Tag: African religious traditions
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Oral Traditions in Africa
The statement that oral traditions in Africa predate writing for example is well-supported by scholarly consensus in African historiography, linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology. The only people that initially denied these facts were scientists with bias during the colonial-era. Oral traditions tend to encompass storytelling, epics, proverbs, genealogies, praise poetry, and historical narratives transmitted verbally across…
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From Nabta Playa to the Osirian Mysteries: Africa’s Claim to the Primordial Wisdom Tradition
How nineteenth-century esotericists ignored Africa’s ancient Wisdom Traditions, limiting their focus to Biblical interpretations, which expanded into understanding Indo-Iranian roots. INTRODUCTION The concept of a single primordial Wisdom Tradition, or even just the origins of “Holy Wisdom” as it was constituted in Western religious and philosophical literature (particularly in the nineteenth-century, to the medieval Alchemists…
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Albert Pike’s Life and Philosophical Legacy in American Esotericism
This article is a combination of transcription and summation of Canadian philosopher Manly P. Hall’s Seminars on the life and ideas of Albert Pike in 1958 tracing the origins of the Wisdom Tradition, which often takes on a form of mythmaking in Masonic lore. A more in-depth factual biography of Albert Pike’s life, views and…
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Pan-Esotericism in African Religious Tradition: Roots of the “Divine Spark”
The “divine spark” refers to the inner divine principle that makes a being fully human and capable of ultimate spiritual realization. The claim made by certain European racist occultists (e.g., some 19th–20th century esoteric racists) that Black Africans or people of African descent lack the “divine spark” (the Logos, Atman, Nous, scintilla animae) is philosophically,…
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The “Divine Spark” in White Racist Biopolitics
If you have kept up, this has a relation to Theosophy in its global context, particularly when addressing the teachings of ancestral and ancient Native American and African philosophical religious traditions. In the midst of researching the life and ideas of Scottish-Rite Freemason Albert Pike based on Manly P. Hall’s lecture, because his toppled statue…
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Pan-Esotericism in Africa: Hermetic Roots and Bantu Spiritual Wisdom
The lengthy article in The Boston Courier of July 18, 1886, in which nearly seventy citizens of Nagapattinam in India penned a letter defending the existence of the Sadhus, of great initiates is a testament of the truth regarding the full ramifications of this elusive history of the mysteries. That people have held personal converse…
The American Minervan 