Recently I was partaking in one of my favorite pastimes, chilling on Wikipedia, and I came across a really interesting article about bone pointing.

Bone pointing is a practice undertaken by certain tribes of central Australia where a shaman-like figure called a kurdaitcha takes the role of executioner, and they kill their quarry with "real life magic". These kurdaitcha, which are also called by the awesome name of featherfoot owing to the traditional footwear they wear (made of feathers and human hair), will be called in by a group that has been wronged if they feel the perpetrator of an act deserves to die. ... it's actually a bit more complex than that, but I guess you can go read the Wikipedia article if you're interested ...

Once summoned, the kurdaitcha will pursue their quarry for as long as it takes until they eventually catch up with them and "point the bone". The bone in question is a "wand" made of bone and specially treated and charged with the appropriate rituals. The bone is said to deliver all that energy at the moment of pointing, which will curse the recipient and invariably cause them to die after a short number of days. The bone wand itself is only used once; new ones need to be prepared every time they're needed.

(Now, I didn't investigate much more beyond the wiki article, but it seems this practice might have fallen out of use in recent years. However, there are some well-documented cases where people did indeed die after being cursed.)

The article goes on to explain that the main hypothesis for this unexplainable death is simply a psychological conviction on the victim's part that they will die (aka voodoo death). The intense amount of fear and stress causes systemic failure of their bodies.

There's a guy, Walter B. Cannon, who published a short but really interesting paper on this. One of the anecdotes he shares consists of a young man (Rob) who was pointed at by mistake and soon gets really ill. The local doctor goes to visit him and:

When Dr. Lambert arrived at the Mission he learned that Rob was in distress [...] Dr. Lambert made the examination, and found no fever, no complaint of pain, no symptoms or signs of disease. He was impressed, however, by the obvious indications that Rob was seriously ill and extremely weak.

After some time lying in bed agonizing, the "witch doctor" who originally pointed the bone at him tells him "that it was all a mistake, a mere joke—indeed, that he had not pointed a bone at him at all", and immediately Rob gets better.

...

I find this fascinating for three main reasons. First, "magic" is subjectively real for them, which is awesome. Second, like these Aboriginal people, we're also human, and we definitely have the same propensity for believing this sort of thing. Third, the effects of fear and stress shouldn't be underestimated.

To us it may sound "quaint", even "silly" that Aboriginal people hold such beliefs as bone pointing, but really we're not so far off ourselves.

For them this works because it's part of how they see the world. It's not a separate phenomenon but actually something that fits in perfectly well with how they think things work.

For us, it might very well be—in fact, I'm certain—that our current culture holds widespread beliefs (modes of understanding our place in the universe) that will themselves seem silly and quaint to future anthropologists. What these beliefs "are" is hard to say, as they would by necessity be part of the very bedrock of our sense of identity and, as such, would totally permeate our subjective reality. Still, I can't help but wonder "what is our modern equivalent"? What "magic" is real for us that we don't realize is there?

I'm sure there are many such phenomena around us, and we just don't see them1. I did, however, find one example of "modern voodoo death" in the wiki article I linked above. They share the case of a man whose doctors convinced him he was about to die because of cancer. He did eventually die, but when they did the biopsy they found out that it wasn't the cancer that killed him; the belief that he was dying had.

Finally, I want to come back to the effects of stress and fear. I don't know about you, but I feel we live in a culture that sees stress as "something you need to put up with in order to achieve greatness". Suck it up, kiddo. While fear is almost omnipresent in our media, and even in how our entertainment paints the world (it's you against the world; everyone is out to get you). Sometimes it can't be helped, but often we take on more stress and fear than we need to, and that's not healthy, and they definitely affect us more than we realize.

Footnotes

  1. Here I'm citing modern voodoo death, but I believe these "magics" would actually cover the whole sphere of human experience. Maybe our belief in money is such a sort of magic. Or maybe our fear of public speaking. Or our desires for fame and recognition. Or maybe our worshipping of "The Algorithm". ↩