Have You Met My Ghoulfriend? - Thinking About Lakelands Ghosts

Resume your flesh and form XI, Beatrice Wanjiku

"My forefather told me that the quagmire known as Mr. Death was worshipped by a king. He offered a sacrifice of nine cows, nine goats, sheep, and servants, and nine chickens...When they reached him, Nakabale said 'Here are the offerings from the king to you. If anything has angered you, let this calm your majesty.'" - Sir Apollo Kaggwa, The Customs of the Baganda

Mostly Ghostly is a prestige IP in my heart

A thing I've been asking myself while working on the Lakelands setting is where the lines are between an average ancestor ghost, a ghost-chief that protects a hearthstone clan*, and a ghost-god of the python cults should be drawn. I'm fine with looser definitions for the spirits of wood-spring-hill, who are much like their North Nyanza inspirations in being both remarkably undifferentiated and vaguely alien, but the distinctions between ghosts directly impact the politics of the setting. While banana cultivation created the conditions for long term occupation of once-marginal land that birthed the ghost-chiefs, the assembly of heterogeneous peoples into fictive lineages (a real phenomenon! - Neil Kodesh's research on regional clanship focused on exactly this) was sparked by the heroic dead's ability to provide health and wealth for their charges. 

Originally, I thought about geists (ghosts that become small death gods and partner with a medium def has some similarities) and the jaggling/gaffling/etc hierarchy from WoD, but there's some problems I noticed.

• While they can be more esoteric than "who beats up who," the systems above are still about ranking potency or strength in ways that aren't in the spirit of the Lakelands. Any classification (augh) would ideally reflect changes in social organization, considering the focus on Inland Sea groupwork. 
• The idea so far is for every PYTHON group to have their own ghost-god to guide and be guided by, hopefully one that grows with the shrine community and the party, but the systems/writing meant to work with a werewolf pack's patron spirit or the death cults formed by sin-eater krewes are not very interested in the reciprocity I'm looking for. 
• Most of all, it feels pretty limiting. The lùbaalè of the Inland Sea were remarkably fluid (ha) - Crawford's Godbound or Emmy Allen's Conjuror class (with its Ars Magicaesque Verbs + Processes system) do this well in certain aspects, but I don't think that it captures the range of meaning that Schoenbrun points out in his recent study:

"Mukasa bundled many kinds of existence at Bubembe, befitting a figure with such a range of followers and managers. Mukasa was male, female, or both. Mukasa was the medium Nakangu, a senior woman of the Lungfish Clan; a meteor hammer; and the Inland Sea. Mukasa’s genders reflected a shifting, composite being, contingent on need and setting. Before Mukasa’s medium was female, a man played the part. As a meteor hammer, Mukasa emitted a masculine aura of metallurgical labor and sexual mechanics. As a metonym of the Inland Sea, Mukasa embodied the femaleness of water as amniotic fluid and of some fish work. Mukasa received the projections of people at different stages of gendered life, making Mukasa relevant to individual and collectively gendered aspiration." - Ethnic Formation with Other-Than-Human Beings: Island Shrine Practice in Uganda’s Long Eighteenth Century

The god is the ritual and the object and the community and the dead hero altogether: Schoenbrun summarizes it effectively when he calls the lùbaalè "idea-practices." Fitting the ghost-gods of the Mother Lake into spirit hierarchies or conventional pantheons would be a lobotomization. 

I also considered using the framework provided by Goblin Punch ghosts but it ain't quite right either. As a commenter noted towards the bottom, the creepiness of Arnold K's ghostly manifestations is at least partially a result of the fact that they're not really people, but Lakelander ghosts are people. Most clans have more dead members than living ones. The dead are homely presences - an idea kind of unfamiliar to most of us thanks to the relentless professional pathologizing of grief (the recent addition of prolonged grief disorder to the DSM 5 and the implicit sneering in some anthropological discussions of "crying the death" - to borrow Gufler's description of Yamba mourning - are good examples.) 

Off-topic - - - I’m not sure that anything I've looked at has clarified the way in which modern death messes with our relationships to my satisfaction, but I think it is the at-a-lossness that is more the problem than the loss itself: not knowing what to say, what to do, or what to think around death.  Due to the death taboo, there’s a lot of blocked communication between the living and the dying, the living and the dead, and the co-surviving. The frustration of facing something so consequential while feeling inhibited from speaking, doing, or feeling is what I think makes modern grief so very messy...and stuff like death innovation so cool. The at-home funeral movement is one of the most dramatic and heartening developments in an explosion of new heterodox practices. It brings the dead back into the home; like a home birth, the idea is that this important rite of passage needs to proceed surrounded by family love and a sense of the naturalness of the transition, not clinical coldness or a sense of crisis. This reborn intimacy with death - the ability to touch, bathe, and dress your person, and to talk to them until you are ready to say goodbye - is profoundly progressive to me. Or at least a profound return to where we used to be, which can be the same thing sometimes. 

Dead boys are better listeners

The answer I'm going with for now was prob first conceived in a Discord convo with Marcia B and John B about Dunbar's number stuff, but Dan D's writing and Sandro's recent blogpost crystallized it for me - the Fail Forward post especially is an excellent discussion of the parasocial and the religious. What if religious relationships were forthright ones, not relying on transcendence/altered states or in-group loyalty or ritual synchronicity or any of the other brainhacks that religious experience typically builds upon?** To misuse Sandro's example, what if God really was your friend?

The three sorts of ghost in the Lakelands are distinguished by the number and intensity of the intimate relationships they can maintain.

Ancestor Ghosts - average human connectivity 

Ancestral ghosts are much like the living, though the experience of death tends to shift priorities. They can have close relationships, but they aren't any better than this than flesh-and-blood folks, so the march of time tends to move their focus towards the good of the clan or other collective identities. 

Ghost-Chiefs - if your mayor was also your grandma 

The mantle of ghost-chief can't be won through spiritual muscling. Great wisdom or immense willpower are good traits to have only because it means that you're more likely to be chosen for the Rites of Elevation. It requires the ritual support of a hearthstone clan and ascending from the ranks of the clan's ancestor dead is largely accomplished through collective effort. It's quite similar to the deep forest class of initiations among the living. A chief of the dead can and usually does develop intense personal connections to all those who are fully invested members of the hearthstone clan, with full investment typically requiring three generations of ancestors interred in designated funeral grounds. Your average ghost-chief doesn't love the idea of their clan, the way a living person or normal ghost might. They can know and love every single kinsman: anyone with folks posted up at the clan ossuary is a potential family member. This is a greater advantage for the long-term success of the clan than any rainmaking or miracle curing the ghost-chiefs perform - immortal social glue.

Ghost-Gods - influencer married for 60 years to all of their followers

Apotheosis is different, more of a jarring perspective shift than an ascension. One can prepare for the experience but it happens all at once or not at all. Many ghosts never develop the plasticity of mind required to entwine their souls with a living medium, which is the only step required for godhood. The creation of possession rituals, collectively labeled the Coiling Art, changed the game. Unlike the longstanding practices where a priest calls a leader’s ancestral ghost from its residence in sacred places and objects, possession both untethers a ghost from their shrine and allows them to form impossibly close relationships with disparate peoples. Anyone who coils souls with a ghost-god gains a profound knowledge of the god's self and vice versa. It's something like the relationship between lovers of many decades, or maybe twin siblings. The god simultaneously rides and is ridden by the medium; the polysemy of the Ganda word mbàndwa, which can refer to the spirit that possesses a medium and to the medium herself, captures that relation elegantly.  As mentioned, this is combined with a new mobility; each medium is a living shrine, so you can learn to channel the god under their tutelage without going to a sacred grave or the like. 

This leads to weird and cool forms of organization. Python cults are young so the changes are still contained to their current stomping grounds (some islands of the Mother and stretches of coastal territory) but the seeds are there.  In the real-world Inland Sea circa 800-1000, "mediums and their interpreters, through techniques of imagination and travel that reached beyond the local, aligned a shrine community’s engagement with other shrines that had different pasts." In PYTHON, which is based on the historical Inland Sea + my mental illnesses, this is augmented by shared relationships with the god. Cultists dedicated to the same ghost-god are more like metamours than co-religionists, intimates of the same person, but even that doesn't account for emotional spillover you're possessed by/possessing the god. Expanding the experience of spiritual embodiment thus stretches human limits on direct community size without resorting to the old statebuilder's tricks. Constellating python communities are knowledge networks as much as they are religious sects, since communing with your ghost-god allows you to take in anything that the god may have learned from its other mediums. This is the scariest thing about the cults to the smarter mainland kings. There doesn't seem to be any limit to the amount of mediums a ghost-god can have/be had by, something about them is changed to accommodate an ever-growing number of close connections, and Lakelanders are boat freaks - the way things are going, there will be fast communicating, tightly bound communities able to tap into vast reservoirs of shared learning all along the lake's rim. The python cultists' promise to "swallow the world" is well within the realm of possibility. 

*The Ganda word for clans of this kind literally means "a stone used to prop up a cooking oven" which is a gorgeous image. "Hearthstone clan" does it little justice. I'm still thinking about names for the new python cults + associates, since shrine-community is nice but a little clinical. One idea I had was "feastbowl clans" as a nod to regional archaeology. Ceri Ashley made a convincing case for religious change-in-pottery, suggesting that multicomponent sites such as Luzira (where Entebbe pottery appears with Classical and Transitional Urewes) reflect a shift in social orientation in her paper Toward a Socialised Archaeology of Ceramics in Great Lakes East Africa. Entebbe-ware’s bowls were huge: full of beer, they would have been extremely difficult to move. Their size clearly implied a larger scale for public events, like those commonly associated with offerings and feasting at New Moon ceremonies held at shrines like Bulonge. The larger group of people involved in such feasting surely included visitors as well as locals. The feasts at some of these multicomponent sites were likely some of the first involving mobile mediumship and constellating communities of practice.

** No shade ofc. I say this as a religious person so I'm in the same boat.