Sacred and Metaphysical

Indigenous and African Religion from Earliest Times to 1800

Native American Religions

• 4-12 millions Amerinds north of the Rio Bravo del Norte in 1500.

• Over 550 discrete languages belonging to 9 language groups.

• Generalizations are difficult; it’s easier to show the ways in which indigenous beliefs and practices are different from Protestantism and Catholicism.

Views of Nature

• Europeans see nature as extending from inanimate objects to living entities, a composite whole.

• Indigenous people tended to see nature as inclusive of themselves and populated by a welter of living, mysterious entities including “other than human persons, often of mysterious powers and dispositions.” (Catharine Albanese)

• Human beings existed as a part of “nature” and in a set of relations with the different spirits in nature.

• What we think of as natural forces were imagined as anthropic or animal beings: Thunder Woman or Water Grandmother or the Great Hare

• Sacred and natural existed on a continuum.

Religious Geographies

• Kiowa Mythology: a boy playing with his seven sisters was “magically” turned into a bear and chased his sisters from their home in the black hills; they became the seven stars of the big dipper and a tree bear boy scarred became Devils Tower. It explained both the scattering of the Kiowa, the origins of the heavens, and reminded them of their homeland in the Black Hills.

Relgious Geography/Ecology

• One acknowledged the spirit of a harvested animal or plant.

• One oriented oneself to the land—including its features, to which powers were ascribed—paying especial attention to the cardinal directions.

• Season and month names were based on growing or hunting seasons.

• Disease and discord reflected a lack of relational balance or improper harmony with the cosmos.

Human-Animal Transformations

• Animals communicated with people and people and animals could assume one another’s forms.

• According to the Oglala, Wakan Tanka (great spirit) appeared as a wise woman, gave them the pipe and sacred ceremonies, turned into two different buffalo and disappeared over the hillside.

• Spirits communicated as animals in dreams.

Colorado’s Utes as Example

Ute’s Ecology

Wolf/Bear

Weasel

Mountain Lion

Center Earth Green, Gray, Blue

Upper Earth Yellow

EagleSkyWhite

Lower Earth Red

Rattlesnake BlackUnderworldThe Sea

So what?

• “Amerind peoples lived symbolically with nature at center and boundaries. They understood the world as one that answered personally to their needs and words and, in turn, perceived themselves and their societies as part of a sacred landscape. With correspondence as controlling metaphor, they sought their own versions of mastery and control through harmony in a universe of persons who were part of the natural world. Nature religion, if it lived in America at all, lived among Amerinds.” Catharine Albanese, Nature Religion in America: from the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (1990)

Sacred MountainVernal Equinox

Bear dance

Coyote/Turquoise

Autumnal Equinox

Pine Nut Dance

Spring Resources Camp

Winter Camp in Basins

Summer Hunting Camps

Autumn Pinyon and Hunting Camps

Summer Solstice/Sun Dance

Winter Solstice/Myth telling time

UTES IN COLORADO

The Cultural Landscape

• Linguistically and cultural related to the Soshoni (Kinsmen), the Paiutes (Water Utes) and the Commanche (Komats or Left-Handed Ones

• Place names reinforce Ute’s Cosmology: Sawatch—inside looking out; Wasatch—outside looking in.

• Sacred mountains served as centers of ritual and practical compasses for annual migrations.

They Met the English—the Algonkian

• 4 major groups: Narragansett, Massachusett, Wampanoag, Pequot.• Communal harmony and work patters were a function of their sense of

being connected with nature.• Creation myths—the Creator made them from trees or two virgins swam in

the ocean connect their view of their own origins to nature.• The Algonkian didn’t shoo crows away from corn because in their story of

the origins of agriculture, a crow brought them corn in one foot and beans in the other. Hence an animal (nature) brought them food (a natural product).

• Cautantowwit, the great god, lived in the southwest, from whence the warm winds of spring, summer, and harvest came.

• Manitou—Algonkian would cry “Manitou” at any excellent example of an animal species, meaning “it is a God,” meaning it had the spirit of Cautanowwit.

• People, animals, planets, and lesser deities could have Manitou.• Roger Wiliams cataloged 38 deities with Manitou and each of these was

oriented to place. • It was as if nature, in its various manifestations, eminated divine power. (I

stole this from the historian Neal Salisbury)

They Met the English—the Algonkian

• Rituals accompanied the hunt and the harvest, to acknowledge the gift of nature’s power for human benefit.

• Generosity, a cardinal virtue among the Algonkian, was likely an attempt to embody the bounty of nature.

• Death rituals including aligning bodies to the southwest, home of Cautantowwit.

The English meet the Algonkian

• Given the belief systems of Catholics and Protestants—accept my true beliefs or burn in hell—and the integrated beliefs of the Indigenous Peoples, the encounters occasioned by European imperialism were not simply a debate about the fine points of theology; Missionary enterprises by the Euros “posed a threat to the very survival of native American Society.” James P. Ronda

Varieties of Responses

• Acceptance of Xianity

• Incorporation of elements while rejecting the essence

• Reaffirmation of tradition and resistance to Xianity.

• In all of these responses, Indigenous Peoples critiqued the theologies that were thrust at them.

Examples

• Sin and Guilt were alien to indigenous people; they acknowledged wrong-doing but didn’t assign it eternal significance. Evil thoughts came from evil deeds and evil thoughts came from some source outside the individual.

• Because missionaries tended to use the “streets of gold” language, Indians thought heaven was irrelevant to their existence and the concept of hell was too toxic to contemplate while living life.

• Huron Indians decided that pictorial images of people writhing in hell were really Indians who had abandoned their traditional ways and were thus punished as traitors.

Examples

• Hurons first rejected Catholic baptism because they didn’t use enough water; then with the coming of small pox and Catholic priests administering baptism prior to extreme unction, the Hurons concluded that baptism caused smallpox.

• Missionaries prohibited converts from participating in traditional healing rituals conducted by shamans; hence, many Indians concluded that Missionaries brought disease and wanted to keep Indians from experiencing a cure.

Revitalization

• Where political autonomy was not threatened, Indians blended Xian symbols with their traditional rituals.

• One Huron reported an encounter with Iouskeha, the “master of the Earth.” He said: “I am the one the French wrongly call Jesus, but they do not know me.”

• Taos Pueblo Indians incorporated Santiago into their traditional feast days, while rejecting Dios, whom they dismissed as “the Mexican god.”

African Religions• The Continent is vast and the religions varied; further,

they have typically been described from the perspective of how they deviate from Catholicism or Protestantism.

• Like native Americans, nature plays a central role in religious thinking.

• “this is a religious universe. Nature in the broadest sense of the word is not an empty impersonal object or phenomenon: it is filled with religious significance ... God is seen in and behind these [natural] objects and phenomena: they are His creation, they manifest Him, they symbolize His being and presence... The invisible world presses hard upon the visible: one speaks to the other, and Africans "see" that invisible universe when they look at, hear or feel the visible and tangible world.” John Samuel Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (1969)

Natura rei

• Animating all is a lifeforce, power or energy permeating the whole universe. God is the Source and ultimate controller of this force; but the spirits have access to some of it. A few human beings have the knowledge and ability to tap, manipulate and use it, such as the medicine-men, witches, priests and rainmakers, some for the good and others for the ill of their communities . Mbiti.

Yoruba Creation Story

• “The oral traditions say that heaven was very near to the earth, so near that one could stretch up one's hand and touch it...There was a kind of Golden Age, or a Garden-of-Eden period. Then something happened, and a giddy, frustrating extensive space occurred between heaven and earth...One story is that a greedy person helped himself to too much food from heaven; another that a woman with a dirty hand touched the unsoiled face of heaven...The privilege of free intercourse, of man taking the bounty of heaven as he liked, disappeared” –E. Bolaji Idowu

Divination

• Rituals help one learn the future.

• Yoruba tossed cowry shells.

• Mbundu studied animal and plant behavior or the stars’ alignments.

• Ngombo was a medium who communicated with the spirit world for understanding of the cause of disease or a cure.

Islam

• The bulk of Africans kidnapped by greedy Euros and brought to the western Hemisphere came from Western Africa, which for 800 years prior, had been the scene of the struggles between Islamic elites and traditional commoners.

• Traditional African beliefs often contained Islamic syncretisms before they encountered Catholicism and Protestantism.

Dom Affonso, formerly Nzinga Myemba