Mbori
Mbori, also written Mboli, is the remote creator being of Zande religion, the ghostly power to whom the origin of the world and of humankind is attributed. Unlike high gods elsewhere in Africa, Mbori receives no shrines, images, or regular cult; the name is invoked chiefly in fixed phrases that assign ultimate causation, as when the Zande say that Mbori made death or that a person's lot rests with Mbori. Everyday misfortune, by contrast, is referred not to Mbori but to witchcraft, mangu, diagnosed through the poison oracle, benge. Evans-Pritchard, drawing on fieldwork of the 1920s and 1930s, judged Mbori a shadowy and little-personified figure; some accounts place the being at the sources of streams alongside the ancestral ghosts, the atoro.
Domains
- creation
- cosmic order and fate
- death and mortality
Powers
- creates the world
- ordains death
Epithets
- Mbori nga bakumba
Sources
- E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), pp. 11-12.
- E. E. Evans-Pritchard, 'Zande Theology', Sudan Notes and Records 19 (1936), pp. 5-46.
- 'Azande', Encyclopedia.com (humanities encyclopedia entry).
- C. R. Lagae, Les Azande ou Niam-Niam (Brussels: Bibliotheque-Congo, 1926).