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From black primordial nothing you get the red fire of life, kala, being, by that flame undiying which is change, will-to-be, the logic-of-the-fire, ka-lunga (which I call simply âdesireâ). Because kalunga underlies manifestation it is also a place, the world of the ancestors, of spirits; so in Afro-Brazilian traditions, the cemetery. Because kalunga is the unseen world that we can dive into and out of, itâs also portrayed as the wide boundless sea.
The cross-in-circle diagram below is the traditional representation; the horizontal line is the dividing line between life and death, the sun-world of science and matter, the moon-world of magic and poetry and myth. Desire is portrayed as V-shaped cones in the diagram, lines bringing from one part to the next.
The Dikenga, the crossed-circle cosmological diagram.
The sunrise-sunset movement from kala/fire/birth through tukula/maturity/blossoming down into luvemba/ancestry/death should be easily relatable to many other traditions. In opposition to coloniser (Hindu-Buddhist-Euro) thought, tho, I would like to draw attention that the holy dynamics of the sun-wheel arenât meant to be cancelled or broken out of; life isnât to be denied, itâs an affirmation; the journey isnât into an eternal unchanging onenessâŚ
âŚbut exactly the opposite: expanding farther and farther outwards, finding newer and newer forms of experience, diversifying, multiplying, rolling and vibing and rolling and vibing forever, from rose to skull and from skull to rose again and again amen.
Human beings are beings-of-life-death-life, we are generated by the âroll of historyâ of the ancestors' life and unroll our own particular rolls, which upon death cross the line back into pure spirit; becoming an ancestor is to become again a story, a vibration-without-body, a coiled roll of potential as you were before birth. By contrast, embodied life is superposed vibes: the vibrations of the ancestral springs unrolling along/syncing with the animal-body vibrations.
(You can also explore the kalunga before death, of course; that's variously called âimaginationâ, and âdreamingâ, and âtheoryâ, and âartâ, and âDMTâ. Thatâs the vertical line.)
Crucially, crossing the threshold back into the underworld doesnât result in the loss of inviduality, but in the expansion of it. When you become an ancestor youâre a distinct voice, ~as well as~ the voice of the collective; like all voices a vibration, which will refract, diffuse, sync or interfere with the living(-dying-living) community. Youâll be a positive influence if you unrolled your own particular life-roll without knots, if you did what you made yourself be *for* (when you made yourself be you), if you picked a good path and managed to unfold it. But there are bad ancestors too, stuck into damaging patterns and unresolved knots, path-blockers, order-givers, border-makers; there are fash spirits, and they need banishing. A very important part of ancestor worship is to acknowledge, recognise, and reject the logic (lunga) of our bad ancestors, for example through restoration of ancestral debt.
(Mu kânda ka mukadi mfumu, ka mukadi nânânga, âin community there is no space for order-givers, no space for slavesâ; babo mfumu na mfumu, babo ngânga na ngânga, âeveryone is a master and nothing else, everyone is an artist/great one/expert and nothing else.â)
That you can die and live forever, and at the same time be reborn, and *at the same time* continue to be an ancestor, to manifest in other peopleâs bodies (multiple simultaneously, even), and again at the same time, be very definitely dead and gone forever beneath the bottomless sea, is because the notion of identity in Bantu thought is a lot more sophisticated than the eternal-individual-soul model of Christianity, or the merging-back-into-oneness model of Indo-European mysticism, or the consciousness-equals-brain model of physicalism. You're not a piece of Daddy's lifepower suffused into mud, or an objective observer detached from the objects; you're a particular locus of vibes, who interacts all the time, permeably, with all the other vibes around you, both above and below the sea, the waves coming right now as well as the resonating coils of past eternal. This is why the notion of âancestryâ has nothing to do with blood or racialist worldviews, and at the same time cultural identity and roots do matter. Your ancestors are, by definition, all the vibes that make *your* vibes vibe; the land and community you were born in, yes, but also the ones you come to, whoever took care of you, which influences you chose to take in, or you got in you without noticing. It follows that immigration and cultural contact and found families *add* ancestry; learning from others is a good thing actually, not âappropriationâ (except when itâs actually appropriation).
This is why my religion, umbanda, is and will always be fundamentally Bantu, but in Brazil has aggregated ancestors from Amazonian-indigenous, YorubĂĄ, Romani, witchcraft etc. traditions, with whom we are grateful to work with. (I heard German umbandistas do incorporation with druids.)
Another consequence of being a locus of vibrations, of being both subject and object of patterns and influences, is that identity is permeable; it has no borders, it can be superposed, coexist, remake itself. This is the basis for the holy sacrament which is incorporation, that wondrous thing that is to be someone else, someone who feels and thinks and does things youâd never *be able to* do yourself, while still being yourself, alongside for the ride. I call it âdemonic possessionâ just for the fun aestheticsâtrolling the Christians is practically a tradition in my religion, we portray the eshus like red horned devils in an act of narrative judo; but Bantu thought actually has no demons and no possession, youâre not forcibly made to do things, getting the call can be very strongly involuntary but whether you answer it or not is your choice; you choose to align with a vibe or not, the same way one chooses to vibe or not with a song, even if you canât unhear it.
Speaking of the good kind of intercultural ancestry aggregation, let me present you the YorubĂĄ account for the problem of evil, which I adoreâŚ
See, our headsâorisâare indeed made of mud; but the potter, AjalĂĄ, he, well, he kinda sucks. Heâs always failing to support his own community, and when other gods come to demand accountability, he runs away and hides and deletes his Twitter grandiosely. As a result, he doesnât put much care into his job; he makes a lot of headsâidentitiesâwhich are full of problems. Some he forgets to put in the oven; others he molds into square shapes, or overcooks and burns them.
Now you, when you became a person (or many), you walked through AjalĂĄâs atelier and picked a head (or many). If youâre trans, you likely went there again, at night down in the kalunga, to choose a new one to change into/wear/be, as you transitioned. And in this there is free will; we pick our own heads, so weâre responsible for picking a bad one. At the same time the heads have their own logic (=Bantu lunga, systemic rules), that, once put on, become opaque to the headsâ own thoughts. Thatâs how the word ori also means âdestinyâ, the things that you are for, but which arenât clear to you. (usually. there are ways to peekâŚ) But this âdestinyâ isnât like Godâs Plan, itâs not an authorityâs decree; itâs more like the skill tree in a character class you picked for this round at the game; the oriâs path may or may not come to fruition, depending on how well you do. (In Bantu terms, each personality-frequency has their own resonant vibes in which theyâll thrive best.)
The fash have picked pasty-white uncooked heads, and are responsible for that choice; but as long as they're wearing/being fash-identities, they have a damaging ori-path, and unless you can convince a fash to switch heads, to *be* someone else (an effort always worth undertaking but seldom fruitful), we have no choice but to stop them from fulfilling their destiny-paths. Eshus are fundamentally path-unblockers, but not if somebodyâs path is to build walls.
