Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 416
sources about the ritual maintenance of the unity of body, spirit and soul as a condition for
mental and physical wellbeing. The vulnerability to supernatural influences was seen as an
integral part of that existential self-conceptualisation.
In this chapter we will contrast supernatural and natural characteristics of existential
personhood by presenting a variety of personality traits included in the Dghweɗe cultural
vocabulary, as we want to explore whether pathological and natural abnormalities are
differentiated from supernatural ones linked to the belief in witchcraft and sorcery. However
before doing that we will present a more detailed picture of the differences our local
protagonists pointed out to us, to better understand any specific distinction between natural
and supernatural causes that it is possible to identify. We will show that they did indeed make
a distinction between pathological mental disorders and mental deterioration caused by falling
victim to a sorcery attack, despite the fact that some of the personality traits, for example
envy, might describe a circumstantial conflict scenario which had resulted in witchcraft or
sorcery accusations. This allocation to a supernatural cause might have been a form of
overcompensation, and although scapegoating was possibly a factor, there might also have
been other deeper cultural-historical reasons, in that however powerful the supernatural, the
Dghweɗe had a system for counteracting it. Unfortunately we do not know whether the
Dghweɗe consider witchcraft as always being unintentional and only sorcery as intentional,
but we can clearly show the gendered aspects of witchcraft and sorcery, and we tend to think
this is a general feature of their ritual culture. This is possibily a result of high ritual density,
but we will return to that at the end of the chapter.
According to our oral sources, the Dghweɗe only used the term wadighe (witch) when
referring to witchcraft in general, rather than zalghede (wizard or sorcerer). We further need
to recognise that it was zalghede alone which seemed to include the ability to perform sorcery
and also the ability to transform into a spirit agent that was capable of permanently trapping
another person's spirit leading to the death of that person's soul. It was not viewed as
impossible, but it would be very rare for a female to kill through sorcery. Therefore only a
male zalghede would be able to kill another zalghede, were someone’s spirit to come under
such a deadly supernatural attack. This type of zalghede or sorcerer was referred to as gwal
ngurɗe (ngurɗe = medicine) and is best translated as specialised healer. Most of the time they
were Ɗagha, but a gwal ngurɗe could also be from a non-specialist lineage, being seen as
someone who had the gift or talent of healing a person who was undergoing a severe spiritual
attack.
This at least is how it was explained to us by our friends from Kwalika (1995), who pointed
out that such specialist healers (gwal ngurɗe) could not only treat but also perform sorcery
attacks themselves. They further explained that such specialist healers were very seldom
women, while female witches (wadighe) were very common. They added that while wadighe
could not kill adults (male and female), they were able to kill children up to the age of
puberty. They added that the reason for this was the belief that the skull of a child was still
soft, and that it was too hard to be broken by a witch after a child had reached sexual
maturity. Our oral source also alleged that it was a common belief that sorcerers would take
the spirit (sɗukwe) out of their potential victims during the night to perform a ritual in which
the victim's spirit was sacrificed to divinity (gwazgafte) while the person was sleeping.
We are not certain how to interpret the idea of a sorcerer sacrificing the spirit of a sleeping
victim to gwazgafte, but considering that the Dghweɗe do not have a noun for evil, and no
concept of hell, negative personality traits were presumably all contained within the concept
of gwazgafte, which was a concept of supernatural divinity that did not recognise evil in a
cosmological sense. Gwazgafte as God included all aspects of life and death, and as a social
mirror image of this world it included sorcery attacks and the ritual means of healing them. In
this context we possibly need to interpret the sacrifice performed by a sorcerer to be related to
the sorcerer’s desire to feed off the spirit of their sleeping victims while holding them hostage
in the celestial world above. As such it could be seen as a destructive aspect of divinity as a
supreme cosmological force, here represented by the application selfishness and greed
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