Obeah & Myal

[YaoYao]

"........the term obeah best approximates the linguistic composition of the Twi word obeye, which conveys the idea of moral neutrality. Patterson makes comparisons with other West African cultures to explain the theory of moral neutrality. For example, among the Ga of present-day Ghana, the word for mystical (medicinal) power is won. “A won,” says Patterson, “is morally neutral and can be employed for evil or good.”146 Among the neighboring Dahomeans, Herskovits’s findings support the theory that Africans conceive of mystical power as morally neutral. He asserts that in the Dahomean theory of gbo, “good and bad magic are merely reflections of two aspects of the same principle.”147 Simon Bockie also explains the concept of kindoki as neutral mystical power among BaKongo groups in Central Africa."




The terms Obeah and Myal and the concepts they signify have been linked to a number of plausible cultural orientations in West and Central Africa. Some of the earlier researchers such as Joseph Williams and Leonard Barrett suggested that Obeah is a derivative of the Twi word obayifo or bayi which means witch in Asante and Fante cultures. Cassidy and Le Page also link Obeah to an Efik (Nigeria) term ubio,  defined as a thing or mixture of things,  put in the ground,  as a charm to cause sickness or death. Many of the later scholars substantiated their definitions of Obeah by citing one or all of these earlier scholars. Orlando Patterson,  however,  contends that the word obeye,  also a Twi word,  is a more fitting cognate in that it signifies the concept of moral neutrality in its original usage and because it is closer in terms of pronunciation to the Jamaican term Obeah than obayifo.

Fewer scholars have speculated about the etymology of the term Myal. Cassidy and Le Page postulate a Hausa antecedent maye, which can mean sorcerer, wizard, or intoxication. It has also been suggested that Myal is Akan or Central African in origin. In earlier publications,  I was less inclined to support the standard assumption that the term Myal is of Central African derivation primarily because the Central African Kumina community in Jamaica observes a ritual practice of Myal. Because the Myal institution was established in Jamaica since at least the 1770s,  and the Kumina community was established in eastern Jamaica only through the settlement of post emancipation African immigrant indentured laborers,  I suspected that Myal,  both the term and the institution,  may have been influenced by another ethnic African culture or by several other ethnic African cultures,  including Central African traditions.

After consulting more recent studies on Central African religious traditions in Africa and the diaspora and conducting personal interviews with Congolese scholar Dr. Fu-Kiau Bunseki,  I find the Kikongo etymology thesis, as argued by Maureen Warner-Lewis,  especially tenable. Warner-Lewis,  a Caribbean linguistic scholar who has studied the Jamaican cultural and religious landscape for several decades,  has published a formidable volume on Central African cultural influences upon Caribbean cultural formation. Her location of Jamaican Myal traditions within a Central African Kongo cultural continuum is consistent with the text of my conversations with Dr. Bunseki, the first scholar to compile a Kikongo lexicon of Kumina terms. Dr. Bunseki believes the term myal is derived from the Kikongo term mayala (the one who leads/rules). Other related terms include yala (to rule,  lead,  govern),  kimyala (ones authority as ruler),  and luyalu (rulership). According to Bunseki,  the mayala can rule because he has mwela,  a eathing power,  within him. And so,  myal,  is particularly derived from the Kikongo term miela,  the plural form of the term mwela,  which literally means eath,  that is,  the energy coming from human beings but . . . also a living eath coming from planetary living energy as well as cosmic living energy. Bunseki elaborates:

It is a eath that comes from a source which is a living source; the Kongo sees that eath can only come from a living thing the planetary living energy,  the cosmos living energy,  and from humans and living plants,  but spiritually when we speak of mwela,  we are referring here first to the elders in the community and second,  to the ancestors. If you have misfortune,  you need a spiritual ritual,  energy, and you go to the community to seek for miela. . . . The village will congregate to hear your problem. You will sit in the circle to explain your problem and to ask if you have wronged the community and if your behavior is out of the cosmic balance.

Bunsekis specific identification of mwela (myal) as the eath and energy of plant life provides some insight into why Myal/Obeah rituals were reportedly enacted around trees or involved trees (for example,  dancing under or around trees and nailing shadows to trees). Bunseki notes how the Kongo-based Cuban religion of Palo (Mayombe) demonstrates a precise connection with the religious significance of trees for BaKongo people. Palo,  he says,  is the Portuguese term for Tree and Mayombe is the Central African region with the deepest forest area. In Cuba,  trees are central to Paleros and their rituals. I spent a day with a Cuban Palero in her Havana home in November 1999. At the center of her ritual courtyard was a massive tree around which were placed numerous ritual offerings and symbolic items. Bunseki explains further:

In Kongo all judgments,  all courts are held under trees,  any debate, marriage, initiation, is done under a tree. The tree is seen as the symbol, the pipe through which the miela comes to us. Any plant is a pipe through which substances, the miela, all the medicine from the earth, comes to us.

The spiritual and ritual significance of trees in Central and West African religions would not have been lost among enslaved African communities in an island dubbed the land of wood and water. Over the past century,  scholars have documented the particular focus on accessing ancestral sources of miela as a definitive feature of Myal religion in Jamaica. For example,  Maureen Warner-Lewiss extended analysis of Myal links the ancestral ritual emphasis in Jamaican Myal traditions to Central African religious cultures. Echoing Bunsekis comments,  she proposes:

. . . the Jamaican term mayaal (generally spelled myal) derives from mayaala,  the physical representations of power. In a secular context mayaala are agents of a paramount chief s authority. The abstract power mayaala wield is called kiyaazi,  a Yombe cognate of the term nkisi. Thus Laman,  writing out of his early-twentieth-century experiences, averred that Nkisi,  and nkisi nsi do not correspond to what is now connoted by nkisi [the physical talismans],  but to what higher up-country [in the hinterland] is called kiyaazi (from yaala,  to rule), thus a power of religious character that is needed to strengthen the authority of the regent. Mayaal [myal],  so seminal a concept in Jamaican religious culture,  may thus be said to refer to spiritual power and/or a person possessing spiritual power on behalf of another: a mayaal man or woman exercised the power of the Creator God, or of powerful spirits or of ancestral presences.

In the early 1990s,  Kenneth Bilby conducted research in the Jamaican parishes of St. Elizabeth, Manchester, Portland, and St. Mary and confirmed what Martha Beckwith had documented as Myal practices in St. Elizabeth in the 1920s. Bilbys recent study is an important contribution to the current scholarly discourse on Myal, for the trend among scholars throughout the twentieth century has been to identify Myal as a direct offspring of Kumina culture in modern eastern Jamaica. Interrupted by six decades,  Beckwiths and Bilbys fieldwork studies,  however,  independently document Myal as a product of the Jonkunnu (John Canoe) masquerading institution and its gumbay drumming rituals in modern southwestern Jamaica. Bilby summarizes best the significance of this discovery:

In Jamaica today, there are, to my knowledge, only five communities in which the rectangular, bench-like frame drum called gumbay is still used:

1) Lacovia,  in St Elizabeth;
2) Nassau,  in St Elizabeth;
3) the Maroon town of Accompong,  in St Elizabeth;
4) the Maroon town of Charles Town,  in Portland parish; and
5) the Maroon town of Scotts Hall,  in St Mary parish.

Whereas the first three communities are clustered together in the western parish of St Elizabeth, the last two are located far to the east, on the opposite side of the island. In all five of these communities,  the gumbay drum is intimately tied to local ancestral religions in which spirit possession plays a central role, and in all five, this form of spiritual possession is still known as myal. Indeed,  these communities,  whose locations span a substantial geographic spread, appear to be the only places in Jamaica (other than locales in which Kumina is found) where the term myal, so common among slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, remains current.

To be sure,  Martha Beckwith provided vivid accounts of the connections between Myal and Jonkunnu. In her 1928 publication, Christmas Mummings, she writes:

The man Ewan [Jonkonnu dancer from Lacovia] (and very likely Swabe [of Prospect] as well) was a notorious myal man in Lacovia, that is,  a man who held communication with the spirits of the dead. He was believed to be able to summon the spirits of the dead to work mischief upon an enemy. Mary Campbell,  his leading singing girl at that time,  told me that he always took the cap [i.e.,  the Jonkonnu house headdress] out into the graveyard on the night before it was to be ought out upon the road,  and performed the songs and dances there among the dead................

[YaoYao]

When Bilby conducted research in Prospect,  Manchester,  seventy years later, he found that several older residents remembered the gumbay tradition well, and they assured me that it had indeed been connected with both Jonkonnu and myal. Encouraged to continue west into the parish of St. Elizabeth, Bilby soon discovered a thriving Jonkunnu culture in Nassau, St. Elizabeth, where he was informed that he had arrived just in time,  for that very night was the night the Jangkunu will be destroyed,  when we dance myal. Bilby noticed that Myal was the common denominator of two independent but related traditions known as Gumbay Play and Jonkunnu among local  residents,  and he specifically describes the Myal specialist as a male or female who is an expert dancer and spirit medium. He goes on to describe how [w]hen spiritual assistance is needed the myal-man [or woman] calls a Gumbay Play ceremony,  which is announced by the blowing of a conch shell,  or conk; the notes blown on the shell invite both the living and the spirits of local ancestors to the ceremony. Although a wide range of problems can be handled by the myal-man,  ceremonies are most often held for the purpose of healing. Bilby also notes that a class of songs called myal sing are used to invoke ancestral spirits,  who,  if things are done properly,  will eventually come and take possession of themyal-man.125 He distinguishes Gumbay Play from Jangkunnu,  by describing the former as a need-based ad hoc ritual practice and the latter as an annual Christmas tradition,  and offers detailed evidence of the role of ancestral veneration in family lineages as the essential feature of all the Myal rituals he encountered throughout the region.

Describing Myal possession in Gumbay Play,  he writes:

Once the myal-man achieves the desired state of myal,  or spirit possession, he is usually directed by the spirit to make his way down to one of the family cemeteries,  in Rhoden Town or Brown Town,  where he is expected to dance in the presence of the ancestors,  and to receive additional spiritual counsel from them. Located alongside each of these cemeteries is a small clearing called the healing ground,  where the myal-man carries out some of his operations while in possession. He may also be sent by the spirit into the woods to collect herbs that will eventually be ought back up to Big Yard,  where they will be used on the person receiving treatment.

Bilby,  a scholar with a long research trajectory in Jamaica,  had conducted fieldwork among Kumina practitioners in eastern Jamaica during the 1970s and was fully aware of the Myal rituals in Kumina religious culture,  as noted above. After doing research in southwestern Jamaica twenty years later,  he concluded in a 1999 article:

Gumbay Play is one of the most African of Jamaicas indigenous religions. . . . in contrast to the attenuated version of Gumbay Play that has survived in Lacovia,  that of Nassau remains relatively robust,  although it has been seriously challenged in recent years by a variety of evangelical Christian churches based in the same area. This local community religion is probably closer than any other in Jamaica to the forms of slave religion described by European writers during the eighteenth century (before missionary Christianity had made major inroads) as myal or the Myal Dance. Even today,  Gumbay Play shows virtually no evidence of Christian influence.

While scholars may never exhaust the search for Myals continental African antecedents,  the Myal stamp on Jamaican religiosity is unmistakable and warrants continued investigations into its connections to Central African Kongo culture and other African religious cultures.128 Myal emerges from the written and experiential records as an imperishable force in diverse expressions of African-Jamaican religiosity from slavery to the present moment. In the words of Joseph Williams,  who wrote in the 1930s:

Myalism . . . was of so potent a religious force,  that it has survived a century and a half of legal proscription . . . and still is able to vitalize each recurrent upheaval against formal Christianity,  even as it inspired the futile efforts to eak the chains of slavery and cast off the white mans rule,  before constitutional methods had found a way to right the crying wrong of humanity.






Obeah and Myal: Avenues to Neutral Mystical Power


The above examination of Obeah and Myal during the slave period in Jamaica also presents us with a number of theological issues for consideration. As stated above, the history of scholarship on Obeah and Myal is basically consistent in defining these traditions as innately antagonistic and morally antithetic. Both Jamaican and non-Jamaican scholars have perpetuated this view of Obeah and Myal as true not only of Jamaica today but also of the slave period. This is due to vivid accounts of a particular emphasis in the Myal tradition, which were written in the postemancipation period during the Myal “revival” of the 1840s. It was during this period that Myal practitioners emerged with a public anti-Obeah campaign.

Across the board, scholarly commentary on Obeah and Myal presupposes that the public projection of Myal as anti-Obeah practice in the 1840s was a consistent characteristic of theMyal tradition throughout the slave period. This reading of Obeah and Myal, however, is an anachronistic interpretation which neglects to account for the evidence of collaboration between Obeah practitioners and Myalists during slavery, as substantiated by nearly a century of observations and documentation.

The tendency to characterize Obeah as “bad magic” and Myal as “good magic” or as Obeah’s nemesis might well be founded upon Western Christian moral theology, which conceives good and evil as contradistinctive forces. Because Obeah was officially condemned as sorcery early in Jamaican history and because Whites were determined to portray Obeah as a menace to all of Jamaican society (including enslaved Africans), scholars, writing with this Western Christian bias in mind, assume that a dichotomy always existed between Obeah and Myal. After reviewing relevant seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century documents, it is apparent that the interpretation of Myal as good magic was only firmly established with the 1842 anti-Obeah Myal campaign. This movement necessarily reinforced long-held interpretations of Obeah as pure evil.

In reconsidering the records on Obeah and African religious cultures in pre-emancipation Jamaica, we established that the “Obeah” of the slave period signified a wide number of diverse ethnic African and Pan-African practices and institutions. In this sense, Obeah was multilayered and came to be associated with manifestations of elaborate African-derived systems of communal belief and practice as well as solo practitioners’ assertions of power via the exercise of specialized knowledge of forces and spirits. We also determined that Obeah was capacity, strategy, as well as weapon (for defensive protection against White aggression and for offensive attack on White aggression). Obeah was the ultimate antidote to colonial African enslavement since Obeah played a social and public role in militant resistance and revolts. We also identified Myal as a religious association with a leader and adherents. It was informed by a spiritual orientation most potently manifest in possession trance; spiritual insight into the invisible world of ideas and ancient African lore; healing, cleansing, exposing, and eradicating evil and negativity; and other subversive traditions which undermined the slave regime. In pre-emancipation Jamaica then, Myalists and Obeah practitioners cooperated in both covert and overt protests against slavery and forged a distinct religiocultural orientation of political praxis around the goal of liberation.

This interpretation invites elaboration on the concepts of moral neutrality, moral accountability, and moral responsibility in African-Jamaican religious consciousness. The social performances of both Obeah practitioners and Myalists do not render one specialist evil and the other good. Both can use power in constructive or destructive ways, depending upon the context and circumstances involved. Research has shown that across African religious cultures morality is rarely absolutized. What we find are neutral notions of morality and moral agency, and the emphasis on capacity as a religiously and philosophically rich concept and practice, despite the theoretical distinctions scholars make between persons who illegitimately practice “sorcery” and those who legitimately practice divination and healing. This was especially true it appears to me within the context of slavery, where White enslavers constituted an evil force to be eliminated, by any available means. White slave masters were the true sorcerers and soul thieves, for they did everything they could to destroy African community:

The White enslaver brought sheer misfortune and the depreciation of African life. “Those who practise witchcraft, evil magic and sorcery are the very incarnation of moral evil. They are, by their very nature set to destroy relationships, to undermine the moral integrity of society.”

 To many captive Africans in Jamaican slave society, White slave masters were the very “incarnation of moral evil,” which Obeah practitioners and Myalists had a moral responsibility to contest. Monica Schuler further explains:

[Wrenched away] from their kin, the experience of the middle passage, and people’s reduction to units of labour in the New World—all accompanied by excessively high death rates—were cataclysmic misfortunes that could only be accounted for by the actions of the most viciously anti-social creatures, i.e., sorcerers. No wonder slaves en route to the Americas thought Europeans were going to eat them, a common pastime of witches [and] no wonder the Myal society in eighteenth century Jamaica offered protection against “death
caused by Europeans.” The vast lists of Obeah paraphernalia noted in the colonial literature indicate that Obeah practitioners and Myalists attempted to counteract slavery and its promoters through any number of approaches to mystical power. John Mbiti offers a view into what this conceptmost likely suggested in slaveholding Jamaica.

Describing mystical powers as neither good nor bad, Mbiti explains how African peoples access such powers for protection, detection, prosperity, success, revenge, control, and so on. Mbiti writes:

There is mystical power which causes people to walk on fire, to lie on thorns or nails, to send curses or harm, including death, from a distance, to change into animals (lycanthropy), to spit on snakes and cause them to split open and die; power to stupefy thieves so that they can be caught red-handed; power to make inanimate objects turn into biologically living creatures; there is power that enables experts to see into secrets, hidden information or the future, or to detect thieves and other culprits. African peoples know this and try to apply it in these and many other ways. For that reason, they wear charms, eat “medicines” or get them rubbed into their bodies; they consult experts, especially the diviners and medicine-men to counteract the evil effects of this power or to obtain powerfully “charged” objects containing the same power. The majority, if not all fear it, and many of them have encountered it in their normal life. This mystical power is not fiction: whatever it is, it is a reality, and one with which African peoples have to reckon. . . . African peoples are aware of a mystical power in the universe. This power is ultimately from God, but in practice it is inherent in, or comes from or through physical objects and spiritual beings. That means that the universe is not static or “dead”: it is a dynamic, “living” and powerful universe.


Both Obeah and Myal allowed enslaved Africans access to this type of mystical power. Obeah and Myal traditions emphasize the relativity of good and evil and the potential for good and evil in every person under variable circumstances. Because African religious cultures often adhere to some principle of moral neutrality, they hold persons accountable for how they access and use mystical power. Free will is a responsibility in African religious consciousness and when it is used to exercise evil or to destabilize social or cosmic harmony, the perpetrator is indicted, punished, and at times ritually cleansed or expelled from the community.

Situating this understanding of Obeah within classical African approaches to morality, where neutrality is emphasized, then the most plausible interpretation of its significance as an African-derived institution and as a system for accessing mystical power is the one forwarded by Orlando Patterson in The Sociology of Slavery. As mentioned earlier, Patterson posits that the term obeah best approximates the linguistic composition of the Twi word obeye, which conveys the idea of moral neutrality. Patterson makes comparisons with other West African cultures to explain the theory of moral neutrality. For example, among the Ga of present-day Ghana, the word for mystical (medicinal) power is won. “A won,” says Patterson, “is morally neutral and can be employed for evil or good.”146 Among the neighboring Dahomeans, Herskovits’s findings support the theory that Africans conceive of mystical power as morally neutral. He asserts that in the Dahomean theory of gbo, “good and bad magic are merely reflections of two aspects of the same principle.”147 Simon Bockie also explains the concept of kindoki as neutral mystical power among BaKongo groups in Central Africa.

These examples are relevant to the case of Obeah because the data specify that Africans from these religious cultures had tremendous influence over the shaping of African-Jamaican religiosity in both ethnic and pan-ethnic configurations. I wish not to overstate the case for Central African continuities, but the parallelisms between the types of items colonial observers describe as Obeah paraphernalia, as well as the carrying cases and pots used to hold or bind such items as a unit (charm), are far too conspicuous when compared with Wyatt MacGaffey’s illustrated explanations of 45 out of the 100 Kongolese minkisi (medicine bundles) and mpiya (ancestrally charged revelatory instruments) collected by the Swedish missionary Karl Laman in the early twentieth century.

 The Kongo, Dahomean, Ga, and Akan are examined here as representative samples of the many African thought systems where good or evil moral agency is associated with the person, his or her intentions, and his or her actions as agents of injury or well-being via obeye, won, or kindoki. For example, the Twi term for “sorcerer” (the person who utilizes obeye maliciously) is obayifo, but for the priest (diviner/healer) it is obirifo. The Ga term for the person who utilizes won maliciously is wontfulo (wonchulo), while the one who employs won beneficently is called wontfe (wonche). The unfixed nature of moral potential (capacity) is an important tenet of classical African religious thought, which was and continues to be embraced by African Jamaicans in spite of the absolutist Christian notion that evil and good are diametrically opposed and ultimately personified by Satan and God. This African understanding of good and evil as contingent, although not exhausting, has significant potential for an African-centered theological anthropology that responsibly discredits absolutism in Western Christian theology, especially the idea that White people are innately good and Black people innately evil,150 and perhaps in more promising ways than the dualistic anthropology embraced by the Nation of Islam and other post-Christian Black religious cultures in the New World.







taken from the book "Three Eyes for the Journey" by Dianne M. Stewart

[afrikanrebel06]

  blackcellent thread! it is pitty,that many christanized slaves from jamaica fear what they dont know,like marcus garvey said" take the kinks from your brain"

[gman]

I've met plenty of christianized slaves in brazil and I was only there for six months. I ain't even from Xamaica I'm from Guyana but we is all de same raaaaaaaaaaaaaas people wedda we deh in brasil, guyana, Jamaica or wherever, so why you dissin "Jamaicans" now.
[suckin teeth] man I distracting from de tread with this ting so I gon stop. But for real afrikanrebel06, it seemin to me, like maybe once upon a time you look pon a Rastawoman from Jamaica, and you like she, but she dis you, and now you tekkin it out on "Rastas" and "Jamaicans".
I mean Brazil is a heavily catholic country. Even nuff of the candomble people is catholics as well. If you want to criticize christ-insanity, you could pick a lot of brazilian examples to look at. Examples that you are more familiar with, and know more about, cos that's where you're from. You could be explaining to people about where you're from, rather than going out of your way to dis people who you don't fully understand or have experience of where they're from.
By the way attorney Ras Miguel Lorne (a Rastafari bredren) was one of the driving forces to legalize what is called "obeah" and other traditional African practices in Xamaica [the land of wood and water].
Bringing it forward to the thread subject... nuff obeahman is nothing but one set of fraud and trickster, but some ah dem got the real science, or parts of it. It is utilizing the powers of the cosmos, it could be for positive purposes, the reason it (obiya) is more known for the negative purposes, is because the negative system that thinks it runs the world, tends to twist everything into negativity. Make you hungry, and hoard all the food, so you ready to buss open yuh brudda head (whether by a bullet or by obiya) in order to get a piece ah food.

[afrikanrebel06]

gman stick to the topic!

obviously you havent been around the whole country of brazil,itself,we have unbanda as well,mixed with
amerindian beliefs,yah there are christinized slaves every where,they like the white folks are my real enemies as well and i dont care much about them,they will be consumed by fire just like white people will be finally decipated and decimated from this earth,i havea friend of mine from jamaica she told me that the cuminas,where afrikan traditional religion in jamaica has dessapeared,i live in city of 500.000 afrikans,who most part,is rastas black christians and evangelized negros,what i call dem KING JAMES SLAVES,i am the only one,practising afrikan spirituality,i recall one time,going to rasta bar,where this rasta man had his white woman,and i asked him if he knew any vodou priest or priestesses,he avoided me like the plague lol
 thats because,in jamaica,they call the ancestors dupe or duppies,they dont honour their ancestors,yes,in brazil,the afrikan deities were syncretized because,people were facing persecution,but under the disguises
they were really worshipping their afrikan gods and godesses.
 afrikan traditional religion is big in guyana as well,it is also the national religion,yoruba tradition pre dates to ancient egypt,kemet,the kemetic deities are the same as the yorubic deities,it is even older than" rastafarism" itself.
when rastas use the word jah,is taken from the yoruba" ja ja fumi ne ela! meaning inner spirit fight for me,god fight for me,obeah is justa derrogative term,that the christian slaves in jamaica and toronto and else where uses,if christianity was all dat,they wouldnt be is such mess they are in right now,it is because,we have abandoned our ancestors and the path of our ancestors and embraced foreign religions
such as islam and christianity.we find ourselves in the web we weaved.