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The second alignment is as follows: |
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Pa Biyare indicated the stones marked above, explaining that this pattern showed the imminent death of a person who had killed a child through witchcraft: "The person has eaten the child through witchcraft, and the child has died and been buried. The child's parents have sworn the man with the big 'horn' swear and a 'red' swear." A "swear" (an-sasa or an-sena) is a collection of harmful medicines which is sent to locate and afflict an unknown wrongdoer by ritualized verbal swearing (see Littlejohn 1960a), a "horn" swear being one which is contained in an animal horn and a "red" swear being one in which lethal "red'' medicines are employed. Pa Biyare based his interpretations, as did many other an-bere diviners, upon stones located in the right-hand columns (which is consistent with the general Temne signification in which right is associated with openness to public view and left with concealment and obscurity; see Littlejohn 1973), and often upon those which are conspicuous in some way. A deeply reddish brown stone, for instance, was identified as showing the "red" swear.
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Pa Biyare said that his knowledge of how to interpret the patterns came from the spirits, and other an-bere diviners sometimes gaze into a small mirror in which they see spirits (especially their patron spirit) as an additional source of inspiration. Thus, although the pattern is built up by the methodical selection of odd and even numbers of stones, the crucial part of the divination is the inspired and holistic interpretation of this pattern. The diviner's perception of the relationship between the microcosm of stones and a wider reality, a perception which is attributed to the external agency of the spirits, is "revelatory" in Turner's terms, although this revelation is largely confined to the diviner. To the client, the diviner's barely audible prayers and cryptic manipulation of the pebbles underscore the "darkness" surrounding the source of the diviner's knowledge, but there is a movement toward clarity as the session progresses, when the diviner shows the client the correspondence between the stones' pattern and his or her own predicament and goes on to give more systematized verbal instructions concerning the ingredients and procedure of the sacrifice to be made. |
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But this explanatory clarity rarely extends to the naming of specific wrongdoers, such accusation being considered improper in private divination because it is said |
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