Читать книгу The World's Most Mysterious Objects - Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe - Страница 14
ОглавлениеCHAPTER SIX:The Statuette of Yemanja
The oldest spells and enchantments often seem to depend upon a picture or three-dimensional image of the subject who is to be healed or hunted, protected or punished. Our earliest ancestors painted remarkably lifelike aurochs on the walls of their dimly lit caves, presumably in the hope of attracting prey into the path of their hunting party. Models of wood or clay representing women, men, and beasts were prominent features of early magic. Sometimes these effigies were burnt, impaled, or crushed underfoot. At other times they were blessed and protected by amulets and talismans in order to keep the subject whom they represented safe.
Today, the territory of the Yoruba nation is located towards the south of modern Nigeria, and the traditional African beliefs in a universe inhabited by spirits are still strong there. Animals and birds, rocks, rivers, and waterfalls, and trees and plant life — especially “healing” and “magical” herbs — are all regarded as the dwelling places of spirits with varying degrees of power. The most powerful spirit of all in the minds of the Yoruba was their great goddess Yemanja. They believed she was the mother of the sun and moon, and one of a dozen gods and goddesses who made up the ancient Yoruba pantheon. The making of small figurines as votive offerings to Yemanja became an integral part of Yoruba worship.
Some four centuries ago, the Portuguese were searching for slave labour to run their new South American plantations, and it was the Yoruba’s tragedy to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thousands of them were shipped out as slaves. The only (very minor) redeeming feature was that the Portuguese tended on the whole to be less cruel and more tolerant than most other slave owners of that era. Unlike certain more rigidly fanatical Christian slave owners, the Portuguese allowed their captives to practise their own African religion. As the centuries passed, however, well-meaning but theologically blinkered Christian missionaries tried to force their rigid and exclusive ideas about faith on to the Yemanja-worshipping Yoruba descendants. Their attempts to persuade the Yoruba of the importance of Mary the Virgin, however, met with success beyond their wildest dreams — or their worst nightmares. To the Yoruba, this new “Queen of Heaven” figure was simply their beloved Yemanja wearing a thin Christian disguise, so Yemanja s Feast Day on August 15 became Mary’s as well — or vice versa.
Statuettes of Yemanja — perhaps as a kind of “Black Madonna” figure — are ubiquitous throughout Brazil. It is also common practice for offerings to be left out in Brazilian streets for Yemanja, and even the hungriest and most desperate beggars will not touch them; such is the power of Yemanja’s grip on the hearts and minds of her people.
Apart from the large-scale celebrations to honour Mary and Yemanja on August 15, there is an even more spectacular event on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro on December 31. An enormous crowd of Yemanja worshippers wearing white and carrying candles wade into the sea chanting her praises and throwing flowers into the water.
The true identity of the central character of this strange Yemanja narrative has to be protected, but the records are all in the rigorously kept scholarly archives of the Society for Psychical Research in London. An eminent and trustworthy SPR investigator was working in Brazil a few years ago when the subject (whom we shall refer to simply as “Belinda” to protect her real identity) was brought to his attention. She had studied psychology at the University of Sao Paolo, and this may have led her into a scientific, pragmatic, and, perhaps, rather materialistic paradigm.
One day, however, Belinda accompanied some other members of her family to an attractive beach near Santos, less than one hundred kilometres from Sao Paolo. Here she found a small statuette of Yemanja that had apparently been thrown up by the sea. Very little paint was left on the tiny figurine after its exposure to the action of the sea for so long, but such paint as was left was highly significant when studied in detail in the light of later developments. The jaw and neck still retained some pigment, as did the arms, together with a little more between the shoulder blades. In addition, one eye still retained its bright blue colour. Belinda took the curious little statuette home, despite the remonstrance of the more superstitious members of her family, who believed that it was a votive offering to Yemanja and, as such, should be left severely alone. Within days, Belinda became so ill that she was taken to a hospital and tested for tuberculosis. The test was positive, but she was lucky, and, following some excellent medical treatment, she was cured. The X-ray had revealed what looked like a sinister patch on her right lung, just below the equivalent spot where the statuette had been painted between its shoulder blades.
Her doctor ordered her to take a long rest, and she stayed with her parents for several months, a long way from Sao Pâolo — too far away, some psychic practitioners might suggest, for the Yemanja figurine to influence her. During the time that there were several hundred kilometres between them, the sinister figurine seemed powerless to injure Belinda.
As soon as she returned home, however, her pressure cooker exploded and severely scalded her arms, face, and neck — precisely where the flecks of paint still adhered to the Yemanja figurine. A few days later, her gas oven exploded, much as the pressure cooker had done. But worst of all, she began to feel continual urges to commit suicide — to throw herself into the road in front of a bus or heavy lorry, or to jump from her apartment window, which was more than a dozen storeys above the street.
For Belinda, the most loathsome and mysterious part of her prolonged ordeal was a sensation of being raped repeatedly by something invisible that nevertheless felt totally solid and real. She knew, of course, about the medieval legends of incubi and succubi — the sexually-oriented demons and demonesses who ravished human victims — but this was the twentieth century, and Belinda was a pragmatic university graduate. Scarcely able to believe the evidence of her own senses, she now felt in desperate need of help.
This, she decided, was a problem that her orthodox scientific paradigm could not adequately contend with. Terrified and reluctant, Belinda went to the nearest Umbanda Centre.
Umbanda was the traditional spirit-based religion that had crossed the sea with Belinda’s distant Yoruba ancestors. In the opinion of the local Umbanda leaders, Belinda should take the statuette of Yemanja as close as she could to the spot where it had been found. It was also explained to her that the run of “bad luck” leading to one injury or illness after another coincided in a quite remarkable way to the areas of pigment that still remained on the model of Yemanja. The tuberculosis was in an area of her lung that corresponded to where the pigment remained between the shoulder blades of the tiny statue. The marks on the arms, the jaw, and throat corresponded, closely enough, to the burns she had received when the pressure cooker had exploded.
Once the strange statuette had been returned to the beach and then — presumably — carried away again by the waves, Belinda’s life settled down to a safe, normal, routine existence once more.
The Yemanja statuette certainly qualifies as an extremely mysterious object — but it is as nothing compared to the mysteries that lurk within the darker recesses of the human mind. There is no doubt that every reader will have in his or her own experience at least one memory of an occasion when sheer willpower and determination brought him or her through a difficult, dangerous, or unbearably tedious and monotonous situation that nevertheless had to be endured somehow.
We have all heard of spectacular examples of the power of a determined mind to control a body that is sick, injured, or exhausted. The massively determined Ray Kroc, founder of the multi-million-dollar MacDonald’s restaurant chain, is on record as saying that persistence is the key to success; and a famous oil millionaire is also on record as saying that the secret of his vast fortune was to carry on drilling when his rivals had all given up. If the power of the mind can be with us on such benign occasions, it is perfectly logical to assume that it can also work against us on other occasions.
Stress in the mind can all too often lead to physical problems in the body. The woman or man who is blissfully happy, fulfilled, and contented is likely to enjoy radiant health and to be filled with dynamic energy combined with practically limitless stamina. The mind that is listless, with no interests, hobbies, or goals that it wants to pursue is likely to find itself — sooner rather than later — as the skipper of a leaking, listing, unseaworthy hulk of a body.
One of the most deleterious things that can happen to any of us mentally is to have ambivalent feelings about the same object, person, or set of ideas. In Iris Murdochs brilliant novel A Severed Head, the title was chosen to indicate just such ambivalent feelings. The cryptic meaning was that the severed head hanging from the belt of a traditional witch doctor, medicine man, or priest both attracted and repelled the group with whom he or she worked. When the human mind is confronted by such ambivalent objects, it experiences severe stress and tension.
One of the most deleterious things that can happen to any of us mentally is to have ambivalent feelings about the same object, person, or set of ideas. In Iris Murdochs brilliant novel A Severed Head, the title was chosen to indicate just such ambivalent feelings. The cryptic meaning was that the severed head hanging from the belt of a traditional witch doctor, medicine man, or priest both attracted and repelled the group with whom he or she worked. When the human mind is confronted by such ambivalent objects, it experiences severe stress and tension.
Belinda, the subject of the encounter with the Yemanja statuette, was, in a sense, a woman of two cultures — two sets of ideas that were almost diametrically opposed. The modern university education from which she had benefitted had made her open minded, investigative, and rational. The deeper cultural strains of her people and the spirit-beliefs of her ancestors went back for centuries prior to their being brought to the Portuguese colonies in South America. Although the conflict in Belinda’s mind lay far below the surface, her logical, scientific university paradigm and the old Yoruba belief that spirits inhabited everything were in serious conflict.
Her insistence — despite the warnings of her family — on taking the strange Yemanja statuette back to her apartment may have been the work of her rational, scientific, collegeeducated component, whereas her final acceptance of the Umbanda counsellor’s advice to return the statuette to the sea represented a resurgence of a much older mental substratum that still lingered vestigially within her: the spirit-culture of her Yoruba ancestors.
Much is reported in medical literature of problems arising from so-called psychosomatic illness. From the earliest centuries A.D., devout, mystical saints contemplating the wounds and sufferings of Christ have been able to produce in their own bodies the stigmata — marks that look very much like the injuries to hands and feet resulting from crucifixion. There are many recorded cases of phantom pregnancies, in which the abdomen swells and other physiological symptoms of pregnancy, like lactation, are presented by the patient. Husbands have also been known to experience “sympathy pains” with their pregnant wives. Some back pains and certain forms of paralysis seem to be psychosomatic in origin rather than to have any strictly physiological cause.
Belinda had noticed very particularly where the pigment was still visible on the Yemanja statuette. It is, therefore, conceivable that she subconsciously “arranged” the series of accidents and the apparent tubercular lung lesions to correspond with the pigment still adhering to the figurine.
We all have friends and acquaintances who could well be described as “accident prone,” but their clumsiness, carelessness, and apparent inability to relate cause and effect accurately and rationally may be more than a simple behavioural characteristic. A clinical psychologist might suppose that the accident-prone patient was working against him- or herself at a very deep and powerful subconscious level. The accident-prone subject may, however, be trying to attract attention, in which case the pain of the injury caused by the accident, or the pain or discomfort from the psychosomatic illness, may be regarded by the subject as a price which he or she is perfectly willing to pay in exchange for the much craved attention. Another theory is that the subject believes him- or herself to have committed some fault or sin that needs to be punished, and the series of accidents or psychosomatically induced illnesses, disabilities, and discomforts may be understood at a level beyond the patient’s conscious control as the “appropriate punishments” for what he or she believes has been done amiss.
The jury has four apparent options in this case study. The first is to accept the possibility that some strange, conscious, and purposeful psychic forces caused the accidents and illnesses that Belinda suffered. This need not necessarily be an external spirit force, but could be the product of many minds believing in such a force and — by their belief — actually producing it. The experience of the Toronto psychical researchers who managed to produce psychic phenomena from a “ghost” that they knew perfectly well existed only in their own minds may shed some light upon this possibility. The Tibetan idea of tulpas of the kind that Alexandra David-Neel thought that she had manufactured is also worth bringing into the discussion. At a better known and more popular level there is the phenomenon of a football or baseball team winning more often on its home ground, where it is surrounded by the goodwill and enthusiasm of thousands of fans and supporters who are willing their team to win.
If it was not a genuine disembodied spirit force focusing through the Yemanja image, and if it was not the power of external minds over matter, then was it something that had its origins and found its dynamism exclusively inside Belinda’s own mind?, Was it her ambivalent feelings and the culture clash that brought about her accident proneness, her illness, and her feelings of suicidal despair?
The fourth possibility is that the whole thing was no more than a series of remarkable coincidences, but this theory, of course, raises the far larger question of just what coincidence (or synchronicity) really is.
