Since the dawn of the human race, envoys have accompanied human beings with this message: « you are gods in the making » and showed them the path to achieve this, a path inscribed in each one.

Envoys like Jesus or Buddha transmitted their message orally but disciples subsequently put it in writing so that it would benefit as many people as possible.

  In Africa, this teaching remained oral, few written documents have reached us. But we still have enough elements, such as tales for example, to find this teaching and see that it is indeed identical to all the other sources.

ANIMISM

  This term was devalued by the first Christian missionaries who saw it as a form of paganism, witchcraft, etc.

While it is a philosophy of life, a way of living in harmony with the elements, close in this sense to current ecological concerns in the West. It is also a religion since there are three essential elements:

A belief in a creator God

Initiation and funeral rites

Ethics, standards of conduct

  Animism places at the top of its values ​​respect for life considered sacred because it is given by God.

A spirit, a breath, animates living beings, objects, protective spirits, all natural elements, stones, wind, water, fire, clouds…

It is not so much a question of faith as of lived experience where the quest for Truth is valued.

  Unlike the Christian God, the creative divinity is not close to man:

“He was the creator of the Cosmos, but now he rests to let the Spirits work.” Compare to Tsim Tsoum, withdrawal, in Judaism.

But this is a false problem because God actually rested on the seventh day as said in Genesis and sent the monads into the world in order to develop their potential as Jacob Böhme writes: « they must be confronted with a opponent to prove their worth. »

  In a Cathar text, Satan, a word which means adversary, asks God to entrust him with humanity which he will return to him in 7 days, the 7 days of creation.

Jan Van Rijckenborgh in the Egyptian Original Gnosis says the same thing: « God does not want an automaton at his service, that is why they were sent to Earth to plant their roots there and then rise to Heaven. »

Animism corresponds to the perception of an internal identity common to all existing things, humans and non-humans, and a physically distinct identity (animals, plants, objects, spirits, etc.)

It is not a belief but the experience that there are spirits with whom one can enter into communication. African religion is based on the belief in one God. Léopold Sédar Senghor, former president of Senegal, said « Fundamentally, the African is monotheist ». But God is so distant from his creatures that men worship intermediate powers closer to them.

(see cult of Saints in the Catholic Church. In India, there are only two temples dedicated to Brahma, the one God, while there are many temples dedicated to other manifestations resulting from Brahma)

ECOTHEOLOGY

  The Christian model of human domination over nature has led to environmental devastation. It is a response to the idea that God transcends nature. Catholic Christianity promotes the idea of ​​human domination over nature, treating nature as a tool to be used and even exploited for survival and prosperity.

For example, the torture of millions of animals for animal testing is justified if it is for our own good.

  The Bible tells us in Genesis that God gave the world to man who can dispose of it as he wishes, while the original text says that man is there to organize, protect and make nature prosper.

  Christian Ecotheology is nevertheless represented by certain figures such as Francis of Assisi whose links with animals are well known.

Isaac of Nineveh, Orthodox priest:

« I want a heart that burns with charity for the whole Earth, for men, for birds, for beasts, for demons, for all creatures. Pray also for animals and even for reptiles, worthy of them also of infinite pity. »

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin says that animals do not have a soul like human beings but that they are the direct expression of the Spirit. (They have a group soul).

Closer to us, Father Jean Martin, a Belgian priest, helps us discover, through animal communication, what the souls of animals call to him.

  Generally speaking, the Western world is today rediscovering the essence of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms thanks to authors such as the German forester Peter Wolhlleben who in his book « The Secret Life of Trees » describes the social life of trees .

And more and more people are becoming aware of the entire surface it covers with an invigorating element which neutralizes the unbreathable element produced by solar heat.

  This principle recalls the paradisiacal “green” which is a spiritual reality of which green here below is a manifestation at the material level.

Paradise is a symbolic garden whose greenery is eternal. It attenuates for us the rays of Divine Light too strong to be supported by our sight.

Words from Tierno Bokar, Malian Sufi:

“Brother in God, while waiting for the chance to enter the celestial garden of tomorrow, respect today the great garden that constitutes the plant kingdom. It is an allegory that God brings out of the earth for our instruction, our food”.

AFRICAN RELIGION

  African religion does not have the notion of original sin.

Neither servitude nor deliverance, neither yoke nor salvation, are the two negative polarities of African theology.

If the African man worships the Divinity, it is not for the glory of God but for his own development. Religion is essentially a function of the human element and its universe, the Earth. Man is the central element of a system to which he gives a centripetal orientation.

Mineral, plant, animal, spiritual world, it affirms its belonging to all these environments and its transcendent position in relation to them.

Birth is insufficient to assure the individual of his status as a human being. This is acquired gradually and is only fully achieved in old age. In India, there are three stages in life:

Youth, training period

Adulthood where you work and start a family

And old age devoted to spirituality

The Kalash are an original people of Pakistan. They say “We are born men, we must become human”.

  The African can use all the materials his environment offers him to express his ideas about God. Everything around it enjoys a kind of transparency that allows it to communicate with Heaven. These are revealing clues of the Divine.

  In initial times, Heaven is placed on Earth, hindering humans in their growth or in their activities. Likewise, God once lived with men and then he resolved to move away.

It is not a fall as in Christianity but a distance which allows a dialogue, a communication between these realities.

  The relationships between the Divinity and men can only logically exist on condition of admitting the interval between the creator and the created being. Religion is communication (from the Latin religare which means to connect).

  The era of man’s religiosity is not the heavenly time when God lived in the village of earthlings but the time after when God had lost his earthly and human characteristics to live far from man.

In African mysticism, the intensity of religious emotion is directly proportional to the feeling of distance that the human soul experiences from God. As indicated previously, Indians prefer to trust nearby Gods rather than Brahma, the creator who is too far away from their daily lives.

  The human adventure has a freedom of movement that it could never have if the creator “hugs” his creature too closely.

The African aspires to become God but he never leaves his human condition. He does not ascend to Heaven to enjoy the beatific vision in peace. Rather, he forces God to return to Earth, to get closer to him again, to descend upon him to deify him. Thus the favorite place of the beatific vision of the African remains the Earth.

  It is thanks to the valorization of the inner man that the human being rises beyond his natural limits and accesses the dimensions of the Gods. He explores his secret being in depth through a science of the soul.

This involves a total transformation of the personality (such a state of consciousness, such a state of life) which is achieved during initiations marked by the death of the old man and the resurrection of a new being.

  The tendency of African religion is to maintain close contact with the cosmos. The African faithful does not isolate himself from nature; this must act without intermediary on those who participate in the mysteries.

The Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the Earth, Fauna and Flora directly exert their influence on humans in prayer.

PLACES OF WORSHIP

  This is why the idea of ​​a temple as a building of worship is foreign to the African faithful. In almost constant communion with nature, it is in it that he will seek to achieve harmony with the Divinity, therefore that he will establish his places of worship.

  For example, water: springs, rivers, lakes, constitute the great aquatic temples. The source is linked to the notion of rebirth and resurrection. Still water is associated with the origin and creation of man and the world. The banks of water reservoirs accommodate prayers concerning the return to the origins. The rites have the theme of death and resurrection.

  The Earth is the symmetrical equivalent of the Sky. As such, it is ideally suited to constitute a place of prayer. It is nourishing power and place of burial. It grows and preserves; it unites in itself life and death. The Earth is believed to have given birth to the first human beings (created with the silt of the earth). We know that life on Earth was born in marshes, the different incarnations of Vishnu, his Avatars, range from water to earth to human beings.

The mountain is considered a place related to the sky, it is therefore ideal for constituting a temple. Symbol of royalty.

In a cave, man returns to the bosom of the earth in order to renew himself and be reborn. These are places of initiation whose fundamental theme is death and resurrection. We access the interior of the earth conceived as a matrix in which the human being nestles, through a movement of involution, to reappear like a renewed newborn, at the beginning of his spiritual life.

  The crossroads represents the God-point, a phase of creation where the Divinity itself was still only a dimensionless being within a universe deprived of coordinates. Thus this place constitutes for the Bambaras a temple in relation to being in its concentrated form, in its aspect of totality.

  The groves are the favorite places of worship of African religion. Generally, the sacred grove is formed by an enclosure of thorns of the acacia genus crossed in an inextricable tangle.

In its center, a clear space which is accessed by a path carved into the living wall. Sacred trees can be found there.

 The thorns represent the difficulty, the darkness which the neophyte’s intelligence encounters before gradually penetrating knowledge.

The inner enlightenment represents the culmination of the path of knowledge: the sky, the abode of pure souls, the holy space.

  Fire: the hearth in every house is a place of worship, the soul of the home.

THE INITIATION

  African initiation is intended to be a sort of sacrament which, after a symbolic death of the novice, is likely to grant him resurrection and a new life. This corresponds to the idea of ​​renewal of the human being who, thanks to this symbolic trauma, strips away the « old man » that he was to transform into a « new man » corresponding to his spiritual state of initiate.

  The final goal of education is to lead man from his primitive state of animality to that of perfect social unity, in other words, to realize Man. Among the Bambaras, candidates for the secret society of Koré are killed on the first day by means of a symbolic gesture: their throats are touched with 2 knives, one made of iron, the other made of wood. From this ritual and for a period of 15 days, the neophytes no longer return home.

Seclusion symbolizes the life of the corpse in the grave and also the waiting for the fetus in the maternal womb. It is a period of training and transformation during which postulants must acquire a taste for knowledge (Gnosis) and wisdom which will allow them to detach themselves from earthly things and orient themselves towards the life of God.

(Activity of the three sanctuaries Head, Heart, Pelvis)

  An identical element characterizes all initiations among the different ethnic groups: the awareness that only knowledge frees the human being from the embraces of matter and allows him to rise above the ordinary conditions of existence.

  Lucifer is the « Bearer of Light », he is present in the world to bring Knowledge of the divine which leads to liberation towards the Original Kingdom.

Likewise, Prometheus came to bring Divine Light to humans and for this reason found himself chained to the rock of matter until he was freed by Hercules during his wanderings. This is the role that every human being must fulfill.

Practically, the passage through knowledge does not admit of exception on the entire black continent because it constitutes the true title of nobility of the African.

  In the African mentality there is a close correspondence between man and the world: these two entities are like two mirrors placed face to face which reflect their reciprocal images.

Man is a Microcosm which reflects the big world, the Macrocosm, and this in turn reflects man.

Through initiation, man becomes a living Temple of the invisible.

  Human beings are in search of a kind of deliverance capable of transfiguring their earthly condition. The African is not content to beg forgiveness or help from the Divinity, he aspires to contact with his God, he aspires to become the other himself. However, he wants to keep his status as a man and live his life as an earthling.

The duality between the soul and the body is keenly felt by the African who attributes to one the characteristics of permanence and continuity and to the other alteration and becoming. The importance given to the body must diminish in favor of the soul.

Self-knowledge, n’domo, leads to knowledge of God, Korah.

Korah is at the top of the edifice of knowledge. His teaching relates to the spiritualization and divinization of man, he makes the human being equal to God.

  The initiation of Korah has the mission of discovering the path to reach God which is a desire comparable to a voice buried in the soul; voice that human beings can and must bring forth for their ennoblement.

Initiation into Korah is a social obligation in order to maintain the harmony of humanity and the world.

We should not believe that the mysticism of Korah isolates the followers of the brotherhood from ordinary mortals and makes them lose their sense of concrete realities. On the contrary, it is the crowning achievement of a Bambara’s life.

Also, while knowing he was resurrected and transformed into God, he goes about his usual activities.

The mystical experience destroys nothing of the daily life of the ecstatic. It gives it a new dimension without which the perspective of humanity would be reduced to proportions of agonizing exiguity.

Self-control is the keystone of the entire African religious architecture. Power over oneself leads to self-esteem.

Legitimate pride is the very lively faith in the value of man, the awareness of the superiority of the human being in relation to the rest of creation.

Self-sacrifice appears in the mystical life during the self-giving of the follower who becomes a “wife” of God. For such is the paradox of African spirituality: man both affirms and denies himself. He asserts himself through the feeling of his own power and denies himself by giving himself.

The paradox is only apparent: the mystic dies to be resurrected. Death becomes a position of withdrawal in order to better conquer life.

You must die before you die in order to live forever.

 Death of the earthly ego and rebirth of the divine soul.

Life and teaching of Tierno Bokar Amadou Hampaté Bâ Editions du Seuil

African Religion, Spirituality and Thought Dominique Zahan Payot

The African Initiation Prince Birinda Les Editions du Prieuré

The Way to Christ Jacob Böhme Editions Hermétisme Chrétien

Listening to the Animal World Father Jean Martin Editions Le Temps Present

The Original Egyptian Gnosis Jan Van Rijckenborgh Rozekruis Pers

The Spirit, Soul and Body Saint Luke of Crimea Editions of the Sretensky Monastery

The Secret Life of Trees Peter Wohlleben Paperback

Cathar Writings René Nelli Editions du Rocher