ABSTRACT
Tiv religious and mystical ideas are very complex, and the intricate interlinking of religious ideas and other cultural elements is a nest of puzzles of consuming fascination for the European observer. Those who have sought a key to this puzzle have, in the past, called Tiv religion an ancestral cult, an earth cult, a pantheon of gods, fetishism, animism, pre-animism, and animatism. No two authorities on Tiv religion agree even on the major points of interpretation. None can be said even to have begun the major tasks of analysis. We believe that such an analysis would involve at least a threefold examination: of Tiv notions of cosmology and physiology; of the complex structure of the key words about which are clustered various centres of religious ideas; and a functional investigation of the role of these ideas in other social and cultural fields. Obviously, such an analysis is impossible here, even were the authors prepared to make it at the present time. What is possible here, and what we shall attempt to provide, is a framework for the adjustment, if not the reconciliation, of apparent factual and theoretical contradictions in the literature.
