Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 414
priests, but the celestial world was exposed to competition on a fairly egalitarian scale,
although gender equality was not part of that. This aspect was apparent as we will see later,
for example witches were seen as not being able to go to the celestial world and carry out
sorcery attacks with the same deadly efficiency as male sorcerers. In that sense we need to
point out now that the ideas around the structure of the mind in traditional Dghweɗe society
had a strong cosmological aspect of gender inequality, because the social mirror image of
divinity (gwazgafte) was also seen as having gender.
Before continuing to explore the concept of the soul, the spirit and the supernatural as part of
existential Dghweɗe personhood, we want to briefly examine how the words safa for soul and
sɗukwe for spirit were translated in the Dghweɗe bible. This is important, since the word soul
for safa particularly inspired my research assistant John Zakariya as a Christian, but we will
see that it also affected other translations related to my attempt to completely understand the
structure of the Dghweɗe mind. For example, the word safa refers in the Dghweɗe bible to
the Christian concept of an eternal soul, and thus takes on a much more dogmatic meaning.
The same applies to the concept of gwazgafte or ghaluwa, which are used to refer to the
Christian God and the Christian heaven respectively. Something similar happens to the word
sɗukwe for spirit, which is translated in the Dghweɗe bible as 'Sɗukw ce Gwazgafte' (God's
spirit or Holy Spirit). There was no concept of a 'Holy Spirit' in traditional Dghweɗe religion,
and we show below how our Traditionalist friends explained the different meanings of
sɗukwe and sɗukwe vagha. While the Christian interpretation of these Dghweɗe concepts is
no older than that of a mainly Protestant missionary influence after independence in the early
1960s, the earlier-mentioned use of the word shatane or shaitan for 'evil spirit' is presumably
much older and might well date back to pre-colonial Islamic influences linked to the sultanate
of Wandala.
Despite the difficulties in relaying the traditional meanings of the words in question, we are
sticking here with the translation of soul for safa, spirit for sɗukwe, and gwazgafte for divinity
and God, but we need to keep in mind why this is unsatisfying when it comes to presuming
likely pre-colonial aspects of the structure of the Dghweɗe mind. In the Western secular
society I come from, the dual concepts of soul and spirit often have a completely different
history, and the human soul can have either a religious or a secular meaning. In contrast to
this, our concept of the human spirit can much more easily be seen as an existential
component of personhood. It is perhaps interesting to point out here that the etymological
origin of our word 'soul' also goes back to 'breath', 3 which is a good reason to retain the
translation of safa for the human soul in this case, but rather in its literal meaning of breath
and life. Other than safa, we see the translation of sɗukwe more as 'the human spirit', in the
sense of the shadow image of existential personhood, a concept which not only implies
physical connectivity to the body but also vulnerability to sorcery attacks. We referred in that
context to the Dghweɗe idea of personal gods as celestial mirror images of the human spirit in
a contested spirit world which had a strong gender aspect. We have referred to the
cosmological dimension of that mirror world (ghaluwa) as a place of spiritual warfare, which
is not to be confused with the Christian or Moslem idea of heaven as a place of spiritual
salvation.
We have so far established that there are four base elements concerning the structure of the
mind and body as aspects of the Dghweɗe integrated self-concept (meaning the belief that
individuals are integrated physical, spiritual and social beings):
•
•
vagha
sɗukwe
= physical body (turns into soil after death)
= spirit (literal meaning is shadow, can be taken away by sorcerers)
3
The Hebrew word nefe猃ఀ, literally meaning ‘breath,’ is the word most often translated as ‘soul’ in the
Bible and has the same root as the the Arabic word nafs.
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