About the worries about Santa Muerte in Hoodoo

Khozmiq NeWaGe is one of the most know through persons in American Hoodoo, with deep roots in South Carolina; so we’re not talking about a com'ya but a real been’ya, a person from inside, with experience, not just abstract knowledge. But as anything real, his own evolution is naturally mixed and complex, coming from the black American evangelism; explaining his own efforts to understand Hoodoo as a mature religion, not just as a culture or a way of life.

That’s important, because it determines his perspective, to the point of explain Hoodoo practices in evangelical scripture; filling the ambiguity of black biblical references with his own theological projections, legitimate enough though. The problem may come from his antecedent as evangelist, because a religious person doesn’t normally recognize the cultural nature of religion; and this means that, as a self-taught scholar, he doesn’t recognize the ontological priority of culture over religion.

In this regard, Hoodoo is the proper religiosity of Gullah Geechee culture, not something apart or by its own; but it’s not still a practice doctrinally organized, and even mostly secular, without a regular priesthood.  It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have a priesthood, or that it doesn’t recognize certain organized beliefs; but that all that is not yet organically structured in the political sense of an institution, beyond the private life of their communities.

In this contest, NeWaGe observes syncretism as something bizarre and rare, properly cultural rather than religious; as if Christian related Hoodoo were not a form of syncretism itself, in its African American interpretation of Bible. There are other interpretations of the Bible, like the Lutheran and Calvinist, which rely on its rationality rather than its magic; and are more aligned with the Catholic way —as the origin of modern Christianity—, and so more orthodox.

We should remember that Biblical tradition started with the preaching of Saint Paul, over the legitimacy of Peter; so there is a line of orthodoxy, stablished by the rationality and not the magic tradition of the Jew culture. This is the originality of African American Christianity, bringing back this magic aspect, lost with west rationalism; but it’s just one among other traditions, and even as a link to Christian related Hoodoo and not Hoodoo itself.

This African American Christianity is of course a mature religiosity, which communicates to its Hoodoo expressions; but not to the whole Hoodoo phenomena, as a religion by its own, but specifically to this kind of practices. So the inclusion of mature figures as Santa Muerte, comes here as a disruption, rather than a simple instrumentality; which is interesting, since African American culture is not entirely African but American, to which Santa Muerte is only a recent acquisition.

That is due to the cultural mingling of Hispanic and African Americans, in the context of common economical tier; so it should not be a problem, except that it’s a problem, because the cultural ambiguities it reflects. This is about the Gullah Geechee culture, constructed retrospectively, from the intellectual approach to local linguistics; which makes sense, since it brings to Afro-Americans and identity, in the void of economic and political determinations; but makes also big problems for self-taught scholars like NeWaGe, recreating culture from scratch, as theologians.

This may be the problem for NeWaGe, as a theologian and not an anthropologist, in an anthropological situation; but it’s this kind of contradiction what brings consistency to any effective reality, as a form —or way— determined in this tension. And this is the case of the Gullah Geechee culture, as a New Africa emerging from the crumbles of the West one; and no matter how disappointing or promising, it looks like a deeply Christian culture, although painful of course.

So this Santa Muerte incorporation may be just another contradiction, shaping the way of this new African Americanity; mixing alien cults that nobody can totally understand yet, but as before happened with the natives, for example. Here, NeWaGe point to the ambiguity that mixes equivalence with convergence, about the figure of death; and that’s why it’s so important, even for brilliant self-taught scholars, to delimit those ambiguities obscuring their approach.

This is important for the world outside African American culture, reduced it to the glamor of the Spiritual tradition; but may be problematic for their own structure, on the understanding of their own nature and originality as Americans. This is also important on its political aspect, as it exposes the susceptibleness of Afro-American people to its manipulations; like its exposition to Hispanic culture, forcing them to identify as a working class, away from their natural conservatism.