Cult of the spectral hyena..

[bryan]

Was paging through KG,s ninth arch and came upon a section in which he describes terrestrial power zones..PG 284 of the starfire edition...I couldnt help but read that the area referred to as Kabultiloa, in reference too the cult of the spectral hyena, resides, according too KG, in South Africa....been a South African I am slightly perplexed. No such place exists by that name..As far as I know, there is no such cult..Voudou is not a south african phenomenon. Snakewand and the darker strain give life to the cult of the spectral hyena. Is someone able to enlighten me in this regard?

[Gregory Peters]

I suspect one would need to explore the more subtle realms of South Africa in this regard, as the dream lands and astral landscape is often far deeper than the eyes or terrestrial maps will discern

[bryan]

Ok...I thought their might be a more physical link due to the other Hot spots mentioned, eg Bond street etc....The tail of the hyena is used to put people too sleep...This is one physical link I can think of that relates too a form of witchcraft...Tail is burnt so as to make a raid on sleeping victims...Will follow up on more astral links...Thanks for feedback...

[bryan]

@gregory Peters...based on what you said, I think I have my answer...Never thought of the sangoma as a spectral hyena...makes sense...

[Gregory Peters]

I think all of these layers must come in to play. The hyaena tail for example, that could open up doors when you follow the thread (follow the hyaena itself!). What rich symbolism you have in the very ground

[stephen]

While Gregory's advice certainly holds good, I thought that I might look a little further into the provenance of Kabultiloa.

The Cult of the Bultu and its centre in Kabultiloa are first mentioned in Nightside of Eden in the chapter on Zamradiel and this is, in fact, the fullest account, as apart from a passing reference to the Bultu Stone in Outside the Circles of Time, Kabultiloa does not surface again until the commentaries on OKBISh in The Ninth Arch.

In the Zamradiel chapter, Kenneth Grant says no more than that Kabultiloa is in Africa, and a rather exotic and primordial Africa is suggested. In TNA he has decided to place it "..in remote regions of South Africa". It serves as one of his idiosyncratic network of power zones, which partake more of a geography of the imagination than do the terrestrial power zones that he covers in The Magical Revival, for example.  It's also questionable as to what he means by 'South Africa'.

Checking out 'werehyena' on Wikipedia led me straight to Gerald Massey, surprise, surprise, and then to The Natural Genesis:

    "In the Kanuri language of Bornu (Africa), the name of the hyena is Bultu, and from this is formed the verb bultungin, which signifies "I transform myself into a hyena." There is a town named Kabultiloa, the inhabitants of which are said to possess this faculty of transformation. These doubtless originated in the hyena Totem, and the donning of the hyena skin in their religious masquerade."

The Natural Genesis, Vol.1, Cosimo edn. page 73.

For some reason Grant does not reference this in NOE, but it is clearly the basis of his Bultu Cult.  The Bornu empire was in the region of Lake Chad in central, sub-Saharan Africa and Kabultiloa was probably in what is now north eastern Nigeria to the SW of Lake Chad.  Quite possibly, the place no longer exists - especially if it was a lair of werehyenas! - although there is a settlement named Kalulua.

The Bultu Cult forms the basis of Grant's novella The Darker Strain, a rather lurid account of Voodoo rites and which contains the highest body count of all the Nightside Narratives.  And then there is his superb poem "Hyaena".

[Gregory Peters]

Great details stephen. I did some searching around and came across this interesting site on the Kabultiloa:
ronelthemythmaker.wordpress.com/2016/06/16/werehyena-folklorethursday/

Copied here as it is quite short:

Werehyena #FolkloreThursday
16
Thursday
Jun 2016
Posted by miladyronel in #FolkloreThursday, folklore, Myths and Legends, Short Story ≈ 4 Comments
Tags#FolkloreThursday, African Fae, African Folklore, African legends, Faerie, folklore, folklore creatures, Graveyardsecrets, Hyenas, preview of work, Ronel Janse van Vuuren, short story, The Lion King, Werehyenas, Wikipedia, writing, writing.com
Hyenas, those giggling beasts, freaked me out in The Lion King when I was just a little girl. I got over it. And then I learned of the Werehyena.

werehyena pic

And it’s not the same as Werewolves. They aren’t men who turn into animals, but rather animals that turn into men.

*It’s okay to shiver right now.*



Were-hyena is a neologism coined in analogy to werewolf for therianthropy involving hyenas in the folklore of East Africa and the Near East. Unlike werewolves and other therianthropes, which are usually portrayed as being originally human, some werehyena lore tells of how they can also be hyenas disguised as humans.[1]

African cultures

In the Kanuri language of the former Bornu Empire in the Lake Chad region, werehyenas are referred to as bultungin which translates into “I change myself into a hyena”.[2] It was once traditionally believed that one or two of the villages in the region was populated entirely by werehyenas,[1] such as Kabultiloa.[3]

In Ethiopia, it is traditionally believed that every blacksmith, whose trade is hereditary, is really a wizard or witch with the power to change into a hyena. These blacksmith werehyenas are believed to rob graves at midnight and are referred to as bouda[1] (also spelled buda).[2][4] They are viewed with suspicion by most countrymen. Belief in the bouda is also present in Sudan, Tanzania and Morocco where some among the Berber people regard the bouda as a man or woman who nightly turns into a hyena and resumes human shape at dawn.[1] Many Ethiopian Christians characterize Ethiopian Jews as being bouda, accusing them of unearthing Christian corpses and consuming them; the commonality of blacksmithing as a traditional profession for Jewish men in Ethiopia may be a reason for the connection between the two beliefs.[4]

In the folklore of western Sudanic peoples, there is a hybrid creature, a human who is nightly transformed into a cannibalistic monster that terrorizes people, especially lovers. The creature is often portrayed as a magically powerful healer, blacksmith, or woodcutter in its human form, but recognizable through signs like a hairy body, red and gleaming eyes and a nasal voice.[5]

Members of the Korè cult of the Bambara people in Mali “become” hyenas by imitating the animals’ behaviour through masks and roleplays. These are evocative of the hyenas’ reviled habits, and may also be used to evoke fear among the participants, leading them to avoid such habits and traits in their own lives.[5]

Eurasian cultures

Al-Doumairy, in his Hawayan Al-Koubra (1406), wrote that hyenas are vampiric creatures that attack people at night and suck the blood from their necks. Arab folklore tells of how hyenas can mesmerise victims with their eyes or sometimes with their pheromones.[6]

A Persian medical treatise written in 1376 tells how to cure people known as kaftar, who are said to be “half-man, half-hyena,” who have the habit of slaughtering children.[5]

The Greeks, until the end of the 19th century, believed that the bodies of werewolves, if not destroyed, would haunt battlefields as vampiric hyenas which drank the blood of dying soldiers.[1]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/werehyena

[John Hope]

It's interesting to note Pliny on the hyena, in The Natural History book VIII chapter 44 he states:

''It is the vulgar notion, that the hyæna possesses in itself both sexes, being a male during one year, and a female the next, and that it becomes pregnant without the co-operation of the male; Aristotle, however, denies this. The neck, with the mane, runs continuously into the back—Bone, so that the animal cannot bend this part without turning round the whole body. Many other wonderful things are also related of this animal; and strangest of all, that it imitates the human voice among the stalls of the shepherds; and while there, learns the name of some one of them, and then calls him away, and devours him. It is said also, that it can imitate a man vomiting, and that, in this way, it attracts the dogs, and then falls upon them. It is the only animal that digs up graves, in order to obtain the bodies of the dead. The female is rarely caught: its eyes, it is said, are of a thousand various colours and changes of shade. It is said also, that on coming in contact with its shadow, dogs will lose their voice, and that, by certain magical influences, it can render any animal immoveable, round which it has walked three times.''

[stephen]

The Ethiopian material on the bouda looks rather interesting on a number of levels.  And Pliny's The Natural History can be as informative as it can be bizarre.

Massey's source for the actual Kanuri words bultu and bultungin is S.W. Koelle, a missionary who compiled and published a Grammar of the Bornu or Kanuri Language in 1854.  It is available on line, although the pagination differs from the edition cited by Massey.

[N0T 2]

Apr 8, 2018 18:16:04 GMT John Hope said:

It's interesting to note Pliny on the hyena, in The Natural History book VIII chapter 44 he states:

''It is the vulgar notion, that the hyæna possesses in itself both sexes, being a male during one year, and a female the next, and that it becomes pregnant without the co-operation of the male; Aristotle, however, denies this. The neck, with the mane, runs continuously into the back—Bone, so that the animal cannot bend this part without turning round the whole body. Many other wonderful things are also related of this animal; and strangest of all, that it imitates the human voice among the stalls of the shepherds; and while there, learns the name of some one of them, and then calls him away, and devours him. It is said also, that it can imitate a man vomiting, and that, in this way, it attracts the dogs, and then falls upon them. It is the only animal that digs up graves, in order to obtain the bodies of the dead. The female is rarely caught: its eyes, it is said, are of a thousand various colours and changes of shade. It is said also, that on coming in contact with its shadow, dogs will lose their voice, and that, by certain magical influences, it can render any animal immoveable, round which it has walked three times.''

I'll bear all this in mind when I visit the zoo next week. The staff (and hyenas) may not be up to speed with their Pliny, but t̶h̶a̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶w̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶i̶t̶i̶a̶t̶e̶s̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶  I'll make sure they get the message.

[John Hope]

Apr 20, 2018 9:53:33 GMT N0T 2 said:

I'll bear all this in mind when I visit the zoo next week.

The description makes his giant tree climbing fish stealing Octopoda all the more prosaic!

On another note I seem to recall English Heretic wrote an article on Kabultiloa, I'll try and find it.


*Edit

Tuesday, 13 November 2012
Cult Of The Spectral Hyaena At Kirkdale

As serendipity would have it, I took a copy of Kenneth Grant's Convolvulus up to Yorkshire this weekend past. The wonderful Hannah Gilbert and I were intending to head over to Rievaulx for a bit of Gothic photography, but it got a bit late on the Sunday, so we started scouting around for a nearer location, when I stumbled across mention of the hyaena caves at Kirkdale. A few months ago, I had chanced upon an exhibit in the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford chronicling the discovery of the same pre-deluge hyaena den by William Buckland in 1821.

Full article

[Gregory Peters]

In his article 'Ḍākinī, Yoginī, Pairikā, Strix:
Adventures in Comparative Demonology', David Gordon White details some Indian folklore relating to a type of witch called the joki.

Quoting Ibn Battuta's  account from the 14th century in the north Indian  town of Agra of the joki:

In the surroundings of the city there are many voracious animals. One of
its inhabitants related to me that a lion used to break into the city in the
night although the gates were closed and that he used to molest the people,
so much that he killed many . . . One night the lion broke into a house and
carried away a boy from his bed . . . Curiously enough, some one told me
that he who did so was not the lion but a man of the magician class called
“Joki” who assumed the form of a lion . . . Some of the Jokis are such that
as soon as they look at a man the latter instantly falls dead. The common
people say that in such a case—of a man being killed by a mere look—if his
chest were cut open one could see no heart which, they say, is eaten up.
Such is, for the most part, the practice with women, and the woman who
acts in this manner is called a “hyena” (kaftār). (Ibn Battuta, Rehla 4.35 in
Husain 1976: 163-64)


The joki is also said to be "a hyena that digs up and devours dead bodies", a type of shape shifting witch (in the tantras a yogini or dakini).