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We are swaying like an eagle; Kayumba [name given to the client] has come, yes, and the sick person is asking. . . . I want to sleep, brothers. [The song ends.] |
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We have gone with our male . . . he is small . . . and yet big . . . he can speak [i.e., is not a baby; the client assents to this]. He has a problem sent by God [i.e., not caused by witchcraft, utsai]. He has the shoe. |
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The diviner repeats the previous refrain and then speaks of the journey through the body. |
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We have tried the head and left it. Now we are down in the chest, and not the heart. My mind [i.e., that of the spirit, standing as the patient] is confused, isn't that true? [The client agrees and the diviner repeats the refrain.] Now we are down to the stomach. [To which the client assents readily: "The stomach, yes, the stomach, that's it!" And the diviner continues.] It is constipated and burning, and something in it gets up and stands erect and clings to the heart. . . . My heart is being pulled. And now we travel down to my back. [The client assents.] My back, my back. It is my loins/genitals [thamaa] isn't it father? It affects my legs, my hips, my thamaa. |
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The client asks what has caused the affliction and the diviner recounts a phase in the victim's childbirth when he was put in a lake and could not breathe, but he lived and has suffered ever since. |
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The diviner then suggests in detail three separate sets of causative agents: spirits, harmful exposure to a family tradition of the occult (the man's mother is also a diviner), and, as in the previous divination, witchcraft trapswhich contradicts her earlier assertion that witchcraft was not involved. The diviner then spells out the curative plants, animals, and cloth that will be required, giving precise instructions as to the identification and whereabouts of the plants, indicating by which lake, in which area of bush, etc. A time for the exorcism of the spirits and reversal of the witchcraft is set for the same afternoon at the victim's home. |
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This Giriama diviner creates the same overlapping metaphors through use of the same polysemic vocabulary as does the Digo diviner. However, one expression used by the Giriama and not by the Digo is worth noting. It is a phrase for human being (magulu mairi mudamu ludzere), which literally means "a two-legged human with hair." The expression perhaps illustrates the underlying idea that though spirits are like humans in some aspects of their nature and in the forms some of them may assume, only "real" humans are of "real" flesh, blood, and hair. |
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The Giriama diviner also at first refers to the spirits she talks to by the term used for "ancestral spirit" (koma), but later uses the normal word for "possession spirit" (pepo). The Giriama people stress (patri-)lineage relationships and ancestry more than the Digo, and this initial reference to dead ancestors is therefore consistent. Otherwise, in both divinations there is the same idea of a wandering soul in distress who joins up with equally nomadic but undistressed spirits to search through the different parts of the body and locate the source of pain. Bodily and mental problems are eventually distinguished, as in the Digo's divination, but the bodily ones are emphasized. The final stage of the Giriama's diagnosis |
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