materialsCowrieकौड़ी

No other amulet material in this atlas was also the currency. Cowries were the most widely used shell money in the world. The Chinese character for money, 貝, began as a stylised drawing of a Maldivian cowrie, and words for money, property and wealth take it as their radical; shells or copies of them circulated in China from more than three thousand years ago. After the 1500s the shell's monetary use widened sharply: European traders, chiefly through the slave trade, moved enormous numbers of Maldivian cowries into Africa. Between 1500 and 1875 at least 30 billion cowries were imported into the Bight of Benin, accounting for 44% of the total value of trade; the shell money literature puts profits on the traffic as high as 500%, and the resulting inflation damaged local economies. In parts of British West Africa cowries were accepted for tax until the early twentieth century, and Ghana named its currency, the cedi, after them in 1965.

The ritual record is just as wide. Cowries are used in divination among the Yoruba, and in Brazil, carried there by the Atlantic slave trade, buzios are thrown to consult the Orixas. The Kaniyar Panicker astrologers of Kerala used them for divination. In West Bengal a cowrie is given as the token fare for the departed soul's ferry across the Vaitarani, and shells are used at cremations and in the worship of Lakshmi. The Ojibwe use cowrie shells, miigis or whiteshells, in Midewiwin ceremonies, and Whiteshell Provincial Park in Manitoba is named for them; how shells from that far away came to be that far inland is an open question, with oral accounts and birch bark scrolls describing them as found in the ground or washed up on lakeshores. This atlas prints what the published accounts say about Midewiwin and stops there.

In parts of Africa cowries were prized charms and were said to be associated with fecundity, sexual pleasure and good luck; in Mende and Kikuyu usage the shell stands for womanhood, fertility, birth and wealth. One modern ethnographic writer reads the underside as a vulva or an eye. On Fiji a drilled golden cowrie was worn on a string at the neck by chiefs as a badge of rank.

The shell is also old in graves. In predynastic Egypt and the Neolithic southern Levant, cowries were placed in the burials of young girls, modified and arranged around the skull; by the Bronze Age they are commoner as funerary goods, with women and children. Egypt then made the cowroid — a seal amulet imitating the shell — and copies in stone and faience appear from the early second millennium BCE.

Still strung, still sold, still thrown for divination on three continents. The cowrie is also the material in this atlas with the heaviest history attached to its supply: the same shell that a West African household kept as a charm arrived, in the millions, on ships in the trade in people.