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of their relationship to their spirits as similar to marriage. Two women mentioned that their spirits were like their husbands; they had to sleep in the amasawo with them. |
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Two experienced spirit diviners, a man and a woman, were called as "midwives" (abalerwa) to initiate the new diviner. They came first to plant a centerpole where the divining but should be built, and later, when all was ready, they returned for the installation itself. This involved the sacrifice of chickens or goats for all the spirits involved and in some cases for the clan spirit of the initiate. Chickens were killed at a crossroads "to open the way" for the spirits to come in. All night long, beer was drunk and the "midwives'' shook their gourd rattles. The spirits possessed the initiate, causing him or her to tremble (ohusamira), fall, speak strangely, and occasionally to run into the bush. One diviner told how his spirits had caused him to go into the bush and eat leaves like a goat, coming back with some in his mouth. In "settling" the spirits, Nyole seemed to be domesticating them, bringing them from outside, from the road or the bush to live in a home. They were straightening the paths from wilderness in the terms used by Parkin (1982; see also Parkin's essay in this volume). |
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The fact that the officiating diviners were not seen as teachers fits with the conception of gourd rattle diviners as mediums for their spirits. The spirits were the authorities, the active agents. When I asked one diviner what his "midwives" had taught him about divination when he was initiated, he replied, "Those people did not teach me anything, they just got drunk. The spirit is what taught me to divine." |
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What or who were these spirits which entered into such an active and useful relationship with human beings? The most important spirit of divination was Hing'ira or ehifumu, literally the "divination thing." Nyole said that ehifumu was composed of the spirits of people who died long ago. These spirits came from the brothers of the mothers of the diviner's mother and fatherthat is, from the diviner's great-uncles. Thus they were spirits to whom one was distantly related, but they were not named individuals. There was an androgynous quality about ehifumu: it came from both the maternal and paternal sides and was composed of the spirits of both men and women. Therefore, it had to be settled by both a male and a female diviner. Some diviners had two bundles of grass in the divining hut, one for the male and one for the female aspects of ehifumu. |
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In the old days, people said, diviners used only ehifumu. But in 1970 virtually all gourd rattle diviners had "foreign spirits" as well. One diviner told us that these spirits came to Bunyole on the roads built by the Europeans. Such spirits were sometimes called emandwa (c.f. Beattie 1967:22223); they were named individuals whose provenance and sex were specified and who could even cause their medium to speak in appropriate foreign languages. Most of them were said to be Ganda; others were Soga, Swahili, Gwere, and Gisu.
2 They were settled in the divining hut at the same time or after ehifumu. |
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Divination sessions, which were private, took place in the divining hut with the diviner seated upon a skin (ehyambi), sometimes behind a partition. The cli- |
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