Baoulé gong hammer in bronze. Old piece over 50 years old.

Delivered on base.

Among the Baoule, there are several divination techniques, some simple in terms of the equipment used, although complex for the analysis, such as the “throwing of laces”. But, in terms of theatricality and plastic creation, the most spectacular involves diviners-dancers, the komyenfwé, who, possessed by geniuses of nature, serve as intermediaries between the spirits and the world of the village. They are also called awèfwè (“border beings”, those who separate the visible from the invisible). During their trance ceremonies, when the spirits who invest them speak through them, they use ritual instruments, earthenware dishes, gourd-shaped rattles, and above all metal gongs which they strike to "wake up" the spirits, to make them emerge from the bush and from their torpor, using, a miracle of art, a decorated wooden hammer. These objects are called lawlé waka. The more renowned the diviner, the more elaborate his religious material, as evidenced by certain objects which have belonged to Western collections, notably the hammer from the old collection of Helena Rubinstein, which, I am convinced, is the most dazzling of all those I have seen, in thirty years of frequenting the Baule people. Is it to make people forget that this piece remains a simple percussion instrument? In fact, far from being added to the functional part, the figure is inserted, in plastic evidence. Its hieraticism, very relative, harmonizes with the semi-circle of the knocker inside which it is inscribed, but also with the twists of the handle at the top of which it stands, sovereign, as if on a pedestal, as if to better free itself from the spiral which carries it, with a layering of planes which gradually leads the eye towards the summit figure.