![]() ![]() The Kassunas Fras, another negro people of the same region, to the north of the Gold Coast, similarly offer sacrifices to the Sky on the terraces of their houses, especially when they are about to set out on a journey. ![]() 7 The worship of the Sky among the Kassunas Fras. This is natural enough, for in the belief of the blacks these pebbles have fallen from the Sky, and are in fact fragments of that great divinity. There he constructs a cone of beaten earth, some three feet high at most, and sets the pebble on the top of it, and offers sacrifices to it, saying that it is the Good God himself, or at all events a fetish which the Good God has bestowed on him. When the head of a family finds in the forest a pebble which attracts his attention by its colour, or beauty, or curious shape, he picks it up and takes it home. Further, the Nunumas, like other negroes, associate the worship of certain pebbles with the worship of the Sky. 6 On the terraces of their houses the people sometimes erect huge pointed cones of beaten earth in honour either of the ancestors or of the Sky. 5 Now it is noteworthy that in this tribe the Sky-god is always invoked along with the ancestral spirits. 4 The worship of the dead forms an important element in the religion of the Nunumas for the souls of ancestors are supposed to dwell under ground and to cause the growth of vegetation, particularly of the grain hence at the time of sowing the seed the head of a family always sacrifices to the ancestral spirits either at their graves or at the little huts dedicated to them. In that case the sacrifices must be continued till a victim yields up its life in the required position. But if the bird does not die on its back, it is a sign that Heaven is displeased and rejects the offering. If it expires on its back, the omen is good: Heaven has accepted the sacrifice. There, on the terrace, they cut the throat of a fowl, throw it in the air, and watch it, as it flutters and flaps its wings in the agony of death. At his bidding they ascend one of the terraces of their large family dwellings ( sukalas), which are built of beaten earth and in their massive proportions often present the appearance of lofty rectangular fortresses rather than of houses. 3 Again, among the Nunumas, another tribe of the same region, the two great deities are still the Earth and the Forest, but the people also revere the Sky or the Good God, as they call him, and they offer sacrifices to him when the diviner orders them to do so. Still, even among them the Sky has to yield precedence to the Earth and the Forest. 2 But among the Sankuras, a branch of the Bobos, who have been influenced by Mohammedanism, the Sky-god has regained some of his original importance because his worshippers have identified him with Allah. This, for example, is true of the Bobos, a tribe of Upper Senegal or the French Sudan, who occupy a territory in the valley of the Niger to the north of the Ivory Coast. ![]() The worship of the Sky appears to be common to all the negroes of Western Africa, but among many of them it is cast into the shade by the worship of the Earth and of the Forest. The worship of the Sky among the Nunumas. ![]() The worship of the Sky among the tribes of Upper Senegal. We begin with the tribes of Western Africa. 1 For my purpose it will suffice to select as examples of this particular phase of religion the beliefs and practices of a single race, or rather group of races, to wit, the black peoples of Africa, among whom the personification and worship of the Sky are particularly well developed. There is the less need for me to dwell at length on the topic because the whole of this wide field has already been surveyed and mapped by Professor Pettazzoni in the learned work to which I have already referred. I do not propose to ransack the whole annals of savagery and barbarism in search of sky-gods to do so would tax too far the patience of my hearers and exceed the time at my disposal. The worship of the Sky well developed in Africa. When we remember that the religious veneration of the Sky is based on a simple personification of the visible firmament, in other words, on an attribution to it of qualities and powers like those of man in kind, though higher in degree, we shall probably be less astonished that so crude a philosophy should commend itself to primitive folk than that it should so long have survived among peoples at a higher level of culture. But that worship is by no means confined to civilized nations it occurs also commonly enough in savage and barbarous tribes. T HUS far we have discussed the worship of the Sky as it has existed among the civilized peoples of antiquity and of modern times. Worship of the Sky in Western Africa The worship of the Sky common in savage and barbarous tribes. ![]()
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