Blood from a chicken’s crest was sprinkled over a fire, and its bleeding head was touched against hot stones and a cooking pot. The chicken was then held over the flames and its feathers burnt off before it was cooked with a set of 19 leaves and other ingredients (which must remain secret). Then, as I looked to the east, palm wine mixed with potions was poured into my eyes to ‘open’ them so I could see clearly. And, finally, a portion of the prepared meal was put to one side and later dropped into the hole of a spider (or crab) to ensure that it would continue to tell the truth. This is how, in a Cameroonian village, I was initiated as a spider diviner by the late Wajiri Bi in 1986.

I had travelled to Cameroon as a young anthropologist hoping to study traditional religion and how it connected to local power structures. My research led me to Somié, the smallest of three Mambila villages on the Tikar Plain near the southern border of Nigeria. Somié was settled by the Mambila people, who live between Nigeria and Cameroon in the zone sometimes called the ‘middle belt’: where north meets south in both cultural and ecological terms. A settlement of single-storey homes among verdant farmlands, the village lies at the end of the motorable road. In it are the Chief’s Palace, the state dispensary, several churches, mosques, schools and, built this century, a solar power installation. Today the village has more than 5,000 residents, but when I arrived in the mid-1980s, the population was recorded as 1,006. A lot has changed since then, but some things have remained the same, particularly governance. The region was never fully incorporated into any larger state until the imposition of colonial rule after the First World War, and it remains at a distance from state power. This was what initially interested me: how were complex disputes settled in Somié without state involvement? What role did religion play?

My research interests led me to the village chief’s court, where I followed dispute resolution processes and the ritual oath-taking many solutions depend upon. As I learned the local language, Jù Bà (a Mambila dialect), and began to understand the interactions in court, I started to pay closer attention to the role of diviners, who were sometimes consulted to decide the answers to questions arising from a case. Had this man committed adultery despite his denials? Had a loan been repaid in full?

Wajiri Bi was often involved in such cases. He was the headman of an outlying hamlet (hence his honorific title ‘Wajiri’) and one of two chiefmakers in the village. People consulted Bi not only from Somié, where he lived and worked, but from other areas, too. Like most diviners, he knew several forms of divination. However, only one method was trusted for serious cases: spiders.

The methods behind spider divination and the principles of interpretation are widely known in Somié, and many people had told me about them. But knowing the ideas is different from being able to put them into practice. For that, I needed to be initiated. I asked Bi if he would teach me, and he did so willingly. There’s a delicacy here: some things I can describe only in outline to preserve the initiatory secrets. (Thankfully, the secrets associated with initiation do not apply to the things that I have shared here or elsewhere.) Without giving anything away, the ritual involved us simply preparing meals together and feeding portions of those meals to spiders to keep them as truth-tellers. No theoretical justification was provided for initiation, nor was any forthcoming, despite my many questions.

Since 1985, I have returned to Somié almost every year, continuing to learn from Bi and other diviners. That means I have been studying Mambila divination on and off for 40 years. In that time, through the guidance of my teachers, I have come to recognise that what first appeared as a local, esoteric practice reveals a broader, even universal, logic: a practical and sophisticated system for making decisions and managing uncertainty in contexts where definitive knowledge is elusive. Each time I return to the Somié, I find new connections extending outward, linking the particularities of divinatory practice in the village to wider questions of truth, interpretation and decision-making.

The question ‘What should I do?’ is a universal and ancient problem that has remained almost unchanged throughout human history. We can’t know the future in the same way we know the present (and some of the past), which means all people share similar concerns: who should I marry? Why am I ill? How should my sick child be treated? Should I move for a better life? Concerns about the future are not only important to individuals. They also matter to states: should we go to war? Should we raise or cut taxes?

The point of this randomness is that the diviner cannot influence the result

All of these are seemingly unanswerable at the immediate point of asking. The future appears unknowable. Enter the diviner, with skills and access to answers that others do not have. Though explanations of their uncanny skills vary enormously, the questions that are asked of them are similar around the world. For this reason, divination appears everywhere and is a contender for the ‘oldest profession’ (alongside warrior, prostitute and priest). It is truly universal.

We might be familiar with quotidian forms of divination, such as tarot cards, but divinatory practices differ hugely from one another and so do the accounts given by different practitioners to explain how and why their method functions. This makes providing general definitions of divination difficult and contentious. For example, is astrology a form of divination? It is for some, but not for others.

In many forms of divination, randomness is important. Examples include bibliomancy (opening a holy text and picking a verse at random), tarot and other sorts of cartomancy (shuffling the cards and picking some at random), Yijing and Ifá (throwing coins or chains; picking up odd or even numbers of sticks or nuts), or African basket divination in which objects placed in a basket are repeatedly tossed in the air (those that settle on top are then interpreted to answer a question). The point of this randomness is that the diviner cannot influence the result, so the message from beyond can be heard without the risk of human manipulation and interference.

But I didn’t study tarot cards, astrology or Ifá. I learned to read the messages left by spiders. So, how do Mambila diviners in Somié generate meaning from ambiguous signs? How do they help people think through uncertainty, negotiate meaning and make decisions? And what might we learn if we took such practices seriously, not as curiosities, but as alternative systems of knowledge in their own right? In a world increasingly marked by uncertainty, divinatory practices can teach us how to decide, act and move forward.

Before discussing the divinatory techniques used in Somié, it is worth noting the uses to which they are put. By far the two largest categories of questions asked, together accounting for almost half of all cases, concern illness (or health more generally) and family (such as issues related to marriage).

Illness prompts questions about what treatments are appropriate, and where they should be sought. Such questions can implicitly explore whether the illness has been caused by witchcraft or whether it has occurred naturally, which Mambila idiom describes........

© Aeon