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kill much, die male." After he repeats this several times, the hunt begins, and if the first antelope caught in the strung circle of nets is male, the subsequent day's hunting should be good. |
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The bursting-pot oracle is more elaborate than ntiseye mboko and is employed only when the assembled hunters have repeatedly strung their nets in a circle, loosed the dogs and beaters into the "head" of the circle, flushed the hidden game out in the open and into the nets, and yet found the catch insufficient. A twenty-odd animal kill is considered good; after two or three days of desultory kills, mbolongo is suggested. |
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No specialist controls the oracle. Rather, once again a man chosen by his fellow hunters for his good back is selected. He goes out in the evening and cuts red wood scrapings from the mbolongo tree. The next morning at dawn he combines this with water and places the mixture in a small clay pot over a fire. While he works, the assembled hunters may or may not dance a dance miming the movements of the animals they hope to kill. The operator covers the top of the pot with a large ngongo leaf, sealing it tight by wrapping a string around the lip. He then draws three or four trails out from the fire center radiating outward like spokes from the center of a wheel. As he draws each line he addresses the oracle, citing the name of a specific cause of misfortune and asking that it be identified and thus exorcised: |
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Mbolongo, I cut like this, I go, I cook you. May the forest open, may the forest boil over all at once. May we kill many animals. . . . If it be a pregnancy, spill here; if it be mangodo, spill here; if it be a death, spill here. . . . I cut like this, I go, I cook, may the forest open, may we kill animals. |
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When the pot boils long enough, its leaf cover splits open and a water/foam/mbolongo mixture bursts out onto one of the three or four radiating spokes, indicating which of the causes of misfortune was responsible and exorcising it in a single stroke. |
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Some of the water/mbolongo mixture is then taken from the pot and carried in a leaf cone either by the oracle operator or by a child to the site of each new raising of the nets during the day. The remaining mixture is taken to the path where the operator squats facing the forest, his back to the village; he then hurls the remainder of the mixture over his shoulder in the direction of the village, stands up, and walks toward the forest without looking back. |
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If we take Pagibeti divinatory practices as a uniform set of techniques for dealing with misfortune, two stand out as being somewhat anomalous relative to the others: ntiseye mboko and the mbolongo oracle. They differ from all the others in site, as both are performed exclusively in the forest and never in the village. Mbolongo differs in its selection of potential causes of misfortune, in its emphasis on unknown pregnancy, unknown death, and unknown eating of the first kill by "he whose top teeth erupted first." Both differ in that they are not owned or managed by any one party, unlike the rubbing-board oracle or string-pulling exorcism. Both differ in the criteria used for selecting the operatornot that he have special |
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