NOTE:

 

            CULTURAL VULTURIZATION:

    A PERDICTABLE YET TROUBLING TREND

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

           In the past decade, there has been an invasion by westerners flocking to the doors of  the Vodoun religion. While it is believed that some are sincere seekers, they are unfortunately overshadowed by a larger segment of “Wiccan's, Neo Pagans, Thelemics, Satanists, New Agers etc. seeking “initiations” to mask and legitimatize their  euro-pagan practices behind African sacerdotal titles.  The demand for “power” is such that in Europe, there is an underground “black market” in trafficking what they have been told are “authentic African fetishes.”

 

             In cash strapped Haiti, this troubling trend has become a cottage industry. Many of these foreigners return to their respective countries proclaiming initiatory titles that are ancestrally impossible, owing to the cosmological and lineage nature of the Vodoun religion.   In order to lend further authority and legitimacy to their “priestly” claims, , they pass themselves off as an “authority” on Vodoun, their  “books”  often dominating the “New Age” publishing industry. The majority marketing their Eurocentric depictions of  the Vodou religion with its de-emphasis on the African ancestors and the compensatory aspects of  slavery, oppression, white privilege etc..

 

             For those searching for accurate information on the Vodoun religion, this disturbing trend threatens to hype and obscure the much more significant sacerdotal aspects reserved  and protected by the enormously powerful deities controlled by the  slave-spirit ancestral Sibs (clans) known as“ The Mama Tchamba”

 

             The Vodoun religion is first and foremost an ancestral religion. It is through the ancestors that the power of the deities are bestowed upon their inherited priesthoods.  It is also these ancestors who possess the divine authority to bestow “power” and sacerdotal authority to an initiate. 

 

             The Vodoun deities continue to reflect the attitudes and culture from which the ancestors rose. It was the Vodou deities who have been front and center in the survival of the Africans across the trans-Atlantic up until the present.  They and the African ancestors are very much dominate in the Diaspora. Many have subsumed back into the greater ancestral pool of Mama Tchamba, waiting for their progeny to re-claim them through proper ceremonial rites that can only be performed by their inherited priesthoods.

 

             It is the lineage Vodou deities and Mama Tchamba spirit lineages that demand reparations/compensation from all who participated and benefited from the slave trade, this also includes Africans. It is critical that the Diaspora and those seeking to learn Vodoun’s philosophical foundation not loose sight of this divine reality.

 

             The following excerpt offers a brief  insight into the complexities of the karmic and  psycho-spiritual conflicts resulting from “black rage and resentment,” due to slavery, Jim Crow, the on-going oppression and exploitation of Africa and its people, and the abuse of “white privilege” at the expense of coming to terms with this unresolved tragic  festering wound on the soul of America and  indeed the world. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quote from :Possession, Ecstasy, and Law in Ewe Voodoo. (October 1998)

Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Virginia. pg-153.

 

 

            Need I say that the dimensions of the Ewe dyad of bought people and parents of the house are not the same as those of Western-created master and slave relationships? This was brought home to me when I was informed by an Afa diviner in Togo that I must prepare a Mama Tchamba shrine to worship the spirits of slaves once owned by my ancestors in the United States:"Why should you not pay your debts to the slave spirits the way we Ewe do? You would be better off for it,  the bokono [diviner] advised." Some of them died violently. Their spirits are powerful; they can help, heal, and protect you when you need them, if you honor them fully."

 

           I struggled to consider these words in all sobriety. The entire population of descendants of slave owners in the United States would do well to think very seriously about this concept of indebtedness to slaves, of overdue recognition of beholdenness, on the part of American families, cultures, and even nations (if it is not historically and culturally too late, and even if it would be an ever temporary healing of the unhealable).In Togo both descendants of slaves and descendants of slave owners must give time to the slave spirits, take care of them, and lavish ceremony upon them. But the descendants of slave owners also think in terms of reparations, eternal payments for services previously rendered. The reward is a continuing relationship of mutual service, care, and respect.

 

           According to the Afa diviner, those who neglect the slave spirits and the debt they are owed risk communitywide illness, bad luck, unsatisfying personal relationships, lawessness, the disintegration of social structures, widespread murder, and thus unseasonal death.

 

           When the slave spirits are honored, however, there is reciprocal possession in a complex sense. The caretakers and the slave spirits are in each others  hands and thereby have access to each others  talents, personalities, and languages as additional personhood (gods also have personhood). The challenge of the Fa diviner provoked a  long reverie in which I allowed myself to imagine naïvely what might happen if white Americans could experience being taken in trance by the spirits of the slaves their forebears owned. (I emphasize whiteness as a major element of identity in the racist West, a culturally constructed essence just as blackness is.)

 

           What follows is an exercise of my moral imagination, romantic and utopian, yet also nihilistic (in the above sense) and political, even as it provokes smiles, thanks to its wild improbability. What if descendants of both slave owners and slaves could become, for a moment, those slaves, empowered and divinized, with African languages glossing their tongues, and the steps of ancestral dances enlivening their bodies the way Ewe, through trance, become their ancestors  slaves from the north? What if European Americans as well as Mexican Americans (and all the other Americans) could become "mimetically capacious" (Taussig 1993) in this context? The slaves would come back to heal their descendants and the descendants of the slave  owners and to cyclically receive payments for ancient debt, for lives and labor spent in the service of the white people..

 

            The African slave spirits would be the beloved stranger gods (although their own descendants are no longer foreign but are also hosts); the descendants on both sides would be the host-worshipers. The hospitality would be sacred and reciprocal, a seasonal remarking of history that cannot be undone but that must be commemorated with full honors, gratitude, and eloquence. It would also be a request on the part of the white people generation after generation, to be forgiven for having inflicted the unhealable wound of slavery not a request for this unspeakable injustice to be forgotten. Finally, on an individual plane, this recognition would include a conscious and respectful invitation of the uncanny into ones very personhood, the embracing of the ultimate Other as a consummately desirable being overlapping with ones own self (as well as the knowledge that ones self overlaps with the Others)."