English has a large vocabulary for people who work magic and almost no precision in it. Sorcerer, shaman, witch, wizard, medicine man, cunning man, conjurer, priest: the words are used as near-synonyms, sorted mainly by how exotic the speaker finds the practitioner.
The traditions themselves are far more precise. They distinguish specialists by what the specialist is for, by who pays them, by whether the power is inherited or acquired, and by whether the work is done in public. Those distinctions are usually invisible in English, because English collapsed them.
This article takes five kinds of magical specialist and asks what each one actually does. One of the five turns out not to be a category at all.
The Sorcerer: Defined by Who Is Complaining
Start with the word that looks most solid and is in fact the least stable.
Sorcerer comes to English through Old French from Latin sortiarius, built on sors, sortis, a lot: a drawn token, an oracular response. A sortiarius casts or reads lots. The root meaning is divination, reading the answer rather than writing it, which is almost the opposite of the modern sense of a sorcerer as someone who imposes their will on the world.
That drift is not an accident, and it points at the real definition. Across an enormous number of societies, the difference between the good specialist and the sorcerer is not technique. It is whose side they are on. The same acts, performed for the community, are healing or protection; performed against a neighbour, they are sorcery. Anthropologists writing about Africa and Melanesia in the twentieth century repeatedly found that the local vocabulary marked this distinction sharply and that English had no way to carry it, so they borrowed the local words instead.
Haitian Vodou marks it with unusual clarity. A bokor is said to “serve with both hands”, meaning both for and against, and the site’s zombie entry describes the zombie precisely as a corpse created by a bokor and enslaved without will or memory. That is the specialist working against. The point is that a bokor is not a different religion, or a defector, or a dark mirror. He is a specialist within the same system whose services are available for hire in a direction most people consider illegitimate.
The European sorcerer of the grimoire tradition works differently again. He operates by authority, addressing named spirits by name and compelling them under a higher name, which is the shape King Solomon left behind him. The Solomonari of Romanian folklore are the folk descendant of that, trained in an underground school, riding dragons above the clouds and commanding hail, and paid off by farmers who would rather not be hailed on.
So sorcerer is a real category, but it is a relational one. Nobody is a sorcerer in their own account of themselves.
The Shaman: A Word That Belongs to One People
Here is the one that is not a category.
Saman is Evenki, a Tungusic language of Siberia. It reached European languages through seventeenth-century Russian accounts of the peoples of the Siberian and Arctic north. Among the Evenki and their neighbours it names a specific role, with a specific initiation, a specific costume, a drum, and a specific technique: the practitioner enters an altered state and their soul is understood to travel, usually to retrieve something that has been lost or taken.
Everything after that is extension. Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, published in 1951, argued that this Siberian pattern was a single worldwide phenomenon of great antiquity, and that argument is the reason English now applies one Evenki word to ritual specialists on every continent. It has been criticised heavily since, most usefully by Ronald Hutton in Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination. The criticism is not that the practices are unrelated. It is that “shaman” as a universal category was assembled by outsiders, that it flattens genuinely different institutions into one, and that it makes the specificities disappear.
Those specificities are the interesting part. A few of them:
- Machi, among the Mapuche of southern Chile. The site’s machi entry describes ritual healers who enter trance and climb a carved pole toward the sky world. The pole, the rewe, is not decoration. It is the axis the practitioner ascends, and it stands outside the practitioner’s own house. Machi officiate at the ngillatun, the communal fertility and renewal ceremony, which makes them public office-holders as much as healers. The role is disproportionately held by women, and by men who take on aspects of a woman’s presentation.
- Babaylan, in the precolonial Philippines. The site’s babaylan entry describes them as spirit mediums, healers and oral historians, most of them women. Note oral historians. The role carried the community’s memory, which is why the Spanish colonial project targeted it directly.
- Angakkuq, among Inuit peoples. The specialist deals with breaches of taboo and travels to the sea woman who withholds the animals when rules have been broken. This is not a healing of individuals so much as a repair of the relationship between a community and what it eats.
Each of these is a different job. Calling all three shamans tells you almost nothing except that the speaker is not from there.
A related point of terminology, since this series has made the mistake in earlier posts and corrected it: “medicine man” and “witch doctor” are colonial English labels, not translations, and where a community has asked for particular handling of its practices, the request is worth honouring in the text. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy has formally asked that medicine masks not be publicly displayed or reproduced. Saying so costs a sentence.
The Cunning Folk: Magic as a Local Trade
The English cunning man or cunning woman is the best-documented magical specialist in the world, and the reason is banal: England kept excellent records and had a lot of lawsuits.
Cunning folk were commercial practitioners operating openly from the medieval period until roughly the end of the nineteenth century. They were paid, they advertised, and their services were narrow and practical. Owen Davies’s Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History sets out the actual trade, and it is not what the word “folk magic” suggests. The bulk of the work was:
- Finding stolen goods and identifying the thief. By a wide margin the most common request.
- Unbewitching. Detecting who had cursed a client and undoing it, which frequently meant naming a neighbour and occasionally started a witch trial.
- Love and marriage divination, including identifying a future spouse.
- Herbal and charm-based healing, for people and for livestock.
- Written charms and amulets, often built out of scraps of scripture and astrological figures.
Two corrections to the popular picture. First, the cunning man was frequently a man, and often a literate one with a shelf of printed astrological and medical books. The image of the intuitive village wise woman working purely by inherited plant lore is a partial view at best. Second, crystals played no meaningful part in the English trade. Crystals as a staple of magical practice are a twentieth-century development. What cunning folk actually used was the written charm, the astrological figure, the herb, the horseshoe, the mirror or bowl for scrying, and a good deal of confident manner.
The crucial structural fact is that cunning folk were the opposite of witches in their own communities, not a variety of them. Their main product was protection against witchcraft. When the anti-witchcraft specialist is the person you hire, witchcraft is a service industry with two sides, and this is exactly the arrangement that colonial witchcraft-suppression law later dismantled in southern Africa: outlawing the detector while leaving the fear intact. The familiar, the witch and the warlock entries on the site all sit inside this English and Scottish world.
Rainmakers: The Specialist Whose Failure Is Public
Rainmaking is the most politically exposed magical office there is, because the result is checkable by everybody at once.
The earlier version of this article located rainmakers “particularly among the Yoruba people”. That is not right and it is worth correcting rather than quietly dropping. Yoruba religion has a storm god in Shango, the deified third king of Oyo, and it has an enormous divinatory system in the Ifa corpus held by Orunmila, but a distinct institution of professional rainmakers is not a documented Yoruba feature.
The well-attested rainmaking institutions are elsewhere in Africa:
- The Balobedu Rain Queen, the Modjadji, in the far north of South Africa. A hereditary line of queens whose rainmaking authority was regionally recognised and politically substantial, and who were treated as a power to be negotiated with by neighbouring polities.
- The Nuer and Dinka of the upper Nile. Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer work describes the leopard-skin priest and the ritual specialists of a Nilotic cattle-keeping world where the timing of rain is the timing of everything.
- The Mbona cult of the lower Shire valley in Malawi, where rainmaking is bound to a martyr shrine and to the legitimacy of local rulers.
The pattern across all of them is the one that makes the office dangerous. Rainmaking authority is political authority, because the rainmaker’s power is the community’s harvest. A rainmaker who succeeds accumulates real influence. A rainmaker who fails during a drought is in genuine danger, and the historical and ethnographic record contains plenty of them. This is the clearest case in all of magic where the practitioner is accountable, and where the accounting is brutal.
The Priest and the Magician: A Distinction That Keeps Collapsing
The last category is the one that undoes the article.
In Haitian Vodou, an oungan is a male priest and a manbo is a female priest, and the female office is not secondary. Both are initiated, both hold a congregation, and both work with the lwa, the spirits who mediate between humanity and the remote creator Bondye. Ceremonies are public, communal and calendar-bound. Damballa is the primordial white serpent, oldest of the Rada spirits. Baron Samedi heads the Gede and keeps the cemetery. The religion’s roots are principally Fon and Ewe from Dahomey and Kongo from central Africa, restructured under slavery in the Caribbean and layered with Catholicism.
Is the oungan a priest or a magician? The question has no answer, and the reason is that the distinction is a European one exported. Where a magical specialist is licensed by an institution, serves a congregation and works on a calendar, English calls them a priest. Where they work for individual clients on demand, English calls them a magician. The line is about institutional recognition, not about method.
Run the test on Europe and it breaks immediately. The medieval priest who blessed fields, cured cattle with holy water and provided written charms was doing what a cunning man did, from inside the institution. A great deal of English cunning-folk practice is straightforwardly borrowed liturgy. And in the other direction, African American hoodoo, which the site describes as folk magic worked by a paid conjure doctor, has drawn heavily on the Psalms since the nineteenth century.
Run it on Japan and it breaks harder. Abe no Seimei held salaried government rank as a diviner. Run it on the Norse world and there is no institution to license anyone: the volva travels, is summoned, is fed and seated and paid, and departs, and even Odin acquires his knowledge as an outsider would, by sacrifice and theft.
What the Categories Are Actually Tracking
Set the vocabulary aside and four real variables emerge. Every specialist in this article can be placed on all four.
- Acquired or afflicted. Cunning folk learn a trade. Machi and many Siberian practitioners are called, often through an illness that only ends when the call is accepted. One is a career, the other is a diagnosis.
- Public or private. The ngillatun is held in the open with the whole community present. A curse is not.
- Licensed or freelance. Onmyodo had a government bureau. The volva had a road.
- For the community or for the client. This is the axis that produces the word sorcerer, and it is the only one where the answer changes depending on who you ask.
None of these four maps onto the English words. That is why the boundaries blur: the categories were never drawn where the vocabulary puts them.
The honest conclusion is not that all magical practitioners are secretly the same. It is the reverse. They are genuinely different, in ways the English words actively conceal, and the way to see the differences is to use the tradition’s own term and then explain what it means. It costs a few more words. It is the difference between describing a world and labelling it.
Further Reading
- Ronald Hutton, Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination. How one Evenki word became a global category.
- Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Foundational, and the thing most later work is arguing with. Read it knowing that.
- Owen Davies, Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History. The best account of what a working magical practitioner in England actually did all day.
- Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books. For the sorcerer of the European tradition.
- Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. A manbo at close range, and the standard corrective to almost everything popular culture says about Vodou.
- Laennec Hurbon, Voodoo: Search for the Spirit. Short, and by a Haitian sociologist.
- E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande and The Nuer. The sorcery distinction and the Nilotic ritual world respectively.
- Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power, and Healing among Chilean Mapuche. On machi, and specifically on gender in the role.
- Isak Niehaus, Witchcraft, Power and Politics, and Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft, for what colonial suppression law actually did.
- Yvonne Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition. For hoodoo and the priest-magician boundary.
Explore More on Gods and Monsters
Haitian Vodou and the African diaspora: Lwa · Damballa · Baron Samedi · Zombie · Hoodoo · Caribbean Mythology · Dahomey, Fon and Ewe Mythology
West African religion: Orunmila · Shango · Eshu · Ogun · Yoruba Mythology · West African Mythology · African Mythology · Nilotic Mythology
Named traditions, not “shamans”: Machi · Ngillatun · Mapuche Mythology · Babaylan · Philippine Mythology · Inuit Mythology · Siberian and Arctic Peoples’ Mythologies · Native American Mythology
The European specialist: Witch · Warlock · Familiar · Solomonari · Volva · Odin · Abe no Seimei · English Mythology · Scottish Mythology · Norse Mythology · Romanian Mythology · Japanese Mythology