“Among a people who cannot conceive human society without a monarch, the
desires of radicals may be expressed in monarchical terms. Among a people who
cannot conceive human existence without a religion, radical desires may speak
the language of heresy.”
- Hakim Bey
Quite commonly Quimbanda is understood to be a necromantic cult, but it
is surely not limited to necromancy or working with the dead per se. Quimbanda
works in a greater field of multiple crossroads, vertical and horizontal where
star falls into earth and we find golems in clouds. A great bar in truly
comprehend what Quimbanda is rests not only in appropriation but how the human
organism process experiences, a matter that changes from person to person, from
time to time and place to place. Appropriation is an eternal temptation in the
work of ‘making sense’, and in this field caution, care and temperance should
be exercised.
Because what happens when we integrate ‘the other’ into what already is
defined and understood as something of its own? What is brought in will
naturally suffer the consequences of having to fit into what is already there.
Hence we commit a violation on the other in the name of what is, just like any
other tyrant who seeks dominion or a fool that knows no better.
We need to accept that the contemporary human being has tied its social
experience to the ideals of rulers and religion and it is to go with or against
these factors we become heretics, antinomians, bureaucrats or law-abiding
organisms. I dare suggest this is a bias, a paradigm we have ended up not
questioning because Freud, Nietzsche and democracy have become a fog for our
sight and thus have ended up becoming nails and directions in not only the
social compass, but the crossroad of Self. Yes Self, because Ego has in our day
and age become something of a demon in its own right. No Ego equals bliss and
hence a cult celebrating the Unique must by proxy be demonic. What a travesty.
How thick the veils of Maya has covered our sore eyes, because void of Ego we
are also void of intent and direction – and so Ego became the devil as a modern
paradox in a world of ambition where everyone can be what he or she wants to
be. And here comes the sadness of things into play. To want to be what you are
not leads to falsity and no matter how much we shout for rights that are
supposedly coming along with being born in human form, you either reap illusion
or clarity as life moves on.
I dare say that we modern people tend to misappropriate most of our experiences
quite frequently because of this fundamental misappropriation we constantly do
of Ego, Self and Other. We do this because these are ideas that lies tar thick
in the nerves of the world and we accept them as axiomatic truths and on this
we spin our world and convictions.
And it is in this field Quimbanda becomes challenging, because here we
are speaking of spirits that teach and do, always aimed towards the
practitioners Uniqueness. We might see this interaction as the otherness of Exu
being seen as a witness to our own coming into being – a process and merging
typified by the crossroad. For us the crossroad is a place of choice and change
– hence danger and devils is what we find there. We are no longer friends with chance or
change and whatever that is not of us, is the enemy resting in the otherness.
It is imperative that we realize that this experience and approach
ultimately leads us to perceive freedom as a tyrant and love as something that
can only be obtained through antinomian chaos. We need to end these perception
and see the Self unique and the Ego that gives intent and direction as
something that is established in relationship to ‘the other’ and I mean here,
not in relation to psychoanalytic dimensions of superego and id – but in
relation to the mysterious that is beyond – this otherness that when we touch
it gives us ‘eurekas’ and ‘ahas!’ – and for some bliss and peace. I am speaking
of making a war on these concepts you and me simply adopted by being children
of the spirit of modernity, because they do bar our understanding for arcane
and living traditions like Quimbanda. It is only when this war have been done
and won and we find ourselves in the ruins of a world we deconstructed by our
own will and power we can use the memory of what once was to give new life and
meaning to old signs and symbols and return to its origin. An example of this
we find in Haitian Vodou from the area of Goyave, Leogane and Port-au-Prince
where images of saints are used as signs for a specific mysté or mystery, hence
they are no longer the saint rooted in Christian mythology, but a signpost for
a greater complexity of wisdom that can be applied on the saint, but not
necessarily… We get easily confused by this kind of ‘order of the other’, but
it is important to at least give this deconstruction a chance and allow the
devils to move in at each star of the constellation that witnesses the becoming
of your Uniqueness.
These concepts hold a tremendous influence on how we should understand
the Exus and Pomba Giras of Quimbanda, because what are these spirits really,
what is represented in their ‘otherness’, and how can we fathom their
witnessing of our Self becoming?
Some houses of Quimbanda speaks of how these spirits we know as Exu and
Pomba Gira were arcane spirits assigned the command over all crossroads in the
world – and with crossroads we mean every single physical place that possessed
power. Clearly a reference to Bruno and his pantheist visions and ideas can be
seen here in the way divine afflatus empowers the world and makes it bursting
with power. We are speaking of a first principle after merging with a second
principle endows the world with power as its offspring.
So, crossroads of power was spread all over the world and on these
sites, plants, temples, houses, roads, cemeteries and taverns were erected and
became a focus for a given potency or vibration.
Are you following me? Do you realize the fundamental premise in what is
the nature of an Exu?
It is a power unique and from its otherness it calls upon the uniqueness
of the one who enters into contact with this power by resonance, sign and
symbol. We are the otherness to these unique powers and we are one another’s
witnesses. And so it follows that upon death, Ego dissolves and sameness unites
with otherness as is only logical, if you have followed my reasoning until now.
In this way the primal forces gains force by death, the unique vibration gains
added strength by addition, because in this a variation of difference enters
the crossroad. Because of this spiritual phenomenon we have a given Exu
manifesting in various ways, but always there will be features of recognition
that announces what it is, but also the otherness that generated its
uniqueness.
Allow me to illustrate this with a reference to the hierarchy of
Quimbanda. The hierarchy have since the 1950’s been modelled on the classical
western grimoires that in turn was modelled on the feudal cast system, we kind
of need to get away from the structures of power embedded in this and thus away
from any archontic implication.
Quimbanda is about freedom, hence we need to see the hierarchy more as a
natural flow, than a political one. We can for good measure use the Platonic
and neo-Platonic ideas of emanation to illustrate this. Quite simply we find a
grand principle that unfolds into variations, fractions and variations until it
becomes earth and matter and mirrors its origin. It has become unique as its
origin remains its witness. And in this the feudal monarchy becomes a monarchic
anarchy…
This means that some Exus or Pomba Giras never manifested, while others
did so, repeatedly in various forms by the Unique example we lived that called
upon the attention of the Otherness that affirmed what we were living. Hence,
we have Pomba Giras of Star, Sun and Moon as we have Exus of ideas and actions…
as much as we have and have had human beings that lived lives in a given
resonance and the sum of life became an added vibration to what was from the
beginning.
This means that death gives increase to the crossroads of power and
death explains the concept of legion because everything that is, do go through
its cycle and makes us crossroads swirling between stars and subterranean
caves. And from star and cave comes our Tata, our teacher, in the form of bat,
fog, fire or devil to teach what you are accepting as the otherness we are in
the greater work of teaching freedom in such grand measures that we not always
manage to fathom the dimensions of what is going on. In this way, Quimbanda is
the circumference of death, life, origin and end, all embedded in a pulse of
otherness that calls our name by any other name…
Illustration; F. Goya