Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 320
After the har ghwe ritual was over and the ancestor stones had been served, the tughdhe kule pot
was removed from above the doorway and taken outside, where the remaining ritual beer was
collectively consumed. We are not sure who participated in this, and can only make an informed
guess as to what bulama Ngatha was referring to when he said that the rest of the tughdhe kule
beer was 'not drunk with your dada', and we suggest that he meant that it did not include zal jije.
Unfortunately, we do not know for sure whether or not the zal jije were also present when the
sons of the deceased father consumed the first half of the beer at the grave. We can therefore only
assume that the zal jije priest was, at least during har ghwe, only involved with the ritual
handling the zal jije pot stored in the 'stomach' of thala.
We learned earlier how the senior brother carried out the ritual over the ancestor stones, and how
he used an ordinary saucepot filled with beer, together with a jahurimbe beer bowl, which was
also the dedicated terracotta vessel for starting adult initiation (dzum zugune) as we will find out
later in Chapter 3.14. That the beer from the ritual journey of the tughdhe kule of the deceased
father (dada) was most likely not shared with the generation mates (skmama) does however not
exclude the possibility that this would have been handled differently during har jije. We
remember that there was also a tughdhe kule stored in the ancestor room of jije in one of the
houses. We do not know what role the zal jije priest who functioned as an extended family
custodian for the second tughdhe thala during har ghwe would have played during har jije, the
celebrations linked to the ancestor room for the deceased grandfather.
Since we do not have a similar description of har jije, we can only assume that a wider part of the
extended family from the next generation up would now play the central role, and the senior
brother as the custodian for the deceased father and owner of the house would be a subsidiary.
We will learn later that not everyone was able to slaughter a he-goat, not only for har ghwe and
har jije as the ancestral core rituals of the house, but also for all the other rituals during the biannual slaughtering period discussed in Chapter 3.8. We present in Figure 20b an annotated
illustration of 'the way of har ghwe' in relation to the house and the grave of a deceased father.
The illustration is then followed by a summary of the sequential order of the schematic base
elements of har ghwe, as described by our protagonists from modern Korana Basa and Ghwa'a.
Figure 20b: The way of har ghwe after the death of zal thaghaya (father and owner of the house)
(1) The dotted lines mark the route of the personal
tughdhe thala pot as it is removed from thala after
the death of a father of the house. This was when
the dada stone was replaced, and the dotted lines
show that the jije and wuje stones were also
moved, in the context of which the latter was
retired under the father's granary.
(2) We see the two unbroken lines marking both
tughdhe thala that were filled with beer in the
lower kitchen and brought back to serve the
potsherds inside thala. Only jahurimbe and the
small cooking pot were taken out of thala to serve
the ancestor stones. We see one unbroken line
coming out of the ritual sauce kitchen. Above we
can see the ritual journey of the tughdhe kule pot
to the deceased father's grave, and how it was then
positioned above the entrance between the lower
room of the first wife and the upper room of zal
thaghaya.
(3) We recognise three pots with small apertures
(see also {3} key), consisting of tughdhe thala for
zal thaghaya and the zal jije pot both stored inside
thala. The tughdhe kule was kept in the ancestor
room dedicated to dada outside the main house.
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