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When sitting in court holding a levee, the king invariably has in attendance several women, Wabandwa, evil-eye averters or sorcerers. They talk in feigned voices raised to a shrillness almost amounting to a scream. To complete the picture of the court, one must imagine a crowd of pages to run royal messages; they dare not walk for such deficiency in zeal to their master might cost their life.
Arrived at the usual throne-room, he took his seat, dismissed the party of wives who had been following him, as well as the Wakungu, received pombe from his female evil-eye averters, and ordered me, with my men, to sit in the sun facing him, till I complained of the heat, and was allowed to sit by his side.
Their true functions were just as obscure as the religion of the negroes generally; some called them devil-drivers, other evil-eye averters; but, whatever it was for, they imposed a tax on the people, whose minds being governed by a necessity for making some self-sacrifice to propitiate something, they could not tell what, for their welfare in the world, they always gave them a trifle in the same way as the East Indians do their fakirs.
And when any evil fancy assails you, Plato says, 'Go to the rites of expiation, go as a suppliant to the temples of the gods, the averters of evil. But it will be enough should you even rise and depart to the society of the noble and the good, to live according to their examples, whether you have any such friend among the living or among the dead.
Nay, others there are that have advanced a certain timorousness and fear, as also madness and fraud, and any other of the vilest passions, into the nature and form of gods, and have persuaded whole cities to offer sacrifices to the better sort of them; on which account they have been absolutely forced to esteem some gods as the givers of good things, and to call others of them averters of evil.
That, he replied, is excellent. Yes, I said; and when a man dies gloriously in war shall we not say, in the first place, that he is of the golden race? To be sure. Nay, have we not the authority of Hesiod for affirming that when they are dead They are holy angels upon the earth, authors of good, averters of evil, the guardians of speech-gifted men? Yes; and we accept his authority.
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