Baule Gbekre Mouse Divination Vessel
Item Details
African Ivory Coast Baule gbeke oracle vessel, a mouse divination pot carved out the wood of a calabash tree, with a open top with leather disc lid decorated with dark twisted cording and fur-embellished wood root ‘mouse’. Regional oral traditions recount that in the distant past mice could speak. At that time they lived in the forest with the earth spirits (asye usu) until a spiritual specialist carried them into the village to be kept in captivity. Their natural proximity to the earth’s surface and their ability to burrow beneath it permit mice to gain intimate access to the omniscient asye usu and the ancestors, thus enabling them to foretell events. The diviner puts a field mouse, who has been on a fast since the moment he was caught, into the bottom of the gbekre, and places chaffs of rice and ten bones of either birds or bats onto a brass or an upside-down turtle shell in the upper half. When the diviner is ready, he closes the lid. The mouse has crawled into the top to listen to all the client’s troubles, and afterward crawls back down to consult with the earth spirts through a tiny hole in the bottom of the gbekre; he spreads the word of what is happening and waits for the spirits’ response. The mouse then climbs up again and tosses around the bones as any hungry mouse would do in the midst of rice. The diviner takes off the lid so that he can ‘read’ the pattern of the bones or sticks. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Condition
primitive state
Dimensions
Item #
13CIN149-049
Additional Information
