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I don't believe that everything that happens will happen today even though it is the last day of the year of our Lord 2013.
I also do not want to believe in any belief that cannot be proven scientifically or at least visually. My weakness is that I sometimes believe in belief.
I do not believe in ghost but I have seen the ghost of Christmas past this yuletide
There is not much different in all religions, in fact the 4 major religions are all from the Orient. They all profess ghosts, shrouds, phantoms, spirits, Devils, djinns , angels. Jibril and azreal , malak al maut and israfel
Magical realism is the sauce and source of all religion. Is the immaculate conception not an impeachable deception? The trinity finds resonance with Egypt and Sumeria. Jesus the Christ ascended but Sango the oba koso descended and Ganesh has an elephant head. What is more magically realistic than the very miraculous affixing of a severed ear without stitches and local anaesthetic.
Had orisirisi igbo irunmole ( various evil forest) not prevented my warlike Yoruba forebears from venturing out beyond Dahomey to colonise and civilise perfidious Albion, today they will be discussing the legacies of mission schools teaching Ifa divination and the proselytising of Ifa cosmology instead of the honors and those who missed it.
Is it not instructive that Jason chased after the golden fleece but Amos searched for his Palm wine drinkard?
The Catholic Church: Do you recall Pascal Bowers anecdote about the Fang people of Cameron and a theologian.
Did I ramble ? My church is close to trinity hospital and the communion served therein fills one with Holy wholesome spirit.
May the dying year take our pain away. Especially We.
--Re-"outside of poetry and the poetic"
Me caught me-self thinking and pleading guilty to this short question & answer found in Spirit on the Water
"You ever seen a ghost? No
But you have heard of them"Forgetting about Brian Eno & David Byrne, for a while, forgetting about Amos Tutuola himself and his "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" , forgetting Professor Soyinka's "Agemo phase" as a dramatic flashback technique etc, and forgetting the supernatural in Camara Laye and even Carlos Castaneda who like Eno and Bryne, is and was not African), forgetting science fiction, there's also what has been described as magic realism attributed to e.g. Ben Okri and his "The Famished Road" although he stoutly rejects the title and the temptation
The connoisseurs of African Literature can take a dip...dig deep...
I suspect that the missionary schools and missionary schooling must have had their own impact, since they introduced the concept of "The Holy Ghost" - as the third person of their Trinity – thus suggesting at least two categories - the Holy and all the things that missionaries deemed unholy, such as the "voodoo" drums which they lost no time in banning to begin with, along with a few other African cultural practices (such as the ancestral holy polygamy) which was also soon damned and without further notice relegated to one of the many categories of "Heathen superstition" – "pagan practices" "pagan beliefs"... not even on par with European pantheism...
Ignorance asking: Is it true that Roman Catholicism was more accommodating of African norms and culture than most of the other Christian missionaries?
If Edward Wilmot Blyden would have been with us today and just about now, settling down to write his Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race – would he still arrive at the same conclusions?
Ah! That was a million dollar missionary question...
On Monday, 30 December 2013 14:31:19 UTC+1, Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:Compliments of the season Sir, and the coming season's greetings to us all!
Indeed Idoto's watery presence is one such.
As Prince Hamlet says to Horatio, "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Some of the cosmologists among us still interested in other people's cosmological ideas may be interested in Meher Baba's "God speaks" - the only book I've had time to read by him....
In these modern, post-enlightenment times, outside of poetry & the poetic, any mention of the supernatural is not only forbidden/ anathema, and pray who is anxious to be ridiculed and labelled either lunatic (crazy) or if such a one is African, to be labelled superstitious, primitive? I guess that's why some people may not talk too loudly about "spirit beings" or "Mami Wata" or watery presences, that area where the extra-sensory enters the realm of what's sometimes known as the mythological ( e.g. all the fictitious," the real" or the imaginary Carlos Castaneda stuff) Toyin Adepoju has already talked about the anonymity of those who authored the Upanishads – and indeed there's Shruti and Smriti, the philosopher-seer-poets of what goes down as other people's scriptures, causing some to learn Sanskrit even as others take to hieroglyphics.
However, the Santeria for example are self-confident and don't bow down to evangelizing missionaries – they themselves have become missionaries - missionaries to other lost sheep of another house.
Bearing in mind the property of water as a purifying agent,
1) I'm still wondering whether the Assemblies of God Pastor& Brethren, who gave me a full immersion baptism in that River in Umuahia, in 1981, considered it a holy river. (I have finally tracked down my long lost evangelical Igbo Brother Titus Akanabu - he will surely be able to answer that question, hopefully on the phone one of these coming days...
2) What Professor Segun Ogungbemi asked here about President Goodluck Jonathan's prayers, on the banks of the Jordan River. (In fact, I just watched this programme on al-Jazeera in which someone (from the Jordan Valley) is in essential agreement with Professor Ogungbemi's "Dirty River" concept: in speaking about the Jordan River he says, "This River, so holy to Christianity, is now a garbage dump!"
3) That one of my bosses in Nigeria was a staunch follower of the leader of the Cross Rivers based Brotherhood of the Cross and Star (and here I'm being a little superstitious - I have never uttered the name of name of their leader which consists in a triple O) - she made me to understand that people were coming from as far away places as the then Soviet Union to be cured of certain skin disease by taking a healing dip in the miraculous river waters, under his supervision...
Langston Hughes: The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Yours sincerely,
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