Hasina

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A free lineage of the highlands, brought before its sovereign at the turn of the year, laid down a coin. Not a weighed portion of silver, not a coin clipped to a value, but a whole piastre handed over entire — the vola tsivaky, the money that is not broken. Everything in the gesture was in the wholeness. To cut the coin, to shave it, to render its worth in smaller pieces, would have unmade the very thing the gift acknowledged, because what the lineage carried to the throne was not a sum but a sanctity, and a sanctity comes whole or not at all. The Merina had a word for what the uncut coin stood for. They called it hasina.

A Spanish colonial eight-reales piece of 1796 — the “piece of eight” that crossed the Indian Ocean as the silver piastre. In highland Imerina such a coin, rendered whole and uncut, was the vola tsivaky, the emblem of hasina given entire to the sovereign. Joe deSousa, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0 1.0.

Hasina is the Malagasy term for sanctity, sacred virtue, the invisible efficacy by which anything that works, works. It is the potency inherent in beings and things — the sacred life force that traditional communities hold to imbue and thereby to legitimate the figures who carry authority, whether over a family or over a kingdom (Culture of Madagascar). It quickens the rice-field and the child, holds a household whole, ratifies a rightful ruler; and it is one of the few sacred things in the world that has no temple of its own, because everything that works is its temple. Where the sacred is doing its work — at the tomb, the spring, the shrine, the throne — hasina is the name for what is at work.

The word before the doctrine

Before hasina is a doctrine it is a word, and the word runs deeper in the language than any teaching drawn out of it. Its adjective is masina — sacred, holy, potent — and masina is everywhere in Malagasy speech. It is in the place-names: Ambohimahamasina, the hill made holy, below the forested mountain where the highland dead are said to gather. It is in the royal titles: Andriamasinavalona, the sovereign of Imerina whose death around 1710 broke the highland realm into the four feuding principalities that a later king would draw back together. It is in the ordinary registers of blessing and consecration, so that the concept is carried less in a text than in the everyday grammar of the sacred — a thing said and done long before it is a thing defined.

Because it lived in the grammar rather than in a book, hasina reaches the written record along the same channels as the rest of the highland sacred world, and each channel has to be weighed for what it is. The deepest indigenous well is the Tantara ny Andriana eto Madagasikara, the vast compilation of Merina royal history and custom that the Jesuit François Callet gathered from highland elders across the 1860s and 1870s. It is a source of the first value and a source with a setting: assembled at a court then turning Christian, set in type on a mission press, it carries its royal and its missionary moment into everything it preserves, and is read here with its making in view. The colonial-era ethnography that followed added its own record, useful and to be read against its own grain.

The concept was drawn out analytically above all by two students of the material. Alain Délivré, in L’Histoire des rois d’Imerina: interprétation d’une tradition orale (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974, 448 pages), submitted the Callet traditions to historical criticism and read hasina alongside vintana (destiny), fandroana (the royal bath) and fanjakana (sovereignty) as a foundation of ancient Merina thought. The anthropologist Maurice Bloch made hasina central to the analysis of highland kingship. Their readings are scholarship laid over the material, not the tradition’s own account of itself, and it is worth keeping the seam visible: what the concept is in the lived grammar and what the analysts have made of it are two different orders of statement.

One such analytic move should be marked plainly, because much of the modern literature rests on it. Scholars often pair hasina with hery — force, power, the active and manifest energy — reading hasina as the latent, innate, conferred potency and hery as the coercive strength that may or may not accompany it. The pairing is illuminating and it is a reading; it is not a settled native taxonomy, and the material does not divide as cleanly as the diagram. A second framing goes further back and reaches wider. Students of the concept have long compared hasina to the Oceanic mana, the diffused sacred potency of the wider Austronesian world, and the comparison is easy to see in a people whose language belongs to that family. Whether hasina is best understood as an indigenous concept in its own right, as the Malagasy face of that Oceanic mana, or as an ideology of rule dressed in the language of the sacred, is itself a matter of scholarly framing. The competing readings are set out here; none is adjudicated (Hasina (Madagascar)).

The physics of the sacred

Within the Malagasy sacred world hasina is the ground-concept, the efficacy that stands behind everything else that is efficacious. It is the physics of the sacred: not a power among powers but the medium in which the powers act. And its first peculiarity is that potency and rightness are one thing in it. To hold hasina is at once to be efficacious and to be legitimate; the strength that works and the authority that is owed honor are not two properties that happen to travel together but a single quality seen from two sides. A chief who commands is not powerful and, separately, entitled; his command carries because the sanctity that makes a command take is the same sanctity that makes it right.

It has no cult-site of its own because it is met wherever those who carry it are honored. It flows from several sources at once, and the sources are the standing furniture of the Malagasy sacred world. From the razana, the ancestral dead, it descends to the living as blessing — the wellspring of hasina lodged in the tombed forebears whose theology is their own. Over the ground itself the vazimba, the first people of the land, are held to keep a hasina prior to any lineage, so that a spring or a boulder can be sacred to people who have no dead in it. It runs through the land and its sacred waters, through the talismans that concentrate it, and through the sovereigns who embody it most fully. Where any of these is honored — at the family tomb, the sacred spring, the doany shrine, the royal throne — the same current is what is being reckoned with.

The channel by which it passes down a line has a name. The tsodrano is the breathed blessing — literally the blowing of water — that an elder or an ancestor gives, and it is sought before any undertaking of weight: a journey, a marriage, an enterprise begun. Through it hasina flows from the senior to the junior, from the dead to the living, from the one who has it in fuller measure to the one who asks. It is a household transaction as much as a sacred one, and it is described here only at the distance of the public record, as the ordinary means by which a blessing is conveyed and not as a rite to be worked.

For all its solidity, hasina is not a fixed quantity. It is relational, made and unmade in the traffic between persons. An individual’s hasina can be augmented or diminished by their own acts — by conduct that befits or betrays the sanctity claimed — and, just as much, by what others concede to them: the honor paid, the tribute rendered, the authority granted from below (Hasina (Madagascar)). Sanctity, in this reckoning, is continually in motion. It accrues to the one who is honored and drains from the one who is slighted; it is banked by right conduct and squandered by wrong; and because it depends in part on what others grant, no one holds it entirely in their own hands.

In the register of the sovereign this relational potency becomes the whole ground of legitimacy. The historian Jan Vansina called hasina “the whole ideology of kingship,” and the phrase is exact: the ruler is the being in whom hasina is embodied most fully, chiefs and family heads holding it in lesser measure down a descending scale, so that the political order and the sacred order are one graded field (Hasina (Madagascar)). And here the emblem returns to the coin. The tribute of hasina rendered to the sovereign took the form of a silver coin given whole — the vola tsivaky, the uncut piastre, handed over intact and accompanied by a set prayer. The wholeness was the meaning. What the gift acknowledged was a completeness — the undivided sanctity of the one who received it — and to break or clip the coin would have broken what it stood for.

Hasina is thus not a god to be worshiped but a force to be kept in right relation — gathered, transmitted, guarded. In one register it is diffused through the whole sacred world; in another it is concentrated and held. The personal talismans the highlands call ody, and above them the royal sampy that guarded the realm, were loci where hasina was gathered into an object and made to dwell among the living; the full account of the royal talismans and their fate belongs to the history of the Merina kingdom, where the twelve sampin’andriana stood as guardians of the realm’s own hasina. It is paired, in the same sacred grammar, with the prohibition-logic of fady: where hasina is the potency that must be kept on the right side of, the fady is the line that keeps it there, and each holds the other in place.

The scholarship, the rupture, and the keeping

The clearest single window onto hasina as a working institution is the fandroana, the royal bath, the annual festival at which the highland kingdom renewed itself. The historian Samuel F. Sanchez has read the fandroana as a machinery of tributary exchange, and the accounting is precise. The ceremony reinforced the sacrality — the hasina — of the sovereign by re-actualizing the ruler’s ties with the royal ancestors, and the free lineages marked the renewal with fixed symbolic sums: one uncut piastre for the hasina, and one variraiventy, a seven-hundred-and-twentieth of a piastre, for the lesser due called the isanaina (Sanchez, The value of the “royal bath”). The festival was first kept at Ambohimanga, the older royal hill, and moved with the crown to Antananarivo after Andrianampoinimerina took that city in 1794 and made it his political capital while keeping the older hill as the kingdom’s sacred one. The offering that had begun as a once-yearly act of the royal bath widened, as money spread through the economy, into a gift called hasina presented to the sovereign and to royal representatives on a great variety of occasions — the sacred tribute becoming, in part, a fiscal one.

That whole apparatus turned on the concept, and when the apparatus was dismantled the concept was not. In 1869 the court of Ranavalona II was baptized and the kingdom declared Christian, and the royal sampy were brought out and publicly burned, the sovereignty of the realm relocated from the ancestral talismans to the Christian God. That history belongs to the Merina kingdom and is not re-narrated here; what belongs to hasina is that the lived concept was not on the pyre. The talismans that the missionaries filed as “idols” were, in the understanding the fire meant to end, vessels of hasina and not idols at all — and the mission-era vocabulary that named them so belongs to the record of that encounter, a piece of history whose terms are not adopted. The French conquest of 1895 and the dissolution of the monarchy in 1897 ended the royal offices; they did not end the concept the offices had served. Masina remains the ordinary Malagasy word for the sacred. The doany are still served, across the highlands and among the western Sakalava, whose four relics of the ancestor-diviner Ndramisara are honored still as concentrated sanctity. The tsodrano is still given. Hasina is still what a blessing carries.

The scholarship reads the concept on two levels that do not quite meet. On the level of political thought stands Bloch’s argument in “The Disconnection between Power and Rank as a Process” (European Journal of Sociology, 1977; reprinted in Ritual, History and Power, Athlone Press, 1989). Bloch reads Merina history as a slow splitting of two things the ideology of hasina holds together: rank, the sanctity conferred on the sovereign from below by the tribute of his subjects, and power, the actual coercive force to compel them. In his account the ruler’s hasina is, in a strict sense, given him by those he rules — a paradox at the heart of the whole system, in which the most sacred person in the kingdom owes his sanctity to the honor of the least. It is Bloch’s reading, argued and contestable, and it is rendered here as that.

On the level of things and their forms stands the archaeology of Susan Kus and Victor Raharijaona. In “Between Earth and Sky There Are Only a Few Large Boulders” (Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 17, 1998, pp. 53–79) they read the highland landscape as hasina made legible in matter — the sovereign’s use of great stones and boulders as sanctity built into the ground, monumentality as potency a person can stand beside. The uncut silver coin belongs to the same reading: an image of completeness and perfection, an offering whose wholeness acknowledges the wholeness of the one who receives it. Between the coin and the boulder, the concept is caught in two registers of the concrete — the small round thing given entire, and the vast rooted thing that cannot be moved.

What no reading disputes is the concept’s endurance. It outlived the burning of the talismans that had held it, the conquest that dissolved the throne that had embodied it, and every attempt to relocate the order it grounded. A potency with no altar is easy to overlook and hard to end. The offices that gathered it in their measured tribute are gone; the word is still spoken every day, over a child, over a field, over the head of anyone about to set their hand to something that matters. Where the work of the sacred is being done, hasina is there to be reckoned with — uncounted, uncut, and rendered whole.

→ Related: Ranoro · Kalanoro · Ndramisara · Andranoro · Doany Ndramisara · Antsahadinta · Ambohidrabiby · The Sakalava · The Betsileo · The Antemoro · Fady