Coronation by Kidnapping
“Congratulations, you are property. Here’s your crown.”
I am quite fond of this author’s posts on priesthood, and today’s entry made me laugh until I cried.
The day I was told I would be a mambo, Anaisa took the head of my godfather in a bar and proclaimed it in her typically viciously joyful fashion to myself and the handful of other people from that society who were present. Her words felt like a doom that I had, somewhere, been waiting for my whole life. Familiarity, recognition, and horror. I would never have been able to tell you before that point that I had been waiting for it, but the second I heard it, it was inescapable.
I ran out of the bar, leaving my drink and everyone and everything else just sitting there, with Anaisa calling after me to come back. A mambo followed me out into the parking lot to ask me what was going on. The only thing I could say was that the idea of being given people to care for, who depended on me, was… a lot. But more than that, it was the recognition: welp, this is the end of my ability to run away. They finally found me, the things I’d dimly sensed chasing me my whole life.
They did not let go. Anaisa’s announcement was just a nicely formal way to say that I had been taken.
The list of things I’ve given up since then is so long I don’t think I could list them all without serious thought. There is no part of me which has not been remodeled to fit the role. We give up our names, our social associations, our families, our lives and personalities until there is nothing left of who we were before we initiate. We give up our bodies, too, and not just during possession.
African traditional religions don’t do authority as special privilege. We conscript our office holders, sometimes literally kidnapping them—bag over the head, picked up and dragged bodily into a vehicle. Contrast this with authority as a reward, the way it is so often seen in society. Absolutely nobody wants to be conscripted who understands what we’re giving up.
Priests are infrastructure, and their authority is the authority of infrastructure. They give up everything to become the glue that holds everyone together and the combination of knowledge, service, and capacity which ensures that the people of their society can survive. Construction worker, therapist, bank, doctor, advocate, lawyer, negotiator: anything the spirit needs us to do for those people, we must do.
The terms of that submission to the spirit are absolute, harder than diamond, and lifelong. Death is the least (and kindest) of the consequences we face for disobedience.
Anyone in a hurry to get their hands on a tcha-tcha needs to have their head examined. They do not understand the nature of this kind of authority.
