Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

The sacred art traditions of sub-Saharan Africa constitute some of the most sophisticated sculptural achievements in human history — and some of the most systematically misrepresented. When Picasso and the Paris avant-garde encountered African masks in the early 20th century, they saw in them a formal boldness and psychological intensity that European academic art had lost, and they borrowed from them the stylistic revolution that became Cubism. What they did not fully understand was that these objects were not aesthetic artifacts in any modern sense: they were sacred objects, each with a specific ritual function, each the product of specialized artistic lineages whose makers were initiates as much as craftsmen, each encoding a theological and cosmological worldview of extraordinary sophistication. The bronze heads of Ife, the brass plaques of Benin, the terracotta figures of the Nok culture, the ivory masks of the Oba's court — these are not primitive art. They are the mature expr...

Let's begin with the thing that must be said first: almost everything you have been told about Vodou is wrong. The Hollywood Voodoo — dolls stuck with pins, zombies, sinister sorcerers serving some dark master — is a colonial invention. It was constructed carefully and deliberately by those who needed to justify the enslavement and subjugation of African peoples by making their spiritual traditions appear monstrous. It worked. It still works. The word "voodoo" has become a synonym for irrationality in the English language. The actual tradition is something entirely different. Vodou (the most widely accepted English spelling, derived from the Fon word vodun meaning "spirit" or "deity") is a living, complex, deeply sophisticated system of spiritual practice that developed among enslaved Africans in the Caribbean — primarily in what is now Haiti — as a synthesis of West African religious traditions (particularly from Dahomey and Yorubaland), Kongo-Ang...