The Green-Stone Spirit (Kujur's Tutelary Power)
The living heart of Nuba religion is the kujur, the diviner-priest into whom a spirit descends, and the power that possesses him is the being here registered. In trance the spirit speaks through its medium to uncover the concealed causes of sickness, death, and misfortune, to accuse witches, to prescribe cure and expiation, and, in the hands of the greatest practitioners, to make rain. What most sharply distinguishes the Nuba case, and what drew Nadel to call it shamanism, is the role of small green stones: the spirit is materially lodged in these stones, which the diviner keeps, handles, and passes to a successor, so that the tie between spirit and medium is inheritable through the objects. Sources vary on the spirit's nature, sometimes casting it as an ancestral shade, sometimes as a free spirit of the hills or waters, and the boundary between the diviner's power, the ancestors, and the rain is not sharply drawn.
Domains
- divination
- healing
- possession
Powers
- possesses the diviner
- reveals the hidden causes of misfortune
- dwells in the sacred green stone
Relations
- ally: The Rain (Nuba Rain-Cult Numen)Rain-making is among the feats claimed for the diviner's spirit.S. F. Nadel, A Study of Shamanism in the Nuba Mountains, JRAI 76 (1946) (secondary)
- ally: The Ancestral Shades (Grandfather-Spirits)The possessing power is frequently identified with, or works alongside, the ancestral dead.S. F. Nadel, The Nuba (Oxford University Press, 1947) (secondary)
Sources
- The kujur, a diviner possessed by a spirit, is the central religious specialist of the Nuba, his power bound up with sacred green stones through which the spirit acts.: S. F. Nadel, A Study of Shamanism in the Nuba Mountains, JRAI 76 (1946): 25-37 (secondary); S. F. Nadel, The Nuba (Oxford University Press, 1947) (secondary)
- Nadel analysed Nuba diviner-mediumship as a form of shamanism in which the spirit seizes the diviner in trance to reveal hidden causes of misfortune and to command the rain.: S. F. Nadel, A Study of Shamanism in the Nuba Mountains, JRAI 76 (1946): 25-37 (secondary)