Parallel Patterns of the Diviner in Ritual and Detective Fiction: Agatha's African Hercule Poirots

Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies 10 (30):344-372 (2011)
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Abstract

There are archetypal parallels between the shamanic African, and ‘diviner detectives' like Hercule Poirot, when it comes to tracking down homicidal sorcerers, and witches, on the one hand, and direct Western-style murderers on the other. The Ndembu diviner uses the fall of symbolic figurines or images, and the canny questioning of his clients and suspects to pierce the veil of deceit and reveal the sorcerer or witch. Hercule Poirot uses chance clues, questioning, and his intuition to identify the murderer. Both processes culminate in the binding up of an evil, or at least the yearned for revelation of its source. As such they supply a form of purgation or cure to their respective congregations or guilds of readers. When the practices of diviner and detective are compared at an archetypal level, a universal dramatic pattern or model emerges which reveals that the adventitious clues commonly powering the modern detective narrative along, could have developed from what was, or still is in Africa, the old axiomatic belief that an African god is manipulating the images of divination

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