Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 435
In the next section we will revisit the Dghweɗe concept of 'the world above', in particular the
belief in celestial parenthood, with God as the male representative of the Supreme Being. This
will throw light on the Dghweɗe idea that wives did not have personal gods, but that their
husbands owned the ritual control over the cosmological dimension of reproduction. This
presumably indirectly underlines the Mafa tale of Goye stealing guinea corn from God's wife
by hiding it under his foreskin while her children searched the orifices of his body. We will
compare again some of the Dghweɗe ideas about divinity represented by God, his celestial
wife and their divine children, with our Mafa sources, to point out more similarities and
differences. For example, one of the differences is that among the Mafa of the Gouzda area
not only men but also women were perceived as having access to female versions of personal
gods when needed.
Dghweɗe ideas around the concept of a Supreme Being (gwazgafte)
We have discussed the concept of gwazgafte on many occasions in the course of this book, in
the chapter about the seasonal calendar, the chapter about the house as place of worship, and
in the previous chapter about ideas around existential personhood. In our cosmographic model
(Figure 25) we translated gwazgafte as God who resides in the celestial world above the 'hard
sky'. In the previous section we also mentioned God's wife, and introduced the idea of
celestial parenthood. We will discover that the Dghweɗe belief system was not monotheistic
in a dogmatic sense, and in other contexts we have translated gwazgafte as 'divinity' in a
general sense rather than God, but we have to admit that our oral sources on the subject are
fragmentary and in this chapter section we rely more or less on the same protagonists. As
before, we will quote some of their statements in the interest of greater authenticity of
meaning and then produce a summary of their shared views and point out differences if we
view them as significant.
There are many references to God as a Supreme Being across the corpus of our Dghweɗe
notes. Whether it is about rainmaking, peacemaking, planting, harvesting, sorcery or
marriage, most of our Dghweɗe friends, regardless of whether they were still Traditionalists
or had converted to one of the global religions, referred to God as 'always having the first or
the last word' so to speak. One of the most common features of this attitude seems to be when
our friends were referring to the various talents people had as gifts from God. In that sense,
not only were rainmaking and other ritual works carried out by specialist lineages seen as
God-given tasks, but any individual’s supernatural talent was also seen as a gift from God.
However not only positive things came from God, but also negative ones, and that was when
they seemed to become attributed to aspects of divinity. This is why in our opinion it is not
always justifiable to spell God with a capital 'G' when speaking of the traditional belief in a
Supreme Being, even though he was reportedly the creator and overseer of all.
While there was a strong belief in a Supreme Being referred to as gwazgafte, which we like to
translate as God who transcends all worlds, there was also the belief that God had a wife and
children. We can indirectly conclude from our oral sources that among the Dghweɗe it was a
generally held belief that God had a family. This was implied by the idea that every human
being had a celestial mirror image outlining his future in this world. Bulama Ngatha (1995)
explains:
Overall God has a wife and, like we humans, he has children. For example, one person was
complaining of having no wife. That means his god does not have a wife. This man was taken to
heaven and his eyes were open to see his god coming from his farm with firewood and grasses and
other things to bring home. So he was told, you see, your god is not married that is why you are
not married. Your god will marry and you too will get married but your god will only have one
child and he will die. The same will happen to you. Other people cannot see that, only that person
can see that. The God who has taken him up to heaven was the brother of his god.
The view of a celestial or divine mirror image in which the children of God functioned as
personal gods of humans was also common among the Mafa of Gouzda (Muller-Kosack
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