The Ombiasy

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The diviner works with seeds. Small and hard and brown, they are gathered from the fàno — the Entada liana, whose pods run the length of an arm — or from the kily, the tamarind: no fewer than a hundred and twenty-four of them, and sometimes as many as two hundred, kept in a pouch and tipped out onto a mat when a client arrives with a question. The diviner takes them up by the handful and lays them down in rows, setting out four columns by a casting no hand controls, then generating twelve more columns from those first four by a fixed reckoning, until sixteen columns stand on the mat in an array called the toetry (Sikidy). What looks, to a stranger, like the idle telling of a fortune is nothing of the kind. The completed array is one of exactly 65,536 possible configurations, and it carries inside it a working algebra — parity relations by which the practitioner, running a set of internal checks, can catch a seed miscounted or a column wrongly built and know the reading is spoiled before it is spoken. This is sikidy, the seed-divination of Madagascar, and the specialist who reads it is the ombiasy.

The reader of hidden things

The ombiasy — also written ombiasa, and in the same breath called mpisikidy, “one who works the sikidy,” or ambiàsa — is the living religious specialist of the Malagasy world: the reader of a person’s state, of a house’s fortune, of the safety of a journey, and the one who prescribes what must be done to set any of them right. The office reaches the record along two braided lines. One is deep and indigenous, an inheritance of the island’s mingled Austronesian and East African peoples: the ombiasy as the community’s reader of things not on the surface, keeper of the ody and the fanafody, the one a family turns to when a sickness will not lift or a venture keeps failing. The other line is learned and Islamized, carried onto the island’s southeast coast across the medieval centuries of Indian Ocean trade.

That second line is written into the vocabulary itself. The scholarly consensus derives sikidy from Arabic geomancy — ‘ilm al-raml, “the science of the sand” — the figure-casting practiced across the Muslim world and brought to Madagascar by Arab and Swahili traders; the name sikidy has been proposed from the Arabic sichr, an incantation or charm, and the parallel term ambiàsa is traced to anbia, “prophets” (Sikidy). The seeds arrayed in their columns are the local form of what a geomancer elsewhere marked in sand or on paper. What arrived was not merely a technique but a body of learning, and on the southeast coast that learning found a people to carry it.

The prestige lineage of the learned ombiasy runs through the Antemoro (Antaimoro), the “people of the shore” who hold the coast between Manakara and Farafangana. Some Antemoro clans reckon their descent from settlers who came out of Arabia and Persia, and though the Islamic practice of those forebears was in time set aside for the ancestral custom of the island, the clans kept something the rest of Madagascar did not have: sorabe, the Malagasy language written in the Arabic script. The Antemoro scribes held a near-monopoly on that writing, and it made them formidable. Their town of Matitanana, near Manakara, served as a training center where ombiasy were schooled in divination and the arcane sciences before scattering across the island; the seventeenth-century governor Étienne de Flacourt already recorded Matitanana as such a center, and its diviners as men who had “migrated widely.” Nearly every Malagasy village came to have its ombiasy, and a great many of them had learned their art, directly or at a remove, in the Antemoro homeland. Historians credit that traveling network of diviner-scholars with knitting a broader awareness across communities the terrain otherwise kept apart.

The specialism enters the royal record at the highland court. The founder of the Merina kingdom, Andrianampoinimerina (r. c. 1787–1810), kept sorabe-literate diviners at his side: he “consulted a group of ombiasy (royal advisers of the Antaimoro clan), who were literate in the sorabe script historically used on the east coast to inscribe a series of ancient texts considered to contain powerful magic and specialized scientific and ritual knowledge” (Andrianampoinimerina). His son and successor Radama learned his first letters from them: the earliest formal school in Imerina was kept from 1800 to 1804 by two Antemoro ombiasy, who taught the future Radama I to read using sorabe (Antemoro). The claim rests on the court-and-mission record read with care, but its shape is clear — that at the making of the highland kingdom, the men who could read the hidden script and cast the seeds sat among the royal counselors.

What the ombiasy names in his own frame is not the vocabulary the missionaries would later bring. The powers he works with and answers to are the razana, the ancestors, and the sacred efficacy called hasina; where a highland ombiasy invokes a creator it is under the island’s own names, and the exact relation of those names to one another — whether the Fragrant Lord of the highlands and the Maker much of the island calls Zanahary are one power or several — is left where the tradition leaves it, unsettled. The ombiasy’s business is nearer to hand than the question of the Creator’s number: it is the state of the person in front of him, and the destiny that person was born into.

Sikidy, divination by seeds, in highland Madagascar, photographed around 1900. Unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Reading the hidden order

The ombiasy’s core power is to make a hidden order legible, and the chief instrument of that reading is sikidy. The seeds cast onto the mat build the toetry: sixteen columns, of which four fall from the diviner’s casting — the renin-tsikidy, the “mother-sikidy,” which carry the element of pure chance — while the remaining twelve are generated from those four by fixed operations, so that the whole array follows, once the mother-columns are set, by rule. Each column holds one of sixteen figures, and each figure is built of ones and twos of seeds, marked as odd or even. The eight figures with an even count are reckoned “princes”; the eight with an odd count are “slaves,” and the geography of the board itself is divided into a land of princes and a land of slaves toward its opposed corners (Sikidy). The columns bear names — the client, the wife, the descendants, the road, the house, the spirits, the enemy — so that the finished array is read as a map of the questioner’s whole situation and of the forces bearing on it.

What the reading discloses is vintana — destiny, the fate ordained by the courses of moon and sun and stars, into which every person is born on the day of their birth. Vintana is not a verdict pronounced once; it is a standing order of favorable and unfavorable times and directions, an inheritance from the Arab astrological learning in which each person carries a fortune “that only God can change.” The ombiasy reads where a client stands within that order, and what may be done to turn a hard destiny aside. (The procedure is set down here only at the distance of the public record. Sikidy is a living professional discipline, learned from a master over years, and no arrangement of these paragraphs is a manual by which to work it.)

That the array is governed by rule rather than by whim is not a modern apology for it but a fact the practitioners have always known and depended on, and it is the burden of the single most searching study the system has received. The ethnomathematician Marcia Ascher, in “Malagasy Sikidy: A Case in Ethnomathematics” (Historia Mathematica 24, 1997, pp. 376–395), worked out the formal algebra of the toetry and demonstrated the logic of the checks by which an expert verifies it: the twelve generated columns stand in fixed parity relations to the four cast ones, and a diviner who knows those relations can test a completed board and detect an error in it — a divinatory science, in other words, with error-correction built in, far more tightly structured than outsiders had ever allowed. The 65,536 configurations are the count of what the four mother-columns, each a stack of four odd-or-even marks, can jointly produce; the reading is the interpretation of which of those the seeds have delivered.

Around the ombiasy stands an allied and closely kindred specialism, the mpanandro, the “day-maker.” The mpanandro reads the same vintana — the order of days and months and directions, the phases of the moon, the destinies attached to each — and from it chooses the auspicious day for whatever a family means to undertake (Mpanandro Malagasy). A wedding, the raising of a house, the start of a journey, the circumcision of a boy: none is set in motion until the day-maker has named its day. In Imerina the circumcision rite, famorana, traditionally waits on the mpanandro’s approval and his reckoning of the boy’s andro nahavelomana, his birth-day destiny, so that the cutting falls on a day the child’s own vintana can carry; the ceremony keeps to the cold months of the southern winter, and its date is the day-maker’s to set. And when a highland family prepares to open the ancestral tomb and rewrap its dead at famadihana, it is the mpanandro who fixes the day the stone may be moved, so that the returning of the razana is done in season and in order. The reader of destiny and the setter of days work the same knowledge from two sides: one tells a person what they are dealing with, the other tells them when to act.

The ombiasy’s work does not stop at reading. He makes ody — charms — and fanafody — medicine — joining a deep knowledge of plants to the blessing of the ancestors, and with them he treats. A sickness laid to the displeasure of a neglected forebear, an affliction traced to a neighbor’s malice, a run of misfortune that will not break: these are brought to the ombiasy, who diagnoses by the seeds and prescribes accordingly — a remedy compounded, a charm bound, a spell lifted, an ancestral debt named and paid. The healing and the divining are one office. To read the hidden cause and to supply the remedy for it are the same competence, and it is this joined work — diagnosis and cure — that makes the ombiasy the practical center of the sacred world for an ordinary household, more constantly present in a life than any shrine or any rite.

Against this healing office the tradition sets its feared inversion, and the distinction is exact and load-bearing. The worker of mosavy — harm done by black magic, the going-out by night to injure — is the mpamosavy, and the mpamosavy is everything the ombiasy is not: the accused destroyer against the mender, the poisoner against the healer. The ombiasy is the one whose charms break bad spells; the mpamosavy is the one whose malice sets them. The two are never confused, and the line between them is the moral spine of the whole specialism: the same knowledge of hidden power that heals in the ombiasy’s hands is the knowledge that harms in the mpamosavy’s, and the tradition names the difference sharply and keeps it.

The office diminished, and restored

The ombiasy stood at the making of the highland kingdom. Alongside the sampy — the royal and household palladia that guarded hasina — and the ancestral tombs, the sorabe-literate Antemoro advisers were counted among the powers that legitimized Merina rule, and the court carried their learning into its counsels and its calendar. But the specialists’ royal setting did not last the nineteenth century unchanged. The London Missionary Society reached the highland capital between 1818 and 1820; the Malagasy Bible was completed in 1835; and at the conversion of Queen Ranavalona II the royal sampy were publicly burned in 1869, an act that broke the old palladia’s place at the center of the state. The ombiasy’s work, however, was never chiefly a thing of thrones. It belonged to households — to the family with a sick child, the traveler wanting tomorrow read, the parents needing a day set — and households outlast dynasties.

In the colonial and mission writing of the period the diviner-healer was diminished with a slur. He was called a “witch-doctor,” and the sikidy was dismissed as superstition — a framing this account rejects, and one the sources themselves must be read against. Even François Callet’s Tantara ny Andriana, the deepest written record of the diviners at their courtly work, was taken down in the very decades when the mission was pressing hardest against their craft, and it carries the marks of that contest. The LMS accounts record the ombiasy from the outside and against the grain of their own purpose. To take either at its word about the “superstition” of the seed-caster is to take a verdict for a fact.

Twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship has restored the office its dignity, and Ascher’s ethnomathematics of sikidy is the sharpest instance of the restoration: a system colonial writers had waved away as mumbo-jumbo turns out, examined, to carry a genuine internal algebra. The wider anthropology of Malagasy religious life — the work of Maurice Bloch and others on the ancestors, the tombs, and the moral world the ombiasy serves — has set the diviner-healer back in the coherent society he belongs to. And studies of medical pluralism have documented, present-tense, what the ombiasy is now. Among the Betsileo of the southern highlands, the anthropologists Olivia Legrip-Randriambelo and Denis Regnier describe the ombiasa — there also called omasiña, from olo masina, “sacred person” — practicing today alongside clinics, hospitals, and Christian healers, constantly adjusting their practice to avoid open confrontation with biomedicine and the churches while keeping a real place in the care of the sick. This is not a survival on sufferance; it is a working profession in a plural field.

That field is the Madagascar of the living present, where Christianity and the ancestral custom of the island continue together rather than in succession — and where the ombiasy, the mpanandro, and the Antemoro keepers of sorabe are not figures of a closed past. The people of the island, the Malagasy, keep the diviner-healer among the specialists a family may need in a year: the seed-caster who reads a trouble, the day-maker who sets the wedding and the tomb-opening, the maker of fanafody who compounds the cure. The office stands apart from the possession-mediums through whom the royal dead speak — the ombiasy reads and prescribes; he is not the mouth the tromba spirits enter — and it is the more constant for it, worked not in trance but in counsel. A family that wants tomorrow read before it acts still knows where to bring the question.

An ombiasy, a traditional healer-diviner of Malagasy society. Tojosoa Raherinirainy, 2015, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The seeds are still tipped onto the mat. The rows are still dealt, four by chance and twelve by rule, into the array that carries its own hidden arithmetic. The reading is still spoken, and the remedy still prescribed. What the missionaries took for the fumbling of a witch-doctor was a learned profession with a written pedigree and an internal logic, and it is a learned profession still — the reader of the hidden order, sitting where the ancestors and the destinies and the sick of an ordinary household all come to be answered.

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