"WEIRD WILD STUFF"

(This entry’s title is a tribute to Johnny Carson’s immortal line.)

This entry is assigned to cover a wide range of “weird wild” religions, that is, “weird and wild” from my personal perspective, as I am mainly writing about these religions as transplanted from their respective native cultural milieux to America. I am sure that some of their American followers may find them edifying but I strongly doubt that this kind of cultural diversity is helpful to the American nation as a whole.

To be sure, the religions relegated to this entry all stress the outward ritualistic element, such as dance, etc., and are otherwise poor on philosophy, mystical introspection, and as I said before, the nation-based cultural element. Paganism is also included here, represented by its two kinds: natural and artificial, the latter may be also called neo-paganism.

Out of Africa (to America) come such things as Yoruba, which is by far the largest among the African traditional tribal religions. It was the principal religion of the large Yoruba nation states in Africa, which existed well before the beginning of the European colonization activities. Cohesive rituals, beliefs and organization were spread throughout the world of Yoruba, to an extent characteristic of nations and organized religions, not just of tribes. Incidentally, the generic word “indigenous” as applied to the religions of African nations is in all probability referring to Yoruba, or to something so similar that their further differentiation would hardly make any difference. By the same token, when I come across something rather unusual, such as the Kimbangui religion of about 10% of the population of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to the Time Almanac, I am reluctant to separate it from the other indigenous religions of Africa, even if it may not be a Yoruba strain of such beliefs. (After all, if we are allowed to talk of Hinduism as a group of Hindu religions, or of Chinese or Japanese, and so on, religions, the same can be done by us outsiders to the native religions of Africa as well.)

Yoruba being the greatest indigenous religion of Africa, there is a great variety of the so-called “Diasporic” African religions, practiced mainly in the Western hemisphere, among the Africans who retained much of their traditional culture and beliefs, but adapted to new environments. These include Santeria, Candomble, Vodoun, etc. Many of these Diasporic religions have a distinctive flavor of Christian influence. Adherents of African Diasporic religions typically have no real tribal affiliation. They are not necessarily African, or black, in their race and ethnicity, which, in my opinion, disinvests them of all residual legitimacy they may otherwise have arguably possessed.

Santeria (The Way of the Saints) is essentially a distinctive African way of worship, drawn into a symbiotic relationship with Catholicism. It started in Cuba, and for a long time was dismissed as a ghetto religion. A growing following which Santeria has developed in modern America should speak volumes about the state of established religions here. It is not without a reason too that primitive African ritualism is being pushed these days, along with Kwanzaa, on the African-American population by some enterprising white-skinned folks, which, however, should be discussed in a different section…

Candomble, which is considered by some to be the Brazilian version of Santeria, which originates with its Yoruba progenitor, is now practiced in several countries and has, perhaps, two million followers. Its name Candomble means “dance in honor of the gods,” which sums the whole thing up pretty accurately, and also exhaustively. So is the case with Vodoun. For the most part, this Voodoo (or Vodoun) is not an organized religion, but a form of African traditional religion, blended with Catholicism, practiced primarily in Haiti, Cuba and Benin.

In the Americas (especially the Caribbean, Brazil and the United States), there are a large number of people who practice some form of Yoruba Diasporic religion, especially Santeria and Vodoun. But even those of them who practice Yoruba more often than Catholicism, still prefer to identify themselves as… Catholic!!! What does that say about their culture and about their religion? I say, it shows the practitioners’ attitude to Catholicism: politically convenient, but spiritually dismissive.

There is a rather unfortunate term Animism in current circulation which applies as a broad classification and not as a singular religious identification. It covers thousands of distinct religious traditions, primarily the religious-cultural worldviews of peoples who have been grouped together in one category because they are pre-literate, such as millions of people in traditional Siberian shamanist cultures. I deplore the use of this term, however, because it is awfully confusing. In fact, the most famous use of the word animism belongs to the British scholar E. B. Tylor, whose spectacularly influential book Primitive Culture employs the term animism in the sense of the basic religious belief in the existence of spiritual beings, from the lowest level of primitive ancestral worship to the heights of monotheism. There is no reason other than to confuse or to be confused oneself, to keep using this term as applied to the lowest levels of spirituality only.

With regard to the religion called Spiritism by the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the religious umbrella of Paganism, currently including such “subreligious” forms as Wiccans, Druids, Sacred Ecologists, Odinists, Shamans, and Heathens, mostly deeped in superstition, whether authentic or feigned is another matter, we may give it all the better name, also in circulation, namely, Neo-Paganism. This term refers to the modern revivals of ancient ethnic and magical traditions, wizards, witches and all. To what incredibly frightening extent these weird and wild revivals have taken root in America has been amply demonstrated recently by the Pentagon’s decision to give the status of a legitimate religious preference, and therefore the status of a legitimate religion, to Paganism, recognizing its distinctive witchcrafter’s pentagram, familiar to us from the horror movies, like The Omen, as a perfectly lawful religious symbol…

It is very unfortunate that this “reality-show” of dissatisfaction with normal religions casts an unpleasantly dark shadow on the wonderful world of fairy-tale, such as the Harry Potter fantasy, for instance, and, perhaps, on the whole delightful and ever-refreshing folklore tradition, with its, yes, wizards, witches and all, by blurring the line between reality and fiction, literalness and allegory. There is already an alarming trend in film and TV infusing a disproportionately large quasi-realistic supernatural element into the viewing fare on a sub-artistic “virtual reality show” level. This deliberate push to erase the borderline between fantasy and reality, making the distinction increasingly ambiguous, dupes the society into accepting neo-paganism and voodoo as some kind of new reality, while dismissing classical folklore as too primitive and naïve for its newly acquired taste.

… Perhaps, one day all politically-correct societies will put a ban on the principal engine of human civilization, the metaphor… I shall not be surprised if that happens, as nothing surprises me anymore.