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killing the male, was returned to his male form. Later, in response to Hera's contention against Zeus that men enjoyed sex more than women did, Tiresias asserted that women enjoyed sex far more (as he had experienced both aspects). In her anger at being refuted, Hera blinded him, but Zeus granted him the art of soothsaying (Avery 1962:1105; Halliday 1967:72). |
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8. The Zande rubbing board has female and male halves (Evans-Pritchard 1968: 362), and throughout southern Africa divining objects are equally divided between male and female pieces; see Junod (1927:539, 604), Gelfand (1959:108), and Parrinder (1969:62). So are divining chains in southern Nigeria (Talbot 1926: 188). |
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9. Hammond-Tooke (1975:30), Lienhardt (1970:151), and Ngubane (1977:86-98) also note the diviner's permanent liminality. Zahan's emphasis on the diviner's "double" is relevant to this status (1979:87-88). |
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10. In fact, one Isoko diviner and his assistant cast their divining chains simultaneously and "read" each other's cast (Peek 1982). |
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11. Ground dwellers are oracular agents elsewhere: mice for the Guro (Fischer and Homberger 1986:8), land crabs among the Marghi (Vaughan 1964), Jukun and Chanda (Meek 1931:328-29), and termites among the Azande (Evans-Pritchard 1968:294ff, 352ff). |
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12. For illustrations of Dogon divinatory grids, see Mair (1973:98-99). Douglas (1979: 132-36), and Griaule and Dieterlen (1986). Pelton (1980:164-223) offers an excellent discussion of this opposition of "random" nature and "orderly" culture between which divination mediates. |
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13. Ndembu avoid animals which might confuse their divinatory vision, such as tunneling rodents, zebras, and spotted bushbucks (Turner 1975:229, 285), while Fipa diviners eat cockerels' hearts to "wake up" their heads (Willis 1968:146). Initiation of Hamba and Tetela diviners includes eating a dog's heart to enhance their olfactory abilities (de Heusch 1985: 31-32). |
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14. For other accounts, see Junod (1927:538), White (1948:96), and Hammond-Tooke (1980:350). Vansina mentions the role of smell in Kuba divination in Central Africa (1978: 200). Gell (1977) presents one of the few studies of smell in religious contexts. |
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15. Turner's description of Ndembu basket divination's symbols extends this idea: "Their semantic structure has 'brittle segmentation.' I mean by this that a divinatory symbol possesses a series of senses, only one of which is relevant at a time, that is, at an inspection of a configuration of symbols" (1975:232). |
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16. Pelton characterizes the trickster's relationship to divination: |
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If the trickster in West Africa provides a way of dealing with discontinuity and change so that human movement through time may become not merely repetition, but an enlargement of sacred frontiers, he does so by linking the acts of re-vision and re-membering in divination, in myth, in dance, in sacrifice. As he teaches West Africans, again and again, how to see, he instructs them, over and over how to piece together their experience and to discover in that new whole the same open-ended order that they have always known as the source of transcendent ordinariness. (1980:275) |
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17. This is not the same as Moore's thesis (1979) about the value of random behavior, which was severely questioned by Vollweiler and Sanchez (1983) and earlier by Park (1967). |
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18. Sansom describes this ritual: |
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The client, after sitting in the correct position, must blow into the skin bag that holds the lots. The doctor then cuts two slivers of skin from the bag. The client slowly chews one while the doctor eats the other. This is a communion which relates doctor and client to each other and to the bag of lots. Regular consultation |
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