I presently found out that he called my pocket compass, "Mbwiri," a very vague and comprehensive word. It represents in the highest signification the Columbian Manitou, and thus men talk of the Mbwiri of a tree or a river; as will presently be seen, it is also applied to a tutelar god; and I have shown how it means a ghost. In "Nágo Mbwiri" the sense is an idol, an object of worship, a "medicine" as the North-American Indians say, in contradistinction to Munda, a grigri, talisman, or charm. Every Mpongwe, woman as well as man, has some Mbwiri to which offerings are made in times of misfortune, sickness, or danger. I afterwards managed to enter one of these rude and embryonal temples so carefully shut. Behind the little door of matting is a tall threshold of board; a bench lines the far end, and in the centre stands "Ologo," a rude imitation of a human figure, with a gum-torch planted in the ground before it ready for burnt offerings. To the walls are suspended sundry mystic implements, especially basins, smeared with red and white chalk-mixture, and wooden crescents decorated with beads and ribbons.
During worship certain objects are placed before the Joss, the suppliant at the same time jangling and shaking the Ncheke a rude beginning of the bell, the gong, the rattle, and the instruments played before idols by more advanced peoples. It is a piece of wood, hour-glass-shaped but flat, and some six inches and a half long; the girth of the waist is five inches, and about three more round the ends. The wood is cut away, leaving rude and uneven raised bands horizontally striped with white, black, and red. Two brass wires are stretched across the upper and lower breadth, and each is provided with a ring or hinge holding four or five strips of wire acting as clappers.
This "wicker-work rattle to drive the devil out" (M. du Chaillu, chap, xxvi.) is called by the Mpongwe "Soke," and serves only, like that of the Dahomans and the Ashantis (Bowdich, 364) for dancing and merriment. The South American Maraca was the sole object of worship known to the Tupi or Brazilian "Indians." [13]
The beliefs and superstitions popularly attributed to the Mpongwe are these. They are not without that which we call a First Cause, and they name it Anyambia, which missionary philologists consider a contraction of Aninla, spirit (?), and Mbia, good. M. du Chaillu everywhere confounds Anyambía, or, as he writes the word, "Aniambié," with Inyemba, a witch, to bewitch being "punga inyemba." Mr. W. Winwood Reade seems to make Anyambía a mysterious word, as was Jehovah after the date of the Moabite stone. Like the Brahm of the Hindus, the god of Epicurus and Confucius, and the Akárana-Zaman or Endless Time of the Guebres, Anyambia is a vague being, a vox et præterea nihil, without personality, too high and too remote for interference in human affairs, therefore not addressed in prayer, never represented by the human form, never lodged in temples. Under this "unknown God" are two chief agencies, working partners who manage the business of the world, and who effect what the civilized call "Providence." Mbwírí here becomes the Osiris, Jove, Hormuzd or Good God, the Vishnu, or Preserver, a tutelar deity, a Lar, a guardian. Onyámbe is the Bad God, Typhon, Vejovis, the Ahriman or Semitic devil; Shiva the Destroyer, the third person of the Aryan triad; and his name is never mentioned but with bated breath. They have not only fear of, but also a higher respect for him than for the giver of good, so difficult is it for the child- man's mind to connect the ideas of benignity and power. He would harm if he could, ergo so would his god. I once hesitated to believe that these rude people had arrived at the notion of duality, at the Manichaeanism which caused Mr. Mill (sen.) surprise that no one had revived it in his time; at an idea so philosophical, which leads directly to the ne plus ultra of faith, El Wahdaníyyeh or Monotheism. Nor should I have credited them with so logical an apparatus for the regimen of the universe, or so stout-hearted an attempt to solve the eternal riddle of good and evil. But the same belief also exists amongst the Congoese tribes, and even in the debased races of the Niger. Captain William Alien ("Niger Expedition," i. 227) thus records the effect when, at the request of the commissioners, Herr Schon, the missionary, began stating to King Obi the difference between the Christian religion and heathenism:
"Herr Schön. There is but one God.
"King Obi. I always understood there were two," &c.
The Mpongwe "Mwetye" is a branch of male freemasonry into which women and strangers are never initiated. The Bakele and Shekyani, according to "Western Africa" (Wilson, pp. 391-2), consider it a "Great Spirit." Nothing is more common amongst adjoining negro tribes than to annex one another's superstitions, completely changing, withal, their significance. "Ovengwá" is a vampire, the apparition of a dead man; tall as a tree, always winking and clearly seen, which is not the case with the Ibámbo and Ilogo, plurals of Obambo and Ologo. These are vulgar ghosts of the departed, the causes of "possession," disease and death; they are propitiated by various rites, and everywhere they are worshipped in private. Mr. Wilson opines that the "Obambo are the spirits of the ancestors of the people, and Inlâgâ are the spirits of strangers and have come from a distance," but this was probably an individual tenet. The Mumbo-Jumbo of the Mandengas; the Semo of the Súsús; the Tassau or "Purrah-devil" of the Mendis; the Egugun of the Egbas; the Egbo of the Duallas; and the Mwetye and Ukukwe of the Bakele, is represented in Pongo-land by the Ndá, which is an order of the young men. Ndá dwells in the woods and comes forth only by night bundled up in dry plantain leaves[14] and treading on tall stilts; he precedes free adult males who parade the streets with dance and song. The women and children fly at the approach of this devil on two sticks, and with reason: every peccadillo is punished with a merciless thrashing. The institution is intended to keep in order the weaker sex, the young and the "chattels:" Ndá has tried visiting white men and missionaries, but his visits have not been a success.
The civilized man would be apt to imagine that these wild African fetishists are easily converted to a "purer creed." The contrary is everywhere and absolutely the case; their faith is a web woven with threads of iron. The negro finds it almost impossible to rid himself of his belief; the spiritual despotism is the expression of his organization, a part of himself. Progressive races, on the other hand, can throw off or exchange every part of their religion, except perhaps the remnant of original and natural belief in things unseen—in fact, the Fetishist portion, such as ghost-existence and veneration of material objects, places, and things. I might instance the Protestant missionary who, while deriding the holy places at Jerusalem, considers the "Cedars of Lebanon" sacred things, and sternly forbids travellers to gather the cones.
The stereotyped African answer to Europeans ridiculing these institutions, including wizard-spearing and witch-burning is, "There may be no magic, though I see there is, among you whites. But we blacks have known many men who have been bewitched and died." Even in Asia, whenever I spoke contemptuously to a Moslem of his Jinns, or to a Hindu of his Rákshasa, the rejoinder invariably was, "You white men are by nature so hot that even our devils fear you."
Witchcraft, which has by no means thoroughly disappeared from Europe, maintains firm hold upon the African brain. The idea is found amongst Christians, for instance, the "reduced Indians" of the Amazonas River; and it is evidently at the bottom of that widely spread superstition, the "evil eye," which remains throughout Southern Europe as strong as it was in the days of Pliny. As amongst barbarians generally, no misfortune happens, no accident occurs, no illness nor death can take place without the agency of wizard or witch. There is nothing more odious than this crime; it is hostile to God and man, and it must be expiated by death in the most terrible tortures. Metamorphosis is a common art amongst Mpongwe magicians: this vulgar materialism, of which Ovid sang, must not be confounded with the poetical Hindu metempsychosis or transmigration of souls which explains empirically certain physiological mysteries. Here the adept naturally becomes a gorilla or a leopard, as he would be a lion in South Africa, a hyena in Abyssinia and the Somali country, and a loup-garou in Brittany.[15]