Mad in Pursuit Notebook
Work of a Spiritual Technician
Brass and garnet from the mountain exiles of Cameroon
Jim gave me this necklace back in 1980—one of his first gifts. It was a decade before I started collecting beads in earnest and before he got seriously into African art. And long before Google cracked open the world. So... an exotic bauble.
An exotic bauble that sported an abstract, if unmistakable, phallus.
I wore it symbolically—when I was feeling bold or when I needed to project some masculine energy. No one paid attention. In the era of gold chains, brass was dull. When bling was in style, garnets didn't sparkle. Gradually, it faded to the back of my jewelry drawer.
We take things for granted. Brass. Little round garnets. A modern springring clasp (too shiny next to the dull brass). It was decades later that I found comparable items while browsing a Beads of the World by Peter Francis. The Kirdi people of Cameroon made these things using the lost-wax process. That involved making a model in beeswax, encasing in layers of clay, heating the mold till the wax melted away, then filling the resulting void with molten metal. Bead by bead by bead.
Now I have found out more.
The pendant and the tiny brass washer rings were made by blacksmith. Many traditional cultures saw blacksmiths as artisans with dangerous, godlike powers. In their smoky workshops, they manipulated fire and transformed raw earth into metal. Iron got hammered into utilitarian objects, while brass (reworked from scrap metal) was shaped into amulets and other precious things. Brass objects, born of intense fire, were potent, charged with a life force that could connect the wearer to the power of many generations of ancestors.
The garnets, brought by trade routes from nearby Nigeria, were added to the brass to "cool" it and make it safe for the average person to wear. (Too much power around the necks of the unwitting can spark chaos.)
Who are the Kirdi people? The name means "pagan" and is the generic term for several animist tribes who fled into the Mandara Mountains of northern Cameroon during the 19th century. They were escaping the Fulani empire, which gave their conquests a choice: convert to Islam or be sold into the slave trade.
These isolated tribes, surviving in the rough, semi-arid mountains, rely on "spiritual technicians" like blacksmiths who channel the chaos of wild nature into order of a good life.
The phallic pendant is not an erotic thing. It represents the vital life force pulsing from generation to generation. As in many traditional cultures, Kirdi spiritual and physical well-being relies on the benevolence of ancestors, so that preserving the lineage is all-important.
So my pendant has power. It is spiritual armor, protecting my life force, if not for procreation, then for creativity and a fertile mind. It is also a reminder that we owe everything to those who came before us. And we are summoned to leave a better world for those who follow.
[Research for this piece was done with the assistance of Google's Gemini Pro.]
28 Jan 2026
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