Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 327
kÉ—afa ritual concerned that hope. We remember the ritual sauce kitchen of zal thaghaya, where
an exogamous lineage brother cooked ritual sauce for his deceased father's har ghwe sacrifice. In
both examples males cooked a ritual sauce, in one case for a deceased father and in the other for
a seven-month-old foetus, one for a past life and the other for a new and future life of the family.
We will learn in Chapter 3.18 that there was also the belief that the embryonic development of a
foetus was seen to take recognisable human shape after the seventh month of its conception.
We have already mentioned the sak sage in the ancestor room of Kalakwa's grandfather in the
backyard of his house (see Plate 35e). It was referred to as sak batiw gajije, meaning ritual
cooking pot in jije's room, but we do not know what it represented. We can only assume that it
was not a former sakgharhfire spirit pot, since the room of the person in which it was kept had
died, but instead a ritual cooking pot used during har jije. On the other hand, this would have
required a reverse transformation into a sak sage or three-legged cooking pot. Perhaps it was
used to libate beer over the ancestor stone of jije, or in another context of the house as a place of
worship. It might have even been taken to the grave to cook a meal there, we cannot tell because
we did not ask.
We now take another look at the image of Kalakwa's tughdhe batiw gajije (Plate 35c) which was
positioned next to his deceased father's sak sage version of a sak batiw gajije (Plate 35e). In
comparison, Kalakwa's father's tughdhe kule was positioned between the roof of his father's
ancestor room and his upper room. This positioning of the pot possibly marked the transitory
aspect of having moved out of the upper room by becoming a family ancestor. We remember
that there was no tughdhe thala for a deceased father inside the house shrine, but only a tughdhe
kule to be taken to his grave during har ghwe. Next to it, already disconnected from the upper
room of the main house, was batiw gajije (Plate 35b), whose deceased grandfather was an
established family ancestor and therefore not only had a tughdhe batiw gajije inside his tiny
ancestor room but also a tughdhe thala (called zal jije) inside the 'stomach' of thala.
There was another category of ritual pot which was generally referred to as dungwe, and they
were for children and maybe also for mothers. There were two types which seem to belong
together, one being a small cooking pot (Plate 41a) and the other a small aperture pot (Plate 41b).
I only saw the ones under their parents' granaries shown here, but bulama Ngatha pointed out that
they were kept in their mothers' rooms while active. This means that the two under the granaries
were retired dungwe pots. We think that the little cooking pot under Buba's granary was also a
retired dungwe, because we found out that a mother would have cooked beans in it before it was
ritually removed from her room after her child had reached a certain age.
Plate 41a: Retired dungwe cooking pot for
child under bulama Ngatha's granary (1995)
Plate 41b: Retired dungwe spirit pot for child
under Buba's granary (2005)
According to bulama Ngatha and others, women did not have personal spirit pots, while he
referred to those of children as personal god pots as he did for his sakgharhfire. They were not
three-legged however, and not kept above the bed of a child but in the mother's room, and rituals
would have been carried out during the night so as not to disturb others. We do not know
whether a child's spirit pot was independent of gender. We know that a sacrificial meal prepared
for a child's spirit pot consisted only of milk or chicken which was prepared in a dungwe. The
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