Piège à sorciers ?

Sorcerer Trap?

This object collected in northern Ghana, whose elegance, execution and manifest age are absolutely exceptional, seems to belong to the category of artefacts used for fighting sorcerers. Many authors have written about African sorcery, and have provided a fairly precise picture of the modalities of the acts attributed to sorcerers and the procedures used to counteract them. Sorcerers, regarded as ‘eaters of souls’, meet in the bush at night to offer each other the doubles (souls) of captured victims and devour their vital elements. To do so they must turn themselves into a bird to approach their prey – nearly always a member of their family – during their sleep, when the soul leaves the body.

Only clairvoyant-healers with these metamorphic powers can combat such sorcery. Their practices are based on the power of herbs associated with that of metal, the element that has the faculty of neutralising their evil spells. The vehicle of this struggle is a metallic object enriched with heterogeneous depictions intended to ‘scribble out’ its appearance, the very target towards which its double, in the form of a bird, attracts the sorcerer’s double.

These ‘traps’ take various forms, all of which include a depiction of a chameleon and one or several of the birds opposing it. Their associated depiction of the concept of transformation (the chameleon) and of crossing over (the bird) symbolises the communal force of two equal and rival, malefic and benevolent forms of power whose permutation is always possible.

The metal cage represents all elements capable of trapping sorcerers, but here this is only a hypothesis: this object’s uniqueness and extremely uncertain origin make it impossible to situate it in its original context.