Nomad Codes

deities are not so much grotesque as rich with character, not so much parasitic as deeply and reciprocally bound up with the daily lives of their devotees. More importantly, they also serve as a window onto the unique metaphysical universe of West Africa and the black traditions that have shaped the New World. The almost “instinctive” sense of recoil many of us feel when confronted with West Africa’s more intense religious practices is itself a lingering afterimage of colonialism and its own narratives of savagery. The fact that modern people tend to hold simplistic images of precolonialist Africa—for example, imagining rustic villages where there were cosmopolitan city-states replete with bureaucrats, poets, and sewer systems—is only one indication of the lingering tendency to see Africa as the repository of the primitive, and therefore in need of “development.” Looking toward Africa, the first thing the West encounters is its own dark mirror.
    The images of West African spirituality that come most forcefully to mind in Western culture are images of ritual possession. Though still very much a performance, possession by the orisha is also a rather visceral fact, one that often seems to be triggered by particular drum patterns struck within the complex webs of polyrhythmic drumming that underlie these rituals. Haitians call these often jarring, rhythmically “dissonant” patterns cassés (or “breaks,” a term used in a similar musical sense in hip-hop). Possession may result from the cognitive dissonance of the cassé, as the alien cross-beat enters from another dimension and shakes up the rhythms of the everyday dance. At this point, the possessed person (usually a dancer; in Haitian parlance, the “horse” who is to be ridden) shakes, falls to the ground, rolls his or her eyes, perhaps froths at the mouth, and speaks in different voices. Once the incoming orisha is recognized by his or her words or mannerisms, the dancer is taken to a ritual room and costumed appropriately, and then proceeds to prophesy, harangue, ask for food or booze.
    I have been amazed by some vodoun rites I have seen in Haiti and Brooklyn, but even from photographs and film it is clear from the eyes of the possessed that a qualitatively different order of consciousness has momentarily annexed the everyday self. Whatever spiritual realm is accessed through these performances, it seems to be strengthened by interfacing with the “lower” traits of ordinary human personalities. Possession by the orisha thus concretizes spirit and ties it to the cycle of human ancestors and the rhythms of procreation, family, and social exchange. So too does blood sacrifice—the feeding of the orisha that so disturbs many observers—affirm the material dimension of spirit. After all, it is we humans who keep the gods who animate the spiritual world alive, and this spiritual feedback loop depends upon a process of mutual contract and exchange. Molly Ahye, a scholar of Trinidadian dance as well as an orisha worshiper, speaks about how one “must have the blood, which is a life force, which spirit lives on. You think that spirit doesn’t need sustenance, but spirit needs sustenance.” (Ahye admitted, however, that she did not kill animals herself.)
    Even if we cannot accept possession or animal sacrifice as legitimate spiritual practices, we err in seeing the orisha as evidence of simple animism, or superstition, or folk culture elevated to the level of gods. The orisha are highly evolved and intelligent archetypal patterns, and they work out metaphysical problems that lie at the heart of life. They compose a living and evolving network of forms and forces that, from certain angles anyway, resonates deeply with Western esoteric lore and the “perennial tradition.”
    Proof positive of this resonance lies in the Yoruba deity Eshu-Elegbara (or Eshu for short), the uncanny and sophisticated trickster who demanded of me this essay (a very similar figure, Legba, exists among the Fon in neighboring Benin). More than a well-hung culture hero (though he’s that too), Eshu is a divine mediator of fate and information, a keen linguist, a crafty metaphysician who rules the network that binds humans and gods. Eshu is a trickster not just because he fools people and creates chaos, but more profoundly because he escapes the very codes that he establishes. He gives the world the divination system of Ifa, but does not rule over its poetic prophecies,