Paper short abstract:

This paper examines ordinary objects that may act as portals to ‘otherworlds’ in the Himalayan religion of Donyipolo (‘Sun-moon’). Household items, kitchen staples, and nature tokens may spontaneously or ritually allow communication with the other-than-human, or transport the human to ‘otherworlds’.

Paper long abstract:

Donyipolo (‘Sun-moon’), the Indigenous religion of the Tani peoples in the Eastern Himalayas, is a cosmic-wilderness ontology: at its heart is the personhood, and occasional divinity, of celestial bodies and aspects of landscape. Non-domestic terrain encompasses multiple simultaneous, parallel ‘mirror realms’ through which people may travel deliberately, accidentally, or unwillingly. This paper examines ordinary objects that may, at times, act as portals to ‘otherworlds’, allowing for communication with the other-than-human (including the formerly human) as well as for inter-realm travel across ‘congruent geographies’. Household items may undergo spontaneous enchantment: the eye of a dried squirrel hanging above a door frame transported the Adi child who touched it to the ‘land of souls’—or they may be deliberately manipulated in ritual for divination purposes: eggs are chanted over, boiled, peeled, and then cut with a pig’s hair by an Apatani specialist to facilitate his communication with well-meaning after-death entities. Pebbles and entrails can similarly be used for divining purposes, either casually or formally. Leaves and shells, when they appear in certain contexts, may be read as an intricate code through which jungle beings communicate with humans. Some believe that a tangible depiction of an entity becomes that entity—exemplified in the example of the Adi man who, himself a were-tiger, created a statue of a deity to relieve his own were-tiger ‘warm desire towards the jungle’; the statue subsequently ate many children in his village, including his own. Based on fieldwork conducted over 10 years across Arunachal Pradesh, this paper explores how, in Donyipolo, the mundane becomes the medium for the making of magic: with the right words, or the wrong look, ordinary objects may be endowed with the ability to traverse dimensional boundaries, often taking the humans who hold these objects in their palms along with them.