Jamaica, Act of 1760 (the Obeah clause)

Passed in the wake of Tacky’s Revolt. Not a standalone statute against Obeah. It is one clause of an omnibus slave-control act covering irregular assemblies, arms, tickets and badges.

The phrase “communication with the Devil” is real, and it does not mean what it appears to mean. The statute says practitioners were pretending to it, and that the “weak and superstitious” were thereby deluded. The colonial state did not file Obeah under the Devil. It filed Obeah under fraud. As Diana Paton’s Obeah Histories project puts it, the wording “reflected Enlightenment ideas that denied the possibility of such communication.”

The phrase sits in the recital. The enacting clause never mentions the Devil at all. It punishes any enslaved person who “shall pretend to any Supernatural Power” and is detected using the listed objects “in order to delude and impose on the Minds of others.” Possession is not the offense. The claim to power is, and the objects are its evidence. The penalty is death or transportation, on conviction before two magistrates and three freeholders.

Jamaica was the first Caribbean colony to make Obeah a crime (Obeah Histories: “for a good thirty years no other colony followed suit”).

Transcription from TNA CO 139/21, as published by Diana Paton’s Obeah Histories project: https://obeahhistories.org/1760-jamaica-law/ (the url above). Quote the act from that transcription, in its capitalization: “evil spirits,” “suffer death or Transportation.” The earlier url, slaveryandfreedomlaws.lib.unb.ca, returned 401 on 2026-10-02.

Corrected 2026-07-14. An earlier version of this record placed the Devil phrasing “in its operative language” and called the act “a statute against the practice of Obeah.” Both were wrong, and both errors propagated into WR-FCT-007, where the misreading ran in the essay’s own favor.

Clause number: an earlier version titled this “Clause X.” The transcription does not number it, and the number could not be confirmed against the act on 2026-10-02.

Corrected 2026-10-02. This record said the enacting clause punished possession of the listed objects. It punishes a claim to supernatural power, with the objects as evidence. The error ran into WR-FCT-007 a second time, after the July correction, and is corrected there.