Divination—one of the most significant traditional spiritual forms in the African and African diasporic way of life—is readily labeled in the theory of religion as a form of “magic” and therefore an other to “mysticism.” Looking at it from African and African diasporic epistemologies, particularly as signified among the Dagara people and in the Dagara worldview shared into the African diaspora and other communities by Malidoma Somé, this chapter offers an appraisal of divination as a mystical practice. Even as it is sometimes strategically sought to address pragmatic concerns, the ethos of poetic transformation in divinatory practice remarks on the crisis of human intelligibility; frays constructed barriers separating mind, body, spirit, and community; and restores unitive consciousness. The discursive space divinations open for the participation of ancestors, deities, and spirits allow the diviner and the divinee to dialogue with mystical knowledge and uphold a mystical view of reality and subjectivity that is continually negotiating “other worlds” that denote belonging, not otherness, within this cosmological frame. The chapter elucidates and honors these understandings through the author’s own practice as a diviner taught within the Dagara-in-the-West tradition and proposes that divination intercedes in the study of spiritual realities as the persistence of an anti-colonial imagination.

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Listening to the Bigger Story: The Dagara Spiritual Technology of Divination on Turtle Island

  • Monica Mody

摘要

Divination—one of the most significant traditional spiritual forms in the African and African diasporic way of life—is readily labeled in the theory of religion as a form of “magic” and therefore an other to “mysticism.” Looking at it from African and African diasporic epistemologies, particularly as signified among the Dagara people and in the Dagara worldview shared into the African diaspora and other communities by Malidoma Somé, this chapter offers an appraisal of divination as a mystical practice. Even as it is sometimes strategically sought to address pragmatic concerns, the ethos of poetic transformation in divinatory practice remarks on the crisis of human intelligibility; frays constructed barriers separating mind, body, spirit, and community; and restores unitive consciousness. The discursive space divinations open for the participation of ancestors, deities, and spirits allow the diviner and the divinee to dialogue with mystical knowledge and uphold a mystical view of reality and subjectivity that is continually negotiating “other worlds” that denote belonging, not otherness, within this cosmological frame. The chapter elucidates and honors these understandings through the author’s own practice as a diviner taught within the Dagara-in-the-West tradition and proposes that divination intercedes in the study of spiritual realities as the persistence of an anti-colonial imagination.