Pentecost: West African Tribal Religion

derkrash-at-yahoo-dot-com

The critical juncture is Azusa Street where the white people’s experiment from Parham in Topeka Kansas met up with African American folk customs together in one congregation. After a period of melding these two things, they exploded across the world. The African tradition and the white tradition alone could not push it forward, but the melding of the two made for the perfect recipe to start a new religion. William Seymour, the son of a slave was the genius to put together this new religion. In West African religion you had the ancient belief of “the little me within the big me.” This “little me” was another person inside of someone that was in tuned to the spiritual and “came out” during spiritual times, which is where we get the term referring to African Americans as “soul” when we know that deep-felt feeling in their music and other customs. This “little me” in the West African tradition was the part of the person that got possessed with the spirit of animals, such as a bear. When the “little me” would get possessed with a particular animal, the person would become for a time acting like that animal.

Now, transfer these West Africans into the American Christian context. Well, they no longer were possessed by a bear or a tiger, but by “Jesus.” This is where Pentecost inherited the African American traditions from Azusa Street. They “get the Holy Ghost,” or so they think, but it is a pagan ritual inherited form West Africa. This “little me” can be explained when Pentecostals go about their normal lives seemingly as normal people – or close to it. During times when the “anointing” comes upon them, they take on another personality and “speak under the authority of the Holy Ghost” like they are a different person. This is the inheritance of the African “little me” becoming possessed by a God, which is now Jesus instead of, say, a tiger.

You can also see the great cultural inheritance of this African phenomenon in American music in things such as improvisation in Jazz and Rock where the person “just jams to the music” with another part of the musician just pulling music from the depths of his soul – the African “little me.” It is like another part of him playing the music without any notes or program. You can also see this cultural inheritance from African American entertainers when they just “break down” and become another person in their “groove” which makes them some of the finest entertainers in the world. Some white people can do this, but not many.

I know some of this stuff because I grew up in a place where I could absorb elements of this culture by being in a predominantly black junior high school and being in the band where I picked up these musical techniques that had served me well as a Pentecostal musician. And I can tell you that the phenomenon of the “little me within the big me” is the key element to all of this stuff. The strange thing is that it is an inheritance of West African Tribal religion and custom. You can read about this in Harold Bloom’s book, “The American Religion” on Amazon.com if you are interested.

Without the grafting of African American culture joining up with Parham’s tongues experiment in Topeka, there would be NO Pentecostal movement. Remember that William Seymour, the African American Azusa genius, was a student of Parham’s for a time, and took it exponentially further at Azusa Street to begin another religion.

This is why you will see a shy little woman “come under the power of God” and start screaming, yelling, and shouting her hair down. The “Holy Ghost" supposedly intoxicates the “little me” inside her but in fact, they are really practicing West African tribal religions customs repackaged as Christianity.

Interesting, huh? I find this fascinating.