Osun Across The Waters Pdf

[Hortense Malovich]

sunis a brilliant deity whose imagery and worldwide devotion demand broad and deep scholarly reflection. Contributors to the ground-breaking Africa's Ogun, edited by Sandra Barnes (Indiana University Press, 1997), explored the complex nature of Ogun, the orisa who transforms life through iron and technology. sun across the Waters continues this exploration of Yoruba religion by documenting sun religion. sun presents a dynamic example of the resilience and renewed importance of traditional Yoruba images in negotiating spiritual experience, social identity, and political power in contemporary Africa and the African diaspora.

The 17 contributors to sun across the Waters delineate the special dimensions of sun religion as it appears through multiple disciplines in multiple cultural contexts. Tracing the extent of sun traditions takes us across the waters and back again. sun traditions continue to grow and change as they flow and return from their sources in Africa and the Americas.

Joseph Murphy is associate professor in the Theology Department at Georgetown University. He is the author of Santeria: An African Religion in North America and Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the African Diaspora.

Mei-Mei Sanford received her doctorate in Religion and Society from Drew University. She was a Fulbright Fellow in Nigeria. She currently does research in Nigeria and in African-American and Yoruba expatriate religious communities in the United States.

The Divine Feminine and Her cross-cultural pursuit is an endeavor that not only starts to dismantle the theological and ontological constructs that are the focus of my studies but is the answer to problems posed by Dr. Sharma in chapter four of her forthcoming volume: Radical Immanence.

This comparative study of Divine Feminine in Ifa or Orisha worship, with the Shakti: Mahadevi, is focused on the so-called esoteric, since my research is a radical emic counter-narrative of the history, culture, and theology of American Esoterica. I am specifically researching the theft of African spirituality and esoteric knowledge by mystics, sorcerers, magicians, and esoteric lodges of the period 1850-1910. This comparative study is an early foray into telling parts of this story, for hopeful later reference at minimum in my dissertation.

Rather than compare intergenerational traumas as a result of colonialism, I instead have chosen to focus mostly on several points of mystical, epistemological, cosmological, and theological synchronicity. I also do this while holding in tension from the very real long-term effects of colonialism, white supremacy, and the eco-apocalypse western Christianity is living out like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

One could spend a lifetime comparing these two traditions and discover a treasure trove of so-called "Parallels of the Ancients". Parallels of the ancients is a term I use to refer to practices that seem to cross continents and are also almost simultaneously being practiced the world over by peoples who had little to no contact at the time. A great example of this is ancestor veneration: a practice that happens in really similar ways the world over. In esoterica, the formula is almost exactly the same throughout the African Diaspora, which in turn has spread all over the Americas and has become wrapped up in Indigenous practice here.

But if one were to walk into almost any esoterica shop and grab a book on Voodoo, Hoodoo, Vodoun, the Lucemi (Santeria), Espirito healing work, Columbare, or even the early medium and new age movement, you would see these echoes of ancestral worship beyond the diaspora of peoples of African descent. Ancestral veneration has been adapted in an almost a-typical way in the African diaspora. Typically a small area or table, images or pictures of a deceased family member from either line of parentage. A candle, typically but not always white. Some sort of incense, or smoke and scent-producing tool, giving wafty smoky plumes of the ethereal. A cup of water or some sort of drink. Perhaps food traditional to land, place, or lineage. This practice in If is explained theologically by Bab aw Wande Abimbola in the following way:

This metaphysical interaction of ancient cultural wisdom in the form of Ancestors and Ori, or destiny, you carry in the world today in this incarnation, is meant to move you toward your own destiny. The Creators plan the world over, which is for us all to be in communication with our Orisha or Divinity, and Embodiment of Nature itself. This can only be revealed through Divination and then following and experiencing the act of offering the indicated sacrifice to Esu the Divine Messenger to carry this mystical communication between the Supreme Consciousness of Olodumare (the creator) and humanity.

We see similar practices in ancient Hindu theology. Sayer, although admitting the practice is not only theologically in error to many Hindu and Buddhist theologians and practitioners for reasons well outside the scope of this paper , also while wrestling with how persistent in some places, spaces and traditions. He makes the argument to understand ancestral veneration of the ancient Hindu cosmology, that the title of Householder must be privileged and that in turn has inherent democratization of text and practice in placing the ritual back in the hands of the Householder. He further states:

The universality of these practices and the ease in which they can be adapted to resist the Christian hominization of critical religious thinking through praxis is what is of use to my work. It is in the doing and in the experiential that we can find hope during this eco-apocalypse. It is in and of itself resistance to the bifurcation of mind, body, and spirit which is leading to an ontological drought in the public sphere when it comes to the collective envisioned future of humanity.

These sort of extra-cultural, parallel, earth-based practices became the great obsession of mediums, mystics, and other new-age thinkers at the turn of the 20th century. While the search for these so-called golden threads has led to problematic modern incursions into cultures for the sole purpose of pillaging and looting esoteric indigenous knowledge, such as the Theosophy society and others, one cannot ignore these same striking parallels. As a scholar committed to the abolition of white supremacy in academia, I must also resist the post-enlightenment urge to create a harmonious system out of two completely unique traditions.

The only way to decolonize esoterica'' is through counter-narrative building, and inherent in counter-narrative building is believing people's own self-understanding of themselves and treating their ontological view as real as my own self-understanding.

Will this lead to authentic interrogation of this earth-based and Divine Feminine practice the world over? Chattel slavery of Black peoples of the African Diaspora people is also a theft of world heritage all society still staggers from the loss of politically, economically, and ontologically. America as a country still staggers from the fact it was built on the backs of Black bodies economically and this ontologically plays out with the American collective conscience, in particular the Protestant Christian theological imagination. I believe these sorts of interfaith, intergenerational, and cross-cultural conversations are incredibly relevant since colonialism has removed even the means by which Black and brown peoples the world over would evaluate spiritual value inherent in anything that is now presented to us as esoteric knowledge when even that category itself is indicative of the problem as Dr. Sherma quoting eco-feminist Shiva spectacularly problematizes above. The creation of experts and non-experts of our experience.

To define the undefinable starts to create the very problems of duality, theodicy, purity, doctrine, and the other plagues of humanity that keep us from facing the great crisis of our time, ecological obliteration as a long term deleterious effect of global systemic white supremacy, the inheritor system of the old colonial system.

If, the Osun tradition, the Shakti tradition, and other Indigenous notions of reality offer us praxis-first models, focused on our interaction with creation, matter, and our daily worlds and lives as direct encounters with the Divine, which in If theology is explained as the following African notions of reality:

Put differently, in African conception of the universe, nothing is absolute, everything is interconnected; apparently the fundamental principle of the philosophy of life in the African reality is complementary. Consequently, Africans do not talk of isolated activities, but of symbiosis. In the universe of holism, things are not compartmentalized, departmentalized and fragmented. Based on this, Okoro extensively quoting Anyanwu (1983:53-54) draws the following conclusion:

(iv) there is no dissociation of sensibility from rationality in African culture. The duality of experience should not harden into dualism. Politics therefore, should not be discussed as if it were separated from religion

It is exactly this Divine Feminine as embodied resistance that makes the Osun tradition, Osun as Orisha herself, and her subversive and corrosive nature to Christian homogenization of African Diaspora spiritual praxis during chattel slavery, and her continued flourishing in the theological imagination of Black girls playing double-dutch in Chicago, while her continuous 700-year-old annual ceremony is still practiced in the Oshogbo Grove, in Nigeria. The site where Her worshippers say She became Orisha and the Osun river itself runs through the grove.

If is a concept that is hard to capture in English since in Yoruba culture not only does a word have multiple layered meanings in ese If verse, but since all the Orisha, or Divinities, are also the embodiment of many aspects of our natural world: a tree may not be just a tree, palm nuts are not just palm nuts, the river is not just the river. This multilayered meaning and Radical Immanence can be noted by changes in "oriki", or praise song, or ese If verse, usually conveyed through accent, changes to the repetitive structures in the verse, slight often phonetic/harmonic variations, or contextual placement, in the recited odu or verse.

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