|
Continuities
and
Discontinuities in the Religious Experience By
Chief Fela
Sowande, Howard University, March 1970*
SEGMENT THREE
1. Profile of Atlantis
Black Experience of Religion: What It Is
From the Yoruba source-materials, it is clear that there were three levels of relationship between those who are now gods, and those who are now men; for easy identification, we might refer to them as god-potentials, and men-potentials. Both of them occupied the same area, which was neither Heaven nor Earth, but from which in due course of time, both Heaven and Earth were differentiated.(Or we might call them the Invisible and the Visible Worlds). During this first level of relationship, contact between god-potentials and men-potentials was direct, conscious, clear, and intimate. The history of each of these god-potentials was unfolding as facts before the very eyes of the men-potentials. It is this history of the god, during the time when he was still a human-being but on his way to god-head, which determine[d] every minute detail of every ritual in which the god is worshipped. This history has been passed down through the ages, from one generation to the next, and we are told that it is still known in all its fullness to those highly-placed traditional chiefs who are today the legitimate Custodians of this Sacred Lore. During this first level all animals and what we now call inanimate objects spoke, and could hold intelligent conversations with the potential gods and men. One of the major figures of that period was the Yoruba "Òrò," or "Word", which was suck a powerful Spirit that even the most advanced god-potential knew better than to cross its path. The tremendous importance that most African societies ascribe to names, and their recognition ofSound as being in its own right a creative force possessing great magical powers, can be traced to this powerful Spirit, for the oral traditions preserved its record in the minds of the traditional African in Yorubaland. Out of this direct relationship, which existed at this level . . . grew an awareness, a consciousness based on actual experience, which became interiorized and would later impel man towards that which we now term "religion" and "mythology" and "magic" as the divine science that it is. For it is the oral history of the direct relationship between these potential gods and men that properly constitutes mythology proper, while, after the gods shall have been removed far away from men, the endeavor to create conditions under which this first level of relationship may be re-activated and made real and effective is the root of that which essentually gave birth to that which we call "religion." As such, traditioual African religion was not a passive but an active process, involving the very core-of-being of the individual, a process that was intensely practical in its orientation. This type of religosity had, and could have had, no room for the idea of "sin" and "redemption"; it was coneerned first and last with the Will to establish direct communication with the gods for specific ends, in which was foremost being-in-alignment with the gods. Nowhere is the traditional African more realistic, more with his feet planted solidly on terra firma, than in his religiosity, even today. Mutwa was but stating a fact applicable throughout Africa when he stated: "The Bantu especially, never start believing anything unless a fact of some description can motivate the belief. The decline of Christianity among the Bantu can be related to this circumstance. The Christian Missionaries came to us with stories of guardian angels watching over us, but they could not substantiate this belief with a single incident or fact that would justify it. . . . The African is more sceptical and less gullible than most people think; he has not the refined imagination of the ancient Greeks who could create out of thin air all those satyrs and centaurs." But there was no need for either religion or mythology at this first level of relationship, or at the second level either, when Heaven and Earth had become differentiated and separated, but with a common boundary connecting the two worlds, something like the figure 8. At this second level, relationship was still conscious and for a while direct, but much less intimate as previously; for now there was a "psychological distance" to take into account. Legends relating to this period refer to the inhabitants-of-Heaven and the inhabitants-of-Earth as two distinct communities; also to the Hunter-in-Heaven and the Hunter-on-Earth as two distinct individuals; the inhabitants of Heaven sometimes came to the market on Earth to buy things for use in Heaven, and men still crossed the boundary to visit in Heaven. Passage between the two worlds was, clearly, open, free, and easy. The horrible spectre of Death was yet to be born. It happened, however, that one day a great fight broke out between the two Hunters, and it took by far the most senior among the major god-potentials to break the fight up, and it was he who then turned the common boundary into a sort of no-man's-land which it was forbidden to cross. Nevertheless the two Hunters still communicated with each other across this forbidden area, which neither of them would be mad enough to attempt to cross. Now the relationship between the potential god and men was no longer direct, although it was still COnSCiOUS. It seems to me reasonable to suggest that it was the gap caused by the indirect nature of the relationship at this stage that made it imperative for the more highly illumined among the men-potentials to devise ways and means whereby the gap could be, at least temporarily, circumvented effectively and with practical results, and that here we have the foundations, and the seed, of African religiosity. Now the distance between Heaven and Earth gradually widened until it became enormous, ushering in the third level of relationship, where religion and mythology replaced actual direct individual experience of the gods; the more highly illumined among the men constituted (in current terminology) the traditional priests who — as a group — functioned as the living channel of communication between men and the gods, and became the Custodians of the Sacred Lore of the human group, in all its fullness. "Going to Heaven" now meant crossing the territory of Death, a new factor in the relationship. As the distance between Heaven and Earth became greater, so men grew away from the gods and became so wicked that the world was eventually destroyed. Yoruba Legends relate four such destructions, and state further that initially all men belonged to one and the same race. Then came the time for dispersion, when the race was split up into tribes. These Legends account for the particular name given to each leader of a tribe, which eventually became the traditional title of that leader and identifies the tribe, even today. Unfortunately space does not allow for these traditional references to be quoted here; but the formed part of my Radio Programs in Nigeria, and some were quoted in my booklet on IFA, privately printed in Nigeria for public distribution a few years back. [To get a copy of this booklet, send an e-Mail to the Webmaster.] For the Bantus, Mutwa also cites oral traditions on severa1 catastrophes which the world has experienced. We read, for example: "Lo! The earth opened and swallowed them all. They fled, they fled, while the waters of the flood clawed at them and sent thousands of them to their doom. They fled while the whole unbalanced world shook, thundered and screamed in agony to the uncaring stars. It lasted for decades, but gradually the earthquakes died and the intervals grew longer. The floods calmed and the waters withdrew to their original levels. But the face of the earth had changed. Great land masses had drifted farther apart and some kind expanded. Commanding mountains reared their insolent heads to the clouds. Where there were lakes, there were now plains of mud, and rivers were blocked to make new lakes."And on another occasion, On the origin of man, he writes: "The African originated with other races of mankind, outside Africa. Many of my own people will no doubt strongly oppose this statement. There is nothing they like more than the thought that Africa belongs to the African. They like this idea almost as much as the white man dislikes the idea that he originated [alongside] the black men." But Mutwa holds that all evidencepoints to "a vast continent which had become partially submerged, leaving only the highest regions exposed above sea level as a complex of islands generally referred to as the East Indies." He rejects the idea that this vast continent was Alantis, and states that "according to African mythology this continent, which we call Ka-Lahari, was also located in the opposite direction. Even according to Hottentot mythology, there was a time when the Great Waters invaded the land and fire fell from Heaven. That this subsidence took place in the east and not in the west is rather obvious to me"; and he then proceeds to say why, in his book."Whole continents vanished under steaming waters Not only was tliere a common origin of man, there also was "the common stock the ancestral tribe from which all the Negroid tribes of Africa sprang," which was known as "the Batu, or the Bantu. Legends say that this stock lived in the 'Old Land.' This was far back in the bone and stone ages. Where was this "Old Land"? It is there where the 'Old Tribes' are still found today — the Watu Wakale. These incorporate all the tribes of the land of the Bu-Kongo right up to the southern parts of the land of the Ibo and Oyo (Nigeria)." Mutwa's two chapters on "The Religion and Beliefs of the Bantu" cannot be summarized, and must be read by those interested. It is from those two chapters that the following excerpts are taken, somewhat at random: "The Ba-Ntu, or the Ba-Tu, were the founders of our culture and our religion. And being a solid, uniform nation they were at peace for thousands of years. They were not ruled by chiefs, but by a High Council of the Mothers of the People — that is, all the Witches and Sybils over the age of forty. . . .And from the High Instructor to Mutwa at initiation: "My child, God is more in you, and is more part of you than you are in and part of yourself. He exists in you more than you exist in yourself. You wore not created by God as the aliens tell you, but you exist as part of God. Your sou1 is immortal, because God is immortal, aud your soul and mine are as much part of God as the grain of sandstone is part of the boulder that is part of the mountain. . . . A God must never be interpreted as having a fixed shape. God can assume any shape He desires and whatever I form would suit His purpose best at any given time. There may be times when Lesser Gods call assume the shapes of animals, or trees, or even rocks and boulders. But the reason why the Lesser Gods more often take human forms is because we would understand better when they communicate with us. . . .These ideas which the African has always held of his traditional religion find substantial and independent confirmation from the writings of the esoteric philosophers of Western Europe, but also with a wealth of details that are missing in the African records. But these Western European authors have been steadfastly discredited by a Western European Academicia that has become more like a cat chasing its own tail than anything else, as it rejects today its own theory which it deified only yesterday, and anoints another theory tomorrow as it throws today's theory into the incinerator . The anthropological sciences, in particular have been so bogged down the unilinear concept of evolution of the nineteenth century that instinctively research material is tailored down, to suit the doctrine, with the result that the Blackman is denied history, culture, evolutionary maturity, achievements in almost any field whatever. It is to be expected that the discipline would reject out of hand, any and every author — black or white — that threatened the security of its fond but baseless illusions; especially the white author, for the discipline can afford to appear to ignore, from its lofty perch, the pseudo intellectual antics of the "savage African"; but the white author it must malign and discredit, especially those who, like Madame Blavatsky, express the view that the white race owes its possession of many wonderful things to the black race. This of course will not do, and white authors of this type have to be 'conjectural writers' or "mystics" — which damns them for eternity — or "charlatans" or worse things. To the admonitions of some of its own members it turns a deaf ear, when it cannot dub them 'rebels' and hound them. It is much more comfortable to sit in the well-padded chair of the inflated ego of a value-free science that has underwritten the informed ignorance which declares that we have so far had twenty-one civilizations of which not one is African; or the arrogant conceit which damns the non-Western soul by implication in such knowledgements as "It is the easiest thing in the world for commerce to export a new Western technique. It is infinitely harder for a Western poet or saint to kindle in a non-Western soul the spiritual flame that is alight in his own" (A Study of History: Toynbee, abridged Somervell). Today, the individual social scientist may have consciously rejected the 19th century uniliner concept of evolution; but to what extent he is still unconsciously shackled by its implications is open to question. But there is no doubt whatever that today, the Social Sciences as a discipline or a field of research has virtually become — like the university of the 18th century — part of the recognized machinery of government. It is over-involved in propaganda, sometimes as the secret agent of its country of origin. For this is the age of psychological warfare, and it is not for nothing that we find, in Gouldner's contribution in Sociology on Trial . . . "Far as we are from a sociological atomic bomb, we already live in a world of the systematic brainwashing of prisoners of war and of housewives with their advertising exacerbated conpulsions; and the social science technology of tomorrow can hardly fail to be more powerful than today's." In the contribution by C. Wright Mills in the same book, he draws attention to Professor Herbert. S. Lynd's comment on the American soldier, with which he does not see how anyone can reasonably disagree: "These volumes depict science being used with great skill to sort out and to control men for purposes not of their own willing. It is a significant measure of the impotence of liberal democracy that it must increasingly use its social sciences not directly on democracy's own problems, but tangentially and indirectly; it must pick up the crumbs from private business research on such problems as how to guage audience reaction so as to put together synthetic radio programs and movies, or, as in the present case, from Army research on how to turn frightened draftees into tough soldiers who will fight a war whose purposes they do not understand. With socially extraneous purposes controlling the use of social science, each advance in its use tends to make it an instrument of mass control, and thereby a threat to democracy."In the nineteenth century, — as Schweitzer has pointed out — it was Philosophy that renounced her duty, turned herself into a drawer of dividends, and thus into an impotent pedantic philosophy of degenerates that no longer had any message for the world. In the twentieth century, social sciences as a discipline seems to have taken over that role, for precisely the same reasons and with precisely the same results. The root-cause in the nineteenth century was the loss of a World-View by Western Europe. And in the twentieth century? Hans Gerth and Saul Landau are quite clear on the point in The relevance of history to the Sociological Ethos (idem): "Just as the United States leaders began to realize their dream of a world economic empire headed by American corporate power, the American sociologist dispensed with world concepts. He dismissed, as metaphysics, all thought and theory that dealt with world or total structures. The world was simply taken for granted. . . . The sociologist wanted to routinize the functioning of the good society at home, focussing on industrial problems, the family, and the behavior of groups in their natural setting.The fact that we are turning to those Western European writers who have always been in the dog house of the Social Sciences is, therefore to be regarded as a point in favor of these esoteric philosophers, and an indication of the sanity of our approach. I can only present here the broadest outline of a skeleton summary of a subject that is as profound as it is vast, and on which I have very limited competence. My main source-references will be two publications by the Theosophical Publishing Company: (a) RACIAL CLEAVAGE by Isabelle Pagan (1937), and (b) THE STORY OF ATLANTIS AND LOST LEMURIA by Scott-Elliott, first published separately in 1896, and in 1904, as one volume in 1925, which had several reprints; the revised and reprinted edition appeared in 1962. For a long time, the mere idea of a lost continent was met with scorn; but there was also a time when the siege of Troy was held, by the informed, as being "only a solar myth." Today, however, scepticism seems to have given way to at least curiousity, and booksellers' shelves are groaning under the weight of the recent publications on Atlantis. Quite a few that I have seen are downright g, and singularly ill-informed. The two standard works on the subject, written long before the thing became a profitable fad, and now classic source references, are, (a) the Scott-Elliot book mentioned above, and Ignatius Donnelly's ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD, originally published in 1904 as a sequel to his RAGNAROK of 1883 which was scoffed at. Donnelly's ATLANTIS has now been edited by Egerton Sykes, as a 1949 Gramercy Press publication. The original 1904 edition contains an illustration showing "the Profile of Atlantis: as revealed by the deep-sea sounding of H.M.S. 'Challenger' and the U.S. ship 'Dolphin'," which seems absent in the Gramercy Press edition; unfortunately, because it lends great point to the continent of Atlantis being a historical fact, even though the waters of the Atlantic Ocean [roll] over it. Madame Blavatsky's THE SECRET DOCTRINE (Theosophical University Press), first published in 1888, also contains useful references. Significantly, the author wrote, in her Introduction: "This first instalment of the esoteric doctrines is based upon Stanzas which are the records of a people unknown to ethnology; . . . they are said to emanate from a source (Occultism) repudiated by science; and, finally, they are offered through an agency, incessantly discredited before the world by all those who hate unwelcome truths, or have some special hobby of their own to defend. Therefore, the rejection of these teachings may be expected, and must he accepted beforehand. to one styling himself a "scholar," in whatever department of exact science, will be permitted to regard these teachings seriously. They will be derided and rejected a priori in this century; but only in this one. For in the twentieth century of our era scholars will begin to recognize that the Secret Doctrine has neither been invented nor exaggerated, but, on the contrary, simply outlined; and finally that its teachings antedate the Vedas. Have not the latter been derided, rejected, and called "a modern forgery" even so recently as fifty years ago? Was not Sanskrit proclaimed at one time the progeny of, and a dialect derived from, the Greek, according to Lempriere and other scholars? About 1820, Prof. Mas Muller tells us, the sacred books of the Brahmans, of the Magians, and of the Buddhists, "were all but unknown, their very existence was doubted, and there was not a single scholar who could have translated a line of the Veda. . . . of the Zend Avesta, or . . . of the Buddhist Tripitak and now the Vedas are proved to be the work of the highest antiquity whose 'preservation amounts almost to a marvel.' The same will be said of the Secret Archaic Doctrine, when proofs are given of its undeniable existence and records."I see a parallel between the foregoing and the passage in Immanuel Velikovky's EARTH IN UPHEAVAL which reads: The greatest mathematician who ever walked on these shores, Simon Newcomb, proved in 1903 that a flying machine carrying a pilot is a mathamatical impossibility. In the same year of 1903 the Wright brothers, without mathematics, but by a fact, proved him wrong.That book by Velikovsky, and "Astrology: The Space Age Science" by Joseph Goodavage, (Signet), seem to me to show the nature of the cataclysms which change the face of the earth. That history may yet repeat itself is the theme of Lewis Spence in ln Will Europe follow Atlantis, written during the second World War, and published by Rider. More relevantly, perhaps, the author discusses several theories for and against the idea of 'the lost continent' in the book, which may be found worth looking at. The historical novel form has also been used to present facts about life in Atlantean days, notably in Atlantis Rising by Daphne Vigers; Island Sonata by Marjorie Livingston; Winged Pharaoh, Eyes of Horus and Lord of the Horizon by Joan Grant. In addition, The Wheel of Rebirth by H. K. Challoner, and Towards Aquarius by Vera Reid, help substantially to complete the picture. There are, of course, the Edgar Cayce books on Atlantis, and two publications — (a) Edgar Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet by Jess Stearn, and (b) The Story of Edgar Cayce: (sub-titled: There is a River) by Thomas Sugrue, — which provide Cayce's own background. In general, however, many contemporary books on Atlantis examine the issue as from the mathematicaI possibility of Simon Newcomb; some of these current publications are singularly ill-informed, some are downright misleading. There are authors who are concerned with nothing else other than "making a quick buck" on the current upsurge of interest in esotericism. Contemporary literature on Atlantis must be approached with care, or mental indigestion is the least painful of unavoidable consequences. The main source-references from which the following digest has been assembled, and which I have already given above, are quite safe, no matter whether one agrees with the findings of the authors or not. However, the following picture emerges from these source references, and it is a picture which, to my mind, more than substantiates that from the African traditions, but moreover supplies details that we do not find in the African traditions that so far I have been able to get. The picture, from the Western European esoteric writer's viewpoint, is that of a human Evolution which involves the entire human race at any point in evolutionary history whatever. This does not mean that all of us entered and are destined to leave the stream of evolution at precisely the same points in time. On the contrary, Evolution consists of two complementary phases, or periods; an active period followed by a passive one. These two periods together constitute one cycle of human evolution. During the active period, the creative forces of life give birth, as it were, to seven distinct races in succession, known as the Seven Root-Races. Each Root-Race grows out of its predecessor, and gives birth to its successor after being the dominant Race in its prime. But each Root-Race also consists of seven sub-races following each other in succession, with the inevitable constant jostling for leadership among themselves, with the appearance of each new sub-race. A close parallel is provided in the contemporary present by the transfer of world leadership from Great Britain to the United States of America, and the power struggle now going on between America aud Russia. Each sub-race consists of seven Nations, and each Nation of seven Families. Thus a Family is one of seven such Families which together form a Nation; the Nation in turn is one of seven such Nations which constitute s sub-race; seven of these sub-races add up to one Root-Race. Each Root-Race contains within itself, therefore, 7 sub-races, 49 Nations, and 343 Families; up to this point, we have what we can call "continuities," as each unit grows out of its predecessor and produces its successor. From
the Family-stage
however, we find
progressive fragmentation of the Family into splinter-groups of
varying
numerical sizes and effective social-power; "discontinuity" takes over
as the Family breaks up into more and more "tribes" with the gradual
loss
of cohesion and of a common origin. A good example is to be found in
the
old Yoruba Empire which consisted of the seven Kingdoms founded
by the seven sons of Odu, the Great Father of all Yorubas. Today in
Yorubaland
is the home of innumerable Yoruba sub-groups, often at
loggerheads
with each other, the classical example being the break-up of the old
unity
finally in the fratricidal warfare of the nineteenth century. Another
example
is provided by Victor Turner in The Forest of Symbols, where he
draws attention to the "high rates of mobility" among the Ndembu,
through
which we have "a society whose villages move widely and frequently over
space and often tend to split, even to fragment, through time."
Fratricidal
warfare does not therefore provide the only or the major cause for this
fragmentation which seems inevitable, once the Family has evolved from
the Root-Race as outlined above. This takes hundreds of thousands of
years,
perhaps up to a million and more. |
his
subject is as vast as it is profound; one in which very few people can
claim real competence, and I believe that we shall find them
largely
among the initiated priests of Africa, solely among those from
within
their ranks who have become the Custodians of the Sacred Lore
of
the African Peoples. Some fragments of relevant material has become
available
in Yorubaland in Nigeria, and in Mutwa's Indaba My Children for
the Bantus. 
