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PART ONE
BECOMING A DIVINER |
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When people come to a fork, they must choose exactly where they want to go. It is a place of choice. Usually they have foreknowledge of the way to go. Everyone has such knowledge. But the diviner goes between the paths to a secret place. He knows more than other people. He has secret knowledge.
Victor W. Turner, "Muchona the Hornet, Interpreter of Religion" |
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Who are those extraordinary individuals who become diviners, who take that other path? How are they chosen? How are they prepared? The following excerpt from Henry Callaway's texts about becoming a diviner illustrates the critical initial stage in a diviner's life and allows us to review a classic example of early European ethnography. |
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Callaway arrived in Natal as a missionary in 1854 and immediately began recording Zulu customs and language with his primary translator and informant, Umpengula (Benham 1896:77). He published "A Kaffir's Autobiography" in 1861, but his first major contribution was a Zulu folktale collection. Callaway realized that these tales were a means of "discovering what was the character of the mind of the people" (228), a theme he directly pursued in his most important work, The Religious System of the Amazulu, published in 1870. In the preface, he declares: ''My object is to show that they have a well-defined religious system." This work was to include four sections covering traditions of creation, ancestor worship, divination, and "medical magic" and witchcraft. Callaway presents his informants' accounts verbatim in Zulu with parallel English translations and only occasional footnotes. The disparaging comments characteristic of his contemporary, the missionary Henri Junod, are absent. |
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A year later, Callaway offered an analysis of divination in which, as a nineteenth-century religious "man of science," he sought to understand human spirituality in its broadest sense. Callaway asserted that "there is a power of clairvoyance, |
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