1 Dafne Accoroni 1. Magic, witchcraft and religion. The concept of magic, witchcraft and religion can be used to give sense to different experiences and provide explanatory models for human behaviours and beliefs in different contexts and with varying meanings. One line of interpretation has viewed them as the response to the uncertainty of life, a way to contain it, through apotropaic means of defence and ward off the negative in life (de Martino, 1959). Anthropological studies (Ciekawy, 1998) have interpreted kinship as a system able to preserve the community from the outer world, whose intrusion and threat has been explained in terms of witchcraft and magic. Similarly, the relationship between local realities and the global world, between tradition and modernity have been looked at in the attempt to analyse the role of magic and culture in a fast developing world, in terms of the question of access or rather, exclusion to resources (Appadurai, 1996). Mythology, symbols and cosmogonies also endow a way of being in the world, of determining power, be it political, religious or economic. Religion, embodying the sacred into moral values and habitus (Bourdieu, 1977), exhibits, by and large, a sophisticated formalization of beliefs and complex rituals which can be construed as the opposite end of popular faith and practices dealing with the unknown. An anthropological exam of African societies cannot avoid such categories, since their role in every day life, both in the past and at present, forged the hermeneutical framework to deal with the existential issue of how securing the survival of the community and more broadly guaranteeing its cohesiveness in the face of the threats life presented. These ranged from war, invasion, illness and famine to the most subtle degrees of what can not be controlled by the human action: change and uncertainty. In the West, where technological progress and scientific knowledge seem to have gained control and established their rationale, religion has not disappeared from the public arena as expected (Habermas, 1991). The undercurrent phenomena of occultism in Europe, the proliferation of fortune tellers and clairvoyances testimony of a more universal search for answers and reassurances which cannot be restricted to the African continent alone. The African cultural landscape is dotted with the figures of healers, sorcerers, traditional and religious healers dominating the forces of nature, linking the human sphere with the supernatural, and with the intra-human realm of the spirits (jinns). Thus, they become the necessary ingredients of the reflection on the ways in which health and healing were managed, addressed and delivered within the specificity of the cultural context of these society. The diagnosis and prognostication of illnesses in terms of magical occurrence entailed a series of explanations and actors which encompassed the body and the mind, the material and the immaterial. The healer had to work through a chain of signs and signifiers to disclose the cause of the illness and tackle its effect (Sow, 1980). Health and illness do not describe per se any specific disease or anticipate any understanding of it. Culture bound syndromes (Kleinman, 1980; Littlewood, 1989, 1993) reflect experiences of pain and suffering which take on the nomenclature and lexicon of the cultural agency which designates them. Transculturally, healing conveys the appropriation of meanings and treatments articulated by its bearers and within a shared system of values. Ginzburg (1989), in his study of the Shabbat in Europe, outlines the intersection of the historical and anthropological analysis, in what he describes as the morphology of events. The diachronic developing of history can miss out individuals’ experiences, underlying concepts and tensions, why and how phenomena have been adhered to, what were the consumption and/or the resistance to a determined knowledge, to what extent it meant power, exclusion or a niche. Thus, this paper will attempt to frame the concept of baraqa (blessing) as the key link to understand the use of magic in Senegal during the XIX-XX centuries as a means both to guarantee