Negating The Profane And Connecting Everything

Traditional religions in ancient Mali were polytheistic, they did not believe in one single supreme being, and the believed in animism. They believed that all plants, animals and objects had spirits. “Spirits of the land” were also a big part of the ancient civilization’s beliefs and they were taught to ensure the success of their crops. They had no sacred texts to support their beliefs but they thought that the spiritual world and the physical world were connected.

In Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas weaves her analysis of religion and society around a very simple topic, one of which I honestly took for granted: dirt. Dirt, Douglas argues, plays a massive role in the formation of society and how societies understand their worldviews and conceptions of sacredness. With this constant pushing and pulling of purity and impurity, meanings can be assigned to all patterns inside and outside the symbolic classification system of a society. Unity of the sacred and the filthy is then achieved through these purity and impurity rituals (3). In this essay, I will discuss the paradoxes of her book, modern approaches with understanding ritual, and my insecurities over the “Primitive Worlds” chapter.

Prior to European influences, many indigenous religions did not dichotomize the world into good and evil, and, as a result, natives interpreted their deities as both good and bad. When the town council describes their indigenous beliefs as “wicked,” this diction represents how European influences affected and shifted how natives interpretation of nature.

When most western people think about Native American or African religions there is a certain stigma that comes with the topic. This is in part because there is a lot of misinformation in the world about Native American and African religions. When most westerners think of African religions they think of voodoo and black magic. Likewise, the view of Native American religions is still looked at through the lens of the pilgrims who wrote about Native Americans as being savages and less than human. These stereotypes were all formed from a lack of accurate information. African and Native American religions are very similar. It is difficult to find a lot of accurate information on African and Native American indigenous religions because of the lack of written history but there is a lot of oral history that has been passed down from generation to generation. From this information, it is clear that Native American and African religions have many more similarities than they do differences. Three of these similarities will be discussed in this paper. The first topic of discussion is the similarity between African and Native American people when it comes to their perception of the spirit world. Following this topic are the similarities between Native American and African views on the afterlife and finally, the diversity of beliefs within African and Native American religions.

The Indigenous people of America are called Native Americans or often referred to as “Indians”. They make up about two percent of the population in the United States and some of them still live in reservations. They once lived freely in the wilderness without any sort of influence or exposure from the Europeans who later came in the year of 1492, and therefore their culture is very different from ours. The Iroquois are northeastern Native Americans who are historically important and powerful. In the following essay we will discover some differences between the religious beliefs of the Native American Iroquois and Christianity to see if culture and ways of living have an effect on the view of religion, but we will also get to know some similarities. I am going to be focusing on the Iroquois, which are the northeastern Native Americans in North America.

Elialde author of The Sacred and the Profane introduces a new model of the sacred and the profane. Elialde’s model is meant to be universal, therefore meant to be appropriate for any recognized religion. David Carrasco author of Religions of Mesoamerica and Kay Almere Read and Jason J. González authors of Mesoamerican Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs of Mexico and Central America, discuss their interpretation of the Mesoamerican religion although their views on the Mesoamerican religion differs in some aspects when compared to Eliade’s model of the sacred and the profane there are a few noticeable similarities between both views.

The religion detailed and examined throughout Don Talayesva’s “Sun Chief” can be difficult to understand and near impossible to appreciate. At first glance to the casual reader it can appear shallow and ridiculous; a religion created around the wants and needs of the Hopi but not based on any empirical or even supposed sacred evidence. When coupled with The Sacred Canopy however, the reader begins to understand the simplistic beauty of their religion providing necessary guidance and support to the Hopi tribe. The reader also is able to relate to Don’s religion in terms of the love one has for his or her own dogma and the importance it plays in an individual’s life.

Like in any religion the people have certain beliefs. In the african religions there is no single religion. Researchers try to identify similarities in world views and ritual processes across the african boundaries. African Religions are polytheistic; which means they believe in more than one god. They believe in one overall god, but also ancestral spirits. Most African religion’s creation story reveal the creation of humans more than

Eliade defines hierophany as something sacred which manifests itself in our world and makes itself known. He mentions that there are two modes of being in the world for a religious man. There are sacred things and non-sacred and the sacred things are the ones that embody themselves in our profane world. Eliade defines the central clash between the sacred and profane by portraying the approach of the human mind towards the sacred and classifying society into the sacred and profane man. The sacred man is the one who develops and requires the sacred space to last while the profane does not. There is a break between the two worlds as developed by the concept of hierophany which is present by sacredness in nature, humans and time.

Achebe’s Things Fall Apart moved me in a way that had once been unreachable by non-Western literary works regarding the state of foundation in the pre-colonialization period of Africa, and of course the subsequent rule from European powers. It is clear that Achebe sought to paint a truer picture of the sophisticated culture and traditions embedded in tribes that had only been smeared by Europeans who were solely after conquest, commerce, and Christianity.

The setting of this story is not clearly disclosed but from the author’s choice of words like the use of “juju”, “traveling from bushes to bushes” and “native blacksmiths”, there is a clear depiction of a typical African village setting. In the story, the author seeks to create a picture of a world of traditional mythologies in the mind of the reader, where human beings easily mingle with beings from the spiritual world. The author also presents a world where

In Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, two thoroughly different religions are brought together and contrasted. Christian missionaries arrive in Africa and attempt to spread their religion to African tribes that practice the Ibo religion. While the novel’s first impression of the unfamiliar religion prepares the reader to believe that Achebe will be suggesting the missionaries’ arrival will be fatal to the entire community of Mbanta, other details in the text suggest that Achebe considers Okonkwo’s inability to adapt an even larger, more ruinous issue because of its harmful impact on the tribe and overall hazard.

In this paper, I will discuss the implications of excluding African traditions from the global religious dialogue. First, I will give a brief overview on the deliberation. Then, I will attempt to present how this exclusion occurs or might occur, while weaving the Yoruba religious art as an example of the piece of the religious dialogue that global discourse tends to reference in unique terms and lastly I will attempt to suggest the implications of exclusing African Religions and Beliefs from Global discourse..

Soyinka uses mystic elements to provide the reader with a sense of the Africa of tradition. The religious traditions of Africa are rife

To the general public, the meaning of the word sacred falls along the lines of being something that is of high value or something that is exclusively devoted to worship. In IGE, we spent the quarter examining societies of early civilizations and how religions heavily affected them. Through readings and class discussions, we learned that religion was a huge component in the establishment or downfall of a society. Though separate religions do not agree on every moral standard or history of how the Earth came to be and our purpose, what all religions share is the theme of sacredness. Unlike many of the other topics we discuss in class, sacred is not an idea, sacred is an object.