In any contest of a human being against these spirits of evil he knows always that whatever influence he may obtain over them by the doctor's magic aid, or whatever limitations may thus be put on them, they can never, as in the case of a human enemy, be killed. The spirits can never die.
Sometimes the word "dead" is used of a fetich amulet that has been inhabited by a spirit conjured into it by a native doctor. The phrase does not mean that its spirit is actually dead, but that it has fled from inside of the fetich, and still lives elsewhere. Then the native doctor, to explain to his patient or client the inefficacy of the charm, says that the cause of the spirit's escape and flight is that the wearer has failed to observe all the directions which had been given, and the spirit was displeased. The dead amulet is, nevertheless, available for sale to the curio-hunting foreigner.
SPIRITUAL BEINGS IN AFRICA--THEIR CLASSES AND FUNCTIONS
Inequalities among the spirits themselves, though they are so great, indicate no more than simple differentiations of character or work. Yet so radical are these varieties, and so distinct the names applied to them, that I am compelled to recognize a division into classes.
1. _Inina, or Ilina._ A human embodied soul is spoken of and fully believed in by all the tribes. It is known in the Mpongwe tribes of the Gabun country as "inina" (plural, "anina"); in the adjacent Benga tribe, as "ilina" (plural, "malina"); in the great interior Fang tribes, as "nsisim."
This animating soul, whether it be only one, or whether it appear in two, three, or even four forms, is practically the same, that talks, hears, and feels, that sometimes goes out of the body in a dream, and that exists as a spirit after the death of the body. That it has its own especial materiality seems to be indicated by the fact that in the Fang, Bakěle, and other tribes the same word "nsisim" means not only soul but also shadow. The shadow of a tree or any other inanimate object and of the human body as cast by the sun is "nsisim."
In my first explorations up the Ogowe River, in 1874, as in my village preaching I necessarily and constantly spoke of our soul, its sins, its capacity for suffering or happiness, and its relation to its divine Maker, I was often at a loss how to make my thoughtless audience understand or appreciate that the nsisim of which I was speaking was not the nsisim cast by the sun as a darkish line on the ground near their bodies. Even to those who understood me, it was not an impossible thought that that dark narrow belt on the ground was in some way a part of, or a mode of manifestation of, that other thing, the nsisim, which they admitted was the source of the body's animation. So far defined was that thought with some of them that they said it was a possible thing for a human being to have his nsisim stolen or otherwise lost, and still exist in a diseased and dying state; in which case his body would not cast a shadow. Von Chamisso's story of Peter Schlemehl, "the man who lost his shadow," in actuality!