Africana Religions

Practically all Indigenous Africana cosmologies contain at least one concept akin to the English term “cosmic force.” Usually, this force has its origin in the Supreme Being as the source of all existence, but it takes differentiated form in everything from people to the natural world, words and sounds, emotional states, institutions, and spirits. The Yoruba cosmic force or power is àṣẹ —aché in Spanish-speaking and axé in Portuguese-speaking diasporas—referring to a type of life force, authority, sacred power, or ability to effect change in the world.[3] Among the Luo of Kenya, juok is a type of cosmic force rooted in Nyasaye, the Supreme Being—it exists in and it sustains everything in the world. In Africana cosmologies, all action is an interplay of cosmic force. Like electricity or fire, cosmic force is neither inherently good nor evil but simply constitutes power; the way this power is marshalled and deployed allows its effects to be well-ordered or not. The well-ordered flow of cosmic force can transform material and immaterial levels of existence; aligning these levels with a cosmic order established by the Supreme Being supports health, prosperity, and productive relationships. The flow of cosmic force, however, can be misdirected to disrupt relationships, erode health and well-being, and release chaos—here, the relationship to cosmic force is not well-ordered—underscoring the need for robust ritual structures to promote cosmic order. 

Virtually all Africana religious traditions contain a special class of people with unique capabilities to work with cosmic force. Because the Supreme Being is so far removed from humans, those people and entities in proximity to the Supreme Being or other higher cosmic beings possess a greater amount of cosmic force than those further removed. These human figures that can powerfully channel the flow of cosmic force are often identified as priestesses or priests, healers, diviners, and also kings, queens, and chiefs, but cosmic force exists in all people and spheres of life. Among the Bamana of Mali, nyama is “a potential energy represented in all beings . . . that exists to a greater extent in certain members of the community” who have high amounts of nyama and can produce it.[4] Bamana storytellers, historians, poets, blacksmiths, and artists wield nyama proficiently. As Dona Richards articulates, this “mystical” ritual combination of the material and potential and immaterial makes art, science, and religion inseparable.[5] Though ritual work takes place on a daily basis in Africana traditions, cosmic force reaches its highest concentration and transformative potential of cosmic force during initiation rituals. 

Considering the absence of a clear division between religious and secular realms in Africana religious traditions, practically all actions become ritual, but initiation rituals, especially rites of passage, are set apart from other rituals by their unique ability to effect ontological transformation for those who undergo them. Rites of passage are ritual complexes—each cluster, step, and part of which can be considered a form of initiation—marking specific points of ontological transformation in the normal human lifecycle: birth, naming ceremonies attached to birth, adulthood, marriage, elderhood, and death or ancestorhood. Regardless of physical age, one cannot truly advance to the next stage of life without passing through the necessary rites of passage around such transitions. Initiations are not limited to rites of passage but can refer to rituals that allow admittance into a specific group: an occupational guild, a secret society, or a specific religious tradition or higher levels within a religious tradition. Initiates profoundly experience transformations from one identity or ontology to another identity or ontology without completely losing who they are. 

African religious traditions play a central role in the scholarly interpretation of rites of passage and initiation ceremonies, and these scholarly understandings have indeed further influenced practitioners’ interpretations. Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process (1969), about Ndembu rituals in Zambia, provides the canonical formulation of a passage through three stages in an initiation ritual: separation, liminality, and integration.[6] In the first stage, participants are separated from the rest of society, often taken into the “bush” or forest, and there “communitas,” the dissolution of most social distinctions and hierarchies, removes all their prior identities. General cosmic order is temporarily suspended, making initiates malleable to intense cosmic force that transforms them during the rite. Transformed into new people, initiates are ready for reintegration into society. 

The most famous account of the experience of initiation in African religious traditions is Malidoma Patrice Somé’s autobiography Of Water and the Spirit (1994) in which the author recounts his experiences in Dagara coming-of-age rites of passage. He encounters spirits, voyages into immaterial realms, confronts past trauma, receives healing, and becomes aware of the life and energy present in every aspect of the world.[7] Such rituals constitute one of the most potent forms of person formation in Africana religious traditions. Margaret Thompson Drewal (1992) provides a detailed description of initiations into Ifá, analyzing the ways that ritual processes help neophytes encounter their cosmic selves, their “inner” identities or destinies that are symbolically rendered as orí, meaning “head” in Yoruba.[8] Oludamini Ogunnaike’s Deep Knowledge (2020) describes and analyzes the ways that Ifá initiations ritually prepare practitioners to encounter, receive, and embody transcendent knowledge. Initiates describe visceral experiences, particularly encounters with Odù, the mysterious female deity and power at the heart of the Ifá tradition. As one Ifá priest describes: 

When you go in, you will feel the energy; in that part of the igbodu [Odu’s sacred grove], it is already charged with Odu. They take you in blindfolded, then they remove the blindfold and you see something. It enters you. You will see something shaking your body. Science will probably say it is your feelings or something, but I felt it. And not only that time, when you are feeding Odu, after, after you have done that you can feed Odu, you can join other Babalawo [Ifa priests/diviners] to feed Odu, during that time you will feel that energy.[9] 

These initiation accounts demonstrate that initiates encounter some reality about who they truly are, and these encounters happen in a very real and not exclusively metaphorical way.  

Initiation brings the initiands into alignment with their cosmic immaterial selves through rituals that concentrate cosmic force toward a deep ontological change or reversion. From a this-worldly perspective, initiates are transformed, but they are restored from a cosmic perspective. The American anthropologist Paul Stoller underwent initiation into a form of Songhay sorcery (the ritual use of esoteric power, not necessarily malevolent magic) in which he ate a type of esoteric paste that uncomfortably distended and mystically filled his stomach. From that moment onward, Stoller was ritually “full” and other initiates could “see” he had become one of them.[10] Access to these rites is tightly controlled, but the sheer weight and force of these experiences makes them dangerous. Not all who begin initiation processes complete them.   

The cosmos is far greater than what initiates initially perceive, and these rituals equip initiates with heightened awarenesses of forces and entities that are all around them but were not recognized before initiation. Among the Dangme of Ghana, the concentration of hewam, meaning “cosmic force,” is invisible to the general public, but hewam “is conspicuous, [though] only to the initiated eye.”[11] After passing successfully through a significant initiation ritual, Somé describes realizing his “visual horizon had grown disproportionately . . . and that there is more to sight than just physical seeing.”[12] His newfound ability to see “otherworldly beings” and to access “hyperbolic” perceptions allowed Somé to observe tiny insects and even the buried roots and personalities of trees.[13]  

The transformative power of rituals, including initiation rituals, works on an individual and a communal level; the communal takes precedence in Africana identity formation, including cyclical ritual events in the life of communities like annual ceremonies of cosmic renewal. In new yam festivals of West Africa, the entire society prepares for the renewed sustaining of life. Ritual participants rid the community of impure elements and forces, allowing a harmonious flow of cosmic energy closer aligned with the immaterial world.[14] Cosmic renewal ceremonies often ritually reenact a local cosmogony or the founding of the entire cosmology; sometimes they reenact both at the same time. In the Nigerian city of Ẹdẹ, the ọba, a sacred king who embodies the entire community, walks around a sacred fire at night, and this purifies him of all malevolent forces. Later, the ritual reenacts the original settlers’ migration to the city, and the sacred fire that guided them is carried throughout the whole town, purifying it. Furthermore, ancestral masquerades—both material costumes that cover the living spirit of individual or communal ancestors and the spirits themselves—emerge once the world of the living is brought into alignment with its ancestral, immaterial counterpart, making it possible and proper for ancestors to take material form in the world of the living.[15] 

African ritual processes do not represent rigid, timeless repetitions of an ancestral precedent. They are dynamic, polysemic, and frequently individualized so that initiates undergo the types of experience necessary for them.[16] Though initiation experiences are universally the most powerful transformation experiences in Africana traditions, these rituals artfully combine formality with a degree of improvisation, leading to their immense diversity, especially when those experiences involve encounters with spirits that occur inside or outside rituals. 

A conceptualization of the Supreme Being as the source of cosmic power unifies Africana cosmologies, but a great deal of internal diversity exists about the types and hierarchies of lesser spirits. Most commonly, there are deities, ancestors, nature spirits or non-human spirits, but these categories overlap and not all are present in every Africana cosmology. The nomadic Maasai of East Africa focus their ritual practices and worship enkAi, the Supreme Being, paying little if any attention to other deities. By contrast, the Sukuma of Tanzania are almost exclusively concerned with their relationships to ancestors rather than interactions with deities and spirits.[17] The Yoruba boast the most famous set of deities, the òrìṣà, but the Yoruba also recognize a variety of other spirits, including the ajogun, who are negative but not evil: Ikú “Death,” Àrùn “Disease,” and Òfò “Loss” among others. Because there is a real physicality to disease, the ajogun offer an instructive example of how spirits have material existence or have a footprint in the material. Many deities associated with natural phenomena are ontologically the same as those natural elements: Ogun is the òrìṣà of iron and also is iron itself.[18] Whether they are ancestors, deities, nature spirits, or other entities, the rootedness of all these beings in the immaterial world affords them powerful potential to enact transformations in the material world by mediating connections between realms and offering points of contact with cosmic order.  

Similar to the negative ajogun connecting to something in the material world and causing negative changes, material and immaterial levels of existence actually contact and communicate with humans during divination sessions. The immaterial transforms the material, if only the physical objects used in divination technologies, with an aim for the material world to better conform with the immaterial one. Divination constitutes communication with spirits who, in addition to being able to influence material, may take material forms, speaking through host bodies or making their voices known through physical items. 

Mediumistic divination, on one hand, involves a spirit using a human body as a host to communicate directly; mechanistic divination, on the other hand, involves a ritual expert using sacred tools to identify and relay the messages of a spirit; augury, furthermore, interprets natural phenomena and events to convey messages from the immaterial world. Ritual specialists in southern Africa called sangomas enter a trance in which they incorporate the spirit of an ancestor or divinity who will then speak directly to a client through the sangoma.[19] While a woman is still pregnant, the Dagara people perform a ritual called a “hearing” in which the spirit of the soon-to-be-born child speaks with a strange voice through the mother. That voice answers questions about identity, destiny, taboos, and relays important information required for the child to live a well-ordered life.[20] Mediumistic divination is common in Afro-diasporic religions in the Americas in which deities visit devotees during festivals and then converse with them, offering admonitions, orders, and guidance.  

There are countless forms of mechanistic divination, such as the Batammaliba use of a stick/cane in Togo, but the most famous and widely practiced mechanistic divination system is the Yoruba tradition of Ifá that employs palm kernels (ikin) or a divining chain featuring half-shell pods (ọ̀pẹ̀lẹ̀). In Yoruba mythology, the òrìṣà Ọ̀rúnmìlà was present at the unfurling of the world, and he knows the end of all things due to his continued presence from the very beginning. From his vantage point above space and time, Ọ̀rúnmìlà speaks through the divining instruments made from the sacred palm tree in order to communicate precise messages through displaying a pattern revealed by the instruments, and these patterns are contained within and interpreted using a vast oral corpus memorized by his priests known as babaláwo.[21]  

In augury, silent animals—such as spiders, mice, or chameleons—communicate important information and messages via their actions; these messages emerge from the normally silent immaterial world. The Dogon of Mali and Burkina Faso draw grids in sand just outside a town at dusk, and they come back the next day to interpret the footprints the fox has left in response to their questions.[22] Another famous example is Dakpa, the termite oracle among the Azande. Having inserted a stick indicating “yes” and another indicating “no” in a termite mound, the Azande discern an answer indicated by which stick is most consumed by termites.[23] Throughout Africa and the diaspora, less formal instances of augury divination outside a controlled ritual environment include stubbing a toe, witnessing an animal take a particular action, or interpreting meteorological events. Each of these instances constitutes a manifestation of activity in the immaterial world that is displayed in the material world.  

Contact with spirits is more direct in other instances. During Ifá initiations, initiates contact the deity Odù as well as their own orí inú, meaning their destinies or “spirit doubles,” and initiates, due to that contact with their orí inú, gain transcendent understanding of who they are and what is the nature of their lives. During Malidoma Patrice Somé’s rite of passage into adulthood, the most critical and transformative stage was when he first encountered a tree spirit he calls the “green lady.” She embraces him, speaks to him, and causes him to weep profusely when she produces “an indescribable sensation of nostalgia and longing in [him]” and a sense of well-being that “no human could sustain . . . for even a day.”[24] At different points during his initiation, Somé describes being visited by dwarf-like spirits called Kontombili who transmit messages and guide him into the spirit realm.  

In material and immaterial forms, spirits find direct and indirect, vocal and silent, ways to communicate and cause transformation in the material world. To further blur these boundaries, the recently departed dead regularly visit their living descendants in dreams—sometimes somehow they visit physically in person, especially when descendants are far away and unaware of the deceased having passed and the need to come home to perform burial rites.[25] The transformations inspired by these communications may be internal, such as those inspired by Ifá initiates relaying instruction to devotees or the contact between Somé and the “green lady” or when Somé communicated before he was born through his mother’s body. Or the transformations may be external, such as when spirits in Afro-Brazilian religions demand ritual offerings and moral reform during spirit incorporation through devotees’ bodies at ceremonies.[26] I turn to spirit incorporation in the next section. 

The term “spirit possession” and other terms associated with it in scholarship require examination, for these terms are commonly and problematically associated with Africana religions. I propose the term “spirit incorporation” and its occurrence as “induction of spirit incorporation,” terms far more accurate and useful than “spirit possession” or “possession” when describing dynamics in these unions of a material body with a spirit. Though common across Africa and the African diaspora, spirit incorporation is certainly not universal. Even in traditions where spirit incorporation is a prominent feature, it is not present in all rituals, and often it is completely absent. In the Yoruba worship of the òrìṣà, the famous deified king Ṣàngó is the deity most closely associated with spirit “possession,” and he has both possession priests and non-possession priests, priests who undergo spirit incorporation and those who do not. In fact, it is a taboo in the preeminent Yoruba tradition of Ifá divination for its initiates to become “possessed.” 

To categorize the range of states and phenomena associated with “spirit possession” or just “possession” without forcing wide-ranging experiences into different categories, scholars often use the term “altered states of consciousness.” At odds with emic perspectives from practitioners, scholarship seeks to “locat[e] the possession experience in the mind, and consequently mak[e] it a psychological event.” Recent scholarship demonstrates that spirit incorporation operates simultaneously across the mind and body, questioning whether the Cartesian binary is useful or even appropriate.[27] The lived experiences of practitioners demonstrate that spirit incorporation experiences involve a transformative interplay between inseparable but distinct material and immaterial levels of existence. 

Today, many scholars actively resist the term “spirit possession” due to its negative connotations and the history carried by the word “possession,” but the term “spirit possession” remains the most recognizable term for the English-speaking public. Practitioners and scholars alike prefer such terms as “incorporation,” “manifestation,” or “mediumship,” which are more descriptively accurate and reflect a greater sense of dignity toward practitioners and traditions. The terms manifestation or mediumship capture different aspects, but I use the term spirit incorporation because it articulates the union of a material body with a spirit. 

When induction into spirit incorporation occurs, the spirit does not violently “take possession” of a human body like in popular representations and horror films; however, the spirit does manifest its nature through the medium of a human body or the spirit incorporates itself into the body by merging its identities and actions with the incorporated body. The term possession reinforces a binary of self and other, a dichotomy many Africana cultures and religious traditions reject and actively work to move beyond. When the spirit is an ancestor or deity and is an integral part of the practitioner’s being and identity—biologically, cosmically, and otherwise—then, rather than using the term possession, it is far more accurate to describe this embodied encounter as manifesting a pre-existing nature or as the full incorporation of the spirit entity.  

Undergirding spirit incorporation is an understanding of the human being and the human body as inherently permeable and as open to other entities who may enter into or operate through the physical body. In modern Western thinking, there is a rigid boundary between a perceived other and a perceived self, aptly described by Charles Taylor’s concept of the “buffered self,” and that independent self is considered impervious to involuntary influence from outside forces like spirits.[28] Each Africana tradition articulates the permeable nature of human identity and physical bodies differently; sometimes that nature is articulated differently within the same tradition. Southern African sangomas function as spirit mediums when spirits enter their bodies, incorporating into and in them so that the spirits might communicate directly with the sangoma’s clients. The most common metaphor to describe spirit incorporation is a horse and rider. Anthropologist J. Lorand Matory articulates the way a deity “mounts” devotees—gùn in the Yoruba language—and controls their bodies in much the same way as an expert equestrian would a horse.[29] 

The potential separation between self and other further blurs in those traditions that conceptualize spirit incorporation not as the invasion of an outside spirit or force but as the inherent presence or sacred energy of a particular type that is already within a person. That presence or energy is activated, energized, or magnified in rituals or events that induce spirit incorporation.[30] In these instances, the spirit is always an integral part of the identity and the body of the devotee, but certain stimuli and ritual contexts bring this connection to the fore. 

In other cases, those undergoing incorporation lose consciousness and remember nothing of the period in which the spirit is present. In other cases still, those experiencing spirit incorporation remain partially aware and partially in control of their bodies. Documenting lived experiences of practitioners in an array of Afro-Brazilian religions, Bettina Schmidt explores how experiences differ across traditions and how different spirits register differently in the body.[31]  

The sensation was a strong heat, the sensation of heat and sleep at the same time. I felt a huge weight in my back and neck, and I began to feel my heart. The heart accelerated! And it was the sensation of two hearts beating inside me. There was a kind of force in my throat, a very strong energy in the throat, and I felt like it was about to speak.[32] 

The induction experience induces ecstasy, fear, exhaustion, and longing, and there is a general consensus that the ontological merging of human and spirit is at its rockiest at first, but the merging becomes smoother and more pleasant the deeper that a practitioner engages the practice.[33]  

Africana traditions that formally integrate spirit incorporation into their structure display a range of formal processes to induce them. Spirits are invited, only rarely are they forced or coerced. These processes bring the body into a state appropriate for the spirit to arrive. Music and drumming are the most common elements for inducing such experiences, also common are rhythmic dancing and singing, particularly in a communal setting.[34] The induction of spirit incorporation is a tangible ritual means to harness and direct cosmic force, concentrating it so that sensitive people respond in a radically transformative way.[35] Deliberate use of clothing, jewelry, dance movements, certain rhythms, ritual practice, moral dispositions, learned motor patterns, and knowledge of sacred history make a person increasingly more responsive to the cosmic force or nature of a particular entity, making more likely the induction of incorporation.[36] Many induction methods are kept secret so they are not misused, but I have witnessed people incorporate spirits without prior exposure to those spirits, and I have met people who report experiencing induction of spirit incorporation outside intentional ritual contexts. 

Scholars have attempted reductive explanations for spirit incorporation experiences, frequently citing drum rhythms, socio-political marginalization, diet, or mental health. Few of these explanations are accurate. Neurological, psychological, and sociological explanations as well as other outsider or etic explanatory models only partially account for the experiences, and many scholars have returned to emic models that they are able to utilize with greater explanatory success.[37]  

Scholarship on Afro-Brazilian religions contains a high number of reductive explanations. The first contributions to this literature came from Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, a Brazilian psychiatrist who conceptualized the centrality of spirit incorporation in African-derived religions as a public health concern and a psychological disorder.[38] Those who experience the induction of spirit incorporation on a regular basis resent prejudicial and reductive explanations.[39] Consider the emphasis on drums in these reductive arguments. Drums are indeed a common feature in ritual contexts that promote the experience of spirit incorporation, but not everyone who hears the same beats or feels the same rhythms experiences induction. Some ceremonies and settings in which spirit incorporation occurs have no drums, some even have no music.[40] 

While it is common for spirits to become incorporated in the material world as illness, natural phenomena, or even in practitioners’ bodies, many practitioners themselves, sometimes through trance states and dreams, travel to the immaterial spirit worlds. These voyages complement spirit incorporation, except here the practitioners move outward rather than incorporating something into themselves or working with inner forces. While descriptions are fantastic, these voyages are not considered purely mental experiences and visions; they also take place physically. 

Spirit worlds are similar to the everyday human world but operate differently. They often exist in or on the other side of water. Just as the beginning of life involves an existence in or a passage through water, passing through the spirit worlds and their associated waters also transforms voyagers. In the Kongo cosmology, the ancestral realm lies on the other side of the water and beneath the earth where ancestors are buried; it is the inverse of the living-human world—the ground is up and people walk upside down.[41] Across much of southern Africa, diviner-healers voyage into spirit worlds after they have been taken underwater by wind, snakes, animals, spirits, or ancestors who chose the practitioner for this role. Instead of traveling into the bush for initiation, these diviner-healers go to “a parallel dimension . . . [that] is similar to that on earth but is peaceful and free from suffering. After a period of time (hours, days, months or years) they [are] returned to the living as gifted healers, armed with medicines to heal the sick, and endowed with great powers of divination.”[42] In Niger, a Songhay sorcerer was ordered in a dream to walk into a river to visit an ancestral village located within it: “I went into the river, but I did not become wet. I followed a path of smooth white sand . . . I saw crocodiles and fishes, but whirlpools kept us separated.”[43] He eventually reached the village, encountered a large black spirit snake, and then he received several powerful esoteric materials that gave him new ritual abilities, but then “a wind caught [him] from behind and pushed [him] away from the village of the spirits. Soon [he] emerged from the river completely dry. A voice told [him] that [he] could return next year, but not before.”[44] The natural world, here a body of water, becomes a portal. Passing through that portal, the sorcerer is transformed, and then he can perceive and interact with spirits in ways normally impossible. 

Malidoma Patrice Somé describes several journeys into the spirit world during initiation. He remembers that, when he was a young child, a Kontomblé (singular of Kontombili, those dwarf-like spirits he encountered at various points) positioned in front of a spirit portal revealed itself to him. In the first voyage of Somé’s initiation, elders created and displayed a spirit portal made of violet light on a buffalo skin stretched between four men. Those elders described what that spirit world would look like. They also explained the bodily movements that initiates would have to make once they jumped into the portal and disappeared entirely from the human world. Somé describes becoming aware of his own presence in this parallel reality:  

I began to see light. At first it was an aurora borealis, shot with areas of dark and ones of extreme luminescence—rays of such intensity they made me think of the cosmos in expansion or a cosmogony in progress. The light was so powerful it would have fried my sight into blindness under ordinary circumstances, but somehow I was able to gaze at the skies of the underworld and survive.[45]  

Somé describes another spirit voyage in which he entered a pool of water and remained there for a whole day before emerging.[46] During this voyage, a Kontomblé guided him into the spirit world, which Somé describes as “not under our world and probably not above it either. It is a world all by itself. Where I was, nature was beautiful, much finer than in the world I had left behind.”[47] Somé witnessed his previous lives and had an epiphany in the midst of an intense experience: “The light we encounter on the road of death is our being in the act of coming home to itself . . . We leave the light to go back and experience the need for light, and thus come back to it anew.”[48] Somé brought a strange stone back from the spirit world, and it became a sacred ritual object for him, also a reminder of the different reality to which he had journeyed. 

In healing practices, the topic to which I turn in the next section, there are overlaps between cosmic force, spirit incorporation, spirit voyage, and trance. This overlap is exemplified by the hunter-gatherer San people in and around the Kalahari Desert, whose healers enter a kind of trance in which their souls “leave their bodies [and] travel to the world of spiritual beings.”[49] This is a kind of extracorporeal travel that takes place in communal rituals around a fire. In these rituals, the spiritual energy called num, which resides in humans’ stomachs but is present in all things, is concentrated and heightened by ritual fire, songs, and dance. Thus stimulated, the num rises up the spines of the healers, puts them into trance, and even allows them to perform superhuman feats. Once in this state, San healers interact directly with spirits that include lost souls of community members, angered ancestors, or a range of other spirits. These entities confer critical information, perform healing work, and create balance in the human realm—health being a reflection of a well-ordered being that is in balance. San healers’ bodies move about and remain in the same physical space as the rest of the gathered community, but their immaterial selves travel. The San voyagers’ actions in the parallel immaterial reality have tangible effects in the physical world, achieving good health for the sick and removing dangerous arrows shot into human bodies by the dead.[50] 

Healing is the most common transformative experience in Africana religions. Usually, illness is personified as its own spiritual force, conceptualized as the natural result of relational imbalances among and between humans and other immaterial beings. On other occasions, illness is sent by specific spiritual entities for their own purposes, what scholars sometimes identify as “cults of affliction.” Within traditional African cosmologies, illness is not merely a negative breakdown in the body or the mind’s biological system that must be fixed but constitutes an important message or presence serving a function for the individual and the community. 

For the Fon people of Bénin Republic, the vodun or “deity” named Sakpata is greatly feared because he governs all epidemics, most iconically smallpox, and he afflicts people when they have violated a taboo or aroused his displeasure. Smallpox illness, in this way, constitutes an encounter with Sakpata, communicating his presence and will. This may lead to an even more intimate encounter and relationship, and sometimes it leads to formal initiation into Sakpata’s tradition. Once a person contracts smallpox, only Sakpata’s priests can treat the illness using specific ritual processes and their knowledge of indigenous pharmacopeia to resolve potentially fatal encounters with the vodun.[51] As a form of initial initiation, Sakpata might nonfatally afflict a person to indicate the vodun has chosen the afflicted to enter a privileged and consecrated relationship with him.  

Illness can be its own active force, an agent working upon the afflicted person. The diviner who trained me in Ifá divination went blind as a young man because it was his destiny to be a powerful diviner and he was not doing so. He had never studied Ifá because his father wanted him to follow a different path. When no medical cure for his blindness could be found and a Muslim diviner revealed that my mentor had to become initiated into Ifá, his father finally relented and my teacher regained his sight after beginning his Ifá training. My mentor had not knowingly violated any taboo, but by not following the path of a diviner, he was out of alignment with his own personal destiny and cosmic identity. In accordance with Yoruba cosmology, his blindness served as a positive barrier stopping him from going down the wrong path and eventually prompting his father to seek ritual help that put his son back in right relationship with his own destiny, his tutelary deity, and ultimately with the countless people that he would help, heal, and teach, including me!  

Illness pushes and motivates those it afflicts to move toward establishing and participating in some type of cosmic balance, but frequently illness is not just a sign or symptom of the lack of balance. Often illness and healing create and maintain relationships with spirits. The American journalist Andrew Solomon traveled to Dakar, Senegal, conducting research about the ways different cultures approach the issue of depression. A Senegalese specialist recognized what he personally needed, and Solomon underwent an intense ndeup healing ritual that included communal drumming and dancing. The ritual culminated when Solomon verbally addressed the spirits afflicting him: “Spirits, leave me alone to complete the business of my life and know that I will never forget you.”[52] Despite being skeptical, Solomon continues to admit that he has never forgotten the ritual, the spirits he encountered, and the realization that he felt much better when the ndeup concluded.[53] Solomon’s case and his depression constitutes less a biological or psychological disorder to be resolved than an embodied encounter with spirits with whom he needed to enter into a more productive relationship: The spirits were not an enemy to be vanquished or banished from his body. 

At times, Africana religions distinguish between “curing” and “healing.” Curing rids the body of an illness, restoring it to an archetypal state of health. Healing, instead, places the whole person into a state of cosmic balance, often involving a person making peace with an injury or illness. Mary Ann Clark describes the difference between the two in Cuban Santería:  

While a cure can be claimed only when the patient has been returned to some assumed ideal human condition free of disease and its complications, healing ranges over the whole physical, psychological, and spiritual landscape in an attempt to bring the patient into a balanced relationship with himself and his environment. A client may be considered healed when he or she makes peace with the physical, mental, or spiritual affliction, even though a cure has not been effected.[54] 

Western medicine is oriented toward curing, but many Africana systems treat affliction as an important transformative state in which something important must be gained. Adherents recognize that the state of affliction should perhaps never completely leave the patient or be fully resolved. Accordingly, smallpox and the visible marks that smallpox leaves on the body are a symbol uniting a devotee and the vodun Sakpata. In Yoruba cosmology, those born with divergent bodies and abilities do not need to rectify their lived experience, for they have been formed as they are by the creation deity Òrìṣàńlá.[55]  They have a unique experience and ability to work with Òrìṣàńlá’s àṣe or cosmic force, provided they are taught to orient themselves appropriately. These supposedly divergent individuals and their experiences are of benefit to themselves and their communities; divergence is neither disorder nor disability. 

Good health is communal. An individual’s affliction may not necessarily be the result of that individual’s transgressions but the result of transgressions by a different member of that community or transgressions made by the whole community. Mental illness in the West is conceptualized as an individual problem, but those experiencing mental illness in traditional African societies may be considered to undergo afflictive experiences for the benefit of the collective. A mental health “crisis is seen as the result of an intense interaction with the Other World, making the person think and act crazily” to the rest of society, but if addressed within the proper communal context, the purpose of interacting with the immaterial world finds its desired expression.[56]  

The Ndembu of Zambia articulate that spirits, particularly ancestors, “catch” and afflict individuals, revealing social breakdown on or across existential levels of the human and spirit worlds, the resolution of this breakdown requires a communal ritual that dramatizes and resolves relational conflict or transgression. The arts—particularly music (primarily drumming) but also dancing, clothing, various forms of medicine, and bodily movements—channel cosmic force to transform people, restoring balance, ideally long-term balance, through the effective use of cosmic and ritual symbols in these communal rites.[57]  

In her Experiencing Ritual (1992), Edith Turner expands her husband Victor Turner’s framework of social drama by further embracing Ndembu understandings of illness as a spiritual reality and irreducible experience. She describes participating in the ihamba healing rituals of the Ndembu community, and on more than one occasion, Turner was surprised to see physically the “spirit tooth” that the collective ritual was designed to extract from afflicted people’s bodies. At the climax of one ihamba ceremony, “[She] saw with [her] own eyes a giant thing emerging out of the flesh of her back. This thing was a large grey blob about six inches across, a deep grey opaque thing emerging as a sphere. [She] was amazed.”[58] The ihamba transformative healing process requires a well-ordered uniting of living humans in community and the uniting of the material and immaterial realms. Breakdowns in these relationships had taken a real physical manifestation in the illness of the woman. Unifying these relationships in ritual allowed the affliction to manifest as a physical substance, and that physical thing could be manipulated to resolve its dangers. That manifestation also confirms to the community that these levels of existence do interact and must interact. 

It is common for scholars and laypeople to conceptualize the religious traditions of Africa in three categories: Indigenous, Muslim, and Christian. However, the two dominant Abrahamic traditions are deeply integrated in African cultures and cosmologies, making it difficult to discern and delineate their separation from the “Indigenous.”[59] Modernizing and reformist Christian and Muslim groups denounce resonances with Indigenous religious traditions, but these resonances are ubiquitous and considered perfectly orthodox by many African Christian and Muslim religious leaders.  

Oludamini Ogunnaike’s Deep Knowledge (2020) analyzes and compares epistemology and experiential knowledge in Ifá and Tijānī Sufism in West Africa, revealing striking similarities between Ifá initiation and the Tijānī ritual of tarbiya, an intense seclusion in which participants directly experience knowledge of God. Within a particular branch of the Tijānī tariqa, namely the Sufi brotherhood founded by Senegalese Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse, highly focused ritual invocations in tarbiya are the defining feature making it possible for a previously unimaginable number of people from all walks of life to have an intense and direct experience of ma‘rifah, “the direct, existential knowledge of the Real/the Truth (al-Ḥaqq), achieved through annihilation (fanā’) and subsistence (baqā’) in Him.”[60] One Tijānī experienced tarbiya as “like jumper cables, you get connected and you come to life . . . it’s an experience of life. I don’t know how I can explain it . . . you can’t explain it, it’s something that you live . . . when you have done tarbiya, you see Him [God], you sense Him! You know that He is everywhere, in every place, in everything.”[61] He likened tarbiya to a “satellite decoder” to turn the confusing static of life into clear pictures and sound. Resonant with Somé’s initiatory epiphany, another Tijānī stressed that tarbiya resolves the important existential questions of life such as “Who am I?” or “Who is God?” The resolution is through a process of a “drop of water becoming completely fused in the ocean. The ocean is God, an ocean of light, or an ocean of water.”[62] 

In The Walking Qur’an (2014), Bilal Ware demonstrates that in West African traditional Islamic education the explicit purpose for memorizing the Qur’an was transforming human bodies into “walking Qur’ans” that are the physical embodiment of the Divine Word, experientially sanctifying the body and the whole person. Referring to the power of sound and rhythmic body movements, one former Qur’anic school student recalled that “bodies sway; the talibés [Qur’anic school students] are possessed by the mysterious rhythm. Frantically reading, each one modifies according to his tastes the sacred text of which he understands nothing. Sacred music, the pious come to listen.”[63] Other learners experience “rushes of discursive or analytical understanding,” demonstrating that both the ritual and human body structure encounters with the sacred on spiritual, mental, and physical levels, levels that cannot be separated. 

The Islamic worldview, or its worldsense, parallels or resonates with a range of African religious traditions, including Indigenous traditions; sometimes these appear to bleed into one another. [64] In Mali, different societies are dedicated to working with jinn—spirits that can be good or evil, Muslim or non-Muslim—through drumming, incorporation, divination, and healing, including the Bamana djinifòli or Minianka jinèton.[65] A similar healing role is performed in the Bori spirit traditions of the Hausa of West Africa and the Zar societies in East Africa, especially Ethiopia and Sudan, which incorporate spirits of mixed ethnic and historical backgrounds.[66] The Moroccan Gnawa tradition, which has gained international fame through its music, works with jinn because “possession by these spirits can inflict a person with physical illness and misfortune until one accepts their power and appeases them with animal sacrifice, incense, music, and trance dancing.”[67] Many African spirits are Muslim themselves, including literal and symbolic Muslim ancestors. I have encountered multiple Yoruba Egúngún—masquerades manifesting ancestral spirits—whose spirits are practicing Muslims. One spirit was involved in the founding of a mosque, and it used to go there to pray, during its dancing and participation in the ritual activity of annual festivals.[68] Islam has no monopoly, however, over deep engagement with Indigenous African traditions. 

African articulations of Christianity demonstrate deep resonances with and participation in African transformative experiences. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, after the Catholic Church became established in the Kongo Kingdom, Catholic ritual items and practices were deeply integrated into religious practices common among the Kongolese. Catholic priests were regularly moved by Kongolese devotion, particularly Kongolese peoples’ desire to receive the Holy Sacraments. Parents clamored for their children to be baptized. One priest had “eyes bathed in tears” when he witnessed hundreds of people staying up all night before Christmas one year, singing praises to God as they eagerly awaited this experience.[69] 

In 1703 and 1704, a Kongolese prophetess named Apollonia Mafuta saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary, and she learned of Jesus’s anger at Kongolese wicked ways. This inspired her to lead a religio-political movement in the fractured kingdom. Shortly thereafter, a noblewoman named Dona Beatriz, or Kimpa Vita, fell deathly ill, but Saint Anthony of Padua, the thirteenth-century Franciscan saint, “entered her head,” effecting an ontological merger with her. She made a rapid recovery. Dona Beatriz undertook a mission to wage war against the evil exercise of sacred force (kindoki) throughout the kingdom. Dona Beatriz’s ecstatic experience of healing and incorporating Saint Anthony of Padua launched a wildly popular movement, earning comparisons to Joan of Arc, for she was tried as a heretic and executed by burning at the stake.[70] In fact, her mystical encounter and subsequent religious movement was so transformative on communal and societal levels that, even after her followers were scattered and many sold into slavery, her theology inspired the Haitian Revolution and Stono Rebellion in the United States.[71] Parallels with Indigenous African cosmologies are clear: contact with powerful spirit beings, divinely sanctioned illness/affliction, divinatory prophecy, and spirit incorporation. 

Despite its emphases on experiencing a liberatory break from the past, African Pentecostalism is deeply connected to Indigenous African cosmologies and worldsense. Regarding glossolalia (speaking in “tongues”), prophecy, healing, and charismatic gifts, African Pentecostals draw on Indigenous African experiences of the “spirit world,” even when they make a general distinction between the Holy Spirit and other “demonic” spirits from Indigenous traditions.[72] African Pentecostal ritual revolves around being “filled with the Spirit,” deliverance from “witchcraft,” and the use of cosmic power to effect change in an immaterial spiritual realm that in turn produces tangible experiences in the material world. African Pentecostalism is deeply ambivalent about illness and healing as well as relationships with ancestors that many recognize to be active in their lives and to influence them for better or worse through dreams and even through spirit incorporation.[73] 

Across the African continent and in the diaspora, perhaps the only universal transformative experience is death and transforming the deceased into ancestors—the latter is reserved for those who led exemplary lives and whose legacy is desired to be preserved by a society or lineage(s). The body dying is not the negation but the transformation of life. Ancestors can be biological but also metaphysical, metaphorical, or spiritual. Relationships with and communication with ancestors permeate Africana religious traditions, particularly the transformations featured in spirit incorporation, initiations, and countless ritual care-of-the-dead processes that include burial rites and ancestral masquerades. All these transformative rituals harmonize the flow of cosmic force between the linked material and immaterial worlds. Ancestors guide, bless, and heal, but sometimes ancestors cause illnesses and other problems. Translating the spirit of a deceased person to the ancestral realm is a process that takes time and involves a battery of rituals. For this reason, the deceased has a continued presence close to the body, creating a place and a temporal window to perform necessary rituals that prepare the deceased for the journey and also to rearticulate positive relationships between the living and the dead.  

The living honor the ancestors, and the ancestors benevolently intercede on behalf of the living; this reciprocal relationship undergirds highly expensive and elaborate rituals during African funerals. One of the most famous examples is the Ga funerals in Ghana that involve extensive dancing and music, professional mourners, and elaborate caskets personalized to reflect the life and preferences of the deceased. Malidoma Patrice Somé gives a lengthy account of the multi-day funeral for his grandfather, including preparing his grandfather for his journey to the ancestral realm. These rituals allowed his grandfather to give final instructions for his lineage in an altered voice but from his own mouth (the mouth of his deceased body) before undertaking his journey toward ancestorhood. Sending his grandfather off entailed drumming, dancing, intense expressions of emotion, demonstrations of esoteric power, and visits from the Kontombili spirits.[74] 

Graves are important ritual sites for contact across the material and immaterial divide. Among the Ndebele of Zimbabwe, “If the correct funeral rites are not observed,” then proper transition into the ancestral world cannot take place, and “the deceased may come back to trouble the living relatives or may refuse to come back to look after the family as an ancestor.”[75] As with many other African societies, the Ndebele deceased are buried close to their homes because their material remains maintain an ontological link to the now-immaterial deceased. Also at gravesites, the Ndebele perform spirit-calling ceremonies called umbuyiso that invoke ancestors and their protection in a manner adapted for Christian contexts.[76]

The need to keep the dead close causes anxiety when a person does not die at home, and the Ndebele have developed elaborate ritual processes for the deceased to take a double journey: first home and then to the ancestral world.[77] Somé’s own grandfather died outside his home, and his community performed a ritual with a hyena’s tail that caused the corpse to rise and walk home so that necessary rituals could be prepared.[78] It is not only the material body of the deceased that maintains an effective ritual function, but, by extension, the very dirt at a grave site carries some of the cosmic force of the ancestral world, granting extensive uses for grave soil in rituals of healing, protection, and cursing in Kongolese traditions and Kongo-derived traditions in the Americas, such as Haitian Vodou, Cuban Palo Mayombe, American Hoodoo, and the Anglo-Caribbean Obeah. 

Not all who die are able to become ancestors. Those who become ancestors represent the full notion of lineage and community, for they remain an integral part of family life. At times, ancestors even reincarnate themselves—as Somé did, having been his grandfather’s elder brother Birifor in his previous life. Olupona notes that to become an ancestor “[they] must have died a ‘good death,’ one not caused by incurable sickness (such as leprosy, smallpox, or AIDS), an accident, or violence,” and they “must transition at an old age, signifying wisdom and experience.”[79] Ancestors may visit their descendants in dreams and visions, and some deceased, like Somé’s grandfather mentioned earlier, may physically return to their home.  

The distinction between ancestors and deceased who are not ancestors is not always clear.  William Bascom recorded accounts of deceased Yoruba individuals traveling to relatives living in other cities, speaking with them, and indicating that a death had taken place in the family so they could come home. Some of these deceased are able to marry, have children, and trade in the market. In other cases, a part of an ancestor’s soul called a “shadow” can be felt by the living when “someone seems to be standing with you in a room at night and you cannot see him, but you feel a chill;” however, for some reason, in this case, the deceased cannot speak with a person who already knows about the death.[80]  

The centrality of transformational experiences to Africana religious traditions continues to attract scholarly and increasingly popular attention, but another attractive central feature to Africana religious traditions is secrecy. Restrictions on what can be known by outsiders and what can be communicated to outsiders limits academic scholarship as well as limiting personal religious interest and engagement in these traditions. As I noted above, the experience-based nature of Africana traditions leads practitioners to limit disclosures carefully so they do not violate the sacrality of the secret.  

Strict taboos and mandated secrecy have long fascinated scholars. Many scholars misinterpret secrecy as obscurantism and associate it with “black magic” and sinister rituals, responses predictably colored by racial prejudice.[81] Other scholars study the rich world of secrecy from a functional perspective, exploring how secrecy creates identity and guides flows of power.[82] The lens of transformation and focusing on transformative experiences offers a holistic approach to the topic, an approach aligned more closely with insiders’ reflections on the nature, purpose, and experiential effects of secrecy. 

Ritual secrets considered more transformative are more closely guarded, especially initiatory experiences that are highly-individualized. Initiation experiences open practitioners to realities far out of the ordinary; therefore, taboos on discussing these experience protect their sanctity by refusing to explain or reduce them through intellectual frameworks and rational discourse, which constitute lower epistemological levels in Africana contexts.[83] Transcendent initiation experiences are some of the most transformative in Africana religions. 

Returning to Somé’s experiences, he pauses a recollection to state that “there are moments when no mind is capable of putting certain kinds of feelings into words, when speech is a meager instrument for communicating the reality of a situation. Words by their very nature, are limited, mere representations of the real, human-made pieces of utterances. Reality exists independently from language.”[84]  When not appropriate, speech is dangerous. “Words entrap meaning, torture it, slice it into pieces the way a butcher cuts the meat of a slaughtered animal and serves it to us. The speech of silence has profound respect for the integrity of meaning as an entity separate from language. In silence, meaning is no longer heard, but felt; and feeling is the best hearing, the best instrument for recording meaning.”[85] For this reason, Somé primarily speaks around his most transformational experience with the green lady and what she “told” him rather than him directly expounding on the topic. “It lives in [him] because it enjoys the privilege of secrecy. For [him] to disclose it would be to dishonor and diminish it. The power of nature exists in its silence. Human words cannot encode meaning because human language has access only to the shadow of meaning. The speech of the green lady was intended to stay alive in silence, so let it be.”[86] Since speech is an imperfect container of meaning or experience, the more transcendent the experience, the more resistant it is to being forced into words. 

Communicating such profoundly transformative experiences is potentially dangerous. When ethnomathematician Ron Eglash offered increasingly large sums of money to be told the secret of how Bamana sand diviners derive their mystical symbols, he was flatly refused until he produced a book that demonstrated a similar recursive pattern. Then the chief diviner ordered, “Show him what he wants!” Eglash’s apparent previous exposure to the secret indicated his ability to receive the knowledge without dangerous complications.[87] Mary Nooter underwent initiation into a Luba society in the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo, and the symbolic and enigmatic nature of the secret revealed to her made her realize that “it would be virtually impossible for [her] to ‘tell’ them.”[88] She could never tell the secrets revealed, could never get them into words even if she had wanted to do so. Tijānī Shaykh Māḥī Cissé asserted that “somethings you know, and you can describe how you know them, and other things you know, but you cannot describe how you know them. Some things we do not have the right to describe, because they are secret, and a secret revealed is not a secret.”[89] Phillip Peek observes a common theme uniting many ritual divination paraphernalia across Africa. Divination messages come from animals who tend to remain silent or who move slowly and deliberately: the fox, the turtle, the snail, the rabbit, the spider, the chameleon, and the mouse. Peek links silence to royal power and authority, but he critically identifies that “also demonstrating the value of nonverbal interaction, “silent” animals are used in these critical cross-world communications because their normal silence serves as a reminder of the wisdom of the quieter elder, the person of few, but important words.”[90] The silent animals convey meaning without reducing that meaning to verbal speech. 

In much the same way that the language of “Holy Mysteries” is invoked in Christian churches, some of the most central rituals and experiences offered by Africana traditions are so transformational that they defy limitation by words on one level and deny rational comprehension on another level. Somé’s uncle informed him after successful completion of his initiation, “You do not need to understand everything right away. You can’t. You have the rest of your life to figure out the meaning of what really went on . . . so don’t be in any hurry.”[91]  

Much can be said about the remarkable array of transformative experiences common across Africana traditions. There is not space in this entry to explore other prominent categories like dreams, “charms” or power objects, “witchcraft” or occult arts/sciences, and many, many more. Even with unlimited space, the powerful dynamics of secrecy mean there is always much more that cannot and should not be said. Arguably, the central feature of what can be said, as I have articulated in this entry, is the understanding of the material and immaterial world as deeply integrated, with cosmic force constantly flowing across, between, and through linked realms. Right relationship within and across the worlds allows the flow of cosmic force to promote life and well-being, but misalignment and ruptures in relationships cause the decay of cosmic order, resulting in chaos and disrupted life. Again, right order and cosmic balance are at the heart of Africana religiosity. 

African societies have developed elaborate ritual processes on personal and community levels to channel this flow in alignment with cosmic order. The common movement of various kinds of spirits into the human world and humans into the spirit worlds serve to bind and transform these dimensions of reality productively. From intensely personal transformational experiences in initiations or spirit incorporation to more routine rituals like divination or care for ancestors, this structured play with cosmic force alters and transforms material and immaterial reality. Africana religious traditions offer a central place to explore a bewildering array of transformational experiences and reflect a deep theory of experience and transformation applied to intense and mundane experiences. A calm and quiet acceptance of experience and cosmic force operating through experiences produces meaning and understanding in its own course.

[1]Here, “Africana religions” refers to religious traditions with significant roots in the African continent, including those primarily practiced within Africa and Afro-diasporic religions. When refering exclusively to traditions on the African continent, I will simply use the term “African.”

[2] Jacob Olupona offers perhaps the best and most accessible introduction to Indigenous African cosmologies and religions. African Religions: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013).

[3] Rowland Abiodun, “Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics: The Concept of Ase,” African Arts 27, no. 3 (1994): 68–78, 102–3.

[4] Dona Richards, “The Nyama of the Blacksmith: The Metaphysical Significance of Metallurgy in Africa,” Journal of Black Studies, 12, no. 2 (1981): 234.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Cornell University Press, 1969).

[7] Malidoma Patrice Somé, Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman (Tarcher, 1994).

[8] Margaret Thompson Drewal, Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency (Indiana University Press, 1992).

[9] Oludamini Ogunnaike, Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions (Penn State University Press, 2020), 267.

[10] Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes, In Sorcery’s Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger (University of Chicago Press, 1987), 53-55.

[11] Nii Quarkoopome, “Agbaa: Dangme Art and the Politics of Secrecy” in Secrecy: African Art That Conceals and Reveals, ed. Mary Nooter (Museum for African Art, 1993), 115.

[12] Of Water and the Spirit, 225.

[13] Ibid., 263.

[14] D .G. Coursey & Cecilia K. Coursey, “The New Yam Festivals of West Africa, ” Anthropos 66, no. 3-4 (1971): 444–84.

[15] Ayodeji Ogunnaike, Forms of Worship: How Oriṣa Devotion Became Religion in Nigeria and Brazil (Duke University Press 2026).

[16] These rituals can be adapted to fit the specific nature or destiny of an individual person, or they can be tailored for the needs of a particular group. Each ritual acts on a specific person or group to shape them in preparation for the cosmic roles they will occupy once the initiation is complete. Or, each ritual gives the initiates particular experiences on which to reflect and upon which they will continue to draw throughout their lives, allowing the same experience over time to reveal new meanings and knowledge. Drewal, Yoruba Ritual; Turner, Ritual Process.

[17] David Westerlund, “Spiritual Beings as Agents of Illness,” in African Spirituality: Forms Meanings and Expressions, ed. Jacob K. Olupona (Crossroad, 2000), 152-75.

[18] Ayodeji Ogunnaike, “Oyinbo Ọmọ Aṣogun Dere: An Analysis of Racial Injustice, Gun Violence, and Sexual Assault in America through a Traditional Yoruba Religious Perspective,” The Journal of Interreligious Studies 23, (2018): 104-5.

[19] Sangomas, additionally, “cast bones” as mechanistic divination, and they also receive messages and visions through dreams. David Cumes, “South African Indigenous Healing: How It Works,” Explore 9, no. 1 (2013): 58-65.

[20] Somé, Of Water and the Spirit, 20, 28.

[21] Ayodeji Ogunnaike, “The Tree That Centers the World: The Palm Tree as Yoruba Axis Mundi,” Africana Studies Review 6, no. 1 (2019): 43-58.

[22] Walter E.A. van Beek, “Footprints in the Future: Dogon Fox Divination,” Mande Studies 7 (2005): 69-88.

[23] E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande (Oxford University Press, 1937).

[24] Somé, Of Water and the Spirit, 222.

[25] William Bascom, “Yoruba Concepts of the Soul,” in Men and Cultures: Select Papers of the Fifth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, ed. Anthony F. C. Wallace, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), 402. In a different but related context, Somé’s grandfather died outside the home and a community ritual performed a caused the corpse to rise and walk home for the proper burial customs. Somé, Of Water and the Spirit, 46-47.

[26] Kelly Hayes, Holy Harlots: Femininity, Sexuality, and Black Magic in Brazil, (University of California Press, 2011); Jim Wafer, The Taste of Blood: Spirit Possession in Brazilian Candomblé (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).

[27] Bettina Schmidt, “Spirit Possession in Brazil: The Perception of the (Possessed) Body, Anthropos 109, no. 1 (2014): 141. 

[28] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007). 

[29] J. Lorand Matory, Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion (University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 

[30] Schmidt, Spirit Possession in Brazil. 

[31] Ibid. 

[32] Ibid., 139. 

[33] Within the context of Trinidadian Orisha, James Houk refers to this highly developed process as “enculturation.” Spirits, Blood, and Drums: The Orisha Religion in Trinidad (Temple University Press, 1995). 

[34] Paul Christopher Johnson, “Spirit Incorporation in Candomblé,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Materiality, ed. Vasudha Narayanan (Wiley Blackwell, 2020). Somé refers to drums as a boat that can carry a person to another world, a fascinating word choice because it echoes descriptions of ritual drums in Haitian Vodou and Brazilian Candomblé. Of Water and the Spirit, 229. 

[35] Ulli Beier, A Year of Sacred Festivals in One Yoruba Town (Nigeria Magazine, 1959), 13. 

[36] Ayodeji Ogunnaike, “The Body in Yoruba Religion,” Center for the Study of World Religions, January 12, 2024, https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/news/2024/01/17/body-yoruba-religion-ayode…. [

37] Houk, Spirits, Blood and Drums; Schmidt, “Spirit Possession in Brazil”; Erlmann, “Trance and Music”. 

[38] Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, L’animisme fétichiste des nègres de Bahia: Dégénérescence et crime–Atavisme psychique et paranoïa (Reis & Companhia, 1900). 

[39] For example, not everyone with certain dietary limitations experiences spirit incorporation. In many cases, those who do not experience socio-political marginalization still experience spirit incorporation. See Houk, Spirits, Blood, and Drums and Veit Erlmann, “Trance and Music in the Hausa Bòorii Spirit Possession Cult in Niger.” Ethnomusicology 26, no. 1 (1982): 49–58 for examples. 

[40] Erlmann, “Trance and Music,” 50–53. 

[41] Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa: The BaKongo of Lower Zaire (University of Chicago Press, 1986), 42–62. 

[42] Penelope S. Bernard, “‘Living Water’ in Nguni Healing Traditions, South Africa,” Worldviews 17 (2013): 140. 

[43] Stoller and Olkes, In Sorcery’s Shadow, 164. 

[44] Ibid., 165. 

[45] Somé, Of Water and the Spirit, 242. 

[46] Ibid., 254–57. 

[47] Ibid., 273. 

[48] Ibid., 277. 

[49] Westerlund, “Spiritual Beings as Agents of Illness,” 156. 

[50] Ibid., 156–57. 

[51] For a description of this healing process and the position of Sakpata within the society of the precolonial Dahomey state, see Elisée Soumouni, “Disease, Religion and Medicine: Smallpox in Nineteenth-century Benin,” História Ciências Saúde-Manguinhos 19 (2012): 35–45. 

[52] Andrew Solomon, “Notes on an Exorcism,” in The Moth: 50 True Stories, ed. Catherine Burns (Hyperion, 2013), 26–34. 

[53] Ibid., 32. 

[54] Mary Ann Clark, Where Men Are Wives and Mothers Rule: Santería Ritual Practices and Their Gender Implications (University Press of Florida, 2005), 138. 

[55] Ayodeji Ogunnaike and Oludamini Ogunnaike, Yoruba Mythology: Stories of the Oriṣa from West Africa and the Diaspora, forthcoming, 43–45. 

[56] Malidoma Patrice Somé, The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding Life Purpose through Nature, Ritual, and Community (Tarcher, 1999), 97. 

[57] Victor Turner, Drums of Affliction: A Study of Religious Processes among the Ndembu of Zambia (Clarendon Press, 1968). 

[58] Edith Turner, Experiencing Ritual: A New Interpretation of African Healing (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 149. 

[59] This framework, first popularized by Ali Mazrui, can be misleading, for it suggests that African societies practiced a singular “traditional religion” before the arrival of Christianity and Islam. In fact, many if not most African societies were highly pluralistic before the introduction of Abrahamic religions. Ali Mazrui, The Africans: A Triple Heritage (BBC Publications, 1986). A. Ogunnaike, Forms of Worship. 

[60] O. Ogunnaike, Deep Knowledge, 188. 

[61] Ibid., 112–13. 

[62] Ibid., 109. 

[63] Rudolph Ware, The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 52. 

[64] The word worldsense is Oyewumi’s term to capture African societies’ conceptions of existence that transcend the Western emphasis on sight. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 3. 

[65] Adeline Masquelier, Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger (Duke University Press, 2001). 

[66] Janice Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zār Cult in Northern Sudan (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). 

[67] Cynthia Becker, “Hunters, Sufis, Soldiers, and Minstrels: The Diaspora Aesthetics of the Moroccan Gnawa,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, nos. 59–60 (2011): 135. 

[68] A. Ogunnaike, Forms of Worship. 

[69] John Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750,” The Journal of African History 25, no. 2 (1984): 166. 

[70] John Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), particularly chapter 5. 

[71] John Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,” The American Historical Review 96, no. 4 (1991): 1101–13; John Thornton, “‘I Am the Subject of the King of Congo’: African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History 4, no. 2 (1993): 181–214. 

[72] Allan Anderson, Spirit-Filled World: Religious Dis/Continuity in African Pentecostalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 

[73] Ibid., see chapter 4. 

[74] Of Water and the Spirit, 46–73. 

[75] Herbert Moyo, “The Ritualization of Death and Dying: The Journey from the Living Living to the Living Dead in African Religions,” in Death and Dying: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion, eds. Timothy Knepper, Lucy Bregman, and Mary Gottschalk (Springer Verlag, 2019), 116. 

[76] Ibid., 123. 

[77] Ibid., 119–21. 

[78] Somé, Of Water and the Spirit, 46–47. 

[79] Olupona, African Religions, 31. 

[80] Bascom, “Yoruba Concepts of the Soul,” 402. 

[81] Mary Nooter, “Secrecy: African Art That Conceals and Reveals,” African Arts 26, no. 1 (1993): 55. 

[82] See Johnson’s famous study of secrets in Brazilian Candomblé. Paul Christopher Johnson, Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé (Oxford University Press, 2022). 

[83] O. Ogunnaike, Deep Knowledge. 

[84] Somé, Of Water and the Spirit, 244. 

[85] Emphasis mine. Ibid., 272. 

[86] Ibid., 222. 

[87] Ron Eglash, “Bamana Sand Divination: Recursion in Ethnomathematics,” American Anthropologist 99, no. 1 (1997): 114. 

[88] Nooter, “Secrecy: African Art That Conceals and Reveals,” 57. 

[89] Ogunnaike, Deep Knowledge, 183. 

[90] Phillip Peek, “The Silent Voices of African Divination,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Summer/Autumn 2013, https://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/the-silent-voices-of-african-divinatio…;

[91] Emphasis mine. Somé, Of Water and the Spirit, 290.

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