Witchcraft is not, so far as I can make out, thought of as a system of compelling the unseen powers (whether dead ancestors or nature-spirits) to work one’s will. The _mfiti_, however, employs certain animals as messengers—the owl, and the jackal, whose bark summons him to midnight orgies; but I do not know that he intrusts these creatures, as Zulu sorcerers are said to do the baboon and the wild-cat, with ‘sendings’ to injure an enemy. Besides bewitching, as aforesaid, by means of ‘medicines,’ the things one most frequently hears of his doing are turning himself into a hyena, leopard, or other animal, and digging up graves to eat the flesh of corpses. But I am not sure that the latter ever happens without the former, it being usually for this purpose that the hyena shape is supposed to be assumed. So much of the funeral ceremonies is connected with this belief that we shall have to treat it more fully when we come to them. Witchcraft and cannibalism are synonymous. ‘Why did So-and-So have to drink _mwavi_?’ ‘_Chifukwa wodiera antu_—because he was an eater of men.’ This need not imply that he actually has eaten any one, only that he has caused (or tried to cause) some one’s death with the intention of eating the corpse. It is the reverse of the vampire superstition, where the corpse will not stay dead, but gets up and feeds on the living; and as there was a recognised remedy for this evil in the Middle Ages, so there are various ways of preventing witches from getting at the graves, as we shall see in due course. It has been said that cannibalism of this sort is actually prevalent among the Anyanja; but the statements on this subject require to be carefully sifted. The Yaos were thirty years ago in the habit of using certain parts of their slain enemies as a charm for producing strength and courage; they reduced them to ashes and mixed them with gruel, which had to be eaten in a particular way. Ordinary cannibalism may have been practised in times of scarcity. But the Europeans who were in the Shiré during the terrible famine of 1862-3, heard of no such cases, though nine-tenths of the Anyanja population perished, many committing suicide in despair. There _may_, of course, be some foundation in fact for this very widespread belief, but it is quite capable of flourishing on little or none.[15] Certain medicines (called _mphiyu_ by the Atonga) have the power of turning those who take them into some animal—each kind, leopard, hyena, crocodile, or what not, having its own particular medicine. The Atonga belief presents some interesting features.