Chapter Seven: The Oracle and the Real

Abstract

This chapter synthesizes the author’s ethnographic work on healing systems in Africa. Divination has political relevance because is the art of shifting frames. The shift occurs by letting in ‘the real’, a moment neither imaginary nor symbolical. Why should oracles need mediumship or the geomantic throw? Ethnography in eastern and central Africa indicates that an oracle’s purpose is to defuse the simplex preoccupying the consulters.

The reader learns about the organs that matter in haruspication. The five chapters of the first part diagnosed society as in a state of entropy and dehumanizing. Sukuma diviners in Tanzania have the tools for such diagnosis but viscerally enact them, which our analysis is in dire need of. To dehumanize is to imagine humans that can lay a claim on you. Bewitchment is the universal experience of someone embodying the Law and living inside you, impinging on your freedom, while you mistakenly situate the help offered by people and so-called ancestral energies ‘outside’ yourself. To live together with one’s witch, an inversion is called for, whereby you accept all those energies of ‘the real’ as part of yourself and locate the Law of the witch where it belongs, quite simply outside of your self. This act is not just a micro-story. Such frameshifts, anthropologists have shown, have built and regenerated society anywhere on this planet. Not surprisingly then, it is here that we discover the tensor of collective reason.

‘No, the gourd is full’, the soothsayer said as he peered into the entrails. It was a hot afternoon in rural Tanzania and we were sitting under the proverbial tree at the center of an extended family’s compound. Despite fickle shadows cast by leaves on the dissected rooster, I saw the bird’s gallbladder looking healthy indeed. Kisabo, gourd, is the name for that organ during the oracle. The client had made the oracle his by spitting in its beak. The oracle conveys ability to digest food through the condition of the gallbladder. Commensality, the consequence of digestive ability, positively indicates prospects of togetherness. The client was the seventy-year old head of the compound, sitting ten yards away.

‘And the blessing stands erect’, the son of the client added holding the oracle’s duodenum between thumb and index. Yes, our beloved elder could still walk, as was plain to see. On top of physical strength symbolized by the erect bit of intestine, blessing (lubango) means invisible backing. The subject had reason to trust in his ancestral guide. The bird’s stomach reassured the audience. It was fat and full confirming that the man’s household is doing fine with a large cattle pen and enough maize in store to feed the many mouths. The stomach called ‘home’ (kaya) measures the impact of this person in society, and in the worst case his social death. Do kin, community and ancestors give their support?

The oracle assesses a person’s life by verifying wellbeing at the micro-, meso- and macro-scale. The way the three are specified through food, gizzard and blessing resembles the scales of trust from the introduction: an individual’s connectedness, impact on the group and trust in the network. The matter of the organs can fool us, reminding of a biology class dissection. As is clear from the attributed names kaya, kisabo and lubango, their materiality is affective. The oracle is a social event with a cultural meaning and affective energy. If the belief in bewitchment is a simplex, the oracle de-simplicates, applying both the centrifugal and centripetal approach. As for the first, participants feel a meaning that extends in all directions of the network, like the tensor in Figure 2 in Introduction. Home, gourd and blessing are events, meanings and energies in one, opening up an expanse of possibilities. The oracle does not command. In direct action the tensor would collapse. I will never forget the upset young man pulled off his bike by the diviner’s assistant after he thought the oracle’s identification of a family member as witch meant she should be killed. Sit in the shade to cool down, schoolboy. Something to that effect the assistant said.

About 3000 miles to the west of this area, my thesis supervisor René Devisch had found among Yaka diviners a tripartite structure as well, to synchronize the fields of body, society and cosmic forces.¹ Any disturbance between the fields was diagnosed and ritually treated, an effective instead of symbolic intervention that led him to revisit the symbolic anthropology of Victor Turner.² Sukuma and Yaka share a Bantu language, yet also among Cushitic speaking Daasanech in Ethiopia a number of life-sensing practices such as verbal blessing and body modification address the social causation of illness.³ In this vein, I propose the tensor.

‘But notice the feet’, the diviner resumed the séance. One of the bird’s two appendices looked irregular, swollen. ‘Mitego’, I might have gasped like a good pupil, referring to a trap laid by a witch, but nobody would have paid attention to the interjection. One should be careful with words, especially when reading signs and where uncertainty prevails. I could restrain myself from uttering the words ‘a witch?’ next. Later the diviner scraped skin from the bird’s knees to detect an internal bleeding indicating that a woman kneeling to greet the client was involved in his illness. The intestines, the skin underneath feathers and head, all tell a part of the story, which because of contradicting signs always remains partly untold as well.

‘What bothers me’, the diviner muttered inspecting two internal bleedings near a sinew on the bird’s breast, ‘are the two ripe ones close to the cattle tracks.’ My friend Masanja whispered to me: ‘Those two are waiting for our client to travel’. That much I understood after a month of training into haruspication. The oracle forewarned of a magical ambush on the way to the hospital. I had a car to help this elderly man who had lodged me for so long, but to die at the hands of enemies outside the home (wacha malali) might turn him later into an ancestor with a grudge. That mistake could haunt the family for generations. A few days later he died at home. According to me, the consequence of long illness.

Such oracles among Sukuma-speaking farmers, wherein adults participate on an equal footing, have been the subject of my ethnographic research in the mid-1990s. The academic purpose being to clarify the context to the reader, I never cared to elaborate on the participants’ avoidance of clear-cut terms. My writing ‘witch’ as if the word is a literal translation set the reader on a path of recognition. Yet in practice what I heard were metaphors opening up a range of possible interpretations. Gourd, stomach, blessing and feet are aspects of a condition. The condition itself nobody would be categorical about. Social status, bodily strength, wealth and ancestral support: the oracle portrays the visceral multiplicity of a singularity. Bewitchment though, articulated in guilt, is the patient’s dominant feeling. The fear of losing the ancestor’s protection because of having breached the law of solidarity sucks all emotions in. Yes, the signs of the oracle covered a wide expanse, whose meaning the participants felt, but this centrifugalism does not suffice for a breakthrough. A seed has to be planted within the subject for a change to grow at its own pace. In the divinatory throw and the mediumistic dream, a centripetal moment of contingency unfolds. What happens when the ancestor speaks?

Quick Pull

Some encounters in the field one will never forget because they unveil the affinity two persons unwittingly have despite distinct cultural backgrounds. At those moments, one experiences as it were the human species. One day a healer, whom my collaborator and I visited regularly, showed us a trick named ‘quick pull’ which he had obtained as a curiosity from a colleague of his. By stealthily manipulating at the base of a stick the two ends of a thread, a small gourd decorated with resonant bells moved up and down the thread. Some diviners, he said, would use this trick to impress their clients by hiding their manipulation, for instance by asking questions to the gourd and unnoticed steering of the threads in reply. Now it struck us: supposing that clients could fall for this trick and that in spite of its uncommonness they would consider it to be divination, why would they—as my collaborator and I were at first—be so readily impressed by it to the benefit of the diviner’s reputation? It occurred to us that the only plausible reason was the gourd appearing to move and stop ‘by itself’. It invoked agency beyond human control. And that, paradoxically, humanized the oracle’s symbolic system.

The invisible agency alludes to something present in the event that cannot be reduced to the participants, their manipulations, questions and interpretations. Indication of its presence is also found in the local criterion assessing a consultation: if, without foreknowledge, the diviner is right about falsifiable assertions like gender, symptoms of the patient and exact purpose of the visit, then an extra-symbolic source of knowledge can be assumed to be at work in the oracle and the proposed diagnosis should be taken seriously. Not surprisingly, the trickery exploits what the customer is known to look for and what makes divination appealing and distinct from other forms of interaction. That is the real. Amidst its rich symbolism and discourse, the oracle offers something external and raw, given out of the blue.

The real imposes itself, shown in signs. An emaciated stomach announces, for all to see, the social death of the client. The diviner carries the onlookers through oracular signs to bring home scenes of life as if they happened. The infrastructure of the oracle, laid down in the bird’s organs, is a terrain of war feeding the viewers’ senses. Quite something else than the real is the manipulation that Quick Pull allows. A fixed outcome resulting from laws at our disposal gratifies. But for the oracle to be therapeutic, the client should believe that the signs came from nowhere, that is, from some invisible force. The diviner mocked Quick Pull. That is why he showed it to us. He did not take the trick seriously, because the point of divination is precisely the opposite, to let in an event that has not been manipulated. Real is chance, whether understood as arbitrary chance, or as animated chance (through ancestral intervention). The bird, whose paws the diviner clenches with his feet creating a scene of symmetry during the séance, has to mirror reality. It is hoped to, via mediation. The diviner speaks in the first-person singular voicing the oracle, like a tensor to make something happen. Quick Pull, instead, simplicates the real into a simplex to make believe.

Clients of diviners go through a healing process which cultural analyses have grappled with. The positivist pitfall is to focus on the diviner’s deceit instead of the mental condition wherein clients go for consult. Since clients are in a state of limbo about their future, possibly ill, they wish for a remedy, a way out. The oracle slowly uncovers signs of evil wishes that have motivated kin or neighbor into performing witchcraft. The diviner suggests that the wishes may be legitimate because of the client’s neglect of the community law of solidarity, which led the ancestral guide to lift protection (a process named ndagu). A rigid Law intrusively inhabits the self, gnawing at life-force. Clients perceive in the oracle their bewitchment, their worst nightmare. After the diviner invokes the subject’s fears, medicine can work. ‘Magic’ remains the standard entry term in the literature for such medicinal concoction, mixing botanical and symbolic ingredients. Magic resolves bewitchment. During the séance clients shift from the disempowering feeling of bewitchment to the empowering feeling of medicine.

Nothing of what I describe here probably strikes the reader as irrational. We are observing frames enacted. The healing process commences when the client is ready to experience the ancestral spirit’s presence in the oracle. ‘Yingila’, onlookers whisper when they see the ulcerous mark of the ancestor on the bird’s spleen. ‘It has entered.’ What is ‘it’? The ancestor. The real. The difference between the two does not matter here. Sensing the real is the pivotal moment in the consultation, for the spirit, chance event or whichever sign arrives amidst a symbolic order seemingly fixed and generating a simplex for the victim: ‘guilty’, ‘you deserved your fate’. The ancestor arrives and listens to the subject. Not only does the ancestor’s arrival portend the support of family clan and society, but the law of solidarity turns out not so unnegotiable after all. In the newly attained frame of experience, the client feels endorsed by the ancestor and thus no longer imagines the threat within, namely that a so-called witch is laying a moral claim on his or her life or that of beloved ones. History appears to be on their side as it were. The once awe-inspiring witch now appears to be a pitiable, marginal figure suffering from pangs of jealousy and therefore resorting to witchcraft. For example, a neglected elderly lady. The client is ready to believe that the diviner-healer has the counter-magic to beat this knowledgeable enemy. The counter-magic will be dreamt by the healer who the next morning leaves the village and goes out in the forest to dig up the selected wild roots and other ingredients. The efficacy of the medicine however cannot be guaranteed because also depends on the real, like the oracle did. The frame of dependence and uncertainty contrasts with the bewitched, in crisis, framing the world in the fixed terms of guilt and certain outcome (see Mwanga magic in “Chapter Three: Losing the Feel for the Craft”).

A frameshift takes place. The bewitchment of client and loved one consulting transforms into receptivity to medicine via the therapeutic effect of divination. Figure 1 schematizes the dynamic a simplex frame like ‘the occult’ could never grasp. (More dimensions in the tensor would admittedly give a less coarse picture of the dynamic).⁴ In my analysis, the experience of bewitchment combines the terms ‘Law’ and ‘inside’ (diagonal in Fig. 1). The bewitched fear that a claim is laid on their life. Hence, their discourse about a curse. Their failed compliance with the law of solidarity, which they sense to be rigid, putatively explains the witch’s success to outsmart or corrupt the ancestral protector, and accounts for the patient’s incapacity of self-healing. Divination remedies this experience of ‘Law inside’ by introducing an unpredictable force ‘Real inside’ (left dashed line). That is the ancestor deciding to talk through the oracle. The shift from Law to Real, both linked in the scheme to ‘inside’, is the therapeutic moment of the oracle. The dashed arrow schematizes the moment. Embracing the real, or chance, of an oracle alleviates distress. It permits the patient to experience the law as an external pressure only, hence negotiable (right dashed line). The fears of personal indebtedness, which were simplicated in a sanctioning witch or spirit, have dissipated. The patient is able again to live with contingency. The frame of uncertainty implies this negotiation of rules, tolerance of exceptions and extension of the self to significant others.⁵

Fig. 1

Tensors of bewitchment (full lines) and healing (dashed)

Medicine or magic, finally, taps from the ‘Real outside’ (diagonal). Contrary to what the catch-all ‘occult’ suggests, bewitchment (Law inside) and magic (Real outside) relate to each other as opposites. Figure 1 is not a matrix but a tensor, owing to the dynamic of shifting frames expressed by the crossing diagonals and the arrow in the figure. Cultural analysis is a search for terms that permit cultural translation and comparison. Which place does simplex society reserve for the real, for the contingencies of life?

The raw power and energy of an unmanipulated outcome plays a pivotal role in oracles worldwide. The real is the closest humans come to witnessing life in action, together with existential events one has no control over such as birth and survival after mortal danger. Western scholars of divination nevertheless have disparaged the real as beside the point.⁶ Their symbolist accounts dissociate the sphere and frame of the oracle from energy and the unmanipulated presence of life. Through initiation rituals and song, Sukuma rhetoricians train their feel for the craft, for tensors, their art of insight in spheres, their knowledge of meanings belonging together and their applications of these frames at the right time to (re)connect the patient to life.

The first dimension inside/outside in Fig. 1 depicts the antagonism between witch and bewitched. No other solution is offered than conflict, poison or apartheid. In simplex society, this one binary dimension of who is right and who is wrong suffices, like a court sanctioning the guilty. But will objectivity improve the client’s state of powerlessness and transform the parties so that the families can go on living together in the community? A transformative dynamic enters the scene once the diviner adds a second dimension: real/law. The real (inside) replaces the Law (inside) embodied by the witch. The life-threatening indebtedness toward the latter (making living together impossible) retreats. The frameshift builds society.

The real exists in the oracle through the contingent presence of internal bleedings in the chick’s organs, through the unmediated throw of geomantic objects, or via the uncontrollable reception of dream images. Despite all kinds of procedures to double-check validity like second opinions among foreign diviners, ritually cleansing the oracle and the diviner’s guessing of the anonymous client’s gender, problem and clan, nobody can certify that the oracle’s ‘immissions’ are pure and not manipulated. Hence, the diagnosis might be true, or it might not be. Divinations happen under this condition of inclusive disjunctivity, defying science’s Aristotelian principle of the excluded third. Parallel realities reflect the uncertainty of human existence. The contingent signs of an oracle, supposedly recounting facts, are not disconnections from reality. It is on the contrary the rare client making abstraction of the oracle’s dependence on the real and taking the message literally who falls in the trap of simplication. This client disconnects from reality, that is, from the sphere of divination and its frame of meaning making.

At last we have the tools to resituate Mwanga magic. The combination of ‘real’ and ‘outside’ for the medicinal frame contrasts with the ‘Law inside’ of the bewitchment frame. Mwanga incarnates bewitchment, ‘Law inside’, because the outcome of this medicine is not contingent (real) on the ancestral will. We likened its workings to a law of nature. Experientially, this new magic occupies the position of bewitchment and therefore could not rescue the bewitched patients. It reinforces their sense of bewitchment. Like the double tap in war and the slurring tweet in debate, Mwanga feeds the cycle of violence and escalation. It is this incapacity to snap out of a frame that characterizes simplex society.

Now we have a chance to redefine our society. An ever larger layer of the population opts for the post-knowledge mode. They trust in their gut feeling. Unfortunately, without proper training of intuition, there probably is little to trust. Another section of the population, claiming to uphold the fruits of Enlightenment, disparages them in the name of reason. The tensor of Enlightenment (individual/collective, rational/irrational) resurfaces here as a simplex opposing reason to intuition. The previous tensor can de-simplicate the simplex as follows. Reason is the individual mind mastering laws of nature (right vertical line in Fig. 2) whereas intuition would be a collective mania driven by outside forces (left vertical line). The diagonal recombines the frames: intuition is salvaged if it can be trained, that is, if the individual can have access to the Real, an unruly contingent and possibly animate source of collective wisdom. In other words, an intuition that possesses collective reason is something to strive for to save humanity from simplexes. It is the difficult option we must explore.⁷

Fig. 2

Tensor of collective reason

The next chapter discusses the repercussions on the political system from a non-Western perspective. Has the West developed a democratic system conditioned by Enlightenment, namely partial to reason (versus intuition) and the individual (versus the collective)? Is the distinction between healing and politics, following from modernity’s differentiation of subsystems, artificial? Can the Western system of democracy heal? Or is its opposition between left and right, between frame-distending (mirroring everyone) and sphere-contracting (modeling the few) endemic?