NECROMANCY AT THE CROSSROAD OF STARS

Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold

Among a people who cannot conceive human society without a monarch, the desires
of radicals may be expressed in monarchical terms. Among a people who cannot
conceive human existence without a religion, radical desires may speak the language
of heresy.
- Hakim Bey

Quite commonly Quimbanda is understood to be a necromantic cult, but it is surely

not limited to necromancy or working with the dead per se. Quimbanda works in a
greater field of multiple crossroads, vertical and horizontal where star falls into
earth and we find golems in clouds. A great bar in truly comprehend what
Quimbanda is rests not only in appropriation but how the human organism
process experiences, a matter that changes from person to person, from time to
time and place to place. Appropriation is an eternal temptation in the work of
making sense, and in this field caution, care and temperance should be exercised.
Because what happens when we integrate the other into what already is defined
and understood as something of its own? What is brought in will naturally suffer

the consequences of having to fit into what is already there. Hence we commit a
violation on the other in the name of what is, just like any other tyrant who seeks
dominion or a fool that knows no better.
We need to accept that the contemporary human being has tied its social
experience to the ideals of rulers and religion and it is to go with or against these
factors we become heretics, antinomians, bureaucrats or law-abiding organisms. I
dare suggest this is a bias, a paradigm we have ended up not questioning because
Freud, Nietzsche and democracy have become a fog for our sight and thus have
ended up becoming nails and directions in not only the social compass, but the
crossroad of Self. Yes Self, because Ego has in our day and age become something
of a demon in its own right. No Ego equals bliss and hence a cult celebrating the
Unique must by proxy be demonic. What a travesty. How thick the veils of Maya
has covered our sore eyes, because void of Ego we are also void of intent and
direction and so Ego became the devil as a modern paradox in a world of
ambition where everyone can be what he or she wants to be. And here comes the
sadness of things into play. To want to be what you are not leads to falsity and no
matter how much we shout for rights that are supposedly coming along with being
born in human form, you either reap illusion or clarity as life moves on.

I dare say that we modern people tend to misappropriate most of our experiences
quite frequently because of this fundamental misappropriation we constantly do of
Ego, Self and Other. We do this because these are ideas that lies tar thick in the
nerves of the world and we accept them as axiomatic truths and on this we spin
our world and convictions.
And it is in this field Quimbanda becomes challenging, because here we are
speaking of spirits that teach and do, always aimed towards the practitioners
Uniqueness. We might see this interaction as the otherness of Exu being seen as a
witness to our own coming into being a process and merging typified by the
crossroad. For us the crossroad is a place of choice and change hence danger and
devils is what we find there. We are no longer friends with chance or change and
whatever that is not of us, is the enemy resting in the otherness.
It is imperative that we realize that this experience and approach ultimately leads
us to perceive freedom as a tyrant and love as something that can only be obtained
through antinomian chaos. We need to end these perception and see the Self
unique and the Ego that gives intent and direction as something that is established

in relationship to the other and I mean here, not in relation to psychoanalytic

dimensions of superego and id but in relation to the mysterious that is beyond
this otherness that when we touch it gives us eurekas and ahas! and for some
bliss and peace. I am speaking of making a war on these concepts you and me
simply adopted by being children of the spirit of modernity, because they do bar
our understanding for arcane and living traditions like Quimbanda. It is only when
this war have been done and won and we find ourselves in the ruins of a world we
deconstructed by our own will and power we can use the memory of what once
was to give new life and meaning to old signs and symbols and return to its origin.
An example of this we find in Haitian Vodou from the area of Goyave, Leogane and
Port-au-Prince where images of saints are used as signs for a specific myst or
mystery, hence they are no longer the saint rooted in Christian mythology, but a
signpost for a greater complexity of wisdom that can be applied on the saint, but
not necessarily We get easily confused by this kind of order of the other, but it is
important to at least give this deconstruction a chance and allow the devils to
move in at each star of the constellation that witnesses the becoming of your
Uniqueness.
These concepts hold a tremendous influence on how we should understand the
Exus and Pomba Giras of Quimbanda, because what are these spirits really, what is
represented in their otherness, and how can we fathom their witnessing of our
Self becoming?
Some houses of Quimbanda speaks of how these spirits we know as Exu and
Pomba Gira were arcane spirits assigned the command over all crossroads in the
world and with crossroads we mean every single physical place that possessed
power. Clearly a reference to Bruno and his pantheist visions and ideas can be seen
here in the way divine afflatus empowers the world and makes it bursting with
power. We are speaking of a first principle after merging with a second principle
endows the world with power as its offspring.
So, crossroads of power was spread all over the world and on these sites, plants,
temples, houses, roads, cemeteries and taverns were erected and became a focus
for a given potency or vibration.
Are you following me? Do you realize the fundamental premise in what is the
nature of an Exu?

It is a power unique and from its otherness it calls upon the uniqueness of the one
who enters into contact with this power by resonance, sign and symbol. We are the
otherness to these unique powers and we are one anothers witnesses. And so it
follows that upon death, Ego dissolves and sameness unites with otherness as is
only logical, if you have followed my reasoning until now. In this way the primal
forces gains force by death, the unique vibration gains added strength by addition,
because in this a variation of difference enters the crossroad. Because of this
spiritual phenomenon we have a given Exu manifesting in various ways, but
always there will be features of recognition that announces what it is, but also the
otherness that generated its uniqueness.
Allow me to illustrate this with a reference to the hierarchy of Quimbanda. The
hierarchy have since the 1950s been modelled on the classical western grimoires
that in turn was modelled on the feudal cast system, we kind of need to get away
from the structures of power embedded in this and thus away from any archontic
implication.
Quimbanda is about freedom, hence we need to see the hierarchy more as a
natural flow, than a political one. We can for good measure use the Platonic and
neo-Platonic ideas of emanation to illustrate this. Quite simply we find a grand
principle that unfolds into variations, fractions and variations until it becomes
earth and matter and mirrors its origin. It has become unique as its origin remains
its witness. And in this the feudal monarchy becomes a monarchic anarchy
This means that some Exus or Pomba Giras never manifested, while others did so,
repeatedly in various forms by the Unique example we lived that called upon the
attention of the Otherness that affirmed what we were living. Hence, we have
Pomba Giras of Star, Sun and Moon as we have Exus of ideas and actions as much
as we have and have had human beings that lived lives in a given resonance and
the sum of life became an added vibration to what was from the beginning.

This means that death gives increase to the crossroads of power and death
explains the concept of legion because everything that is, do go through its cycle
and makes us crossroads swirling between stars and subterranean caves. And
from star and cave comes our Tata, our teacher, in the form of bat, fog, fire or devil
to teach what you are accepting as the otherness we are in the greater work of
teaching freedom in such grand measures that we not always manage to fathom

the dimensions of what is going on. In this way, Quimbanda is the circumference of
death, life, origin and end, all embedded in a pulse of otherness that calls our name
by any other name
Illustration; F. Goya