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God of evil west africa8/1/2023 ![]() ![]() WD: I think Joseph Campbell was once asked to name a place where people really live their religious beliefs as opposed to just spoke about them, and he didn't hesitate to say Equatorial West Africa. Is this what you're talking about, just sort of always dwelling in those two realms simultaneously? JB: Getting back to what you said about this moving in and out of this realm and the spirit realm, I told you an anecdote that Godfried and I observed when this woman had her twin doll there, and we gave her some money for letting us shoot pictures in her shop and she said, you know, "Look what they have offered us," and she had a little conversation with her twin doll, the spirit of her dead twin sister. ![]() And so that the actual spirit event, the moment of epiphany becomes not just an individual act, but in some sense a prayer for the well being of the entire community. You notice at Epe Ekpe, when a woman would become possessed, her sisters would come to her, hold her gently, make sure that her valued jewels were taken off her so they wouldn't become broken, there was this amazing sense of the community enveloping the spirit, "to protect the horse from the rider," as you might say, as some Africans might say, but also just to almost envelope the person in the embrace of community. And it's a display of joy, even as it's a display of incredible profundity, as the people around the person possessed take care of them. It is that moment of spiritual epiphany for which all voodoo ritual at some level is dedicated.Īnd of course, we've noticed in particular that the spirit possession does not occur in privacy, it's not like the revelation of a Jesuit priest or perhaps the journey to the Bodhisattva realm of the Tibetan monk, it is quintessentially a public display. And it's amazing to see because it's not just a moment of psychological or even spiritual transformation, it really is according to the belief the moment when the divine comes into the realm of the living. One is fear - which finds its outlet in disbelief and cynicism and dismissive attitudes towards the faith, dismissing it to the realm of phantasmagoric - or awe for those of us who don't know our gods in this direct way. And within that world, you find completeness.Īnd when you see spirit possession for the first time coming from a world, which, as Saul Bellows said, "Science has made a house cleaning of belief," I think your tendency is to have two reactions as an outsider. I think when you come to West Africa, one of the things that you witness is this extraordinary living dynamic, happening faith, which is not just a set of religious beliefs but encompasses the entire being of the individual, it becomes not just a voodoo faith, but a voodoo society. When we first came here, I mentioned to you our first night, when we were listening to that marvelous music, I suddenly said I understood the roots of racism - which are jealousy - and I was only being slightly tongue in cheek. WD: When people witness spirit possession they tend to have two reactions. JB: Start with that point and explore a little bit because that's one of the things that I think that we saw about worshipping God or becoming God. Rain, good crops, good health, well being for your family, whatever, but the key thing is you have this constant active dialogue, and that's why I think Africans say that white people or "Europeans go to church and speak about God, we dance in the temple and become God." But by the same token, you can demand that the gods give something to you in exchange for your devotion. That the people move in and out of their spirit realm with an ease and impunity, with the notion that there is this complex hierarchy of gods beneath the umbrella of the greater god, but with those gods the people have an ongoing constant dialogue, so that you must serve the gods, you must sacrifice to the gods. There is a notion that this is a religion that is not talked about, but that is lived. And just as the dead are born from the living, so the living can invoke the dead to return to earth to momentarily displace the spirit of the living. Sometimes it's hard when you're right in the midst of the phantasmagoric elements of ritual to discern the deeper patterns as to what is actually going on, and one of the things that is so clearly going on in all African worship that we've witnessed is this marvelous dialogue between the living and the dead. Wade Davis: I think the thing that's most interesting over here is the extent to which you see the fundamental principles of African worship consistently invoked throughout a range of ethnic groups, a range of geographic areas, and yet in each of those areas it becomes manifested in slightly different ways. ![]() What have been your impressions of our first week of exploring voodoo here? Wade Davis takes photos at an Egungun ceremony. ![]()
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