Asiman

Also Known As: the English encyclopedia spelling, given elsewhere as Asin or Azeman; the Fon word behind it is azètɔ́, “the one who holds azè”
Region/Culture: West Africa
Mythos: Dahomey/Fon/Ewe Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: She holds azè, a force Fon speakers describe as involuntary and corrupting, which compels the person who carries it to attack and consume the souls of other people.
Role in Mythos: She is the explanation for the wasting death that arrives without a wound, and she lives inside the family that buries the victim.
Relation to Humans: She is not an outsider preying on a village but a member of it, most often a relative, and the harm she does runs along the lines of envy, inheritance and grudge. Protection against her is bought from healers and charm-makers who hold the same power she does, which is why the cure and the disease are so hard to tell apart.

The silk-cotton trees stand at the edge of the village where nobody has ever built, trunks pale and buttressed and far too wide to get an arm around, and after dark the ground beneath them belongs to other people. An owl calls from somewhere up in the crown. Children get counted and brought inside. The air off the lagoon is warm and heavy with wet earth and palm oil, the compound walls give back the day’s heat long after the sun has gone, and somewhere behind one of those walls a person who spent the afternoon pounding millet with everyone else is not asleep.

Southern Benin has a word for what she carries, and it is not a word for a monster. It is azè. Fon speakers rank it as the most powerful force in existence, an African science that harnesses nature the way an aeroplane harnesses air, and they use the same word for the mobile phone in a visitor’s hand. Held by the wrong person it turns predatory. In one common account azè is not chosen at all but arrives unbidden, an involuntary power that compels its holder to attack and consume the souls of others, and even those who use it kindly must eventually kill somebody in order to keep it, or die themselves. A person who holds it is an azètɔ́. The vampire encyclopedias call her the asiman.

What that means in practice is a child who stops thriving. No wound, no fever anyone recognises, just a slow subtraction over weeks while the mother cooks food the child will not eat and the compound gets quieter around them. When the burial is over, the counting starts, and it does not go outward to strangers. It goes backward through the last year of quarrels, to the co-wife who was passed over, the brother who thought the land was divided against him, the aunt who was slighted at a funeral and said nothing at the time.

She is somebody’s aunt.

That is why there is no description of her. The record has nothing to say about her face or her height because the question does not arise, and the one physical signature the belief does insist on belongs to the victim rather than to her. Nineteenth-century observers on the Slave Coast recorded the surrounding machinery instead: the belief that wizards and witches assembled by night at the foot of the great huntin and loko trees, and the conviction that an owl could be sent from house to house to eat out a sleeping person’s heart. The Ewe word for owl carried the accusation inside it, khedome-ku, the bird that destroys the body. The same observers noted the plain principle underneath all of it, still in circulation as a saying: the blood is the life.

The commission could also be placed openly, for money. In one tale collected in Abomey, a king wants a girl who has refused him three times, so he goes and finds an azondato, a man who makes evil charms, and has the charm turned against her. She is dead on the seventh day. Two men are digging her grave that night while the king waits behind the house. The story is told as history rather than as a warning, which is its own kind of warning.

Nobody is born into this in any way the record will confirm. Azè comes to people, often to people who did not want it, and it comes trailing the ordinary emotions that make a compound difficult: jealousy, greed, resentment at somebody else’s luck. There is a benign register too. Fon distinguishes white azè from black azè, and the white kind, the sort a healer uses to bring rain to his fields or to pull a sick man back, is reckoned rare, largely because initiation into it costs thousands of dollars while the black kind is close to free. The economics of that are not lost on anyone.

The name is younger than the belief, and it did not come from Benin. It surfaces in English in J. Gordon Melton’s 1994 vampire encyclopedia, which reports that among the Dahomeans the vampire was known as the asiman, and it hardened into a headword through Theresa Bane’s compilations after that. The description that travels with it, the woman who peels off her skin and flies as a ball of light and drinks blood from sleeping children, is not Fon. The soul that leaves the body at night belongs to the Ashanti obayifo, and the shed skin belongs to the women of Suriname, Trinidad and Haiti, whose ancestors were shipped out of this coast. Bane’s own entry gives Azeman as a variant, which is the Surinamese name, spelled the Dutch colonial way. Full-text search across the scanned ethnographic literature turns up asiman in the vampire compilations and nowhere else; Herskovits, working in Dahomey in the 1930s, never uses it. What the encyclopedias built was a West African label wrapped around a Caribbean silhouette.

Strip that off and the powers are still considerable, and they are stranger for being domestic. Azè is credited with teleportation, with instantaneous travel to anywhere on earth, with shapeshifting, with healing, and with the manufacture of wealth out of nothing. The soul-eating is not a separate ability but the price of the rest, levied on the nearest available person.

The limits are made of the same logic. She cannot stop, because stopping kills her. She works only where she has standing, which means within the family, which means the harm is bounded by the guest list at her own funeral. And she can be met by her own kind. Healers openly say they hold benevolent azè in order to fight the malicious sort, and the Aja country to the south-west has a reputation for supplying anti-witchcraft deities to anyone willing to fetch them. The older defences were smaller and more portable: a fringe of dried palm leaves tied round a person or an object placed them under the protection of Bo, and a house that saw an owl come in was advised to catch the bird and break its legs and wings.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the asiman?

The asiman is the name English vampire encyclopedias give to the Fon witch of Dahomey, in what is now southern Benin. In Fon she is an azètɔ́, a person who holds azè, an occult power that compels its bearer to consume the souls of other people. She is a living member of the community rather than a monster living apart from it.

Is asiman a real Fon word?

No Fon or Dahomean source uses it. The word entered English through J. Gordon Melton’s 1994 vampire encyclopedia and was carried forward by later compilers, and it does not appear in the ethnographic record for the region. The Fon terms are azè for the power and azètɔ́ for the person who holds it.

Does the asiman shed her skin and fly as a ball of light?

That description belongs to her neighbours and her descendants rather than to her. The soul that leaves the body by night is the Ashanti obayifo, and the shed skin and the travelling flame belong to the soucouyant, the asema and the loogaroo of the Caribbean. The Fon record describes soul-consumption, night gatherings and an owl sent to eat a sleeping person’s heart.

Who does the asiman attack?

Her own relatives and neighbours, almost always. Fon accounts tie azè to envy, greed and jealousy, so accusations follow quarrels over inheritance, land and status inside a compound. The victim is usually a child or a rival whose slow, unexplained decline is read backwards to a grudge.

How do you defend against her?

By acquiring the same power in a benevolent form, which is what Beninese healers openly claim to do, or by importing anti-witchcraft deities from the Aja region. Older Slave Coast protections were physical: a fringe of dried palm leaves tied around a person or object put them under the protection of Bo, and an owl that entered a house was to be caught and crippled.