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My High Priestess

Bone, Shell & Object Divination · The Living Archive

Southern African Bone Casting: Ancestors, Calling and the Meaning of the Fall

Tradition:
Southern African bone casting
Context:
Southern Africa; Ngwaketse area, Botswana
Period:
Historical and contemporary

A divination set may contain a coin beside a shell, a stone beside an animal bone. To someone encountering it for the first time, the mixture can be surprising. Why would objects from such different parts of life belong together?

In Southern African casting practices, the set can bring relationships, concerns, and spiritual knowledge into a form the diviner can work with. The arrangement matters. So does the person who reads it, the training behind that person, and the relationship with ancestors through which the consultation is understood.

There are distinct traditions across the region. An isiZulu-speaking diviner in KwaZulu-Natal and a Tswana practitioner in Botswana should not be treated as interchangeable. Looking at particular examples gives us a fuller picture than a single label could.

The ancestors are part of the consultation

Within the ancestral beliefs described by practitioners, death does not end a person's relationship with the living. Ancestors may guide, communicate, and take an interest in the affairs of descendants. Divination is one way that relationship becomes part of a consultation.

Phansi Museum's account, which includes the perspective of physician and sangoma David Cumes, describes several channels of ancestral communication, including dreams, spirit mediumship, and divining bones. It presents the healer's relationship with ancestors as central to the work.1

That understanding changes how the objects are approached. They participate in a relationship the practitioner regards as spiritually active. The consultation has a purpose within that world: to bring hidden causes, neglected relationships, or a possible response into view.

A calling, then a demanding apprenticeship

In research published in 2016, Thembelihle Zuma and colleagues recorded how traditional health practitioners in rural KwaZulu-Natal described becoming a diviner. Their accounts distinguished ubizo, the calling, ukuthwasa, training or initiation, and ukuphothula, completion. Dreams and experiences interpreted as ancestral communication could form part of that calling. An established practitioner guided the training.2

The study also distinguished diviners, herbal specialists, and faith healers, while showing that practitioners' roles could overlap. Its value is the specificity of those voices. It describes people explaining their own work in a particular community.

Training therefore involves more than memorizing an object's assigned meaning. It concerns the practitioner's role, responsibilities, relationships, and capacity to conduct consultations. Descriptions of a spiritual calling are accounts of religious experience, not a basis for diagnosing a reader's illness or unusual experiences.

Why a set includes more than bones

Phansi Museum documents casting sets containing vertebrae and other bones alongside cowries, stones, dice, coins, and pieces resembling dominoes. It describes selection as personal to the practitioner and, in the case of animal remains, connected with knowledge of the animals concerned.3

An animal's observed behavior can make it meaningful within an interpretive system. A manufactured object can carry associations from everyday life. The set is assembled from a world the practitioner knows.

This also helps explain why a contemporary-looking item need not be out of place. Living traditions continue in changing material surroundings. A coin has a history of circulation and use; a shell has a different history. What brings them together is their place in the particular set.

The fall is an arrangement

In the historical Ngwaketse account Phansi Museum attributes to Alec Campbell in 1968, four principal bones relate to family, with supplementary pieces adding social detail. Facing, direction, and the relative positions of pieces contribute to interpretation.3

This is a useful way to understand the “fall.” The reader is attending to a configuration. Identifying one piece begins the process; its relationships contribute further information.

Imagine the difference between naming everyone in a family photograph and understanding what is happening between them. Naming the individuals leaves questions of closeness, distance, attention, and relationship. That is an explanatory comparison, not a traditional interpretation of a cast, but it helps make the importance of arrangement clear.

Why people consult

South African History Online describes consultations in which the practitioner asks questions about the person and family, considers social circumstances, and may use bones associated with aspects of life such as family relationships or finances. It also recounts Nomsa Dlamini's history as a nurse at Baragwanath Hospital before she trained as a sangoma.4

Her story complicates the assumption that traditional practice exists in a world untouched by hospitals, formal education, or urban life. The people involved can move through several institutions and understandings of care.

For historical understanding, the important point is that a consultation can address the person's life as a set of relationships. A question about distress may also become a question about home, work, family, responsibility, and belonging.

A wider ceremonial setting

The cast may be the part that draws an outsider's attention, but the surrounding material culture is substantial. Phansi's collection includes ritual staffs, ankle rattles, drums, beaded medicine containers, and clothing associated with particular practitioners and regions. It identifies a Venda drum used in ancestral communication and a reed basket decorated with cowries and red ochre for storing equipment.5

These objects help us see a larger practice involving sound, movement, preparation, storage, and care. The casting set belongs within that setting.

Southern African bone casting becomes far more intelligible when approached through those relationships: the practitioner and ancestors, the practitioner and teacher, the client and family, and the objects within the fall. Each relationship contributes to what the consultation is understood to do.

Key terms

Casting (Bone, shell & object divination)
Throwing or releasing objects as part of a procedure. A cast has no single universal interpretation.
Provenance (Bone, shell & object divination)
An object's documented history of ownership or custody. Provenance information may be incomplete.

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