Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 507
Divination as traditional method of decision making
While the previous section was about lineage majorities and how they might have initiated
collective decision making which also implied divination, this section is more about the
Dghweɗe mindset and the role of divination as an expression of an underlying belief system.
We remember from the chapter on existential personhood that divinity was not only a
religious belief in a Supreme Being, but was based on a cosmographic image of a celestial
world above this world to where talented rainmakers, sorcerers and healers could travel. In
the light of this worldview, the human spirit could be trapped by sorcerers in the upper world,
and specialist healers (gwal ngurɗe) were needed to free them. We learned about the
Dghweɗe idea of powerful spiritual healers fighting with sorcerers as their negative
equivalent over individual spirits of fellow humans in the world above, and established that
the human spirit was seen as particularly vulnerable to such supernatual attacks while asleep.
The cosmographic equivalent of the world above was a world below this world as a next
world of ancestors, and there too particularly powerful rainmakers could travel to collect the
'roots of the sun'. We showed that mythological descent from the same ancestral father and
mother could indeed be a way of organising divine interaction, and that the cosmological
splitting of blessings from above and below were represented by two full brothers from the
same ancestral 'kitchen' (kuɗige). Such mythological and cosmographic pairing set the
religious agenda of rainmakers and cornblessers who were seen as having inherited the
entitlement of ritually reenacting successful socio-economic reproduction in the form of
cosmological blessings on behalf of divinity. Some of our Dghweɗe friends also liked to see
them as being born to ancestral twins. We learned in Chapter 3.19 that twins represented the
epitome of blessed communal reproduction linked to the farmstead into which they had been
reborn, particularly if we take into consideration that divination was also needed to identify
the home of the former parents of the twins. It was the former mother of the twins who
brought them into their new parents' house and the new mother who brought them out again
seven days later.
The division of ritual labour between rainmakers and cornblessers also overlapped, and the
same powerful rainmaker who could travel into the upper world to fight with other powerful
rainmakers over limited resources of rain for a particular locality could also travel inside the
earth to collect the 'roots of the sun'. Fighting over limited resources of rain in the upper world
was presumably also the reason why in a crisis situation a majority decision might have
recommended advising the specialist rainmaker lineage to carry out rainmaking rituals in
certain places only. This hypothetical conclusion underpins the fact that locality was not just
an abstract concept, but that it was rooted in the oral history of local kin-groups classified by
lineal descent which had reproduced through intermarriage along the lines of prescriptive
albeit changing exogamy rules (see Chapter 3.20). This brought about kinship ties across the
patrilineal and matrilateral divide which had developed into a network of interactive kindred
connections between individuals and families who had farmed and looked after the fertility of
their ancestral land for many generations. We also demonstrated in Chapter 3.14 how adult
initiation (dzum zugune) not only created a seniority-based support network within extended
families, but that seniority outside extended family networks was considered secondary to
individual achievement as a symbol of successful terrace farming.
Divination played a key role in the process of decision making concerning communal and
individual wellbeing in families and local groups, and here we would like to hypothesise that
this was workable because divination was a decisive cognitive tool for management of the
Dghweɗe belief system. A good example to illustrate this is the belief in sorcery as an
integrated part of existential personhood. We remember that our main protagonists saw spirit
abduction as a type of sacrifice to a negative concept of God, which we described in Chapter
3.15 as the negative side of divinity. In the context of this, the personal god of an individual
was seen as a mirror image of spiritual selfhood linked to the supreme God as the head of his
celestial family, and his children were seen as anticipations of what would happen in the life
of every individual in this world. In that sense, God had already decided what would happen
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