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to look for, and later see, a jok within the walls of a hut or inside the body of an individual. It is then known that the younger man ca puoce tiet, "has come to know the ways of powers." The theme of separation, seclusion, and reintegration is evident in this rite of initiation. When the new tiet later performs a ritual of divination or exorcism, he acts as a mediator between two worlds, separated from the human realm in order to establish communication with the suprahuman. |
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The term tiet is derived from tet, "hand." During the divination ritual the tiet holds a rattle in his hand, but it is said to be the jok, the suprahuman power within his body, that shakes the rattle, not the tiet himself. As the Atuot say, "This is the jok moving within him." His own consciousness apparently becomes subordinate to the jok that is presumed to control his behavior. |
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A short text offered by the diviner Mayan Acuot may help in understanding this basic feature of Atuot divination: |
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A tiet sees jok as you see people in the reflection of water. This is how it comes to your eyes. It comes with the thing that was taken [kue jaal ke a diet ma yen ca lom]. The jok comes to claim its property. The tiet will know the reason because he can see it. If a man steals a cow the jok comes and says, "This is mine." The jok says, "I am coming because of this and that." |
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Because jao are considered to be spiritual manifestations of an individual's inner state of consciousnessmanifestations that may enter and act upon another individualthey can be spoken of as active spiritual agents (see Burton 1981). |
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As Mayan Acuot indicated, divination involves two separate though closely related phenomena. First, the tiet must come to know in the course of his work which of the many jao in the Atuot pantheon has taken possession of an individual. The jao identified by the Atuot generally correspond to diseases as defined by Western medical knowledge. Thong alal, for example, is the spiritual power Atuot experience as generalized fever. Abiel, the power that speared the man in the myth, is known by the symptoms we associate with amoebic dysentery. Agok possession resembles the symptoms of cerebral-spinal disease. (The term agok also means "monkey," and a friend once drew, at my request, a picture of a person possessed by agok; it shows a man lying on the ground with a monkey on his back.) Second, the tiet claims as an important part of his competence the ability to name the individual who was initially responsible for "sending" a power that brought on the symptoms. It should be stressed that the experience of possession by a jokto the degree that this experience can be translated by a foreigner who does not claim to have been similarly possessedalways manifests in a physical malady rather than a psychic transformation of the self.
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To describe the situation that gives rise to divination, Atuot use the phrase ca dom ke jao, which indicates that a power seizes, commandeers, or takes complete control over a person. When that happens, a tiet is called, and he normally arrives that evening at the homestead of the afflicted. |
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A group of people who share some relationship of kinship with the possessed |
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