Trance Dancing with the Jinn: The Ancient Art of Contacting Spirits Through Ecstatic Dance by Yasmin Henkesh

Author:Yasmin Henkesh [Henkesh, Yasmin]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Tags: trance dancing with jinn, trance-dancing with djinn, yasmen henkesh, trance dancing with the djinn, ecstatic dance, trance dancing, trance-dancing with the jinn, yasmin henkesh
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.
Published: 2016-12-07T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 29: Map showing possession religions in Africa and early Homo sapiens migration

If all these possession cults share a common origin, they should share similar traits, right? And they do. To begin with, they all predate Islam and their members are mainly women. And even though names and ritual details vary, their underlying raison d’être is the same—healing. Patients enter these sisterhoods after being diagnosed “with spirit.” And once initiated, they devote considerable energy into placating their entities: they wear their clothes, sacrifice to them, and allow them to manifest in their bodies. And most, from east to west and north to south, use some form of trance dancing to communicate with them.

Let’s dig a little deeper to see if there are other similarities among Africa’s possession cults.

Ethiopia/Abyssinia

Sadly, far less is written about the zar in Ethiopia—the zar’s birthplace—than about other African possession cults. Besides Women’s Medicine, I found only one other study, based on research from the 1930s–1950s, specifically dedicated to Ethiopian zar: Michael Leiris’s La Possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Éthiopiens de Gondar (which translates to Possession and Its Theatrical Aspects of the Gondar Ethiopians). Of course, new books are released every day, so I may have missed recent publications. According to what I have read, though, Ethiopian spirits are divided into two main types: zar and ganen. The zar are not considered evil or murderous, but they do punish offenses by inflicting nervous or psychosomatic illnesses. Individuals have names, personalities, habits, and histories, similar to Egyptian zar, and are human in origin (ancestor spirits). Most believe in God. The ganen, on the other hand, are demons of divine origin, or “bad angels” as the country’s Orthodox Christians call them.298

In practice, Ethiopian zayran include pure spirits, ancestor souls, and hybrids of the two, organized in social hierarchies according to their maternal lineages, religion, likes, and dislikes. Most live in the brush, particularly rocky or wooded areas, with the females being the more malevolent. Tradition has it that zayran descend from Eve. Apparently, she hid half her thirty children from God, fearing he would take them away. To punish her, God decreed that the hidden would remain so, with “brother governing brother.”299 This is why the zar are hidden and humans rule the Earth—or, why the zar rule invisibly over humans; it depends on how you interpret the phrase. A proverb takes the story further. Eve hid the fairest, brightest, and most pleasant, which explains why humans are disagreeable and the Hidden better in every way. This is also the explanation given when zar become difficult or hurt their “horses”—human cruelty is to blame, not the reverse.300

Zar and their progeny come in many shapes and sizes and are divided into two houses: right and left. The right house is composed of forty Amharic Christian males that spent fourteen years in Jerusalem for religious training. The right house rules over the left since it has the only entities strong enough to make the others obey. This is also why all great zar healers must be possessed by at least one of these Christian males.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.