Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 264
In the olden days they reared mainly:
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Cattle
Goats
Sheep
Chickens
The bull was only used for the bull festival. He-goats were used for sacrificing to the
deceased father and grandfather, known as har ghwe and har jije, and for more personal
sacrifices in a room (har batiwe). This could be a sacrifice to a personal spirit, or ‘god pot’ for
a child or the father of the house. Such a spirit pot was called sakgharkhfire, which means 'pot
on top of your head where you sleep'. We will describe this particular pot later, in the chapters
about the house as a place of worship, and further discuss the belief in personal gods as spirit
agents in the chapter about the concept of personhood. We do not want to repeat here all the
other ritual occasions when mainly he-goats were sacrificed, but we know that they were once
linked to the slaughtering period following the harvest and threshing of guinea corn. It started
with the guts of the stomach being thrown into the crops before they were harvested and
ended with the closing ritual har khagwa after har ghwe and har jije had been performed. Har
khagwa required a sacrifice from parts of both the he-goats previously sacrificed to the
mentioned family ancestors.
We want to add two more rituals of the house here, one of which we have not yet presented.
Our friends from Korana Basa mentioned har ghaya (ghaya = house), which was reportedly a
continuation for the neighbours following har gwazgafte, the ritual related to threshing and
bringing the guinea corn safely through the main entrance and into the granaries of the house.
We learn later that neighbours had to stay away during that sacrifice, and we think that the
subsequent slaughtering of another he-goat for the house (har ghaya) was for sharing the
success of the completion of the process of harvesting, threshing and filling the granaries with
guinea corn. The ritual applications of stomach and guts was firstly to the ripe corn still in the
field, and later to its storage in front of the main entrance area where it was ready to be
threshed.
Another personal sacrifice of a he-goat was chuwila, which was a sacrifice to prevent bad
luck, or in the case of an accident or something frightening having happened to a household
member. The ritual process involved swinging the living body of a he-goat or a chicken three
times around the person's head before it was slaughtered. We were told by our friends from
Korana Basa that chickens were used for the same rituals as goats, apart from har ghwe, and
they added that the diviner would have the final say in whether a goat, chicken or ram was
used, or even the milk from a cow. However we tend to think that chickens were perhaps used
more often for rituals related to the well-being of individuals, rather than as sacrifices to the
paternal family ancestors of an individual household. For the latter, it was the father of the
house, and his family priests (zal jije) as generation mates (skmama) of the deceased, who
were mostly responsible for calendrical ritual.
A cow was also the bride price for a good marriage (Chapter 3.20), and our friends
specifically explained the past method of leasing out cows for the production of manure,
which we presume was also used to befriend families with whom marriage was permitted.
They did not specifically explain that it was to befriend for future marriage arrangements, but
said that it was not only the consumption of meat which made domestic animals desirable, but
also the need for dung as fertiliser. They explained that in the case of someone who did not
have animals, he would ask someone else to lend him theirs to look after in his house, for
nothing else than the manure. Someone would even offer the owner of domestic animals a
payment to continuously put manure on his house fields for a good yield. We think that this
included the leasing out of cows, at least this is presumably how it was once practised, as
more cows were acquired as a result of the surplus production of iron bars.
Nowadays, I was told by John, it would rather be the other way around, and one would need
to pay in the form of money for the privilege having someone else look after one's animals.
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