The Earth (Earth-Power)
Nuba (Nuba Mountains) · numen · Nuba (Nuba Mountains) traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
The earth appears in Nuba ritual less as a fully drawn deity than as a power implicit in practice. Offerings are poured onto the ground, where they reach at once the buried ancestors and the earth itself, and the ground is invoked in oath and ordeal as a witness to truth. From these usages ethnographers infer a conception of the earth as a fertile and moral power complementary to the sky, but it is thinly personified, carries no developed myth, and is not everywhere clearly distinguished from the ancestral dead who lie within it. It is registered here as a genuine but minor and weakly individuated focus of Nuba religious practice.
Domains
- earth
- fertility
Powers
- receives the poured libation
- witnesses oaths and truth
Sources
- Libations poured on the ground and oaths sworn by the earth point to a conception of the earth as a power underlying fertility and truth, though it is only weakly personified.: S. F. Nadel, The Nuba (Oxford University Press, 1947) (secondary)