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is significant, however, is that the trickster animal who is assigned the role of diviner in Temne stories, Pa Lulu, the Senegalese Fire-Finch, is a bird which comes unusually close to people and appears equally at home in town and bush. This characteristic of being a go-between from wild to social space makes Pa Lulu a particularly fitting choice, not only because diviners are ritual mediators between human and non-human realms, but also because the truths which they mediate are viewed partially in spatial terms. |
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It is therefore appropriate to sketch an outline of Temne spatial regions in which truth is seen to be located particularly. In addition to the visible world of ordinary human beings, which is called no-ru, three worlds invisible to humans are usually distinguished by those in southeastern Temneland: ro-soki, the place of spirits, ro-kerfi, the place of ancestors, and ro-seron, the place of witches.
1 These non-human regions are said to be like large towns and to be spatially contiguous with no-ru, although some describe the place of the ancestors as being in the east (see Littlejohn 1963). They are "here" and all around us, but as it is usually expressed in Temne, there is a "darkness" (an-sum) which hides them from us; their inhabitants can see us, but we cannot see them. |
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In some contexts, however, this "darkness" is not merely a visual barrier between us and the non-human worlds, but can be entered by those who mediate between them. Certain categories of people can penetrate the darkness and can see and participate in these worlds by virtue of possessing "four-eyed" vision, in which the two visible eyes of ordinary people are supplemented by two invisible eyes. Such people are termed an-soki, a word derived from the root sok, which is associated with vision and visibility as well as knowledge and comprehension (see Littlejohn 1960b:68). The world of spirits, ro-soki, is accordingly a place of vision and understanding, revealing an epistemological classification of space which is also apparent in the description of the world of the ancestors, ro-kerfi, as the "place of truths," ro-ten. "Truths'' are always spoken of in the plural; there is no term for "truth" in the singular as a generalized entity but rather a multiplicity of powerful externally revealed items of knowledge, such as the knowledge of particular medicines revealed to those who become an-soki by ascending the initiatory hierarchy of the an-Poro cult association. Diviners are another category of people who are an-soki, their power to divine deriving from their relationship with either a patron spirit or a recent diviner-ancestor who gives them revelations of hidden knowledge, initially through an initiatory dream, and under whose auspices they are sometime able to enter ro-soki and ro-kerfi. As among the Dogon, then, divinatory knowledge and truths have an extra-social origin and a cryptic quality, being obscured by "darkness" to all but the diviner.2 |
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This knowledge of the truths of ro-soki and ro-kerfi is explicitly distinguished from the divinatory techniques themselves, and is often described in visual terms. A synonym for divination, keli-keli, meaning "to look-look," indicates the intense act of vision required of the diviner; it may be compared with the Kuranko term for diviner, bolomafelne, meaning "hand-on-looker" (Jackson 1978:118), the Krio term, luk-gron man ("look-ground man"), and the Mende term, toto-gbe-moi, "the |
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