Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 415
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safa
= soul (literal meaning is breath/life, can only affected by witchcraft
in case of death)
gwazgafte
= supernatural self (also personal god, has a gender component,
is used by the specialist healer to bring back sɗukwe)
Our Dghweɗe friends from Kwalika explained that the concept of sɗukwe vagha should not
be confused with that of safa (breath, life or soul). In their opinion, sɗukwe vagha meant not
only the shadow of the human body, but it was seen as the gate through which the soul (safa)
could be attacked. They emphasised that safa could not be killed in any other way than by a
sorcerer finding access to a person's soul via the spirit as the shadow image of the person's
body (vagha). We presume our Kwalika friends implied that sorcery attacks took place during
the night while the body was asleep because it was a physical state in which the spirit
(sɗukwe) was seen as being most vulnerable for the success of such attacks.
That sorcery could affect the soul and lead indirectly to death in severe cases, suggests that
safa did not survive after death, but can we infer that sɗukwe did survive? After all, the spirit
could leave the body, while the soul could not, but relied on the spirit in order for it to remain
an integrated part of existential personhood. Unfortunately we do not have a yes or no answer
to that question, but we do know that the traditional Dghweɗe religion did not have a concept
of salvation as contained in Christianity and Islam. Instead they believed that the ancestors
continued in the cosmological next world below, and that the extended family heads of this
world sacrificed to feed them there. We will discuss the cosmographic aspects of the
Dghweɗe belief system in the next chapter, but want to point out here that the concept of
spirithood had a strong transformational dimension across the multiple worlds above and
below, which was subject to ritual management. We remember the rituals related to the use of
the ancestor and spirit pots, from the chapter about the house as a key place of religious
observances. The Dghweɗe belief system was conditioned by a cosmographic worldview in
which the celestial world above and the next world below were conceptualised as mirror
images of this world, where the existential struggle for survival was ongoing.
In that sense, it was not only the person in its completeness which was thought to exist in the
next world, but also all the social circumstances found in this world, including the rituals and
beliefs and the ways they interacted with the local environment. In that respect we can draw
from what we know about the self-concept of existential personhood in this world for an
understanding of the cosmographic mirror worlds above and below this world. It seems that
the vulnerability to sorcery attacks was specifically attached to the idea that the human spirit
was somehow a representation of the divine aspect of the world above. That bulama Ngatha's
spirit or god pot was a three-legged cooking pot that had been ritually transformed in the
context of the first pregnancy of a man’s first wife, and which was then positioned above
rather than below his bed, could be interpreted as a material manifestation of this idea.
Vulnerability to witchcraft and sorcery 4 in the light of opposing character traits
We have so far established that the word sɗukwe for the human spirit was derived from the
image of the shadow thrown by the human body (sɗukwe vagha), and that the traditional
Dghweɗe belief system saw it as the display of the inseparable material and immaterial
condition for physical and mental wellbeing. Individual wellbeing was believed to be
continuously exposed to witchcraft or sorcery attacks, which created an air of individual and
collective fear of being affected by it. While milder versions of witchcraft might not have
affected the soul (safa), severe sorcery attacks could bring about certain death because they
took away a person's life force. This at least was what we indirectly concluded from our oral
Pamela A. Moro (2018) gives a good summary of the history of the different anthropological
approaches to understanding witchcraft, sorcery and magic, but here we are avoiding the term 'magic'
and only differentiate between witchcraft and sorcery as integrated expressions linked to existential
personhood.
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