Religion and Art in Ashanti

Record summary

R. S. Rattray's Religion and Art in Ashanti expands his documentation of shrines, priestly authority, ritual objects, possession-like behavior and divinatory practice. The artefacts and ritual descriptions provide a useful bridge between altered-state testimony and material culture: researchers can ask how extraordinary knowledge claims were authorized, recorded and transmitted. The work should be treated as a colonial-era ethnography and historical record of claims, not as confirmation of supernatural communication. Its illustrations and museum references may allow comparison with surviving objects and later Akan scholarship.