In parts of west Africa around the Gulf of Guinea, people will deliberately remove the tip of their cats’ tails, or sometimes their ears.
Why? Because it makes them “impure” for ritual purposes and thus stops people stealing them to turn them into religious power objects.
Why? Because it makes them “impure” for ritual purposes and thus stops people stealing them to turn them into religious power objects.
Africans are not generally kind to animals (understatement). You keep them either as labour or as food, and often one after the other. But cats are usually at least tolerated because they keep other things that eat your food at bay.
But cats are also eaten, and, even more gruesomely for the gentle-stomached oyinbo, they are also used as the basis for “gris gris” – protective or offensive talismans – as well as victims for blood sacrifices.
It’s difficult to tell how common this is exactly because practitioners of the traditions of which these rituals are a part are reluctant to discuss them with outsiders. There are often multiple levels of initiation involved into a variety of priesthoods and secret societies.
The best known of these traditions in the west is “vodun”, mostly practiced by speakers of the Gbe languages, however the practices of other Volta-Niger speakers and some neighbours more into the interior are very similar in their broad features.
These include: all-powerful but largely absent creator deities supported by a “pantheon” of innumerable minor deities. The term “vodun” refers to one such class of spirits (although there’s never only one class and ancestors usually play an important role).
Spirits can be of greater or lesser power, can be specific to families or domains, and more or less well disposed towards humans. Naturally these systems lend themselves to syncretism and gods are borrowed relatively freely between different groups and traditions.
The default attitude of the spirits towards humans seems to be indifference verging on malevolence. Many can be bargained with or bribed into providing favour with the correct rituals, but most commonly they have to be placated in restitution for a variety of mortal slights.
This is all determined and mediated through a class of priests who inhabit a world of secret societies and mystery traditions and will perform divinations, rituals, and healing ceremonies – and are typically well compensated for their services.
This is the meat of the belief system. These are highly practical religions, concerned more with actions and effects than anything else. Their most important elements are sacrifices and the production of ”power objects”.
Sacrifices are either “dry” or “wet”, meaning the offering of goods vs a live animal. Different spirits have different preferences, which vary widely. Some prefer their meat smoked, others raw. Some like eggs. Others take cash. Blood is highly prized for most.
The specific manner of sacrifice also varies from god to god, animal to animal, and ritual to ritual. The chicken must be killed just so, its meat and organs harvested correctly.
The same also applies to the construction of shrines.
The same also applies to the construction of shrines.
Shrines are often constructed from a mixture of rocks, wood, and animal and even human body parts, often with an image of the object of their devotion.
Specific gods can require extremely specific items for their shrines to be “valid”.
Specific gods can require extremely specific items for their shrines to be “valid”.
Once correctly prepared and activated with a blood sacrifice to invite in divine power, shrines are taken to be literal manifestations of the god. Some anthropologists have referred to them as “god-objects” or “fetishes”.
Sacrifices are thought to provide numinous energy to both shrines and to participants in rituals, who will often consume the victim and their blood at an appropriate interval after the god has been allowed to take their share.
The production of power objects (famously called “gris gris” in Benin French) is also central to religious practice and often requires specific plant or animal ingredients. It’s not always clear which as the people who prepare these charms keep their precise methods secret.
Many – especially initiates of secret societies – will take whatever specimens they can find to perform their rituals, either through simple theft or with promises of divine retribution for any resistance.
Animals that are visibly scarred or deformed are believed by many to be unacceptable as sacrifices or as components of power objects because they will be rejected by the gods. Hence the deliberate clipping of an ear.
None of this has anything to do with Haiti by the way.
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