West African lineages greatly accentuate certain principles in their spiritual vision. What Parrinder1 and others long ago found and what indigenous African scholars of these psychospiritual disciplines today continue to witness is a paradigm emphasis on dynamism, vitality, life force, power, and energy as the matrix of psychospiritual reality. These imbue the relationship with the chosen or inherited divinity—prayer, invocations, praises, dances, and so forth. The idea is to deepen or amplify the sense of life force. This increased sense of life force serves to enhance one’s power or vitality in life, to increase one’s family, to avoid death, disease, and destruction. It is not about getting into the next life, although an afterlife is accepted. No, it is about intensifying and enhancing this life, this body, this existence. To increase one’s emi is to amplify one’s life force. One is in the position of “energy” with respect to life. Significantly enough, the disciplines of rhythm, dance, breathing, and community entrainment are designed to bring this emi or life force up the spinal line and into the head or ori. An accomplished practitioner is regarded as one who is “strong in the head.” This belief pervades the West African paradigm of religion.
This life force is perceived in everything and at critical junctures and in particular processes can become not only personified, but also personalized. While there were and are significant differences between tribal and ethnic groups, some principles can be understood to underlie this diversity. First, there is a belief in a transcendent, benevolent divinity, who very often is far removed from the small affairs of people. This is the creatrix, the primal source, and the root manifestation of the world process. There is also a widespread belief in a number of imminent gods to whom a person must pay sacrifice in order to keep life strong and to keep the god active. Belief in the power of spirits animating things, forces, and beings is quite common. These spirit forces are perceived to affect the day-to-day life of men. Coinciding with this is the belief in priests, priestesses, and others who can influence these spirit forces for positive and negative reasons through their training and “medicines.”….
As stressed earlier, there is a profound and body-based belief in the direct experience and realization of the divine by way of “spirit possession.” Each Orisha or Voudoun spirit has a particular rhythmic and dance “signature” recognized by each member of the many secret societies. This whole paradigm is one in which the life essence is seen to pervade the entire world. Biology and consciousness subsume physics. The world process is a discontinuous gradation of spirit, personhood, and matter localized at various times and in specific objects and forces out of the rhythmic flux and foment of existence.
This power and life force are believed to be implicit and active in all things, animate and inanimate. This is not necessarily “animism,” but rather a radiant consciousness and dynamism pervading the world process. There is a hidden, all-pervasive power and force that interacts with human consciousness in different “coupling strengths” depending on one’s relationship, skills, and psychospiritual discipline. This is how African “medicine” is thought to operate in the traditional context. Natural herbs, the vibratory power of the “name” of things, the inner structure of things and their relationship to corollary forces can be manipulated by consciousness. Things that are intimate or have had an intimate contact with the person—such as personal belongings, body parts (hair, blood, saliva, and so forth)—are believed to still have a resonate affinity or “sympathy” or similarity with the person and, in a sense, can psychoenergetically represent that person in certain spiritual equations. This is a philosophy of life force and dynamism that has an implicate order paradigm as its guiding assumption. The physical body is the localized body in which are enfolded the subtle and other bodies of the spiritual anatomy of one’s beliefs and practices.
Witchcraft is the skillful manipulation of these forces for evil purposes. Embedded here is the importance of representative and localized bodily aspects of the person, especially blood, hair, and sexual products. In terms of sacrifice, blood is felt to carry the life force to the divinity or spirit world, which can then be recycled back to the person who does the sacrifice for more power and vitality. There are, of course, innumerable variations on this theme, but the underlying paradigm is a shared one. In this context, a witch is believed to be able to manipulate, capture, or in some cases, “eat the spirit” of a person by skillful manipulation of these symbolic and actual objects that have a resonate affinity with the victim. This is the dark side of the practice. To the outside observer, of course, steeped in purely intrapsychic psychodynamics and logical positivism, these notions may raise an eyebrow or two. Direct experience of the phenomenon, however, with its sense of dread and skin-crawling uncanniness, we guarantee you purges the system of an intellectual doubt!
The light side of this force, on the other hand, leads to community healing, altruistic sacrifice, and communion with the divine. It can also serve to ward off the evil force of the witch and circulate this spiritual force through the divine and back to the person. When the blood is spilled in sacrifice or another offering is made, an immaterial or energetic essence (ase) is believed to be liberated, directed, and by circulation is reamplified through the body-mind and life context of the practitioner. A clear distinction is made between the outer sacrifice and the inner essence of a thing. This is not archaic or concrete operational level logic, but rather a certain psychoenergetic and metaphysical stance on hidden forces and spiritual equations that we have seen earlier stated in the Kemetic texts of Egypt and, to some extent, the later Greek philosophers. The Ionian school worshiped the hidden but all-pervasive energy that was imbued with the divine intelligence and force and gave rise, by way of emanation of unfoldment, to the objects, beings, and forces of this world. The background radiation or sea of light energy in this universe is all-pervasive. Personalized consciousness and life force capable of “transferring” sacrificed energy by way of activating specific “coupling strengths” through the power of ritual and symbolic psychoenergetic formulas are known to the initiated disciples. The forces of this world, including the physical body, are to be amplified, not negated or denied. There is no ascetic, body-negative tradition of withdrawal here, but rather energy enhancement, vitalism, and psychoenergetic discipline as far as the priest is concerned.
This is not to say that there is no tradition of the essence or “soul” of the person having dynamics beyond the body. Indeed, it is believed that the body can be invested and inhabited by other intelligences, taking with it the “personality” of the person to a hidden place in the spirit world. Variations and nuances on this paradigm are numerous, of course, as are the number of “souls” enfolded in one person. Dependent on the cultural belief there can be three or four types of souls in one person. In general, however, the “soul” is associated closer to the outward, social personality of the person and all their conflicts and so forth, while the “spirit” is generally associated with the more inward arch toward the divine. Naturally, there is an unbroken continuum supplied by thoughts, health, and memories. There is no Cartesian duality between mind and body here. As a consequence, perhaps, there is a marked tendency to associate feelings with bodily parts and states (Morakinyo & Akiwowo, 1981).2 This may lead to greater somatization and symbolization of the body, and perhaps to the belief that other minds can influence your body. It is really more a matter of localization than discrete either/or categorization, with each ethnic group and theology providing its own coloring to the perception. In this context, contact with ancestors, out-of-body experiences, dream body travel, and all their related dynamics provide a matrix of events and transformations in life and death. This includes the capacity of the witch’s soul to “feed” on the soul or spirit of another person and the ability of the practitioner of “black magic” to evoke the soul of a living person into a jar or bowl of water, stick pins into it, and have the person fall ill of the soul, which then affects bodily health.
It is also believed that witches can send out their own souls in a dream, their own personal Khaka, or covering of the soul in Ancient Kemet, causing nightmares, pain, injury, and confusion to the sleeping soul of another person. This is because it is often believed that the soul wanders from the body in sleep and is more vulnerable to attack and less protected by the deeper residing spirit of the sleeper. Some believe a wandering soul actually initiates the dream and can even be slightly separated from the body while awake. A sudden sensation of touch or being watched is actually a perception of a slightly separated soul from the body. Again, there are shadings and gradations of difference and metaphysical sophistication between the ethnic groups and within ethnic groups between critical thinkers, practitioners, and lineages. However, all seem to share in the tangible perception of an elastic, mobile, and multifaceted inner soul of love and power, an aspect of which transcends the body and denser mind and is implicate in the divine, imperishable spirit of the Creator. In a very real sense, the practicing witch takes Bell’s Theorem of Quantum Interconnectedness quite literally. That which has been connected with an object at some point in the past will always have a resonate affinity with it in the future, regardless of distance! In the special case of the so-called witch there are first these local, then nonlocal connections to the personal objects of the victim. This witch then “evokes” a negative process in the shared field by way of imagery and rhythmic vibratory means, then “projects” this evoked potential to the victim, just as the healer does—the problem for the witches, however, that the healer does not have, is how to create a negative intention and image, without getting caught by their own negative “medicine” that they are sending—the so-called boomerang effect. Part of the secret here is when and how to cease “effort.” Quantum mechanical research in neuroscience already suggests that the nonlocal evoked potentials are a real phenomenon in human interhemispheric communication between persons already in some relationship with each other. Some aspects of “witchcraft” appear to be older, non-Western demonstrations of this phenomena (Grinberg-Zylberbaum & Ramos, 1987, 1994).3 ◆
From Our African Unconscious: The Black Origins of Mysticism and Psychology by Edward Bruce Bynum, Ph.D., ABPP published by Inner Traditions ©2021. All rights reserved. http://www.Innertraditions.com. Reprinted with permission of publisher.
This piece is excerpted from the Fall 2024 issue of Parabola, THE WAY OF MAGIC. You can find the full issue on our online store.
- Edward Geoffrey Parrinder, West African Psychology (1951). ↩︎
- (Morakinyo, Olufemi, and Akinsola Akiwowo [1981], “The Yoruba Ontology of Personality and Motivation: A Multidisciplinary Approach, Journal of Social Biological Structures [4], 19-38). ↩︎
- Jacobo, and Julieta Ramos, [1987]. “Patterns of Interhemispheric Correlation during. Human Communication.” International Journal of Neuroscience [36], 41-54; [1994], “The Einstein-Polodsky-Rosen Paradox in the Brain: The Transferred Potential.” Physics Essays, 7 (4). 422-28. ↩︎