HEALING THE RUPTURE: A JUNGIAN PERSPECTIVE IN AFRICAN RELIGION/MYTHOLOGY
Eva Rocha (Turner)
Virginia Commonwealth University
In a letter dated March 25, 1998 from the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, Vatican City, to the Presidents of the Episcopal Conferences of Africa and of Madagascar, the pastoral began by saying that, “[t]he secretariat for Non-Christians has become more and more convinced of the importance of giving greater pastoral attention to the traditional religion (incorrectly called animism) in Africa and Madagascar. This conviction is reinforced by the expressed wishes of many Bishops of Africa and Madagascar which our Secretariat receives, together with the experience gained by other heralds of Gospel in this continent” (Arinze 1998:1).
African religions/cultures have had a very difficult and particularly painful history of survival in the Diaspora, as well as in the African continent itself, due to the long trade of the carriers of these religions and to the oppression inflicted on them by outside cultures. Western culture caused indirect damage as African religions were misinterpreted or defined through European perspectives. This caused as much damage to the African psyche as did centuries of enslavement. Under subjection to other dominant religions, African religions were neglected and dismissed as lacking deep wisdom based in complex mythologies and symbols. Stigmatized by terms such as “barbarism,” “savagery,” “animism”—as mentioned in the Vatican letter—these religions have become incapable of communicating their deep knowledge. The misconceptions that have undermined African traditional religions have caused African peoples to become disconnected from their spiritual and cultural roots. The misconceptions have also alienated humanity as a whole, which could have benefited from the richness of the African myths, and through them gained insight into the human experience in its totality.
Beginning in the 16th century, many African cultures were dislocated from their indigenous context by the slave trade and relocated in diverse cultures. A great number of slaves were brought from diverse cultural backgrounds and dispersed in the New World in such a way that their individual cultural, linguistic, and religious similarities were lost. Thus, those that had shared the same cultural identity had their unity broken and their identity weakened. There was a deliberate attempt by part of the dominant society to dislocate a people’s unity by weakening their system of beliefs. In the words of Gayraud S. Wilmore (1998: 22), “The most immediate and determinative reality in the life of most slaves was their bondage in this strange land, thousands of miles from the sacred earth in which were interred the bones of their ancestors and where the gods of their fathers walked and talked with men and women.” With the institution of slavery, not only the cultural integrity of these people was broken, but their ability to maintain their mythological unity, creating, in this way, a psychological vulnerability and a deep disassociation from their beliefs.
The real process of slavery began with the breakdown of the slaves’ own religions. The teaching of a new religion was a means to convince the slaves of the inferiority of their beliefs and to perpetuate the superiority of the masters’ beliefs. The new religion—Christianity in different manifestations, being Catholicism in the South and Central America and orthodox Protestantism in North America—was inaccessible to the slaves since the sacred was cited in words, in a sacred book. The African peoples were accustomed to an oral tradition of cultural transmission.
Missionaries played the role of mediators in translating the ‘sacred’ and they translated it from the perspective of a hierarchical, monotheistic power structure. E. Franklin Frazier states that, “The slaves were taught that the God with whom they became acquainted in the Bible was the ruler of the universe and superior to all other gods” (in Wilmore 1998:29). Missionaries served the purpose of the masters using the message of Christianity. The superiority of the Christian God over other gods, the choice of the Old Testament God for one race in favour of another, or even the example of Christ in submitting himself to suffering and self-sacrifice, were messages manipulated to keep the slaves in a state of powerless awe at the feet of this ‘superior God’ and superior race. They learned to content themselves in sacrificing their lives to the purpose of that God.
Contact with this new religion and the ministrations of the missionaries diluted the spiritual base of African religions. Africans in the New World were taught completely new ways to conceive the sacred and to relate to nature. Due to their closeness with nature, African practices became easily associated with Christian conceptions of evil and devilish imagery depicted in European books. This process of associating African practices with evil created for the African people a state of dependence. Under the manipulation and pressure of dominant religions, African religions lost many of their primordial concepts. They were doomed to extinction or to undergo syncretism with Western religions, thereby muffling their expression.
It is very important to understand that West African religions and orthodox Western European Christianity religion(s) differ greatly from each other in their conceptions and their manifestation of the sacred. For Christian religions there is only one God and all things serve this God. It is a monotheistic religion that serves a hierarchical order (especially in Catholicism) in which, the sacred experience is normally conducted by a priest who offers the ritual and the interpretation of the scriptures. This hierarchical form would become fundamental to the support of slavery, where the masterholder, or “the Lord,” dominated over the slaves.
Different from Christian religions that preach the existence of a unique God, the majority of the African religions believe in many gods, in a pantheon. Every god—Òrìsà—in the African pantheon has his/her power and significance—not in a hierarchy, rather in horizontal, linear form. These gods, as the diversity of forms and powers of nature, have their own “non-substitutable powers and are respected and revered in a unique way” (Umbanda 1995:39).
While the god in the Christian tradition is in a heaven with man dominating over nature, gods in African traditional religions, specifically using examples from West African religions, revere nature as sacred. The elements of nature are empowered, and archetypically formatted in a way that the practitioner can identify him/herself in a direct way with the sacred nature outside and inside of him/herself. In this direct contact with sacred forces, celebrations in the African religions are not performed inside of churches, but in nature itself. West African religions have an integration of the elements of this world àiyé and another òrun, being represented in this same place and not in a heaven or hell outside of this world.
Another important distinction between West African religions and Western Christianity comes from this proximity or distance from nature. These religions, by being close to nature and here in this world—the sacred place, have no contradiction, no distance between being and nature, body and soul. In this way, the Christian view of sexuality as virtually taboo in Christian religions found no parallel in West African religions. For these, sexuality is a manifestation of nature and it is worshiped in rituals of fertility or in forms of a god, an orissa—Eshu, in its pure energy. The body in West African religion performs an important role in the manifestation of the gods—Òrìsàs.
Those fundamental differences between religions served as a base for the idea of the inferiority of African religions—seen primarily as a form of savagery, and many times believed to be “something without any real value—something in which barbaric crudeness is mercifully relieved by a touch of the ridiculous” (Idowu 1994:3). Rituals on the ground, bare feet, animal sacrifices and a direct relation with the body would sustain this preconception mixed with repulsion for African rituals. West African rituals, imagery, and dances are full of eroticism which were immediately associated with demonic practices through the visions of hell thought of in the catechism. Nevertheless, the assumption behind such preconceptions was the phenomenon of man becoming ever more distant from nature.
Carl Jung (1964:24) wrote that “modern man is disassociated from nature” because he has lost the connection with the gods of nature. In his book The Man and His Symbols, he recalls an incident among the primitive men, dealing with what they call “the soul’s loss—which means as indicated by its name, a rupture (or technically, a disassociation) of the consciousness.” Jung notices that “primitive man” believes in many interrelated souls, that for this man, a tree could exercise a vital function, once he felt their destinies interrelated. The French ethnologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl called that the phenomenon of belief, “mystic participation” (in Jung 1964:24) –a communion with man and nature. That “mystic participation” with nature is what Jung affirms has been lost in our “objective world.”
The Jungian concept of the “collective unconscious,” which he defines as a part of the psyche that retains and transmits the common psychological inheritance of humanity” (1964:107) is very well known. According to Jung, all of humanity is connected by this “collective unconscious.” He argues that, as a person has his /her own unconscious—the register of his/her childhood, even before being able to distinguish the reality of things or talk, walk, and even while living in his/her mother’s womb—this person is able to receive his/her mother’s memories and sensations having contact with the mother’s unconscious registry. This same unity with a person’s mother’s consciousness happens between every human being and humanity. For Jung, the collective unconscious is the combination of all human experience—the memory of every society, every man living now or who has ever lived in ancient times. This ‘register’ of human experience makes itself accessible not only by way of history books, but inside every human being as an integral part of every cell which has been conducting information from body to body since life first came into existence. The collective unconscious, according to Jung, is conducted by an invisible connection between all beings, between every experience. In this sense, the holocaust of the Jews, for example, is not an isolated fact present in an unconscious of a dead Jewish person, but is an integral part in the unconscious of all humanity—living in the present days, or yet to be born—leading each one of us with instant emotional reactions to determined symbols.
To Jung, symbols and myths are the key to opening this collective unconscious—symbols have the capacity to offer immediate access to a determined fact, and mythology is the register of human emotions in every imaginable possibility. A myth expresses more than a formulated expression can say because myth by its nature has multiple layers of meaning. A good example of this is the reliance of psychology and other academic discipline on mythic interpretations for understanding many of their concepts. A specific example of this is what Sigmund Freud called “the Oedipus complex.” The myth of Oedipus speaks for itself, and yet it offers many ways to interpret this condition. Myths are open and infinite. They repeat themselves in different cultures while still referring to a universally understood experience or fear of the human experience. One can find, for example, the myth of Eve and The Garden of Eden, used in different ways in other mythologies such as the Greek myth of Pandora, or a similar myth among the Shuar of Ecuador. They are all variations on a theme.
It is fundamental to note that what makes some mythologies, such as Greek mythologies, to be more widely disseminated and better known than others is not the greater complexity of their myths, but the expansion of the carrier culture, and the acceptance of this culture in a elevated social position. African cultures, such as the Yoruba culture, have a strong, elaborate pantheon of Gods and myths similar to Greek mythology. What prevented African mythologies from being widely disseminated was the discrimination to which African religions/cultures were subjected.
It is important here to create a separation between religion and mythology since religions are particularly chosen by each person in agreement with his/her character. Mythologies, on the other hand, can be ‘learned’ without the religious connotation—although not without experiencing the “mystic participation” with the myth. Mythologies are fundamental keys to the understanding of a human being in a totality and they can be applied to any form of belief. The “Oedipus complex” derived from Greek mythology by modern psychology, can be applied to many societies, in both the occidental and the oriental worlds. The same application is possible to the myth of Shiva across cultures. The myth can be used to refer to human emotions of creation and destruction. At the same time a physicist, such as Fritjot Capra, can divine a particular interpretation of the myth comparing it to the dance of atoms (Capra 1989).
Myths have the capacity of spreading and interacting with different cultures independent of their beliefs. There are distinctions in the ability to propagate myths due to the myths’ integration into complex societies and their attachment to other cultural factors in those societies. The dissemination of myths will not occur, at least in a proper way, if the culture is submerged within rational interpretations attributing inferiority to those myths. Greek mythos or Hindi myths were known independent of their original belief systems, beyond the rites of sacrifice related to them, and their ‘strange’ conceptions of the sacred and means of attaining it. African myths could not.
As much as Greek, Hindus, and Western mythologies were diffused in spite of their religious rituals, African mythologies were constrained by being attached to misunderstood and despised religious practices. A good example of this is the Western conception of voudon as barbaric and dangerous. Rituals of sacrifice have been discontextualized from their spiritual roots, described even in classic anthropological texts, in a way that causes revulsion and fear. This discourages an investigation of African religions by outsiders. Ironically, Christian religions were the most responsible for the blaspheming of the Africans rites as associated with evil because of their rituals of sacrifices. At the same time, their sacred book, the Bible, is full of examples of sacrifices requested by their own God.
African mythologies must be liberated from their obscure places and be diffused as a patrimony of humanity and as a fountain of deep knowledge. If the whole of humanity is interrelated, and if the collective unconscious is the register of every experience, then what has happened to African religion/mythologies affects all beings. It is part of the psychic heritage of humanity, which has been lost. It has, perhaps, stigmatised us with a type of slavery. Our experience remains in chains preventing our connecting with our (every being) mythological roots and deep notions of the sacred.
The dissociation from nature that has occurred with modern man has its roots in the Enlightenment with societies’ privileging of rational thought over conceptions of nature. To reconnect with African mythology is to reconnect with nature. Neglecting our association with African mythologies, in terms of the collective unconscious, is similar to depriving a person’s contact with the experience of life inside the mother’s uterus since humanities’ roots are in Africa. It is a loss to humanity to be deprived of an experience with earth’s unconsciousness. Using Jung’s words, as recalled by Segal (1998:56) “…The unconscious contains not only the sources of instinct and the whole prehistoric nature of man right down to the animal level, but also, along with these, the creative seeds of the future… a separation from the unconsciousness …means nothing less then a separation from the source of life.”
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