In Africana religions, devotees/practitioners navigate visible and invisible worlds in ways that can lead to mystical union/communion. This panel explores what embodied practices or material technologies facilitate mystical encounters. What roles creativity, story, and sound play in fostering mystical engagement? And how the fluid and hybrid nature of Africana religions enable marginalized and queer identities to experience mystical empowerment and transformation? These papers examine the use of adornment to generate vitality and aliveness, James Baldwin’s relationship to the sacred, and Mambo Maude’s temple in Jacmel Haiti as sites of religious innovation.
In his meditation, “Meaning is Inherent in Life,” Howard Thurman identifies the integrity of meaning, life and the fundamental expression of “aliveness” as “materializing vitality.” This vitality and aliveness is an outpouring of divine agency or power through embodied expression. For Audre Lorde, this generative centering vitality and aliveness is linked to the erotic. For Lorde the erotic is life-force. It is creative energy and power and an internal assertion of life. This aliveness is fundamental to what it means to work at “full-capacity” with passion and joyfulness. Thurman would identify this as the yes within. This paper argues that aliveness is generated through mystical encounter and engagement in Africana religion, performance and cultural aesthetics and will specifically focus on the uses of material technologies such as adornment to generate vitality and aliveness particularly for members of marginalized communities.
This paper examines Baldwin’s relationship to the sacred, while refusing to place Baldwin within the thought world of Christian theology—theology as that which attempts to “categorize” and “make sense” of God and the sacred. The primary thesis of this paper is that Baldwin articulates what is more properly described as a mysticism, one committed to the experience/pursuit of a mysterious power, an unnamed something which is always and already sensually present. In other words, Baldwin displaces the sacred from the realm of “belief” to that of feeling or affect—feeling in the sense of a deeply embodied experience, which he clearly locates in the arts and sexual expression. However, this is not an individual experience, for this paper will show, in conversation with the scholarship of Ashon Crawley, that Baldwin’s Black mysticism, like Crawley’s “mysticism otherwise,” is inextricably linked to the social, a kind of radical human connectivity.
This paper uses a case study of Mambo Maude’s temple in Jacmel Haiti to focus on the role of spiritual marriages (the ritual and ceremonial practice of joining a practitioner to a Haitian spirit) in allowing for easier communication between spirits and practitioners. These interactions can take place through possession during marriage ceremonies, as well as within dreams where the ongoing communication can facilitate possible sexual encounters between spirits and practitioners. I also explore the often unspoken realities of same gender desire between spirits and practitioners and how this sometimes challenges the ritual traditions of spiritual marriage within Manbo Maude’s temples. The religious fashion and gender presentation involved in spiritual marriage extends beyond ceremonies into the everyday lives of practitioners, as social and cultural influences impact how the human body is perceived during possession in spiritual marriages.