Chapter 2 Death, Witchcraft and the Temporal Aspects of Divination Knut Rio Introduction tis curious that even though the technologies of death—ic. divination, witeheraft ‘and soreery—expressively work through materially mediated practices, their ‘objects offen have no particular eharacter or aesthetic value. The case is that divination, the work of discovering the cause and agency behind death or ilness, achieves this through manipulation of objects, but the objects are often of extraordinary simplicity or minimalism. They can be stones or shells picked up from the ground and tossed in the air, marks made in the sand, leaves put into hot water, water put in a bowl, or plain pieces of wood held in particular ways, Likewise, remedies for sorcery can be just remains of someone's hair, fingernails ‘or pieces of clothing. Artifacts of witcheraft can be ashes of human bone, a needle ‘or particular thom or some other hardly observable thing, Divination, sorcery and witchcraft seem to conceal their practices and potency.in this everyday, simplistic character oftheir work and instruments, Both the dviner and the soreerer work ‘on the basis of a technology that is next to nothing even though they bear great results in terms of life and death. But how come pebbles and thorns are chosen for creating miracles? 1 shall argue that this has to do with the very character of these practices as ‘operating with an intentionality toward a realm that is also next to nothing, if not nothing at all. In order to approach this realm, such as approaching the witch who is constituted in this realm and bursting forth from it, the diviner has to handle materially the very bits and pieces of the most ordinary of the everyday things: items that are closer to nothing than anything else. With regard to the temporality cof death, I believe this goes in parallel with its materiality. The diviner picks up some stones, shell or sticks from the ground in order to let these elementary forms reorient themselves and illustrate the composition of elements and personnel in ‘different realm, and time is restructured in the same sense, In order to recall ‘a moment of death, the diviner also has to toss time up in the air, and to let it restructure itself so that tan become comprehensible for those who need to know about the realm of death itself, ‘This chapter thus offers preliminary thoughts on how divination works to recall ‘bygone moments in time, related tothe potent moment when someone has died or2 Taming Time, Timing Death become il ftom witchcraft or sorery trace the causation and logic of witcherat tials and look a how one is seking evidence by soto say walking backward into a past that was never a present In terms of material mediation and time, te theme of this volume, I ook at how beating or killing wit, like seizing into the inner organs of a dead animal in divination practices, is eeating an intermediary space for communication with spirits, objets and persons that all help to document a