Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 512
sacrifices to Durghwe. When asked if there was a specific diviner to consult about a sacrifice to
Durghwe he said that they could go to any diviner.
We notice that Katiwa used the word gwazgafte for God when referring to his own divining
spirit, and considering that he was talking about his healer spirit, we infer that he might have
been indirectly referring to a personalised version of divinity. This of course is only an
assumption, but taking into account that a person was seen as having a personal god who
would always experience things shortly before the living person experienced them, it is
suggested. The connection between the human spirit (sɗukwe) and its divine counterpart
(gwazgafte) could therefore be interpreted as a representation of what the diviner read from
the twenty mandatha slices floating in water, which made his gwazgafte or personal god talk
to him. This is only an informed suggestion and we do not know why Katiwa might have
thought that twenty slices were the correct number for successfully communicating with
divinity.
We also asked Katiwa which of the various divination methods listed was the best, and he
said that any method would do. We think this is a very practical statement, confirming that
belief in divination was the key and not so much the method of divining. We know however
that divining with sliced mandatha pieces was the most common way of divination, which is
perhaps not surprising considering how many different ritual varieties of Cissus
quadrangularis the Ɗagha peacemakers owned in the past, to manage all sorts of communal
conflict situations. Many of them were linked to feelings related to competition, which also
throws light on the ritual density that Cissus quadrangularis represented.
Katiwa using the leaves of the wulinge tree to catch a lost spirit is interesting since it reminds
us of the talking divination (kula kula) which used hollow branches of the same tree by
moving them around in water. That the leaves when waved around were heard to be making a
noise like heavy breathing or the flapping wings of birds could well be interpreted as a form
of language. The demonstration also shows how the patient is receptive to Katiwa's treatment
by holding his heart while receiving back his lost spirit. We remember that the wulinge tree
grows best near the groundwater on the summit area of the Durghwe mountain shrine which
was earlier referred to as the 'house of twins'.
Katiwa also referred to the sacrifice at Durghwe, and said that any diviner could be used for
that. We doubt that this was always the case, but perhaps it depended on the occasion or the
kind of demand being made of Durghwe. For example, during the annual harvest festival
(thagla), divination had to be carried out before the throwing of intestines onto the pillars of
Durghwe which represented cosmological granaries, but we doubt whether just any diviner
could perform it. Unfortunately we cannot know because the thagla festival had already
disappeared a couple of decades or longer before I started to visit Dghweɗe from the mid1990s.
We think that any formal divination, especially when the larger community was involved, was
a greater official ritual event, whereas divinations in relation to issues of individual families
were most likely of a more private nature. Still, regardless of whether divination was carried
out publicly or privately, it led to some form of decision making in which the diviner rather
than lineage elders played the crucial role. In more formal circumstances however a lineage
majority (gadghale) might have recommended a course of action before a diviner became
involved, and their particular decision-making power came from their divine political
entitlement as the most numerous local group. However, divination as a tool for communal
decision making needed gifted individuals with an ability to bring about an advisory result.
When things went wrong a Ɗagha peacemaker or Gaske rainmaker could be blamed, but a
Ɗagha diviner was reportedly never blamed, at least not for divination leading to an accused
sorcerer proclaiming their innocence. It also seems that many decisions diviners had to make,
regardless of whether for a communal or a more private purpose, were often about
determining the actual ritual procedure rather than the purpose of that procedure. In that
sense, divination must surely have been an intergrated part of the egalitarian religious belief
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