Mysteries and Secrets of Voodoo, Santeria, and Obeah Read online

  A large lake seems to have occupied the site millions of years ago, a lake that was subjected to periodic depositions of volcanic ash. More recently — probably about half a million years ago — a small river cut its way through these successive volcanic deposits. From a contemporary scientific point of view this is an ideal situation, as it allows the artifacts found in the ash strata to be dated using modern radiometric techniques. Stone tools made from the local basalt and quartz date back well over 2.5 million years. These ancient toolmakers, Paranthropus boisei and Homo habilis, would almost certainly have practised an early form of magical religion — the earliest African roots, perhaps, of modern Santeria and similar religions.

  Blombos cave in Africa.

  A limestone cliff situated on the southern cape coast in South Africa contains the ancient and mysterious Blombos Cave. Nearly 100,000 years ago — still relatively modern by the standards of Olduvai — the inhabitants of the Blombos Cave were using jewellery made from nassarius shells. Biologically, the nassarius mollusc measures just over a centimetre across and can be found thriving in warm seas and coral reefs in most parts of the world. It has an oval shell and breathes via a siphon. Feeding mainly on dead and decaying organisms or other detritus matter, the nassarius can also be carnivorous.

  It is highly probable that nassarius shells were used as a simple form of currency or jewellery — perhaps both — by some of the earliest paleolithic people. They would almost certainly have had religious significance as well. The samples found in the Blombos Cave in South Africa are at least 75,000 years old, and other examples have been found in the Skhul Cave (known as the Cave of the Goats) on the side of Mount Carmel in Israel. Another sample turned up in Oued Djebbana in Algeria that dated to a similar period.

  Because examples of the shells of nassarius gibbosulus — to give the little marine gastropod its full scientific title — have been found at three different sites, it is reasonable to suggest that very early human beings were using them purposefully: as currency, as ornaments, as jewellery, and as magical and religious symbols. Careful archeological-chemical analysis of the sediment surrounding nassarius shells from the Skhul Cave placed them in the same strata as ten or twelve ancient sets of human remains going back perhaps as many as 140,000 years.

  University archeologists have suggested that the finds in and around the Skhul Cave provide evidence of cult and ritual burials, and of belief in an afterlife. Another Mount Carmel cave is known as the Tabun Cave — the Cave of the Oven. It could have been first occupied as many as half a million years ago. Remains show that the earliest inhabitants used hand axes made from flint and limestone for killing and preparing gazelles and wild cattle and for digging up the roots of plants. It is theorized that these hunter-gatherers may have indulged in sympathetic magic in the hope of a successful hunt. Other remains in the Tabun Cave date from the Mousterian culture, which flourished between 200,000 and 40,000 years ago. The Tabun Cave also contained the skeletal remains of a female buried in Neanderthal style, and there are archeologists who accept the possibility that Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals coexisted for a considerable time before the latter became extinct.

  The El-Wad Cave — the Cave of the Valley — provides more than a hundred burial sites from less than 20,000 years ago. The bodies were buried in the fetal position, often with their ornaments of bone or shell: further evidence of cult ritual and ideas about a future life.

  Remains from Olduvai, Blombos, Mount Carmel, and Oued Djebbana all point to the similarities between contemporary human beings and our earliest ancestors. The nassarius beads served much the same social, cultural, and psychological purposes that clothes, body adornments, and accessories do in our own sophisticated twenty-first century: they say things about the wearer. They proclaim leadership, group membership, status, sexuality, strength, ambition, ferocity, and power. They may be an invitation or a warning, a welcome or a challenge. They may say that the wearer is a man or woman with magical powers — a priest or priestess, a wizard or witch.

  Because of the great barrier of the Sahara, it is easy to forget that the green and fertile territories of Africa away to the south of that vast desert are an inseparable part of Egypt and the North African Mediterranean coast. For thousands of years, and perhaps up until as recently as five thousand years ago, the hot, dry, barren Sahara contained grass and trees as well as lakes and rivers. It was teeming with aquatic life as well as life on land.

  People of that period enjoyed these natural resources and amenities. Fish were taken from lakes and rivers. Sorghum and millet were grown, as was a type of wheat native to Africa. Cattle herding and pottery developed. Then — just as with threats of global warming today — the climate of the Saharan region began to change for the worse around 4000 BC: grass and woodland dried out into formidable and inhospitable desert.

  Some of the ancient Saharans fled to Egypt. Others retreated southwards. These refugees took their seeds, their animals, and their agricultural knowledge with them. They also took their ancient religious ideas and their beliefs about magic.

  Down from Mesopotamia came the secrets of using bronze, the art of writing like the Sumerians, and deep secrets of ancient Sumerian religion and magic.

  Early Egyptian government was administered by the families and trusted friends of the pharaoh. The biblical account of Joseph being put in charge of the Egyptian anti-famine measures, as second-in-command to the pharaoh, is in harmony with what archeologists and Egyptologists know of early administrative techniques there. As distance grew between the pharaohs and their people, the priests devised special religious rituals that were applicable to the divine autocratic pharaoh but not to anyone outside the highest ranks of his court and government. The Egyptian concept of an afterlife also seems to have been an exclusive preserve of pharaohs, nobles, and priests — not something for the ordinary citizens to look forward to.

  Egyptian science and technology made remarkable progress considering that they seem to have been severely handicapped by the idea that nature was controlled by capricious and unpredictable gods. Yet despite their inconsistency, these divinities gave a certain stability and order to the universe. Not surprisingly, these gods clung tenaciously to their secrets.

  It is worth giving a few moments of serious consideration here to the hypothesis that highly developed, technologically advanced aliens from elsewhere would endeavour to control a less advanced terrestrial human population by keeping the secrets of the controlling technology well away from any intrepid and independent-minded terrestrials. Egyptian religion also encompassed the belief that spirits could invade material objects and people, and these spirits were the generators both of illness and dream phenomena. This again corresponds to the biblical account of Joseph’s reputation and rise to power in ancient Egypt.

  Solar worship was another essential ingredient of this early Egyptian religion, which was preoccupied with myths purporting to explain how and why certain things had come into existence. For example, the sun god had climbed a mountain to rise above the primeval, chaotic waters and had then created everything from his mountaintop. Having made the other gods and then the flora and fauna that filled the earth, the sun god, known as Re or Ra, died in the west every evening and resurrected himself in the east every morning.

  As various pharaohs saw themselves as descendants or incarnations of Re they felt it necessary to keep their divinely royal bloodline separate from all others, so pharaohs frequently married their sisters.

  Mummification of the pharaoh became another ingredient of this early Afro-Egyptian religion. It was believed that as long as the dead pharaoh’s body remained more or less intact his spirit would retain the power to protect and guard his people.

  The story of Isis and Osiris became an extremely important part of ancient Egyptian religion and magic. Murdered by his jealous and evil brother Set, or Seth, Osiris’s mutilated body was thrown piece by piece into the Nile. His devoted wife, Isis, recovered the pieces, incurred the help
of the gods, and enabled Osiris to rule in the underworld as he had once ruled on earth. As an especially benign deity, and one with greater magical powers than most, Osiris benefited crops and taught humanity how to make agricultural tools and instruments. He became a much revered god of agriculture and fertility, while the evil Set became a god of sterility and barrenness. Osiris, who made the Nile flood, was the god of the prosperous, agricultural Nile valley, while Set was more or less exiled to the Saharan wilderness. The lovely and loving Isis was associated with happy and lasting marriage, and she was revered as a perfect goddess throughout Egypt. She also inspired weaving and the skill of grinding corn into flour.

  She and Osiris had a son, Horus the Falcon. He became the god of vengeance and tracked down evildoers.

  Of even greater significance to serious students of Egyptology is the wise and benign god Thoth, who was associated with the moon, just as Re was associated with the sun. Thoth was said to have been the scribe of the gods, the keeper and protector of all their magical secrets. He knew and recorded everything in the universe that was worth knowing.

  Horus the Egyptian god.

  The authors tend to agree with those historians and theologians who suggest that Thoth and Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes the thrice-blessed), upon whose awesome Emerald Tablets were written all the greatest and most powerful ancient secrets, were one and the same. Thoth and Hermes were also identified with Melchizedek, the Priest-King of Salem at the time of Abraham. Melchizedek was a being of immense power and was thought to be immortal, “having neither father nor mother, neither beginning of life, nor end of days.” Regardless of by which of his three names Thoth is most accurately known, his wife, Ma’at, was the goddess of ethics, morality, justice, and truth. Good Egyptians aspired to be like her. “To live as Ma’at” was an Egyptian ideal — to harm none and to benefit all.

  Any deep and worthwhile understanding of early African religion and magic is inseparable from the beliefs and practices of ancient Egypt — because so much of the sophisticated Egyptian belief system came, in its earliest form, from the surrounding areas of what is now referred to as sub-Saharan Africa.

  Egyptians revered and worshipped cats, largely because their war goddess was a lioness. Dead cats were respected and mummified. Bulls were venerated because of their great strength and fertility, and in one Egyptian magical ceremony, women who were hoping for children would strip and display themselves to the great “Bull of Bulls” in order to ensure their own fertility. There is almost certainly a connection between this Egyptian bull magic and the legend of the Minotaur that lived within the labyrinth on Crete. Pasiphae, the wife of King Minos, concealed herself inside a hollow model cow and was made pregnant by a sacred white bull. Their offspring became the Minotaur — part bull and part human — which was eventually slain by Theseus of Athens with help from Ariadne. The nexus between the Cretan Minotaur legend and the Egyptian fertility magic reveals the way that early religious-magical ideas and practices spread throughout the ancient world. It is also significant to note that when the Egyptian “Bull of Bulls” died, it was embalmed and mummified as though it had been a pharaoh — and a new bull was solemnly chosen as its replacement.

  But there was a great deal more to Egyptian-African magic and religion than rituals, incantations, and spells that sought power, wealth, or fertility. The importance of the just and fair Ma’at, Thoth’s consort, is an essential part of understanding the equation. At least some of this mysterious ancient magic and religion was concerned with ethics and morality. As time passed, and powerful new pharaohs established and then re-established peace, order, and justice in their Afro-Egyptian domains, there were writers of conscience who argued that what the gods really required of human beings was hard, honest work, contentment, and tolerance of others.

  One of the most controversial of the African religious mysteries concerns the Dogon people, who live in Mali, south of the River Niger, close to Bandiagara in the region known as Mopti. Although fewer than a million strong, the Dogon people have a very long and distinguished cultural history. It is one of their tragedies that they were frequent victims of slave traders, but that tragedy has meant that their knowledge of many ancient and mysterious things has been disseminated across the world.

  Dogon religion acknowledges a great ancestral spirit whom they refer to as Nommo. Under his care and guidance, they are basically a very happy and harmonious people. They are sometimes referred to by outsiders as the sewa people, because it is part of Dogon culture to greet friends and relatives with a question as to their health and welfare and always to be answered by the word sewa, which translates broadly as “Everything is fine, thanks for asking.”

  The magical-religious issue at the heart of the controversy over the Dogon is their apparently inexplicable knowledge of astronomy and cosmology. They put Sirius at the centre of the cosmos and refer to it as Po Tolo. According to Dogon theories, Sirius was the focal point from which the Milky Way galaxy came into being. Their thinkers describe the known universe as measurable, yet infinite, and they populate it with numerous yalu ulo, star systems with spiral patterns. In a similar way to western astrologers and the Persian magi, the Dogon believe that Sirius, Orion, and the Pleiades can exert a great influence not only over human lives but also over the whole of human history.

  From the development of the earliest humanoids in places like the Olduvai Gorge, through the Afro-Egyptian mysteries, and on to the strange, seemingly pre-emptive stellar knowledge preserved by the Dogon people, the origins and developments of magic and religion in Africa are very old and enigmatic. Are there really grounds for believing that someone — or something — from out there visited earth long ago, bringing awesome new knowledge from beyond the stars? Was it genetic engineering that created the Minotaur? Was Thoth (alias Hermes Trismegistus, alias Melchizedek) a highly advanced extraterrestrial alien whose knowledge was engraved on gleaming green tablets? Was there warfare between these godlike superbeings? Between Osiris and her hawklike son Horus on one side, and Set, her husband’s murderer, on the other?

  Almost every pantheon of the ancient religions had its heroes and villains: were they rivals for possession of this earth when our ancestors had nothing but flints with which to fight back? Were the “good” invaders the moral equivalent of Isis and Osiris, of Thoth, Ma’at, and Horus? Were Set and the other “evil” invaders mere land-grabbers who wanted to enslave our remote ancestors? To a man with Stone Age technology, anything much beyond that would have seemed like magic — and those who could control that technology would have seemed like gods to a paleolithic people.

  Minotaur, the bull-headed god.

  It may reasonably be assumed that the ancient origins of African magic and religion formed part of the culture of the pioneering peoples who once inhabited the Olduvai Gorge, who used nassarius gibbosulus in their rituals, and who might have made amazing discoveries via the intervention of extraterrestrial aliens.

  Neither can the rich possibilities of the existence of Atlantis and its hypothetical inhabitants be ignored. From submerged Atlantis to North Africa via the Pillars of Hercules is no long journey. What if that journey was made by Atlantean survivors of the deluge and inundation that destroyed their continent? Did they bring a technology that seemed like magic to the pre-desert inhabitants of the Sahara? Was Egyptian technology the child of Atlantean technology? Was it Atlantean astronomers who brought knowledge of cosmology in general, and of Sirius in particular, to the wise Dogon people?

  It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that African religion and magic originated many millennia ago — and far beyond this earth. How many of those vital, ancient secrets are still preserved and encoded today within what appear to be religious liturgy and ceremonials, and in magical spells, incantations, and enchantments?

  By a careful examination and analysis of Santeria and similar religions, and by tracing their convoluted historical pathways — which have sometimes converged and sometimes separated widely —
it should prove possible to find at least some of the deep and ancient secrets that form their common denominator.

  Chapter 2

  THE GODS OF PREHISTORIC AFRICA

  Although A number of traditional African gods and goddesses may be traceable for only a few centuries, the primary ideas from which they developed are much older, going back into the earliest dawn of human history. The mystery of their origins can be approached from seven different perspectives giving rise to a number of diverse theories.

  The first perspective accepts the possibility of visits to earth by highly intelligent extraterrestrial aliens who seemed magical and godlike to our distant ancestors. Like the well-known deities in the pantheons of Greece, Rome, and Scandinavia, these supposed extraterrestrials had their own particular characteristics and responsibilities. They also exhibited behavioural failings that were suspiciously similar to our familiar human weaknesses. A variant of this hypothesis is that the so-called gods were humanoids with superior powers — like those of the supposed extraterrestrials — but that these abnormal entities came from Atlantis or Lemuria, or even from vast labyrinthine caverns deep below the surface of the earth.

  This has led to a second theory put forward by some social psychologists who suggest that our earliest ancestors creatively imagined their gods as beings like themselves but with vast powers. The discreditable behaviour of certain pantheon members can then be understood in terms of what terrestrial human beings would like to do if only they had the power with which they credited their imaginary deities. This harmonizes with what James Frazer wrote in The Golden Bough: “Primitive man creates his gods in his own image.”