Neither of these gets a section of its own in the course. Both arrive as asides, and both are the kind of concrete practical detail that tends to be more reliable than the theory around it.
One. You go to the river. You get into the water. You begin the ritual invocation — and the fish start swarming.1
Two. Somebody is possessed, and white powder is put on their body.2
The rite is okra guare — the ritual cleansing of the okra, the soul, through washing the head.3
You go to the river. You enter the water. You begin the invocation.
And the reported confirmation: the fish begin swarming.
The corpus offers a parallel from a practitioner in the Vodun tradition: she goes to the water, engages the ritual incantation, and the fish start jumping out of the water.4
Two traditions, same reported phenomenon, and the corpus treats it as evidence that the lagoon-and-water divinity is responding.5
Grading it. Fish do congregate where there is disturbance, food, or shade, and rivers where people bathe are places fish learn to gather.
But the report is specific and repeated, and it is the kind of claim a practitioner would be well placed to notice being wrong. It's recorded here as a reported observation, [PARAPHRASED], not as a mechanism.
The second rite is more interesting because the corpus builds an argument out of it.
When someone becomes possessed in Akan practice, white powder is put on the body — to show the person is possessed.6
And the corpus's reading is that this is not merely a marker. It is facilitating the state.
"Instead of us using white bandages or white cloth, we put the white powder on — becoming Asar-ianized, facilitating possession."7
The chain the corpus assembles:
Asar is wrapped in white bandages and wears a white crown.8
Obatala, his Yoruba counterpart, is the chief of the white cloth.9
Akan practice puts white powder on the possessed body.10
And the underlying reason: possession is si — the descent of a spirit onto a person — and that descent is governed by the divinity whose name-root is si.11 So marking a person white is aligning them with the force that makes descent possible.
Which makes the powder a piece of equipment rather than a costume.
Because it explains a correspondence that would otherwise be a coincidence.
White is not an obvious colour for a funerary or possession context — many traditions use black, red or ochre. That three related traditions all attach white to the same complex of death, descent and possession is worth an explanation.
And the corpus's explanation is functional rather than symbolic: white is what the spirit-descent state looks like, and the wrappings, the crown, the cloth and the powder are all the same claim.
There's a further strand it doesn't quite pull: smoke.
Wusi means smoke or steam — white, rising, released from a body — and the corpus reads it as the image of a spirit leaving.12
So white is the colour of the thing that comes and goes. Wrapping a corpse in it, and powdering a possessed body with it, are both marking a body as one a spirit is passing through.
The corpus has every piece of that and states it in three separate places.
Both are water and whiteness operations, and both mark a threshold.
The river washing cleanses the okra and is performed at the boundary between land and water.
The powder marks the boundary between a person operating themselves and a person being operated.
Both make a transition visible. Which is what most of this tradition's ritual apparatus seems to be for — not causing transitions but rendering them legible, so a community can tell what state someone is in.
That's the same job the funerary wailing does, and the same job the professional mourner does.13 Announce the state. Let everyone see it.
He's talking about the lagoon goddess and mentions the sister in the Vodun tradition.
Once she engages the ritual incantation, all of a sudden the fish start jumping up out of the water.
Then his own: once we start the ritual invocation, all of a sudden the fish start swarming.14
Reported as a matter of course, without emphasis, as the kind of thing that happens.
You watch a ceremony and someone is marked — powder, chalk, cloth — and you read it as costume.
The alternative reading is that they are being prepared, the way a surface is prepared before something is applied to it.
Which changes what you're watching from a performance into a procedure.
You notice how few transitions in ordinary life are marked at all.
People change state — grief, illness, authority, exhaustion — and nothing on them says so, and everyone has to guess.
Marking is cheap and we've mostly stopped, and the guessing is what fills the gap.
Take the marking function seriously across the corpus, because it recurs and is never named as a category.
Instances.
White powder marks a person as currently possessed.15
Ritual wailing, performed by hired non-relatives, marks a death as having occurred and announces to the deceased that their condition has changed.16
White bandages mark a body as one whose spirit has departed.17
The tyet amulet, red, marks its wearer as under protection.18
What they share. None of them primarily causes anything. Each renders a state externally legible — to the community, and in the funerary cases to the person whose state it is.
Why that's infrastructure rather than decoration. A community that can see who is in what state can act correctly toward them. You don't address a possessed person as themselves. You don't treat a completed funeral as an ongoing one. You don't handle a protected person the way you'd handle an unprotected one.
Without the marking, every interaction requires inference, and inference is expensive and often wrong.
And it explains something about the corpus's anxiety over lapsed practice. When marking stops, states stop being visible — but they don't stop existing. People remain possessed, bereaved, in transition, unprotected, and nobody can tell.
Which is a more concrete account of what is lost when a tradition lapses than the corpus's usual appeals to disorder.
[n≥3 PATTERN] on marking as a distinct ritual function across this corpus — four instances, all serving legibility rather than causation, and the corpus never groups them.
Strongest support. The white correspondence across three traditions is real and needs an explanation, and the corpus supplies a functional one that also accounts for the smoke imagery.
The tension. The fish reports are first-person, unrepeated by anyone else, and have an ordinary explanation available. Recorded as reported observation rather than as mechanism.
A second. The powder's role slides between marking and facilitating within a sentence, and those are different claims.
Open. Is white used for possession-marking across other African traditions, or only these three? A wider survey would either strengthen the functional reading considerably or reveal it as a regional convention.
Against Death, the Funeral, and the Smoke Going Up, this page supplies the colour strand of an argument that page makes about the same root.
That page has wusi — smoke, steam, the white thing that rises when a body is released. This one has the white powder, the white bandages, the white cloth.
Together they are one claim: white is the colour of a body a spirit is passing through, in either direction. Neither page states it whole and the corpus states it in three places.
Against Cool, Wail, Cut, Root, the marking function connects. The hired wailer is doing a marking job — announcing a state to a community and to the deceased — and this page's rites are the same category.
The corpus has at least four instances of ritual-as-legibility and never groups them.
Both pages are about externalising internal state so a group can coordinate on it, and they operate at opposite speeds.
Gestural referencing works in the moment: a signal, a posture, an orientation that tells others how to read what follows. It is continuous, low-cost, and largely unconscious — and it works because the group shares the code.
Ritual marking does the same thing for states that last longer than an interaction. Possession, bereavement, protection, transition. These are conditions you're in for hours, days or weeks, and gesture can't carry them because gesture is transient.
The insight the pairing produces is that there is a gap in the middle, and modern life sits in it.
Fast states get gestural marking, which still works. Permanent statuses get documents and titles. But states lasting days to months have almost no marking apparatus left — and those are precisely the states where misreading someone does the most damage.
Bereavement is the clearest case. Mourning dress marked it for a fixed period and everyone adjusted. Its disappearance didn't shorten grief; it made grief invisible, and the bereaved now spend energy either explaining their state or performing normality.
Which is what a marking system was doing all along: saving the person in the state from having to communicate it.
Sharpest implication. Most of this ritual apparatus is not causing transitions but making them visible — and when a tradition lapses, the states don't stop occurring, they stop being legible, which means the community can no longer act correctly toward its own members.
Generative questions.