John Beattie - Spirit Mediumship and Society in Africa

Routledge Library Editions

Anthropology and Ethnography

AFRICA

In 26 Volumes

SPIRIT MEDIUMSHIP AND SOCIETY IN AFRICA

EDITED BY JOHN BEATTIE
AND JOHN MIDDLETON

LONDON AND NEW YORK

Spirit Mediumship
and Society in Africa

JOHN BEATTIE ELIZABETH COLSON
M. J. FIELD G. KINGSLEY GARBETT
ROBERT F. GRAY ROBIN HORTON
S. G. LEE I. M. LEWIS
JOHN MIDDLETON AIDAN SOUTHALL
R. E. S. TANNER PIERRE VERGER
F. B. WELBOURN

Edited by
John Beattie and John Middleton
Foreword by Raymond Firth

LONDON
ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL

First published 1969
by Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited
Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane
London E.C.4
No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form without permission from
the publisher, except for the quotation
of brief passages in criticism

SBN 7100 6036 X

Plate 1 is reproduced by courtesy of the Ghana Daily Graphic. Plates 2,3,4 and 5 are reproduced from E. L. R. Meyerowitzs Akan of Ghana, Faber, by kind permission. Plate 6 is from a photograph by E. L. R. Meyerowitz, by kind permission. Plate 7 is from a photograph by M. J. Field. Plates 8, 9 and 10 are from photographs by S. G. Lee. Plates 11, 12 and 13 are from photographs by R. E. S. Tanner.

Location of societies discussed

Raymond Firth

Spirit possession and spirit mediumship are among the most widespread and most intriguing phenomena in the occult field. Under these names, or as ecstasy, pythonism, demon possession, devil-dancing, shamanism, spiritism, spiritualism, they have been the subject of a vast literature extending over at least two thousand years. In the classical Greek period accounts of Dionysiac cults refer to possession by the god in which worshippers saw visions and performed feats of an extraordinary kind. In Christian proselytization in the nineteenth century, possession and mediumship often presented problems for the missionary, who found himself opposed, as he thought, by evil spirits in person.1 In Britain after the first world war spiritualism responded to a widespread interest of bereaved families wishing to get into touch with their loved sons who had died: more generally, it attracted the attention of the Society for Psychical Research, leaders of the churches, and a host of earnest seekers after evidence of the survival of human personality after bodily death. In such contexts spirit mediumship has been variously described as psychic renewal, discovery and utilization of the miraculous powers of the human mind, irreligious spirit communication, a superstition leading to loss of health, loss of morals and loss of faith.2

Social anthropologists too have studied spirit possession and spirit mediumship, but from a different point of view. They have been concerned not with problems of survival of personality of the dead, but with problems of multiple personality of the living. Many of them have been faced in the field by dramatic changes of personality in men or women they were studying startling yet evidently accustomed alterations of behaviour, with trembling, sweating, groaning, speaking with strange voices, assumption of a different identity, purporting to be a spirit not a human being, giving commands or foretelling the future in a new authoritative way. Sometimes it has been hard for the anthropologist to persuade himself that it is really the same person as before whom he is watching or confronting, so marked is the personality change. Most anthropologists have not been equipped to study the technical physiological and psychological questions involved in such trance or dissociation. But they have been able to focus upon aspects of the phenomena usually neglected by other students of the subject the social position of the performer, the reactions of the audience, the structural type of personification adopted by the medium, the relation of the seance to events before and after, the general place of the spirit cult in the social and religious system of the people.3