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From The Ramparts, Junious Ricardo Stanton
It’s Time for an Exorcism
RBG Communiversity
order had to have spiritual causes and ramifications. From an African perspective spiritsthat made members of the community physically ill or behave in inappropriate ways hadto be evil. As such they reasoned/realized sickness could easily affect the wholecommunity given it was spiritual in nature! From and African perspective, healing had toencompass spiritual and social as well as physical remedies. As spirits are invisible,ubiquitous and unpredictable, the safest thing is to keep away from them. If they or theliving dead, appear too frequently to human beings, people feel disturbed. Then thespirits possess men and are blamed for forms of illness like madness and epilepsy.Spirit possession occurs in one or another in practically every African society. Yet spiritpossession is not always to be feared, and there are times when it is not onlydesirable but people induce it through special dancing and drumming until the personconcerned experiences spirit possession during which they may even collapse. Whenthe person is thus possessed the spirit may speak through him so that now he plays therole of a medium and the messages he relays are received with expectation by those towhom they are addressed. But on the whole spirit possessions, especially unsolicitedones, result in bad effects.
John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy page 80
Europeans are not spiritually conscious by culture. They are thoroughly materialistic intheir orientation to the point they pooh pooh notions of demons and spirits as causes of illness. Europeans always seek material causes and sources such as germs or bugs for illness. Unlike Africans, Asians and other First World people whites rarely consider spiritual, social or psychological paths for either illness or healing modalities. As suchthey ignore a powerful force for healing and restoration. While their technology canisolate and treat specific regions of the body quite effectively, they are addressingeffects rather than causes. Never do they seek to find the causes which often areenvironmental, emotional, psychological and behavioral born out of mental, social andphysical habits repeated unconsciously by the sick person, their families and immediatesocial environment.