Riddum- The Voice of the Ancestors

About the Author Martino Nicoletti (Perugia - Italy, 1968) has for over ten years been a specialist in the ethnography of the Himalayas and history of religions of southern Asia. Former professor of Visual Anthropology and History of Religions at the University of Perugia (Italy) he is the director of the Anthropological Section of the Italian research project Everest-K2-CNR.

Foreword One day, the aged shaman Sancha Prasad Rai told me the story of his people. The story that even today the elders of the Kulunge Rai tribe hand down orally from generation to generation, under the name of riddum. This story starts a long, long time ago. It begins before all the objects that surround us were manifest in their infinite variety, and even before human beings appeared on the face of the Earth.

For the Kulunge Rai, the riddum is the sacred tale describing the origin of the cosmos, of nature and the living beings that populate it. Expounded using the formula of a specific ritual language, the riddum is narrated whenever an important religious ritual is celebrated. According to the Kulunge Rai, the ritual language of the riddum is the primordial language, the one that the ethnic group's forefathers once used daily for communication. With every passing generation, it began to be forgotten. Many other different idioms arose and thus the primordial tongue of the riddum began its slow, but inexorable, eclipse. Among human beings, only a few continued to hand it down, in order to keep alive a dialogue with the ancestors who lived in mythical times, and with the gods of their own religious tradition.

Having lost its original function, the ancient language withdrew within the protected borders of ritual, the only place where it could continue to bear fruit, not only as a tool for memory, but more especially as a powerful magical agent, capable of making the religious rituals efficacious: drawing on a past full of potentialities, in order to pour it out on the present, which has its own roots in that very past.

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