Who are the Gods?

[the_teacher]

The following is an email response in a group discussion started by the question…”Who are all these gods I am reading about: Zeus. Apollo etc?” Specifically anpother lady was aksing if the orisha deities are the same as the 'gods' of Greece or Rome or Egypt.


“Hi folks....
All wise men know God is the same and the names are different!

Now this is my take on things. The Gods of the ancient world are superhuman personifications of the divine effluence. They are what we would now call angels who were worshipped and paid homage to, much like many people do the Virgin Mary and various saints of the Christian tradition. A good reference to this would be the naming of the angels with the suffix “EL" (or aleph lamed) at the end of their name when the Canaanite Gods were incorporated into a new and revised mainstream religion called Judaism. The suffix literally means GOD.
Hence Micha-el can be interpreted as the God who is like unto God, and many theologians would state this name is more of a "battle cry" or question on which of the gods are as great as the true GOD.

The Greek Gods were borrowed from Egypt and other African based traditions, renamed and interacted with. It is well known the shrines of the Greek gods contained sacred relics from many places outside of Greece where people had strong interaction with these "powers". Now of course God should be reserved for the true divine effluence which is no longer expressed to us in any case. We can say the "gods" are the representatives of the divine power moving in creation. A really good explanation of this is the Hindu theory (again their gods were bought from Africa) that we all move and having our being in Durga Shakti or Maha-Lakshmi. This is basically saying all things created are living in the spirit of G_D. Different things created have different marks of G_D's influence in them.

The lowest gate to wisdom is said to be the worship of the stars (ie. amongst the 231 or 221 gates to heaven given by the cabbalists). It is said that mankind was first indoctrinated into the idea and expressed knowledge of God by contemplating the stars of heaven and then identifying their power and influence. In due course one learns to utilise the power of these stars or of the angles or ‘Gods’ as some call them. In this way we are not dealing with the literal star but the spiritual idea attached to these bodies. It is said that mankind fell abase by this form of worship due to its inability to see beyond the star, which is an inherent part of the human psyche...i.e. the need for material culture. And so we learnt everything from these "stars" but could not disengage from their worship and take up our true place as gods ourselves with this knowledge.

In the IFA traditions we find the same ideas. For me there are the four gods: Obatala, the creator of man and god of wisdom; Orunmila, the diviner of heaven and god of understanding; Ogun, the expressed intelligence (knowledge) of heaven and teacher of mankind; Eshu, the keeper of destiny, punishment and balance. Of course each of these beings who dwelled in the house of heaven when it was created has consorts (Odu, Oshun, Oya respectively) with the exception of Eshu.

Now this is very similar to the Hindu tradition of Brahma the creator of man and super intelligence or wisdom; Vishnu the preserver or god of understanding and Shiva the re-absorber or god of knowledge. There is no 4th person to this Trinity and there is simply Shakti (or Durga Shakti as I said before) which represents the eternal spirit who holds balance of the universes. We see how similar these systems are!!!

Then there are the primordial spirits of creation: Yemaya (and Olokun) the watery accommodation and basic fluid of life, Osyain the representative of vegetable creation and propensity for healing; Mama Latta (Caribbean version of the French Maman de la Terre or mother of the earth); Aganju the representative of fire and heat energy, Shango, representative of mankind and god of the sky (Shango olorun). So we see here the five correspondences to water, life, earth, fire, air! I could go into how this picture fits with the Egyptian cosmology but it will take way too long.

Lastly there are the great ancestors, among whom they are elevated ones like Shakponna, Vigroana, Olokbo, etc, and lesser or family ancestors. To me the gods are “heavenly gods”, the primal spirits are our closest “nature gods” who hold all the secrets of our existence, and the ancestors are our guides and first points of contact. Of course this is my own understanding of the orishas after years of personal contact and observation. Obatala rules my head.

I’ll have to leave here as I have university work to do but I’ll continue when I can.