This oracle entered the museum with no information on either the identity of the person who had handed it over to the famous missionary and scholar Henri-Alexandre Junod (1863-1934) or on the confiscation or transaction then involved. Because it belongs to vernacular cults, this soothsayer’s instrument bears witness to the interest aroused by pagan forms of spirituality. They are central to missionary-ethnographers’ “fieldwork” and the main subject of their scholarly publications, justifying in fact the “civilizing mission”. F. Morin/MEG