Adze

The lights come at the hour when the lamps are out and the village has gone quiet, drifting in over the threshold like sparks blown off a dying fire. A firefly finds the gap beneath a closed door, or the keyhole, or a hairline crack in a mud wall, and slips through without a sound. It crosses the dark floor to where a child is sleeping. By morning the child is hot and listless, and within days the household is grieving, and no one can say what came in the night, only that something did.

This is the work of the adze, the blood-drinking spirit of the Ewe people, who for centuries have farmed and fished the tropical coast of what is now Togo, Ghana, and Benin. In the wild it wears the body of a firefly, sometimes a beetle or a mosquito, sometimes nothing more than a floating bead of light. The disguise is the whole point. A firefly is harmless. A firefly is almost pretty. No one bars the door against a firefly, and so it goes wherever it likes, and what it likes is the warm bodies of the sleeping. It settles, and it feeds. The blood of grown men and women will do, but the adze prefers the blood of children, and a house where infants keep dying was a house where people began to whisper.

Catch it, and the firefly is gone. In its place stands something else entirely: a stooped, hunchbacked creature with a hide of jet-black skin and fingers that end in talons. This is the adze cornered and forced out of hiding, and it is at its most dangerous here, quick and vicious and hard to hold. The two shapes belong to one thing. The glow that drew the eye and the clawed horror that lunges when trapped are the same spirit, only stripped of its pretty mask.

There is a second way the adze works, and it is the one that frightened people most. The spirit does not only feed; it can climb inside a living person and stay there. A man or woman carrying an adze becomes a witch, abasom in the Ewe tongue, and the harm radiates outward from the host into the lives of everyone nearby. The damage falls on the host’s own family, or on whoever the host happens to envy. This is where the adze stops being a creature of the night and becomes a way of reading a community’s tensions. Suspicion settled along the lines of resentment. A woman with brothers might be accused if her brother’s children thrived while hers did not. The old were eyed when the young began to die and the elderly went on living. The poor were suspected if they were thought to covet the wealth of the rich. Behind nearly every accusation lay the same engine: envy, and the fear of being envied.

Where the adze came from is a question with a quieter answer than the legend suggests. The Ewe settled this coast around the thirteenth century, into a region where mosquitoes carried malaria through the wet heat and killed without warning or visible cause. A thing that slips unseen through the smallest gap, bites a sleeper, and leaves them burning with fever describes the disease as neatly as it describes the spirit. The adze is most likely the shape that helplessness took, a face and a motive pinned onto an enemy no one could see or fight. Centuries later, when European missionaries arrived in the nineteenth century, the Ewe did not trade their Vodun beliefs for Christianity so much as stack the two together. The adze absorbed the new theology and drifted closer to the figure of the Devil, and possession by an adze became the explanation reached for in cases of jealousy, illness of the mind, addiction, failing marriages, and childlessness.

Its powers are simple and total. It moves where it pleases, small enough and innocent enough to pass any door. It drains the life from sleepers and spreads sickness and death through a household. It hides inside a human being and works its ruin from within, untouchable as long as the disguise holds. The oldest tellings are blunt about the odds. There is no charm, no weapon, and no medicine that turns an adze away, and there is no cure once it has fed.

The weaknesses are real but narrow. The spirit can be driven out of its human host and forced into that hunchbacked, taloned body, and in that exposed form it can be killed. The trouble is that the cornered adze is fast and savage, and the attempt is dangerous enough that few would try it. The gentler remedy belongs to the age after the missionaries. Where once there was no defense, congregations now hold deliverance sessions, long and forceful prayer meetings meant to expel the adze from the possessed. It is an easier method than hunting a clawed thing in the dark, and a more comforting one. Whether it works any better, the stories do not promise.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Adze?

The Adze is a vampiric spirit from the folklore of the Ewe people of Togo, Ghana, and Benin. In the wild it takes the form of a firefly and feeds on the blood of sleeping people, and it can also possess a living human, who is then regarded as a witch.

What does the Adze do to its victims?

The Adze slips into homes at night through keyholes, cracks, and gaps under doors, then drinks the blood of sleepers until they sicken and die. It feeds on adults but prefers the blood of children, and a household where infants kept dying was often believed to be under attack by an adze.

How do you kill an Adze?

The oldest tradition holds that there is no defense against an adze, but it can be destroyed if it is forced out of its human host into its true shape, a hunchbacked creature with talons and jet-black skin, and then killed. This is considered extremely dangerous because the exposed adze is fast and vicious, so a more common remedy after the arrival of Christianity is intensive prayer and deliverance sessions meant to expel the spirit.

Why is someone accused of carrying an Adze?

A person was suspected of being possessed by an adze when misfortune seemed to follow envy. Women whose brothers’ children thrived while their own died, elderly people who outlived the young, and the poor thought to covet the rich were all common targets of accusation, because the adze was understood to work through jealousy and resentment within a community.

Is the Adze connected to a real disease?

Historians believe the Adze legend most likely arose as an explanation for malaria and other insect-borne illnesses. Like the spirit, mosquitoes enter homes unseen at night and leave their victims feverish and weak without any obvious cause, which closely matches how the adze was said to attack.

Related Entries

Asiman, Aziza, Mawu-Lisa, Dahomey/Fon/Ewe Mythology, Obayifo, Asanbosam, Anansi, Ajogun, Adroanzi, Eloko, Mami Wata, Tikoloshe, Impundulu, Soucouyant, Loogaroo