kapuwana is anyhow believed to be the something which in the nightly flights leaves the body of the yoyova and assumes the various forms in which the mulukwausi appears. Another variant of the belief about the yoyova is, that those who know their magic especially well, can fly themselves, bodily transporting themselves through the air.
But it can never be sufficiently emphasised that all these beliefs cannot be treated as consistent pieces of knowledge; they flow into one another, and even the same native probably holds several views rationally inconsistent with one another.
Even their terminology (compare the last Division of the foregoing chapter), cannot be taken as implying a strict distinction or definition.
Thus, the word yoyova is applied to the woman as we meet her in the village, and the word mulukwausi will be used when we see something suspicious flying through the air.
But it would be incorrect to systematise this use into a sort of doctrine and to say: “An individual woman is conceived as consisting of an actual living personality called yoyova, and of an immaterial, spiritual principle called mulukwausi, which in its potential form is the kapuwana.”
In doing this we would do much what the Mediæval Scholastics did to the living faith of the early ages.
The native feels and fears his belief rather than formulates it clearly to himself.
He uses terms and expressions, and thus, as used by him, we must collect them as documents of belief, but abstain from working them out into a consistent theory; for this represents neither the native’s mind nor any other form of reality.
As we remember from Chapter II, the flying witches are a nefarious agency, second in importance to the bwaga’u (male sorcerer), but in efficiency far more deadly even than he himself. In contrast to the bwaga’u, who is simply a man in possession of a special form of magic, the yoyova have to be gradually initiated into their status. Only a small child, whose mother is a witch, can become a witch herself. When a witch gives birth to a female child, she medicates a piece of obsidian, and cuts off the navel string. The navel string is then buried, with the recital of a magical formula, in the house, and not, as is done in all ordinary cases, in the garden. Soon after, the witch will carry her daughter to the sea beach, utter a spell over some brine in a coco-nut cup, and give the child to drink. After that, the child is submerged in water and washed, a kind of witch’s baptism! Then she brings back the baby into the house, utters a spell over a mat, and folds her up in it. At night, she carries the baby through the air, and goes to a trysting place of other yoyova, where she presents her child ritually to them. In contrast