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The two forms of Nyole divination fit the opposition proposed by Zuesse (1979:212) between "possession" and "wisdom" divination. In the former, ultimate reality is personalized and spirit agents communicate messages through and to human beings. In the latter, personal experience is subordinated to a profounder cosmic order which emphasizes atomistic, impersonal elements. Thus the lamuli make use of number, measuring, and writing as opposed to violent trance states. Zuesse notes the complexity of methods and long training periods of wisdom diviners, the authority gained by traveling far away for training, and the importance of these diviners as innovators. |
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This distinction between a personalized and an impersonal cosmic order was important at the level of technique rather than epistemology. A Nyole client returning from a divination by a lamuli said that at one point the diviner seemed about to mention a "reason" for his children's illness that had to do with his (the father's) side of the family. But then the diviner took up another explanation instead. The client commented: "The ancestral spirits were about to come, but they left." (This man had earlier been "reminded" by his dead grandfather to offer a goat.) Clearly for this man, the book diviner's methods gave access to a personalized spirit world. For him and most other Nyole there were two modes of divinatory approach to the same underlying reality. |
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In Bunyole, another more practical distinction seemed to be important for understanding the two types of divination. I mentioned earlier that most diviners also specialized in some type of treatment. Many gourd rattle diviners also performed ceremonies for getting rid of various bothersome little and foreign spirits or for settling divining spirits. Having spirit colleagues themselves, they seemed more aware of all types of spirit agencies, including ancestor and clan spirits, which were placated with rituals performed by kin. Lamuli diviners were often also abang'eng'a, "protectors" or medicine men who dealt with sorcery and even claimed to be able to "tie" curses by medicine, thus obviating the need for a family ritual of reconciliation. This use of medicine to obviate ritual and relational forms of therapy has potentially far-reaching implications in that it treats persons by the application of powerful substances, "liberating" therapy from the personal relations in which it would otherwise be embedded (see Whyte 1988). |
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Book diviners were very aware of human agency in their clients' misfortunes. In analyzing the records kept by two book diviners and one spirit diviner, I found that the spirit diviner diagnosed human agents (cursers or sorcerers) in 29 percent of his cases, while the two lamuli found human agency in 80 percent and 63 percent respectively. The relatively low proportion of sorcery (as opposed to cursing) diagnoses by the spirit diviner was particularly striking. Diviners differed in their diagnostic orientations and this fit with the different types of treatment which they carried out in addition to divination. The book diviners, who used modern technology and had learned their skills as medicine men from foreign sources, were more oriented toward sorcery as an explanation. |
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Yet these divergent patterns reflect more than differences between diviners; cli- |
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