Divine origin of the Word
Since I cannot validly speak of any traditions I have not experienced or studied personally - those of forest countries, especially - I shall take my basic examples from the traditions of the savannah to the south of the Sahara (what was formerly called the Bafour and constituted the savannah zones of former French West Africa).
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The Bambara tradition of the Komo teaches that the Word, Kuma, is a
fundamental force emanating from th e Supreme Being himself — Maa Ngala, creator of all things. It is the instrument of creation: 'That which Maa Ngala says, is!' proclaims the cantor - the singing priest - of the god Komo.
The myth of the creation of the universe and of man which the Komo Master o f Initiates (who is always a smith) teaches circumcised youths reveals that when Maa Ngala felt a yearning for an interlocutor he created the First Man: Maa.
The story of genesis used to be taught during the sixty-three-day retreat
2. One of the great initiation schools of the Mande (Mali).
imposed on the circumcised in their twenty-first year, and then twenty-one years were spent in deeper and deeper study of it.
On the edge of the sacred wood, where Komo lives, the first of the circumcised group would chant to a rhythmic beat:
Maa Ngala! Maa Ngala! Who is Maa Ngala? Where is Maa Ngala?
The Komo chanter would respond:
Maa Ngala is infinite Force. None can place him in time, Nor yet in space.
He is Dombali(Unknowable) Dambali (Uncreated-Infinite).
Then, after the initiation, the recital of the primordial genesis would begin:
There was nothing except a Being.
That Being was a living Emptiness,
brooding potentially over contingent existences. Infinite Time was the abode of that O n e Being. The OneBeing gave himself the name Maa Ngala. Maa Ngala wished to be known.
So he created Fan,
a wondrous Egg with nine divisions,
and into it he introduced the nine fundamental
states of existence.
'When this primordial Egg came to hatch, it gave birth to twenty marvellous beings that made up the whole of the universe, the sumtotal of existing forces and possible knowledges.
'Butalas!Noneofthosefirsttwentycreaturesprovedfittobecomethe interlocutor (Kuma-nyon) that M a a Ngala had craved.
'So he took a bit of each of those twenty existing creatures and mixed them; and then, blowing a spark of his ownfierybreath into the mixture, he created a newBeing, Man,to whom he gave a part of his own name: Maa. And so this new being, through his name and through the divine spark introduced into him, contained something of Maa Ngala himself.'
Synthesis of all that exists, pre-eminent receptacle of the supreme Force and confluence of all existing forces, Maa,Man,received as his legacy a part of the divine creative power, the gift of Mind and the Word.
Maa Ngala taught Ma a , his interlocutor, the laws according to which all the elements of the cosmos were formed and continue to exist. H e installed him as guardian of his universe and charged him with watching over the maintenance of universal harmony. That is w h y it weighs heavy, being Maa.
Initiated by his creator, Maa later passed all that he had learned on to his descendants; and that was the beginning of the great chain of initiatory oral transmission of which the order of Komo (like the orders of Nama, Kore, and so on, in Mali) claims to be a continuator.
Once Maa Ngala had created his interlocutor Maa he spoke to him, and at the same time endowed him with the faculty of replying. A dialogue was begun between Maa Ngala, creator of all things, and Maa, symbiosis of all things.
As they came down from Maa Ngala towards man, words were divine, because they had not yet come into contact with materiality. After their contact with corporeity they lost something of their divinity but took on sacredness. Hallowed in this way by the divine Word, corporeity in its turn gave out sacred vibrations which established relations with Maa Ngala.
African tradition, then, conceives of speech as a gift of God. It is at once divine in the downward direction and sacred as it rises upwards.
Posted By: Steve Williams
Wednesday, January 21st 2015 at 8:44AM
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