is to lawlessness and antinomianism.180 The use of poison and ritual murders to gain magical powers is an essential part of witchcraft, despite frequent denials.
Here again, we have a decapitalization of society, an even more radical one. Whereas fortune- telling is a masochistic and suicidal activity, witchcraft is a sadistic and murderous one. The society which gives itself to these activities soon ceases to be a society. Its intellectual, religious, social, and material capital is laid waste, and there is a sundering of all ties and standards.
According to Buckland, “Behind the magic of witchcraft is a belief that ‘power’ comes from the human body.”181
It ascribes the possibility of ultimacy to individual man, and the capture of this ultimacy and power mean warfare against God and man. A witch is a witch by “self- proclamation. Essentially a witch is a witch if he says he’s a witch.”182
Ironically, however, both fortune-telling and witchcraft are quests for power. Fortune-telling seeks power by means of an illegitimate peek into the future, but it is a self-defeating power because it is a self-fulfilling prophecy that is gained. Witchcraft seeks power by lawless control, which is again self-defeating, in that it destroys society. It is like being a captain on a sinking ship, a position of importance indeed, but hardly an enviable one. Witches can only command society by destroying it.
In a very real sense, both fortune-telling and witchcraft involve an eating or drinking of blood, one’s own and society’s. They are forms of social cannibalism.
The essential fact remains: society can be capitalized only as it obeys God’s law.
180 Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages.
181 Ray Buckland, Ancient and Modern Witchcraft, p. 144. (New York, NY: H. C. Publishers, 1970), 144. Buckland is a “ high priest” of a witch coven; see Brad Steiger, Sex and the Supernatural (New York, NY: Lancer Books, 1968), 164.