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head man of his town. They read their bodies and honored their authority. 33
    In cultures in which ancestral spirits (
ndebla
) loomed large, the Poro derived much of its power from its claim to serve as intermediaries to past generations, to embody their spirit, and to reach, through them, the remote supreme deity, Ngewo, linking the people to spirits great and small and connecting past to present. The Poro Society therefore had supreme authority in making decisions on behalf of the corporate group. The Temne Poro, Major Alexander Laing remarked, “possessthe general government of the country,” a fact he considered “a most serious obstacle to its civilization,” that is to say, to European control. 34
    The basic purpose of the Poro Society was to establish law and maintain social order—in a word, to govern—and its primary focus was settling disputes and policing the boundaries of behavior. Poro leaders adjudicated all of the normal disputes within and between communities, but a special concern was always witchcraft, the use of supernatural power for anticommunal ends. The elders of the Poro Society alone held the power of capital punishment and did not hesitate to use it against those they considered malevolent witches and sorcerers. In less extreme cases, the Poro used ostracism to move offenders “from communal grace to isolated individualism.” According to anthropologist Kenneth Little, the main purpose of the Mende Poro throughout its history has been to create
ngo yela
—“one word” or “unity.” 35
    The Poro Society also made decisions about war. This was done in tandem with kings and chiefs and “head war men” (who were Poro members themselves), but the Poro had the stronger hand because they had often helped to choose the political leaders in the first place. George Thompson noted that “even the greatest kings” in Mende country feared Tassaw, the mysterious and awful leader of the Poro. Laing saw the same power in Temne country and was moved to speculate that the Poro Society had originated among slaves who ran away to the bush to escape their African masters. In what would become the sacred space of the Poro, they “confederate[d] for mutual support.” Because “the means of subsistence [was] easy to be procured” in the bush commons, and because the power of divided and quarreling local kings and chiefs “did not extend beyond the limits of their own town,” such an organization from below may soon “have become too powerful for any probable combination against them.” If true, Laing’s theory might explain the limitations the Poro placed on slave masters, who were forbidden to do anything that would draw the blood of their bondsmen. 36
    Another important function of the Poro Society was to preside over the rites of passage in which boys became men. In the sacred bush,where the initiation took place, Poro members—all adult men—taught the skills of survival to the youth: how to hunt, how to fight, how to think about the material and spiritual worlds. They taught new disciplines of the body, such as acrobatics. They imparted knowledge about the values and beliefs by which the people lived. Each boy “died” in the bush and was reborn as a man and given a new name. The initiation into manhood also included scarification: “two parallel tattooed lines round the middle of the body, inclining upwards in front, towards the breast, and meeting in the pit of the stomach.” When a young man emerged from the bush, he could proudly show the “teeth-marks” by which his juvenile self had been devoured. To conclude the initiation, the Poro elders, “dressed as demons and wild men,” emerged from the bush, howling, torches in hand, to sow terror throughout the town, to impress upon one and all their arbitrary, absolute power. The ritual would be followed by all-night feasting and dancing. 37
    Crossing boundaries of territory, class, clan, and family, the Poro Society could create