Mask of the Kore

 

KoréIt is the spirit of the waters. Its brotherhood pursues two objectives:

1.- Return to the human being its original harmony overshadowed by circumcision.

2.- Allow the human being to recover, on the spiritual plane, his primitive femininity, his mystical union with God and the triumph over death.

Koré activates the moral and intellectual formation of the being. No one can pretend to any other initiation after having participated in the rituals of Koré. The big party of the Koré with the ritual of initiation takes place every two years and the practices and teachings are distributed in two times, every two consecutive years.

First time: The immortality to which the being aspires can only be obtained after a symbolic death. It is in this first part that the neophytes are “killed” and initiated. It starts with the full moon and lasts for fifteen days.

Second time : It concerns the theomorphosis of being, which takes place twelve months later. The ceremony begins with a ritual theft of the bags with their clothes and belongings, which the neophytes hide in a hidden place and their owners will only be able to recover them by paying for some cauris that the neophytes will deliver to the head of the brotherhood, who in return will introduce a small stone into the bags. After ten sessions of ritual theft and six stones in the bags, the chief announces the date of the next ritual.

The ritual theft of their bags is assimilated to the death and reincarnation of humans. The Bambara think that the market square symbolizes the world and the bags or pulls them out of the street vendors symbolize men.

This mask symbolizes the antelope man, the animal man who constitutes the very principle of human duality.

On the central part of the head he wears a chameleon which is one of the primordial animals of the bambar cosmogony and represents prudence and wisdom.