The use of cowry-shells for the purposes of currency, amulets, and charms / by J. Wilfrid Jackson.

  • J. Wilfrid Jackson
Date:
[1916]
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: The use of cowry-shells for the purposes of currency, amulets, and charms / by J. Wilfrid Jackson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    other philosophers, that nothing created was annihilated, and that to cease to be was only to assume another form, dissolution being merely the passage to reproduction. In its association with the Borfimor [and in this connection the presence of the coivry must not be overlooked],102 we seem to have the reflection of some such ideas, the fetish being animated by the indwelling life of the victim and the spirit attracted to it.” (p. 67). The Borfimor bag also contained a pebble made of some earthy matter and lime, in one side of which was incorporated a cowry-shell. The remarkable resemblance in the use of the money- cowry here to that of the Ojibwa and Menomini tribes of North America, who also employ the same shell, has been pointed out already in an earlier paper.103 In Liberia, according to Stewart Culm,104 pierced cowry-shells (i.e., rubbed down on the back) are used in fortune-telling. (See Fig. 1, E). Ratzel (op. cit., III., page 105) also gives a figure (f. 6) of a sword-sheath from Liberia which is ornamented with cowries arranged in stars. Bowdich, who in 1817 was sent on a mission of peace from Cape Coast Castle to Kumassi, mentions that in Accra, as in Gaman, Kong and other neighbouring places, cowries had currency. North of Ashanti proper, in Koranza and Atabuobo, Perregaux found them in full use and of higher value than on the coast. According to this observer, in Koranza, they were counted per thousand, and 100 cowries were 102 The italicized sentence is my own. j. w. j, 103 J. W. Jackson, “The Money Cowry (Cyprcea moneta, L.) as a Sacred Object among North American Indians,” Manch. Memoirs [Lit. and Phil. Soc.), vol. lx. (1916), No. 4. 104 Culin, “Chess and Playing Cards,” op. cit., p. 815, footnote, and fig. 134 on p. 817.
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