Table Of ContentEsotericism in African American Religious Experience
Aries Book Series
Texts and Studies in Western Esotericism
Editor
Marco Pasi
Editorial Board
Jean-Pierre Brach
Andreas Kilcher
Wouter J. Hanegraaff
Advisory Board
Allison Coudert – Antoine Faivre – Olav Hammer
Monika Neugebauer-Wölk – Mark Sedgwick – Jan Snoek
György Szőnyi – Garry Trompf
VOLUME 19
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/arbs
Esotericism in African American
Religious Experience
“There Is a Mystery”…
Edited by
Stephen C. Finley
Margarita Simon Guillory
Hugh R. Page, Jr.
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Untitled, c. 1977 by Martin Green. Graphite and poster paint on poster board
22” × 28” from the collection of Robert Tannen and Jeanne Nathen. Reproduced with kind permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Esotericism in African American religious experience : “there is a mystery”... / edited by Stephen C. Finley,
Margarita Simon Guillory, Hugh R. Page, Jr.
pages cm. -- (Aries book series. Texts and studies in Western esotericism, ISSN 1871-1405 ; VOLUME 19)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-28309-1 ((hardback) : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-28342-8 ((e-book)) 1. Occultism--
United States. 2. African Americans--Religion. 3. United States--Religion. I. Finley, Stephen C., editor.
BF1434.U6E86 2014
200.89’96073--dc23
2014033846
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issn 1871-1405
isbn 978-90-04-28309-1 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-28342-8 (e-book)
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Contents
Foreword ix
Jeffrey J. Kripal
Preface xii
Acknowledgements xiv
List of Contributors xviii
Introduction: Africana Esoteric Studies
Mapping a New Endeavor 1
Stephen C. Finley, Margarita Simon Guillory and Hugh R. Page, Jr.
Part 1
(Pre-) 19th Century
1 Esoteric Writing of Vodou
Grimoires, Sigils, and the Houngan’s Notebook 23
Yvonne Chireau and Mambo Vye Zo Kommande LaMenfo
2 Paschal Beverly Randolph in the African American Community 37
Lana Finley
3 The Self Divine
Know Ye Not that Ye are Gods? 52
Darnise C. Martin
Part 2
Early to Mid 20th Century
4 Working Roots and Conjuring Traditions
Relocating Black ‘Cults and Sects’ in African-American
Religious History 71
Elizabeth Pérez
5 Spirit is Universal
Development of Black Spiritualist Churches 86
Mary Ann Clark
vi Contents
6 The Harlem Renaissance as Esotericism
Black Oragean Modernism 102
Jon Woodson
7 Mathematical Theology
Numerology in the Religious Thought of Tynnetta
Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan 123
Stephen C. Finley
8 On the Knowledge of Self and Others
Secrecy, Concealment and Revelation in Elijah
Muhammad’s Nation of Islam (1934–1975) 138
Justine M. Bakker
9 Post-Imperial Appropriation of Text, Tradition, and Ritual
in the Pseudonymous Writings of Henri Gamache 152
Hugh R. Page, Jr.
10 Mystery Matters
Embodiment and African American Mystics 162
Chad Pevateaux
11 Show and Prove
Five Percenters and the Study of African American Esotericism 177
Biko Mandela Gray
12 The “Nu” Nation
An Analysis of Malachi Z. York’s Nuwaubians 198
Paul Easterling
13 Sacred Not Secret
Esoteric Knowledge in the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors 210
Julius H. Bailey
Part 3
Late 20th Century to Present-day
14 Astro-Black Mythology
The Poetry of Sun Ra 227
Marques Redd
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Contents vii
15 Conjurational Contraptions
Techno-Hermeneutics, Mechanical Wizardry, and the Material
Culture of African American Folk Magic 246
Stephen C. Wehmeyer
16 Portraying Portraits
The Intersectionality of Self, Art, and the Lacanian Gaze
in the Nahziryah Monastic Community 262
Margarita Simon Guillory and Aundrea Matthews
17 Those Mysteries, Our Mysteries
Ishmael Reed and the Construction of a Black Esoteric Tradition 277
Marques Redd
18 Rockin’ for a Risen Savior
Bakongo and Christian Iconicity in the Louisiana Easter
Rock Ritual 295
Joyce Marie Jackson
19 Pole Dancing for Jesus
Negotiating Movement and Gender in Men’s Musical Praise 314
Alisha Lola Jones
20 Wonder Working Power
Reclaiming Mystical and Cosmological Aspects of Africana
Spiritual Practices 331
Barbara A. Holmes
C onclusion: The Continuing Quest to Map Secrecy, Concealment,
and Revelatory Experiences in Africana Esoteric Discourse
“There Is a Mystery…” 346
Stephen C. Finley, Margarita Simon Guillory
and Hugh R. Page, Jr.
Afterword 356
Anthony B. Pinn
Bibliography 361
Index 388
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Foreword
“Listening to the Esoterica Africana”
Jeffrey J. Kripal
It is a great pleasure, indeed a delight, to see this volume appear. I cannot help
but think that it signals something genuinely new and something truly promis-
ing. It is certainly long overdue for the shared and overlapping fields of study
that gathered in the twentieth century under the umbrellas of those three
heterodox – isms: Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism, or “gem,” as we have
come to call them affectionately here at Rice, where a number of these young
essayists were trained. It is certainly time for those of us who have labored in
these same historical fields for decades now, with little or no awareness of these
African religions and these African American esotericisms, to put down our
theories and books and ponder what appears in these pages—to listen.
It is time to listen to our colleagues, as they move the study of African
American religions from the margins to the center of the professional study of
religion, and as they liberate that study from the traditional assumptions of
denominational history, congregationalist identity, and the Black Church,
indeed even from Christian theology, the Bible, and the category of race itself.
There are multiple precedents to and ancestors of this project, of course. One
thinks, for example, of those distinguished European intellectuals who carved
out the new field of Western esotericism for us in the last decades of the last
century and the first decade of this one: individuals like Antoine Faivre, Wouter
Hanegraaff, and Kocku von Stuckrad. One also thinks of all of those American
intellectuals who have pioneered the study of black religion in America, prom-
inent figures like Charles Long, who has blazed exactly these sorts of intellec-
tual paths in the history of religions and the study of black religion for over
four decades now, and my own colleague here at Rice, Anthony Pinn, whose
words appropriately conclude the present volume. More on Tony in a moment.
The present volume represents the work of the next generation of scholar-
ship, as it consists of a collection of essays that are performed, for the most
part, by younger intellectuals, many of whom are looking at figures and move-
ments that are either poorly known or hardly known at all. As a developing
new school of thought, the essayists write against the common assumptions
that black religion and the Black Church are the same thing, and that African
Americans are more or less equivalent to their socially constructed racial iden-
tities. Put more positively, without ever taking their eyes off the crucial con-
cerns of race and social justice, the essayists are able to show in exquisite detail
how such complex, conflicted human beings also know extraordinary moments
