by Lionel
From this interface between Christianity and the ancient African belief systems that took place during the turbulent centuries of the American and Caribbean slave era grew the mysterious syncretism that underpins Santeria, Voodoo, Obeah, and other quasi-magical religions.
Chapter 4
CHRISTIANITY ENCOUNTERS THE OLD AFRICAN RELIGIONS
Christianity has always been an adventurous, challenging, and exploratory religion. For traditional Christians, the core teachings of the faith are about a supreme father god whose nature is infinite love personified, allied with omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. Involved alongside God in the mystery of the Holy Trinity are Jesus Christ, his son, the saviour of the world, referred to by Saint John the Evangelist as the logos or word of God; and the Holy Spirit, the comforter, the strengthener, the inspirer and helper of Christian believers.
For traditional Christians, God is the creator and sustainer of the entire cosmos — of all that ever was, of all that is now, and of all that can ever be. It is the loving will of God that all who seek Him will find Him, and that all who find Him will enjoy eternal and abundant life with Him and with one another.
For traditional Christians, the life of Jesus begins with his miraculous birth to Mary the Virgin, wife of Joseph the carpenter from Nazareth. At the start of his earthly ministry, during the episodes known as the temptations, Jesus decides what sort of Messiah he is going to be and how he will accomplish his mission of salvation. He teaches sublime truths about love, mercy, and forgiveness, and he announces that the Kingdom of God is at hand. He performs miracles of healing, and challenges the humbug and hypocrisy of the contemporary religious leaders who promptly plot to have him killed. Following his agonizing death by crucifixion at the hands of the Roman occupiers of the Holy Land, he is resurrected. He appears to his overjoyed disciples on numerous occasions and then ascends to Heaven.
For traditional Christians, the world will end when he returns in power and glory to judge it.
Saint Mary the Virgin.
Traditional Christianity also includes a belief in angels, in Satan — otherwise called Lucifer — and in fallen angels, or demons, who follow him and cause the suffering, misery, and evil that spoil our world and our lives. Many Christians believe that as well as angels, there are saints and other holy beings who have conquered evil in this world and are now in Heaven with God. A majority of Christians believe these saints listen to our prayers and pass them on to God — and generally protect and assist us.
Mainstream Christianity promotes an ethical system that is rooted in loving and serving God and treating our fellow human beings as we would like them to treat us. There are more specific moral teachings about the desirability of faithful, monogamous marriage, and some Christians question the ethical foundations of same-sex relationships, genetic therapy, abortion, and euthanasia.
Different Christian groups have their own ideas about the nature and meaning of baptism and the sources of religious authority. Some church organizations are centralized, hierarchical, and bureaucratic. Others are largely free, autonomous, and independent.
One group looks to its priests, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and the papacy. For them, authority is vested in the Church and the hierarchy controlling it. Questions of doctrine and ethics, creeds and moral behaviour are referred to its leaders to decide. For another group of Christians, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit is authoritative. Believers in this group look inside themselves for God’s guidance as the occasion demands. They observe a situation and pray about it before deciding what God wants them as Christians to do about that specific situation. Many of these Christians follow what they describe as the principle of situational ethics rather than any system of prescribed and definitive ethics for all occasions. On principle, such autonomous moral thinkers do not say never or always in a religious context. Their loyalty to the underlying Christian principle of love is the background against which their decisions are made — but there is great flexibility in their decision making. Reason and logic blend with spirituality and religious commitment. They trust their own decisions — not those of any hierarchical, bureaucratic, ecclesiastical establishment.
A third group of Christians relies upon scripture. For them the ultimate authority is the Christian Bible, which they regard as the inviolate and infallible Word of God.
Today’s academic Christian theologians — independent progressives, modernists, and liberals — question the authority of the Church hierarchy on the grounds that those who occupy its ranks are neither more nor less qualified than anyone else to make religious pronouncements. These progressive Christians also question the absolute authority of Scripture — however ancient and sacrosanct — on much the same grounds. They would argue that those who had set down their religious thoughts and opinions in writing millennia ago, often in the honest belief that they had been inspired to do so, might be just as right — or just as wrong — as any twenty-first-century religious thinker putting his or her thoughts on paper for posterity to read. Modernists argue that the Bible, by which fundamentalists set such great store, is a miscellaneous collection of very different books, written by authors from divergent cultures. Those scriptural writers lived in different centuries and, unsurprisingly, focused on dissimilar priorities.
The book of Genesis serves as a useful example. The oldest available Masoretic (Hebrew) texts are the Aleppo Codex from approximately AD 900 and the Westminster Leningrad Codex from around AD 1000. Fragments of Genesis were also found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, which could be from as early as 200 BC. Modern academics have identified several separate texts comprising Genesis as we have it today. There is the E text, so named because it uses the word Elohim when referring to God. This E text was probably composed in the Northern Kingdom of Israel a little later than 922 BC, which was when the united Kingdom of Israel and Judah that had been ruled by David and then Solomon broke up. It was almost certainly written by a priest — or a group of priests — in the holy place at Shiloh prior to 722 BC when the Assyrians overran and destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel. In this E document Jacob’s all-important birthright is bestowed upon Joseph, who had all the adventures in Egypt and became the ancestor of the tribe of Ephraim. The Northern Kingdom’s royalty were members of the tribe of Ephraim. The E document identifies Shechem as the northern capital and describes it as the burial place of Joseph. Judah, whose name is later applied to the whole of the Southern Kingdom, doesn’t get a mention at all in the E document.
Genesis also contains a document named the J text because it refers to God as JHWH in German, or YHWH in English. The J document is about the same age as the E document but seems to have been written by a group of priests in the Temple in Jerusalem. It stresses the importance of the royal family of Rehoboam, a son of Solomon who founded the Southern Kingdom after the country split. Another identifiable text within Genesis is called the JE strand because it has been created by welding the J and E documents together.
Further literary analysis reveals the P text, a priestly document composed during the reign of King Hezekiah (715–687 BC). The P text is concerned with deeply ethical and religious matters rather than with the petty rivalries of the monarchs of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms. It was also written with the less righteous intention of elevating the power and authority of the Aaronite priests who ran the Jerusalem Temple and had a vested interest in concentrating worship there exclusively via the sacrifices that they alone could carry out. The P documents made no reference to direct contact with God via dreams. Neither does P mention angels. It also omits the curious phenomenon of the serpent in Eden that had the ability to speak. Another interesting aspect of this P document is its omission of references to any prophets who preceded Aaron himself.
Moving on beyond Genesis, scholars can detect the existence of a D document, which seems to have been written during the reign of King Josiah (640–609 BC). Further complications arise with the detection of yet another thread known as the R te
xt. This is the work of a redactor, or editor, who seems to have welded D, E, J, and P together into the Jewish Torah. There is also evidence that an earlier book than Genesis once existed, which appears to have been called the Book of Generations. Some scholars suggest that it was an independent work not connected with the writings and editings of D, E, J, and P.
But this questioning of both hierarchical, ecclesiastical bureaucrats and sacrosanct scriptures by progressive modernists had not yet modified the inflexible, old-style traditional Christianity that confronted the African slaves.
Broadly, they had their own general African beliefs in a supreme god surrounded and assisted by benign Orishas and Loas, but what precise religious ideas did the different groups of African slaves actually hold? What did they fall back on as authority for their religious beliefs and actions? How far was African religious thought influenced by the ideas of ancient Egypt? Or did religious ideas flow in both directions?
It is highly probable that there was a dynamic two-way traffic between the religious ideas of Egypt and the rest of Africa. Egypt also had contact with states that lay to its north and east: Babylon, Assyria, Persia, and the Empire of Solomon. Religious thought from those territories could also have reached Africa — and African religious ideas could have reached them as well.
There are tantalizing biblical references to Solomon’s prolifically productive gold mines at a site named Ophir, regarded by a number of serious religious historians as being somewhere in Africa. Certainly vast quantities of gold were reaching Egypt and Solomon’s Empire, and Africa seems to be one of the most likely adjacent sources.
Zimbabwe plan.
Zimbabwe ruins.
The tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamen provides germane evidence of the quantities of gold involved. When it was opened by Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter in 1922, it was found to be packed with priceless golden objects. In considering the magnitude of Egyptian gold, it must be remembered that Tutankhamen was only a relatively minor and unimportant pharaoh compared to someone like the great Rameses II. If there was so much gold in such an insignificant tomb as Tutankhamen’s, how much more must there have been in ancient Egypt as a whole — and where did it come from?
Moses led the Hebrews out of their Egyptian slavery during the reign of Rameses II, which ended circa 1225 BC. Approximately forty years later, under Joshua’s powerful and effective leadership, the Israelites were established in Palestine. After some two centuries of being ruled on an ad hoc basis by leaders referred to as judges, the Israelites appointed Saul as their first king. He was followed by his son-in-law, David, one of whose later wives was the famous but mysterious Bathsheba. She became the mother of the wise and powerful Emperor Solomon, but Bathsheba’s own origins and ancestry are shrouded in mystery. Her name literally means daughter of Sheba. Does that suggest that she originated in that strange, semi-legendary country, whose beautiful Queen Makeda later visited Solomon? If the controversial land of Sheba lay in Africa, did it also house the elusive gold mines of Ophir?
There is significant evidence suggesting that present-day Ethiopia was once the ancient land of Sheba. One of its early rulers, Menelik, was also called Ibn al-Hakim. Traditionally, this Menelik was the son of Queen Makeda and King Solomon, and his name meant Son of the Wise Man. Could he have been conceived when the famous queen visited Solomon? The biblical book called the Song of Songs, or in some versions the Song of Solomon, is a long and sensuous poem describing the passionate relationship of a beautiful black girl and her adoring lover. Does that elegantly written love poem refer to the relationship between Solomon and Makeda, the exquisite black Queen of Sheba?
Tutankhamen is also relevant to the analytical study of Santeria, Voodoo, and Obeah because of the curse associated with the violation of his tomb. Lord Carnarvon, Carter’s financial backer, died of something similar to blood poisoning following an insect bite. The curse on the tomb supposedly read, “Death shall come on swift wings to him who desecrates my tomb.” Whether the curse was intended literally or metaphorically is a matter of conjecture — but it seems likely that a bite from an infected flying insect caused Lord Carnarvon’s death. He was only fifty-seven years old. Howard Carter lived on until 1939, dying of natural causes in England at the age of sixty-four. His remains lie in Putney Vale Cemetery in West London.
Although the curse is dismissed by skeptics and cynics, there are some significant statistics connected with it that are worth a closer look. Within seven years of Tutankhamen’s tomb being entered, eleven people connected with it had died in questionable circumstances. Two of them were members of Carnarvon’s family, another was Carter’s secretary. Richard Bethell and his father, Lord Westbury, were also among the eleven. Within the next seven years the total of deaths possibly connected with Tutankhamen’s curse had risen to twenty-one.
A sensible, pragmatic, psychological theory connected with investigations into alleged maledictions suggests, however, that so-called curses can only affect those who believe in them. It has been argued that knowledge of the existence of a curse can perhaps work at a subconscious level to persuade credulous victims to harm themselves. The external curse itself is totally innocuous. According to this theory, a dismissive disregard for curses — however convincing and blood-curdling they may seem — is the best defence against them. Positive, confident, optimistic thinking is armour plating that curses cannot penetrate. The defensive, therapeutic powers of the mind have yet to be definitively demonstrated, explored, and developed — but they are undoubtedly potent. Confidence in the strength and efficiency of our own mental, spiritual, and psychic immune systems — as well as our physical ones — can powerfully reinforce all three. A healthy mind and a healthy body invariably give each other mutual support.
A sense of humour can also provide an invaluable defence. Even the solemn and serious-minded Martin Luther (1483–1546) taught his followers to laugh at the devil in order to get rid of him: “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.”
Ancient magical traditions associated with Solomon make him a powerful controller of beings like Orishas, Loas, djinn, and other paranormal entities. They were in awe of him and his great seal, which could effectively imprison any who disobeyed him. Biblical evidence links him closely with the Egypt of antiquity and its sophisticated religious culture: “And Solomon made affinity with Pharaoh, King of Egypt, and took Pharaoh’s daughter, and brought her into the city of David, until he had made an end of building his own house, and the house of the Lord, and the wall of Jerusalem round about” (I Kings 3:1).
There were literally tons of gold in those palaces and in the Jerusalem Temple. Just as with the gold in Tutankhamen’s tomb — where did it all come from? Where was Ophir? If it was not in Ethiopia, could it have been in Zimbabwe? Although the famous Zimbabwe stone ruins are thought to go back no more than 1,200 years, Stone Age tools and weapons, pottery, and Khoisan cave paintings reveal that the area must have been inhabited for many millennia before that. It is certainly possible that both Solomon and the ancient Egyptians obtained their vast supplies of gold from Zimbabwe.
Thomé Lopes sailed with Vasco da Gama (1460–1524) on their epic voyage to India in 1502. Thomé thought that Sofala in Mozambique and the land around it was Ophir — and the home of the Queen of Sheba.
One important link between ancient African peoples and Egypt — and the empires like Solomon’s that lay beyond Egypt — is forged from the gold of Ophir. There are other links, too, one of which is an overwhelming similarity between the Hebrew Song of Solomon and the tender sensitivity of ancient Egyptian love lyrics like this one:
Oh, you beautiful one! The desire of my heart is
To be your caring, protective husband, and to bring your food for you,
My arm resting upon yours because your love has changed me.
Early African religion and culture differed from area to area and from one group of people to anot
her. Some early Christian missionaries were unimaginative, inflexible, dogmatic, and unsympathetic towards other faiths. When they encountered rites and sacrifices that they could not understand among the indigenous Africans, they tended to regard the local religion as paganism at best and as Satanism at worst.
There were, however, broad compartments of thought into which the African religions that Christians encountered during the centuries of the slave trade could conveniently be divided.
Ubiquitous throughout the ancient African religions was a belief in One Supreme God. There was also a widespread belief in subordinate deities — Orishas and Loas. The third widely shared traditional African belief was in spirits. They could be the spirits of trees, of rocks and mountains, of fire and water.
Then there was also a widespread belief in the continuing existence of ancestors. These might be relatively impotent, like the shades that drifted forlornly in the Greek Hades and could only gather strength to speak to the living when they were given a blood sacrifice to sustain their ethereal forms. Some ancestors, however, like those of great chieftains and warriors, might yet be powerful in the physical world. If your grandfather had been an awesome hero and slain a hundred enemies in battle, it would seem reasonable to expect that he could be summoned from the spirit world to help you when you were in need. Invisible he might be — but powerless he was not.
Although Africans believed in making contact with dead ancestors, these ancestors were not worshipped. Families tended to treat dead forebears as if they were still alive and with them here on earth. It was customary for the Swazi people, for example, to address their departed ancestors in the same way that they spoke to the living. This is reminiscent of the thought expressed by the late Canon Harry Scott Holland of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in his “Death is nothing at all” essay, which brings a great deal of comfort to the bereaved when it is included in funeral services: “Speak to me in the easy way that you always used … let my name be the household word that it always was … laugh, as we always laughed, at the little jokes we enjoyed together.”