Divination and Its Primordial Sources among the Yakaphones
From the perspective of the Yakaphones in the southwest of the DR Congo, it is through his or her shamanic dream and intuitive insight into the conduct of consultants that the diviner succeeds in discerning some major signifiers regarding the client’s unthinkable, hence unnameable misfortune. Consulted, the diviner in trance probes the oracle to avail an inchoative phonation of mythological propositions concerning the dawn of all life. The rhythmic beat of the slit drum – that the diviner wears on her or his left arm in the manner of a newborn baby – invites the spirits of the family and the cult, as well as the consultants to join the query and react to a series of fixed questions on an affirmative or negative way. The phenomenological essay advances how the oracle is a vocal emission of the realm of the night and moon, itself a manifestation of the regenerative and primordial sources of all life. The oracle detects the curse and ensorcellment at play, and interrogates the affliction’s social and cosmological wounds. Elaborating without a subject or author of the saying, the oracle probes a communication between the invisible or indistinguishable « elsewhere » or otherness and the visible reality of the « here ».