Jamaica, Act of 1760, Clause X (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 puts it, the wording “reflected Enlightenment ideas that denied the possibility of such communication actually taking place.”

The phrase sits in the recital. The enacting clause never mentions the Devil at all. It lists household objects and prescribes death or transportation for possessing them.

Transcription from TNA CO 139/21. Also published by Diana Paton’s Obeah Histories project: https://obeahhistories.org/1760-jamaica-law/

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 favour.