Alight with bioluminescence as they float through the night sky,
the firefly is a mystical, enchanting creature for many cultures.
But not so for the West African Ewe peoples of Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, and Togo.
For them, fireflies can cause great anxiety. In Ewe mythology, fireflies may be the form
taken by an evil entity called the Adze. While there are very few folk stories about
the ‘Adze’ as a physical monster, mostly just passing references and descriptions,
‘adze’ as a belief is more complex. So why has the idea of a flying,
nocturnal, blood-sucking firefly endured? I'm Dr. Emily Zarka. And this is Monstrum.
A nebulous monstrous spirit, adze can take on many guises, the firefly among them. The
Ewe peoples believe that this nocturnal force is almost always ill-intentioned, and if called upon
through malevolent sorcery, may enter the body and empower the sorcerer with special abilities.
While under the influence of malignant adze, these individuals are called an adzetos or azetowos.
While possessed, the adzetos are compelled into nocturnal shapeshifting. A floating ball
of light or a flame emerges from the possessed person’s nose or mouth or may appear through the
top of their head. Often, the flame takes the form of an owl, firefly, or a kind of beetle.
This allows the possessed to travel great distances by flight, which comes in handy
because the spirit also compels the adzetos to feed on the life force of other humans,
usually their blood or their flesh. The word ‘adze’ however itself has a bit
of a complex etymology, especially amongst west African people like Theon the mean
the Shante and so many others who live in Togo, Benin, Ghana, and Nigeria.
That’s Helen Nde, researcher and curator of Mythological Africans,
an online community that explores mythology and folklore from the African continent.
In one context, as they are understood as a creative genius and spiritual power,
especially as embodied and wielded by women, Adze is also understood as a bad sorcery,
so creative genius and spiritual power wielded for harm. So to hurt
other people out of jealousy or envy, or just sudden for design to see them suffer.
Helen taught me that all adze aren’t bad or malevolent. It's more about
the intention of the person who wields this force.
The capital “A” Adze monster we are talking about is just one manifestation, a very frightening one.
The monster Adze’s ability to appear as an insect makes it particularly threatening.
They could be anywhere and everywhere.
Their small size allows them to enter seemingly closed spaces through keyholes,
cracks, and under door frames. And insect-borne illness is already a threat.
In some variations of Adze lore, the monsters have an appendage like an
elephant trunk or ant-eater -like nose used to slurp up the blood of their victims.
If blood isn’t handy, the creatures will drink palm oil, coconut water, or coconut milk,
so these fluids can be offered to appease an Adze monster and protect one’s community.
Flying, nocturnal, blood-sucking insects—you would think the mosquito
would be the most common form, so why fireflies? If you start with the understanding of as a, as
a flame-like entity, which comes out of people's noses and mouths or out the top of their heads and
flies around at night, looking for other people to stop blood from and cause death or disease to
then it makes sense that the firefly would be one of the creatures associated with this entity. It
flies around at night, it glows in the dark. A flying insect that appears to glow like
a small flame makes sense. It’s also possible that the belief in the monstrous Adze developed
as a response not only to illness more broadly but to disease-carrying insects
like mosquitoes, which could explain the proboscis-like appendage of the creature.
But let’s not forget, ‘adze’ mostly refers to malevolent sorcery, not a monster.
The main misconception about that, I would like to dispel is this understanding of it
as simply a blood sucking vampiric entity. Adze cannot be understood outside of its context
as a manifestation of bad sorcery. So you have the entity, but the entity comes out of the efforts of
a bad actor using occult powers. Um, blood sucking is also just one of the ways in which they will
break havoc on a person's life. They also cause illness and death. They cause mental distress
and they can cause loss of job, loss of property, or just lots of good standing in society.
Ewe practitioners of this bad sorcery, in general, may be associated with cannibalism and
consumption because they prey on the resources of the community to the detriment of all.
Often associated with contentious familial and community relationships, in Ewe culture
adze attacks pose a constant threat, most predominantly to wealth and fertility.
And another valuable resource—blood. The Adze monster’s preferred victims are children.
In fact, in some Ewe traditions, they only hunt the most beautiful children.
My theory around this is that physical attractiveness is, uh, an enviable quality.
And one of the motivating forces behind using Adze is jealousy and envy and wanting other
people to suffer. So, uh, people who have qualities that another person envy
become targets for Adze, and it's not just beauty. There is intelligence and charisma and wealth,
and anything that a person might possess that other people might, might, might want or feel
jealous towards them and want them to suffer for. The Adze are active at night, and some people say
they see them in their dreams. If you manage to catch one of these creatures, it will transform
into a human and attack you. So it’s possible that they can be killed in this mortal form.
They believe, however, that if you were to catch an Adze and a transforming into a human being,
it will plead for its life and offer you all kinds of things to make sure that you don't kill it.
And if you spirits life, then it becomes your friend and it doesn't bother you anymore.
There are groups within Ewe culture that work against the use of malevolent sorcery,
neutralizing or punishing the accused—sometimes with death.
Someone can be accused of being a blood-sucking, possessed firefly or a traveling flame and also
look like a human during the day—and therefore there’s a possibility that real innocent lives
can be taken in the name of Adze destruction. Long a part of oral traditions, one of the Adze’s
first appearances in written literature is in an ethnographic book written in
1906 by German missionary Jakob Spieth. While his description isn’t incorrect,
he is very quick to label adze as ‘witchcraft,” a complicated term in Africa.
Over time, you know, with colonization and the introduction of Christianity and,
and other spiritual belief systems. The fear of Adze has only become more complex.
Now it is impossible to situate this outside of the context of colonialism, because,
what happened with the wave of colonial enterprise that swept across much of the African continent is
that traditional ways of organizing community belief systems and political systems were
destabilized. And this had a profound effect on the physical, emotional, and psychological
wellbeing of communities. And there is research which shows that, where this, this destabilization
brought by colonialism, the inequities and operations caused by that, that system
where they, where they happened, there is an increase in complex beliefs, such as witchcraft.
Helen and I both found that identifying the Adze as a vampiric spirit doesn’t occur until
the 20th century, in Matthew Bunson’s 1993 book The Vampire Encyclopedia.
So the Adze gained the “vampire” moniker not from the culture from which it originated,
but from an attempt to contextualize the entity to a broader, largely Western, audience.
It’s so important that we trace back to and understand the origins of this monster.
Without that the true meaning is lost and muddled.
There is a resurgence in mythology and folklore from the African continent,
which is good, but it also carries the risk of misunderstanding and misinterpretation,
especially since many of the documented sources of these mythologies and folklores that are available
were done by people who are not themselves African. So, it is well known that myths and
folklore are not just stories. They are containers of cultural beliefs and values and practices. And,
and so they are used to preserve and plum to expand cultural knowledge and practices.
And I believe that myths and folk will offer a great opportunity to learn what we have thought
about ourselves in the past and explore the possibilities of who we can be in the future.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Studying monsters isn’t about what you think you know
because of something you’ve seen or read, but investigating what that creature means
to the culture in which it was created.
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