Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 427
placed the mountains where they lived at the cosmographic centre of the world. They referred
to themselves as gwal ghwa'a, meaning 'people of the mountains' and from that
topographically elevated perspective they looked at the adjacent plains and referred to them as
luwa haya, meaning 'settlements of the plains'. The word haya was a reference to any flat
place, even a plateau in the mountains, but in connection with luwa it became a reference to
where the people of the adjacent plains lived. This implies that their late pre-colonial
worldview distinguished between mountains and plains as basic topographical entities.
We think that the word luwa also meant that they looked at this world from their perspective
as montagnards and terrace farmers. This implies that they used the word khuɗi luwa (khuɗi =
stomach, also belly or womb) meaning here 'stomach of the settlement' to refer to the centre
of the world of their labour-intensive agriculture. We demonstrated in earlier chapters how
the household compounds of extended families cooperated, not only in ritual but also in
socio-economic terms. We saw the 'stomach' of the house shrine (khuɗi thala) in that context,
not only as a place where fathers stored their most important ritual pots but also as a
cosmological symbol of successful terrace farming. We further explained, in the chapter
about the seasonal calendar, how ritual sequences reflected the interaction with the invisible
worlds below and above, from the point of view of ongoing survival in this world. The
chapters about the bull festival and adult initiation underpinned this, as did all previous
chapters in one way or another.
In this chapter we are concerned with the wider underlying Dghweɗe cosmological view of
the world. We see that the word luwa not only features when referring to the familiar visible
earth, but also when referring to its complementary unseen counterparts. We are familiar with
the concept of ghaluwa from the previous chapter about existential personhood, being the
cosmological world above where specialist healers fought with vicious sorcerers and where
rainmakers struggled to gain control in the interest of the greater good. We aim to expand this
view and explain further that ghaluwa can be translated as 'hard sky'. This is possibly the
reason why ghaluwa was translated to me by John to mean literally 'belonging to luwa',
because in cosmographic terms it formed the upper limit of luwa. In that sense the 'hard sky'
of this world was the ceiling of luwa and at the same time the floor of ghaluwa. I came across
a similar concept of a 'hard sky' as the limit for the visible sky above the earth in the Mafa
area of Gouzda, including the idea that this was the place where sorcerers would abduct the
individual spirits of people, and that it needed a specialist healer with supernatural powers to
penetrate and rise above that 'hard sky'.
It was bulama Ngatha who first pointed out that between the surface of this world and the
'hard sky' was vale, forming the space where the wind blew and the clouds gathered. He
compared luwa in that context with the room of a house in which he saw ghaluwa as the
ceiling and a cosmic chain of outer mountains as the wall on which that ceiling rested. The
earth was the floor of that room, somewhat like the terraced platform of a homestead. Bulama
Mbaldawa also compared the living world (luwa) with a house, but thought that calabash
gourds to store milk (dhangale) formed the wall. Zakariya Kwire claimed that four people
dressed in chicken skin formed the four corners of luwa, and if we look at our list we see the
expression gwal tung ghaluwa, meaning 'the people who hold up the hard sky'. The Mafa of
the Gouzda area had a similar belief, but in their case four wooden supports held up the 'hard
sky', while an old woman was seen to be sweeping the termites so that the sky would not
collapse.
It is very seductive to translate ghaluwa as outer space or the cosmos, but it was more like an
umbrella or ceiling, because the world was not perceived as a globe but as a level space above
a primordial ground. That space was limited by the 'hard sky' visible as the firmament, while
the clouds, wind or air could be likened to the earth's atmosphere which we have already
identified as vale. This was the space the rainmakers observed to predict the weather, but to
influence it they had to go deep inside the earth to find 'the roots of the sun', and some could
also travel into the higher world above the 'hard sky' referred to as ghaluwa. We could
interpret the war of the rainmakers high in the air as a dramatisation of gaining control over
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