The Ancestors in African Spirituality in Comparison with Swedenborg’s Experience of the Spiritual World

(Note: This post is a lightly edited version of a paper written in 2022 for an academic program at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. References for some quotations have been left in condensed academic format. For full publication information, see the bibliography at the end.)

Introduction

During the time my wife and I have been living in Soweto, Johannesburg, since we moved here from the United States in January of 2020, it has become clear to me how strong a role the ancestors play in African community and spiritual life. Funerals here are not perfunctory affairs as they often are in the U.S. They are ongoing cultural observances that extend over weeks, months, and even years, highlighted by specific ceremonies and rituals. Recently, I was honored to attend a traditional Xhosa ceremony in Eastern Cape that took place over two decades after the person remembered in the ceremony had passed on from this world.

Rather than thinking of their deceased loved-ones as “gone,” Africans more commonly think of them as continuing their journey in another realm, while maintaining their connection with their children who are still alive.

This fascinates me. Why? Because of its striking resemblance to the recorded experiences of my church’s key theologian, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). Swedenborgians, also known as New Church people, look to Swedenborg’s writings for our understanding of the Bible and the Christian religion.

Swedenborg’s travels in the spiritual world

In his voluminous theological writings, the bulk of which consist of Bible exegesis and doctrinal exposition, Swedenborg also offers detailed descriptions of the spiritual world, especially in his most popular book, Heaven and Hell. These descriptions are based, he said, on his own visits to and travels in that world (see Heaven and Hell #1). These spiritual experiences stretched over a period of nearly three decades, from his mid-fifties right up to his death at the age of 84.

In the spiritual world as Swedenborg experienced it, people who have passed on to the next life are very much alive. In fact, Swedenborg said that after death people continue with their lives as a seamless continuation of the way they had lived in the physical world. Further, he said that people in the spiritual world maintain a usually unconscious but very strong relationship with people who are still living in their physical bodies in the material world.

Compatibility with African beliefs

Certainly there are significant differences between Swedenborgian and African practices with regard to family members and friends who have passed on to the spiritual world. Most obviously, the members of the organized New Church (Swedenborgian) have no regular practice, as part of their religion, of communing with their ancestors through ceremonies and rituals, which is a key part of African spirituality.

And yet, unlike traditional Christianity, which generally teaches that people sleep in their graves until a future universal Last Judgment, and which therefore cannot easily accept communing with the ancestors as a valid practice, there is nothing in Swedenborg’s experience of and teachings about our resurrection and the spiritual world that would invalidate African beliefs and practices in relation to their deceased ancestors.

Swedenborg did frown upon present-day attempts to contact the spirits of deceased persons. See, for example, Heaven and Hell #249, in which he speaks of the danger of coming under the influence of fanatical spirits who will lead people astray into evil and destructive actions. And yet, he also said that in ancient times it was common for people on this earth to have open communication with the spirits of deceased people who were living in heaven. See, for example, Secrets of Heaven #69, 784.

This article will offer a presentation of key aspects of African beliefs and practices in relation to the ancestors and their realm. It will then cover some of the problems these have caused for Western Christian missionaries and African Christian converts alike, including a brief synopsis of various solutions that have been proposed and enacted to address these problems.

Yet my thesis, as presented in Part 3 of this article, is that Swedenborgian Christianity offers a more robust and less conflicted path toward reconciling and creating dialog between African Traditional Religion and Christian faith and practice.

The contribution of African beliefs

I have also come to believe that African beliefs and practices in relation to the ancestors embody a key element of spiritual life that has been missing from traditional Western Christianity for many centuries—which is why few to no previously established Christian denomination have been entirely adequate to meet the spiritual needs of African people.

Swedenborg, very unusually among eighteenth-century European theologians, viewed Africans as highly advanced spiritually. He presented them as more spiritually perceptive than the Europeans of his day. It seems to me that now, several centuries later, instead of Africans being junior partners in the Christian-African relationship, it is time for the distinctively positive aspects African Traditional Religion to elevate Christian faith and practice to a higher level.

Specifically, the African belief and experience of the inhabitants of the spiritual realm as a real presence and direct influence on our life in this world is something that has been largely banished from Western Christianity. I believe this sense of the real presence of the spiritual realm in our life here on earth must be revived in Christianity for it to continue serving people’s spiritual needs in present-day culture, and into the future.

(Note: Although I have now lived among African people in South Africa for nearly three years, and have attended ceremonies reflecting the traditional African relationship with the ancestors, this article is based on existing literature, not on original studies of my own.)

Part 1. African Cosmology and the Ancestors

The difficulty in studying African Traditional Religion (ATR) from an outside scholarly perspective is highlighted by New Testament academic Charles A. Wanamaker:

Those familiar with the study of religious traditions with sacred written texts cannot help but be struck by the complete absence of such texts in relation to African traditional religions. African traditional religions historically have had no written texts because Africa had, and by and large still has, an oral culture, though this is changing. The small scale, stateless societies of pre-colonial Africa neither required nor generated written languages. (Wanamaker 1997, p. 282)

Nor is it a simple matter of interviewing spiritual leaders in ATR and recording their explanations. Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa (1921–2020), commonly known as Credo Mutwa, was brought up Christian, but while still a young man returned to the religion of his African roots. He was chosen and initiated into the sacred knowledge of ATR. As part of that initiation, he was told:

My son, you who today are to be welcomed into the Sacred Kraal of those chosen to bear the heavy load that is the Lore, the History and the Beliefs of your forefathers for the ears and brains of those as yet unborn; you who are today to be one of the few torches that have been lit in the Great Darkness covering our native land these days, so that the religion of your forefathers and mine do not die—hear my words with your brain and your soul and with every nerve and fibre of your body and blood.

What you are to be told this day is something that very few ever are told, and which many would give their lives to know; and what you are to be told this day is not for the ears of the common rabble out there in the plains and valleys of the land, the unthinking rabble who can never understand much of what they are told anyway. Neither is it for the ears of the foreigners from beyond the seas, who would only use what you tell them to enslave the spirits of your people and destroy the Bantu in spirit and turn their bodies into empty soulless shells—slaves in spirit as much as slaves in the flesh.

If you ever pass what you are about to be told today on to the ears of the aliens, a curse shall fall upon you and dog you for the remainder of your days. Men shall come who will tear your living body with sharp weapons, and the very aliens to whom you will have dared betray the spirit of your people shall revile and deride you, and you will know no peace no matter where you go, and you will be injured alike by enemies from without as by those with whom you share the love mat. And your own children shall take your life eventually and you shall lie in a grave of blood and shame—by the Gods cursed and by men abhorred. (Mutwa 1998 p. 560–561, originally published in 1964)

If Mutwa’s experience is at all typical of those initiated into the deeper knowledge of ATR, those willing to defy these impressive curses and reveal what they have learned to foreigners and academic researchers alike will be few and far between. And indeed, most literature on ATR is written, not by its adherents themselves, but by Christian missionaries, clergy, and scholars who have studied ATR largely from the outside. Even ordinary Africans, so says Mutwa and his instructors, are not to be taught these great mysteries.

Where, then, can we gain reliable information about African cosmology?

One concentrated source is Mutwa himself, who chose to defy the curses called down upon him should he reveal to outsiders the secret knowledge vouchsafed to him. He wrote:

Much of what I shall reveal here will shock and anger many people—most of all my fellow Bantu, who resent having their doings and secrets exposed to foreigners. By writing many of these things, I am becoming, in terms of our tribal laws, a traitor to my own race. And this is going to make me hold back much of what I should also reveal. Terrible as the stigma of traitor is, I shall risk bearing it in the belief that what I am doing here will help my people in the end. Only time will tell whether I am right or wrong. There has been much suffering and bloodshed in Africa in recent years—bloodshed that has led to hatred and still more suffering. And the most pathetic thing about it is that much of this could have been prevented had the White rulers of Africa had a better knowledge and a better understanding of the way a Black man’s mind works than they do, even now. (Mutwa 1998, p. xvii)

And again:

Before one appoints oneself a judge of any race of Man on earth, one must have a thorough knowledge of the religions and beliefs of that particular race. The reason people from beyond the seas judge the Black Man so very wrongly is that they have not the slightest inkling of the true nature of the religions of Africa’s sons and daughters. Ask any of these wise ones from abroad what the Bantu people believe in, and they will say the Bantu worship the spirits of their dead ancestors; they will tell you that the Bantu are a fetish-ridden, superstitious race sunk in the lowest levels of heathenism.

And they will be utterly wrong.

I have been a Christian; I was once a Muslim. And this I can tell without prejudice or fear: the Native religion of the Bantu, the religion of my fatherland, is greater and nobler than both of those creeds. Of all the religions under the sun, ours is the most genuinely based on ‘Love thy neighbour’ and ‘See, live, and let live.’ (Mutwa 1998, p. 552)

This brief survey of key beliefs in ATR spiritual cosmology, especially as it relates to the ancestors, will draw heavily on Mutwa’s account in Indaba, My Children (Mutwa 1998), but also on Kenyan Christian cleric John S. Mbiti’s popularly written Introduction to African Religion (Mbiti 1991). I will draw from other sources as well.

God in ATR

Western Christians and other outsiders commonly view ATR as a form of pagan polytheism. Not so, say our African authors.

In Mutwa’s understanding of African cosmology, though there may be a concept of demigods, the one Great God encompasses all things. Here is how one of his instructors expressed it to him:

My child, you know from the teachings of your parents that every child is taught that there is a Great God (and that there are also Lesser Gods), but you do not know just what the Great God, whom we shall call the Most Ultimate God, is, and this you are about to be told this day. The Most Ultimate God, who is the God of the Gods of the Gods, is Everything in Everything. Each tree, each blade of grass, and each stone that you see out there, and each one of the things that live, be they men or beasts, are all parts of God, just as each one of the hairs on your head and each flea in your hair and each drop of your blood is part of you. The sun is part of God; the moon is part of God and each one of the stars is but an infinitesimal part of Him who Is, and yet is not, Him who Was, and yet was not, and Him who Will Be, and yet shall never be; because there never was a time when God was not and there never is a time when God can never be. (Mutwa 1998, p. 561)

In theological terminology, this would be called pantheism. What it is not, according to the usual definitions, is pagan polytheism. Even the mention of “Lesser Gods” would not imply polytheism, since these “Lesser Gods” also would be parts or manifestations of the one Most Ultimate God.

Mbiti, who hails from Kenya, and looks at ATR from a Christian perspective, sees ATR as much more clearly and classically monotheistic:

A very strong aspect of African religiosity is its monotheism. Listen to the voices from the east to the west, from the north to the south of Africa, and they are unanimous in proclaiming that there is only one God, Who is Creator of everything. . . . God is God and anything else, any other being, is less than God and cannot be called God. African religiosity does not entertain the unimaginable idea that there is or could be more than one God that made the heavens and the earth, Who created the sky and the mountains, the waters and the light, the stars and the moon, Who still creates babies and heals the sick. (Mbiti 2001, p. 2)

For Mbiti’s description of the nature of this God, including beliefs common all around the world of God being good, merciful, holy, all-powerful, all-knowing, omnipresent, self-existent, and so on, see Mbiti 1991, p. 54–59.

However, it should be noted that there is considerable debate on whether ATR is monotheistic or polytheistic—or is perhaps in a third category, drawing on the African concept of ubuntu, of God as “community” in a way that can be considered neither monotheistic nor polytheistic (see Manganyi and Buitendag 2013, p. 6). Perhaps the safest thing to say would be that the concept of God in ATR is complex and varied across the continent of Africa, and cannot easily be reduced to traditional Western concepts and categories applied to God.

Two inseparable realms

A key belief that is much clearer in ATR is that there are two realms, a visible one and an invisible one, which are intimately connected with one another. These are roughly equivalent to the Christian concept of the material world and the spiritual world. Mutwa takes this as a fundamental concept, as in this statement from one of his instructors:

All living things are swimming across a great lake, called Time, and those things that are of flesh-and-blood are outdistanced in the race across the lake by those things that are spirit, such as souls and Enas. (Mutwa 1998, p. 569. Note that the Zulu word “Ena” is equivalent to the English word “self”—see Mutwa 1998, p. 569, footnote †)

Mbiti characteristically states it in more rationalistic language, also noting that some Africans add a third realm:

In many African societies it is believed that the universe is divisible into two. These are the visible and the invisible parts, or the heavens (or sky) and the earth. Some peoples, however, hold that the universe is in the form of a three-tier creation, namely: the heavens, the earth and the underworld, which lies below it. African peoples do not think of these divisions as separate but see them as linked together. (Mbiti 1991, p. 35)

And yet, the underworld is also part of the invisible spirit world.

Another scholar writes:

According to African cosmology, the universe is divided into two realms: the spiritual and the physical. God represents the Chief Being and sits at the summit of power. Among the spiritual beings are the ancestors and minor spirits. The physical world is dominated by man, who occupies the central position in the scheme of the created world. (Lajul 2017, p. 30)

And yet another:

Like most other groups in Africa, the various South African Bantu divide reality into two spheres, the visible and the invisible worlds. An indivisible unity and continuity is thought to exist between these two worlds, and this plays a crucial role in African people’s perceptions of reality. Death does not lead to non-existence or as in Christianity to some form of final judgment. Instead it represents a transition or transference from the visible world to the invisible but metaphysically real, world. (Wanamaker 1997, p. 286)

The key point is that ATR sees the cosmos as consisting not only of the things we can see with our physical eyes in what Westerners call the material world, but also of the things that we cannot see with our physical eyes in what Westerners call the spiritual world.

In ATR, both of these realms are very real, and very present. This is in contrast to Christianity, which has a strong sense of the reality and presence of the material world, but only a tenuous sense of the presence of the spiritual world. In mainstream Christianity as it exists in the world today, angels and spirits may exist, but they are in a realm far from us, and have little influence on our day-to-day life.

In ATR, however, spiritual beings, including the ancestors, are very close to us. Our lives are intertwined with theirs and theirs with ours such that neither can exist in a state of integrity without the other. We will return to this shortly. But first we must consider the nature of the invisible world in ATR.

The spirit world

Not surprisingly, the exact nature of the spirit world seems not to be clear or consistent in the minds of many people who follow ATR in the various cultures across the African continent. Some view it as a shadowy, almost formless place. Others view it as a continuation and recreation of life on earth, complete with all the usual earthly scenery. According to Mbiti:

It is generally held that the heavenly universe is not empty but that it has its own population. It is teeming with its own kinds of life in addition to the visible objects mentioned above. This means that it is more or less the counterpart of the earth, even though what goes on there is invisible to us. (Mbiti 1991, p. 36)

And even more vividly:

In many parts of Africa, people believe that the next world is invisible but very close to that of the living. We have already come across this idea when we considered African views of the universe. The hereafter is in this view next to this world, and for the majority of people it is situated on the same earth. It has rivers, mountains, lakes, forests, homesteads, fields, cattle, sheep, goats, dogs, chickens, wild animals, and all the things we find in our physical life. But we cannot see them, although the spirits who live there are believed to be able to see what we are doing. (Mbiti 1991, p. 122)

However, Mutwa sees the realm to which our spirits go as much emptier and more and shadowy. In the words of one of his instructors:

As you know, nothing grows in the cold deserts that are the land of Forever-Night, and there the Gods allot each Ena [the self of a departed person] a given length of time in which to continue existing. If, at the end of that period, none of the relatives has sacrificed a cow or a goat, it goes into a state of non-being. (Mutwa 1998, p. 570)

Regardless of how the spirit world is viewed, people’s spirits are believed to go there immediately after death. As Mbiti says:

Whereas nature spirits have no direct physical kinship with people, human spirits are those that once were ordinary men, women and children. Belief in the existence of these spirits is widespread throughout Africa. It is the natural consequence of the strong belief in African Religion that human life does not terminate at the death of the individual, but continues beyond death. It follows, therefore, that there must be myriads upon myriads of human spirits. (Mbiti 1991, p. 75)

This is in contrast to the common belief in Nicene Christianity that the dead must wait in the grave until some future Last Judgment before they can rise from death and live again, whether in the spiritual world or on a re-created earth.

Further, as indicated in the quote from Mutwa above, the spirits of the departed depend upon humans still living on earth for their continued existence. Meanwhile, people on earth depend upon the spirits for their continued well-being.

In short, in ATR there is an active, essential relationship between people living on earth and their departed relatives in the spirit world. This close relationship is embodied in the belief of some Africans that the realm of the ancestors is very close to, and perhaps even superimposed upon, the realm of the living:

For some societies, the departed remain in the neighborhood of their human homestead. They are still part of the family, as we mentioned elsewhere. Their surviving relatives and friends feel that the departed are close to them, and that people may even walk on them since their graves are close at hand. (Mbiti 1991, p. 122–123)

The relationship with the ancestors

Under this heading, it should first be said that knowledgeable writers on this subject roundly reject the common Christian notion that Africans worship the ancestors. First Mutwa:

It is this Ena that is known by the ignorant common people as the ‘Spirit of a dead person’, and which the strangers from beyond the seas falsely believe that we worship. In fact, far from our worshipping the so-called spirits of our ancestors, it is these ancestral spirits who worship us. We who combine flesh, mind, soul, Ena, and life are much more fortunate than the Enas of those who are dead. (Mutwa 1998, p. 570)

And Mbiti:

African Religion is wrongly called ancestor worship

This is wrong because Africans do not worship their departed relatives. It is true that departed relatives are believed to continue to live and to show interest in their surviving families. These families may show their belief by building shrines for the departed and placing bits of food or drink there or on the graves, and sometimes mentioning them in their prayers. But these acts of respect for the departed do not amount to worshipping them; they show people’s belief that the departed of up to four or five generations should not be forgotten. (Mbiti 1991, p. 18)

It would be more accurate to say that Africans communicate with their ancestors—a distinction that is present in the African languages themselves. Here is an example drawing on the Zulu language:

The ancestors are present, but are merely unseen. Communing with the ancestors is not seen as worshipping them. Berglund explains:

The shades are not worshipped. There is, rather ukuthetha amadlozi, a speaking relationship with the shades. They are the seniors of the lineage, and without communicating with them there is a breakdown of normal and harmonious togetherness with them. Without their constant activity and nearness there cannot be a happy future. (Berglund 1976:384)

It is important to recognize that the term used for relating to the ancestors is not ukukhonza, meaning worship, but ukuthetha, for which the most appropriate translation is communication. (Richardson 1998, p. 42–43)

As suggested in some of the above quotes, sacrifices for the ancestors are more a matter of feeding them than of worshiping them. As Mutwa (or rather, his instructor) puts it:

Enas must continue to eat the Enas of the animals they used to eat when still with the people in whose bodies they were formed. This is why it is so important that all your forefathers’ Enas should continually be nourished by the Enas of the cows and goats you slaughter in their name. (Mutwa 1998, p. 570)

Mutwa is far from unique in his view of the dependency of the ancestors upon the living:

The ancestors also depend on the living. Only if they are remembered, only if attention is paid to them through ancestor veneration will they exist as ancestors. Catholic Cameroon theologian Jean-Marc Ela (1987:29) says, “Without cult the dead will roam about, they will be stripped of any communication with the living.” Without the living the ancestor is nothing. Therefore every African is interested in having children so that there is someone who will perform the ancestor veneration and preserve him or her from becoming a “non-being.” This inclusive understanding of the family is the main root of ancestor veneration. (Triebel 2002, p. 189)

This also illustrates just how close the relationship is between the living and the spirits of the dead in ATR. And the relationship is not one-way. When the ancestors are honored and “fed” in this way, they provide various benefits to their living children and grandchildren. For example, even in contemporary Africa:

The understanding among at least some Christians is that their forebears are now in heaven with God, but that they continue their relation with their living families, as ancestors did in the past. Now, however, the ancestor[s] are spiritual guardians and protectors of their families . . . especially protecting them against misfortune, evil spirits, and the malicious power of witches. (Wanamaker 1997, p. 289)

In addition to providing protection from evil and misfortune, the ancestors can provide guidance to the living:

Other manifestations of the living dead are said to occur in dreams, visions, possessions and certain illnesses or mental disturbances. In dreams and visions, people claim to encounter the spirit of the living dead, to talk to it, and to receive certain instructions or requests from it. (Mbiti 1991, p. 126)

Though this has been debated, it seems clear that some Africans, at least, believe that the ancestors intercede with God, or the gods, on their behalf. Continuing an earlier quotation, Mutwa says:

Enas should continually be nourished by the Enas of the cows and goats you slaughter in their name. In return for this kindness they intercede with the Gods on your behalf, and the Gods give you wealth and luck in everything you do, and they also keep enemies from the threshold of your life. (Mutwa 1998, p. 570)

And Mbiti agrees:

People make offerings and sacrifices in order to draw the attention of God to their needs, but these things are not always given to him directly. It is believed that God does not need such things. The sacrifices and offerings are then made to lesser spiritual beings, such as divinities, spirits and the departed. These act as go-betweens between men and God. They are expected to receive the offerings and sacrifices, and then relay people’s requests to God. Yet most people do not concern themselves with such distinctions. As long as they have made a sacrifice or offering in accordance with the proper procedures, they are satisfied. (Mbiti 1991, p. 66)

The concluding sentences in this quotation are a nod to the reality on the ground that many Africans, when they make sacrifices for their ancestors, are not thinking of the ancestors as intermediaries between themselves and God. Nevertheless, the idea of the ancestors as intermediaries is present in ATR. According to Mbiti:

People feel themselves to be very small in the sight of God. In approaching him they sometimes need the help of someone else, just as in social life it is often the custom to approach someone of a high status through someone else. For that reason, some African peoples make use of helpers in approaching God, although they also approach him directly. (Mbiti 1991, p. 68)

Among many Africans who follow ATR, spirits and ancestors can also chastise or even curse the living:

When people face sickness and misfortune in the family, the cause may be attributed to the living dead, unless magic or sorcery and witchcraft are held responsible. In this case, these spirits serve as an explanation of what has caused things to go wrong. In order to put them right the spirits have to be satisfied by the performance of rituals, by following their requests, or by correcting any breaches of the proper conduct towards them. Generally the diviner or medicine man is consulted in order to find out exactly what the alleged spirits may wish. But on the whole the spirits of those who died recently are benevolent towards their families as long as they are remembered and properly treated. (Mbiti 1991, p. 78–79)

Overall, then, the ancestors provide many benefits to the living in return for the living remembering them with sacrifices. The ancestors provide protection from evil, blessings such as fertility, wealth, and good crops, and guidance through the often difficult and confusing passages of life. They also serve as moral and ethical guides and as carriers of the divine essence and energy to humans on earth:

This continued life of the human after death is not for its own sake but for the continued sustenance of the physically living as well as for ethical-moral purposes of ensuring righteous dealing between humans as also between humans and other beings in nature, animate as well as inanimate. Ancestors are “the guardians of the morality” of the group, i.e. community in family or tribe or nation. They carry out this responsibility with excellence and effect because they are Badimo, Va-dimu, Wa-zinu (Swahili), literally “the people of Modimo (divinity) and transmitters of Modimo’s essence, energy, Vital Force”. (Masoga 2012, p 12/149)

And more compactly:

Besides being the guarantee of life and well-being, the ancestors have yet another responsibility. They are the representatives of law and order; they represent the ethical values. (Triebel 2002, p. 189)

This brief survey of a few key points in ATR hardly does justice to the vast complexity of ATR as a whole, or even to these few points. Yet as meager as it is, it will provide some basis for an understanding of the collision of ATR with Western Nicene Christianity as it has spread strongly into sub-Saharan Africa in the past few centuries. It will also provide some basis for a less conflicted comparison with the spiritual cosmology of Emanuel Swedenborg.

Part 2. A Clash of Worldviews

The strong fight of missionaries against ancestor veneration has not been successful. Africans, whether Christians or not, still believe in ancestors. Living together with the ancestors is part of their African identity. If they would ignore that belief, they would no longer be Africans. (Triebel 2002, p. 193–194)

This statement sums up a fundamental problem Western Nicene Christianity has had in its expansion into the African continent. Despite many decades of trying, Western Christian missionaries and church leaders have failed to stamp out the African practice of ancestor veneration, and the traditional African beliefs behind it. Even Africans who have converted to Christianity commonly continue to cultivate their relationship with their deceased ancestors, giving it great weight and value in their lives.

The failure to stamp out ancestor veneration among Africans is widely recognized by Christians in the African field. Responses to this failure have fallen across a wide spectrum, partially detailed in Triebel 2002, 192–196.

On one extreme, some Christians have continued to insist that what they call “ancestor worship” is nothing other than worshiping demons. How could it be anything else, they argue, since those who have died have not yet been resurrected and therefore cannot be the ones being contacted? Even some African Christians have entirely rejected “ancestor worship” on this basis:

Many [African] Pentecostals identified ancestors as demonic. A member of an independent Pentecostal church said bluntly that ancestors were “evil spirits” and that “the devil is able to disguise himself in the form of a person who died long ago. . . . He pretends as if he has come to help and protect you, while all the time the ancestor is the devil himself.” Another Pentecostal woman said that although ancestors existed, they were “idols.” . . . Another Pentecostal was also opposed to the ancestor cult: “Ancestors are our forefathers who are asleep; they will wake up one day.” . . . The general reaction of Pentecostal people to the questions on ancestors, therefore, was that ancestors were powerless in Christians’ lives, and that they were evil spirits who should be rejected. . . . Another member said that the dead were resting and that therefore the “ancestors” were not ancestors at all, but were “the devil’s angels.” (Anderson 1993, p. 32, 35, first ellipsis in the original)

Other Christians continue the effort to stamp out the practice, seeking to eradicate it in the minds and lives of the African Christians in their churches and congregations, but without taking the aforementioned heavily negative doctrinal stance against it.

Still other Christian churches and leaders quietly allow the practice to continue among their members, neither endorsing it nor fighting against it, but simply continuing to preach their Christian message regardless.

Moving to the other side of the spectrum, some Christians in the African field actively attempt to reach a theological accommodation with traditional African ancestor veneration. Some proclaim that Jesus Christ himself is the ultimate ancestor, attempting to divert ancestor veneration away from people’s actual ancestors toward Jesus. For an analysis of this idea, see Palmer 2008. Some say that Africans are not really worshiping their ancestors, but rather are seeking their aid as intermediaries in reaching out to God. This would reduce the sense of conflict with Christian belief, in which God is the only proper object of worship. Some say that communing with the ancestors is not a religious practice at all, but simply the continuation of hierarchical family relationships that exist in extended African families on earth.

None of these proposed solutions to the problem has proven entirely satisfactory. There are cogent arguments against all of them.

If the Bible is to be believed, Jesus Christ is not, in fact, an ancestor, but “God With Us” (Matthew 1:23). African Christians themselves also commonly reject the idea of Christ as ancestor. See Palmer 2008, especially p. 69–71.

As covered above and exemplified just below, the idea of ancestors as intermediaries between God and humans does exist in African theology. However, when ordinary theologically untrained Africans commune with their ancestors and offer them veneration, the most common focus is not on the ancestors as intermediaries to God. Rather, it is on the ancestors themselves, and on their ability to help or harm the living. An example of this in contemporary African literature is found in the popular novel Iqunga, (Busini-Dube 2020), whose plot revolves around the need to provide a proper burial for deceased family members to end an ongoing curse on the family. In all the action of seeking out and exhuming the improperly buried human remains, there is nary a mention of God. Besides, in traditional Christian belief Christ is the only mediator between God and humanity (see 1 Timothy 2:5).

And given that communing with the ancestors involves ceremonies and sacrifices invoking the ancestors, sometimes led by priests—something that is not done for living relatives higher up in the family hierarchy—it is hard to argue convincingly that ancestor veneration is a mere social practice, not a religious one.

Rounding out this abbreviated survey of Christian responses to traditional African ancestor veneration, some Africans, especially those in African Independent Churches, such as certain leaders and members in the Zion Christian Church (ZCC), have fused Christianity with traditional African religion in various ways, rejecting the idea that there is an inherent conflict between them. In these churches, members may continue their traditional African practice of communing with the ancestors while also worshiping Jesus Christ as Lord. For example:

A ZCC minister said that as the ancestors were mediators between people and God, they had to be obeyed. “We should pray to the ancestors so that they could speak to God on our behalf,” he said. He also said that the ancestral spirit that operated in a person could through baptism and prayer be converted into what he called a “church spirit,” or the Spirit of God. This is how he answered our question “What are ancestors?”:

Ancestors are people who have died—but this does not mean that they have ceased to exist. They can still continue living in another world. Now they have more power than we have. They can see all things that are happening to us, because they are working very closely with God. . . . They are able to pray to God on our behalf, and the things we ask of them they present to God. I believe that they are people very much concerned about us and our lives. (Anderson 1993, p. 35–36, ellipsis in the original)

However, Anderson also states that a majority of ZCC members reject ancestor veneration (Anderson 1993, p. 37).

Finally, many religious Africans reject Christianity altogether, continuing in their practice of traditional African religion.

In summary, from a traditional Nicene Christian perspective, despite many attempts, there has been no satisfactory resolution of the “problem” of the African practice of ancestor veneration and the traditional African cultural and religious beliefs and values in which it is embedded. That practice and its accompanying beliefs continue strongly even among many Africans who consider themselves to be Christians.

The conflict with Nicene Christian beliefs

Why the ongoing impasse on this issue?

First, there is an inherent conflict between traditional Western Christian beliefs about the afterlife, specifically, and the beliefs that surround ancestor veneration. From a traditional Christian perspective:

The biblical witnesses do not conceive of death as just a transitional stage with a subsequent continuance similar to our life here on earth [as the world of the ancestors is thought to be], but as a rupture and a dimensional borderline beyond which there is something entirely different from what we face here on earth. (Triebel 2002, p. 194, quoting Schwarz 1979. Interpolation in Triebel’s original.)

Even more problematic for acceptance of the role of the ancestors in ATR is the belief in most Christian churches that the deceased remain sleeping in the grave until a future universal Last Judgment in which everyone will be raised from death at once and judged for either eternal life in heaven or eternal death in hell. For those who believe in a future universal resurrection, the “ancestors” with whom Africans are communing cannot possibly be those ancestors themselves. They must therefore be some evil and demonic beings—perhaps even the Devil himself. This is reflected in the statements of some African Pentecostals that were quoted earlier.

Second, ancestor veneration clearly satisfies a deep longing in the African psyche that is not satisfied by traditional Christianity. Otherwise it would already have been replaced by Christian beliefs and practices among the large proportion of the African population that has adopted Christianity. Instead, ancestor veneration in one form or another continues very strongly in Christianized sub-Saharan Africa.

In short, traditional Western Christians want to either stamp out ancestor veneration or somehow integrate it into their own belief systems in the African field, but have been largely unsuccessful in doing either one. Another way of saying this is that the Christian churches and institutions imported into Africa from the West want to fully satisfy the spiritual needs and longings of Africans, but all the efforts and evidence so far suggests that for most Africans they are fundamentally unable to do so.

Part 3. African Traditional Religion from a Swedenborgian Perspective

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) is, to my knowledge, unique among Western theologians in claiming that the many volumes of theology he wrote (over thirty volumes in English translation) were written based not only on his own thinking and experience, but on direct inspiration from the Lord (Jesus Christ), and supported by nearly three decades of direct personal experience in the spiritual world. In explaining the basis of his theological writings, he said:

This Second Coming of the Lord Is Taking Place by Means of Someone to Whom the Lord Has Manifested Himself in Person and Whom He Has Filled with His Spirit So That That Individual Can Present the Teachings of the New Church on the Lord’s Behalf through the Agency of the Word

The Lord cannot manifest himself to everyone in person, as has been shown just above [776–778], and yet he foretold that he would come and build a new church, which is the New Jerusalem. Therefore it follows that he is going to accomplish this through the agency of a human being who can not only accept these teachings intellectually but also publish them in printed form.

I testify in truth that the Lord manifested himself to me, his servant, and assigned me to this task; after doing so, he opened the sight of my spirit and brought me into the spiritual world; and he has allowed me to see the heavens and the hells and to have conversations with angels and spirits on a continual basis for many years now. I also testify that ever since the first day of this calling, I have accepted nothing regarding the teachings of this church from any angel; what I have received has come from the Lord alone while I was reading the Word. (True Christianity #779, interpolation in the original)

In Swedenborg’s view, the Lord’s Second Coming was not to be a second physical appearance of Jesus, but rather a spiritual appearance. This appearance would be in the form of teachings for a “new church,” meaning a new spiritual era symbolized by the New Jerusalem in the final chapters of the book of Revelation. These teachings, he said, were shown to him by Jesus Christ himself, who enlightened Swedenborg’s mind to see them as he was reading the Bible.

And indeed, about two-thirds of Swedenborg’s theological writings consist of Bible exegesis, in which he draws these renewed Christian teachings directly from the pages of the book that Christians regard as the Word of God. A full presentation of these teachings is beyond the scope of this article. They may be found presented in organized fashion in the work quoted from just above, True Christianity.

African adherents to Swedenborg’s teachings

It was this book, in an earlier translation under its traditional English title of True Christian Religion, that drew the Rev. William David Mooki, an ordained minister in an African Independent Church called the African Holy Catholic Church (AHCC), to an enthusiastic acceptance of the teachings of the New Church (Swedenborgian) when he first read it in 1909.

On January 25, 2011, Mooki and a group of fellow AHCC converts to the New Church, both clergy and lay, formed the body that would become the present-day New Church of Southern Africa (NCSA). Within half a century of its founding, the NCSA became the largest Swedenborgian body in the world both in number of congregations and in membership. For accounts of Mooki’s conversion and the founding and history of the NCSA, see Buss 1924, Evans 2019, and Williams-Hogan 2005, p. 319–329.

What impressed Mooki so much that he left the African Independent Church in which he had formerly served, and founded a separate church based on the Christian teachings found in Swedenborg’s writings?

Undoubtedly the theology itself was the primary attraction. Buss records that Mooki

read this formidable volume of 816 pages through in a very short time, and to such purpose that, when he reach the end, he found himself so powerfully convinced that the Lord Jesus Christ had made His Second Advent in the manner there explained, that he felt equally sure that the “New Church,” of which the book also told him, must be in existence somewhere in the world. (Buss 1924, p. 11)

One does not press rapidly through an 816 page tome heavy with heterodox Christian theology unless one has real interest in its doctrine and perspective! (Eventually Mooki was able to verify the last point by contacting the General Conference of the New Church in Great Britain, which subsequently sponsored the NCSA for many decades.)

But there was something else in this book that struck Mooki. Buss continues:

He was also profoundly impressed by what he read in the “Supplement” of the book, about the Africans in the Spiritual World and the peculiar genius by which they are distinguished from all other races even on earth. From this he drew the conclusion that the “New Church” type of Christianity was pre-eminently the one for the African people. (Buss 1924, p. 11)

Swedenborg on Africans

Here are some of the statements descriptive of Africans in the “Supplement” of True Christian Religion, in an older translation similar to the one Mooki would have read:

As the Africans surpass all others in interior judgment, I have talked with them on matters requiring rather deep consideration, and recently on God, on the Lord the Redeemer, and on the interior and exterior man; and since they derived great pleasure from that conversation, I will here mention what their perceptions were from their interior sight on these three subjects. (True Christian Religion #837)

On hearing these things the Africans, because they are superior in interior rationality, perceived them more fully than others, and each assented to them according to his perception. (True Christian Religion #838)

The Africans were delighted with what was said, because from the interior vision in which they excel, they acknowledged its truth. (True Christian Religion #839)

Like other Africans who lived in the era of European military and political domination of Africa, Mooki must have been quite used to people of European descent viewing him and his fellow Africans as ignorant, dark-minded, and superstitious. Yet Swedenborg, based on his experience in the spiritual world, spoke of Africans as more enlightened, rational, and inwardly perceptive than people of other races. Having read through and been mightily impressed by Swedenborg’s massive presentation of his theology, as Mooki devoured its closing pages he could now be assured that this Christian theology was not one that would despise, condemn, and oppress Africans, but would value them and their unique character.

And now, over a century later, I have similar assurance that Swedenborg’s theology can have greater respect for traditional African beliefs and practices, including those related to the ancestors, than can traditional Western Nicene Christianity.

This is not to say that Swedenborg or his followers, the Swedenborgians or New Church people, have the same approach to the ancestors as Africans traditionally do. Specifically, there is no official practice among the people who belong to the various New Church bodies of contacting their ancestors. And yet, Swedenborg’s teachings about the nature of the afterlife present none of the complications and contradictions that traditional Christian beliefs do. In fact, Swedenborg’s picture of how the earliest spiritually aware humans practiced their religion is quite compatible with ATR beliefs and practices regarding the ancestors.

Let’s look at some of these compatibilities.

Salvation is not limited to Christians

First, by way of background it should be mentioned that Swedenborg rejected the view almost universally held among Christians of his day that only Christians can be saved, and that people of all other religions will spend eternity in hell. For example, he wrote:

It is an insane heresy to believe that only those born in the [Christian] church are saved. People born outside the church are just as human as people born within it. They come from the same heavenly source. They are equally living and immortal souls. They have religions as well, religions that enable them to believe that God exists and that they should lead good lives; and all of them who do believe in God and lead good lives become spiritual on their own level and are saved. (Divine Providence #330.5)

The Africans Swedenborg met in the spiritual world are not presented as Christians, even though they assented to many Christian beliefs. They are presented as “gentiles,” outside the Christian sphere. And yet, they were dwelling in heaven, not in hell. Accordingly, Swedenborgians need not engage in the conflict of heart and mind that traditional Christians face due to their common belief that unless they convert Africans to Christianity and stamp out their former traditional African beliefs, those Africans will spend eternity being tortured in hell because they did not believe in Jesus.

Further, Swedenborgians can never accept the old justification that even if white people subjugate, oppress, and exploit black people, this is more than compensated for by the immense favor of converting them to Christianity and saving them from eternal torture in hell. Rather, in Swedenborgian belief, it is the life of love, kindness, and service that we engage in with our fellow human beings pursuant to our faith that opens the doors of heaven to us, just as Jesus Christ himself taught in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25:31–46.

In Swedenborgian belief, people of all religions—including African Traditional Religion—will spend eternity in heaven, not hell, if they devote their lives to loving and serving their fellow human beings. If anything, African philosophy and culture leads its people to care about their human brothers and sisters even more than European philosophy and culture does. Perhaps this is one reason why, according to Swedenborg, Africans are especially loved in the spiritual world:

The best-loved of the non-Christians in the next life are Africans, because they accept heavenly goodness and truth more easily than anyone else. (Secrets of Heaven #2604)

We enter the spiritual world immediately after death

In his most popular, best-selling book, Heaven and Hell, Swedenborg wrote:

When someone’s body can no longer perform its functions in the natural world in response to the thoughts and affections of its spirit (which it derives from the spiritual world), then we say that the individual has died. This happens when the lungs’ breathing and the heart’s systolic motion have ceased. The person, though, has not died at all. We are only separated from the physical nature that was useful to us in the world. The essential person is actually still alive. I say that the essential person is still alive because we are not people because of our bodies but because of our spirits. After all, it is the spirit within us that thinks, and thought and affection together make us the people we are.

We can see, then, that when we die we simply move from one world into another. This is why in the inner meaning of the Word, “death” means resurrection and a continuation of life. (Heaven and Hell #445)

Accordingly, Swedenborgians believe that death is a seamless transition from one life to the next. Swedenborg continues:

The deepest communication of our spirit is with our breathing and our heartbeat; thought connects with our breathing, and affection, an attribute of love, with our heart. Consequently, when these two motions in the body cease, there is an immediate separation. . . .

After this separation, our spirit stays in the body briefly, but not after the complete stoppage of the heart, which varies depending on the cause of death. In some cases the motion of the heart continues for quite a while, and in others it does not. The moment it does stop, we are awakened, but this is done by the Lord alone. “Being awakened” means having our spirit led out of our body and into the spiritual world, which is commonly called “resurrection.” (Heaven and Hell #446–447)

In short, unlike in traditional Christianity, in which our resurrection awaits a future Last Judgment, in Swedenborgian belief our resurrection into the spiritual world happens immediately after our death.

This removes one of the fundamental conflicts, discussed above, between traditional Christian beliefs and the beliefs and practices of ATR in relation to the ancestors. In Swedenborgian belief, as in ATR, the spirits of our friends and relatives who die continue to live on in the spiritual realm—however that is conceived. Swedenborgians feel no need to identify “the ancestors” as evil spirits, demons, or the Devil impersonating the ancestors. While this could happen, in Swedenborgian belief the simpler explanation is perfectly acceptable: that the spirits Africans are communing with are their actual ancestors who have moved on to the spiritual world.

We are the same person after death

In the quotation from Heaven and Hell #445 just above, Swedenborg writes that the essential person, meaning our real self, continues into the spiritual world, since we are a person not because of our body, but because of our spirit. In other words, we are the exact same person we were before.

At the most basic level, he insists that “after death, we are in a complete human form” (Heaven and Hell #453). Abstractly, he writes:

This may be grasped even more clearly from the fact that we are human because of our spirit, not because of our body, and because our physical form is appended to the spirit in keeping with its form, not the other way around, since a spirit is clothed with a body that suits its form. (Heaven and Hell #453)

Concretely, throughout his writings Swedenborg describes spirits and angels (all of whom, he says, were once humans living on earth; none are a separate creation as is believed in traditional Christianity) as looking exactly like humans on earth, having every feature, part, and organ that humans on earth have. For those who may be wondering, this includes the reproductive organs. Swedenborg’s angels and spirits are not sexless beings as is often believed in traditional Christianity. For a humorous story from the spiritual world along these lines, see Love in Marriage #44)

Our life, also, continues as it did in the material world:

Repeated experience has witnessed to me that when we move from the natural world into the spiritual, which happens when we die, we take with us everything that pertains to our character except our earthly body. In fact, when we enter the spiritual world or our life after death, we are in a body as we were in this world. There seems to be no difference, since we do not feel or see any difference. This body is spiritual, though, so it has been separated or purified from earthly matter. Further, when anything spiritual touches and sees something spiritual, it is just like something natural touching and seeing something natural. So when we have become a spirit, we have no sense that we are not in the body we inhabited in the world, and therefore do not realize that we have died.

As “spirit-people,” we enjoy every outer and inner sense we enjoyed in the world. We see the way we used to, we hear and talk the way we used to; we smell and taste and feel things when we touch them the way we used to; we want, wish, crave, think, ponder, are moved, love, and intend the way we used to. Studious types still read and write as before. In a word, when we move from the one life into the other, or from the one world into the other, it is like moving from one [physical] place to another; and we take with us everything we owned as persons to the point that it would be unfair to say that we have lost anything of our own after death, which is only a death of the earthly body. (Heaven and Hell #461, interpolation in the original)

Swedenborg, then, takes great exception to the idea in traditional Christianity that our transition to the afterlife involves “a rupture and a dimensional borderline beyond which there is something entirely different from what we face here on earth” (Triebel 2002, p. 194, quoted more fully above). The rejection of this idea removes another of the barriers present in traditional Christianity to accepting communion with the ancestors in ATR as communion with the actual ancestors. Mbiti says:

On the whole African Religion has neither heaven nor hell, and neither rewards nor punishment for people in the hereafter. Life continues more or less the same in the hereafter as it did in this world. (Mbiti 1991, p. 124)

Though Swedenborg did say that there is a heaven and a hell, he did not think of them as reward and punishment. Rather, he saw them as the areas of the spiritual world that people naturally gravitate toward based on their own character, good or bad, as developed through their choices and actions during their lifetime on earth. In the spiritual world, Swedenborg says, any outward masks or pretentions people may have put on in the world are gradually stripped away, so that their true inner character comes out if it had been hidden before (see Heaven and Hell #499). It then becomes clear whether they are headed to heaven or to hell.

But whether they go to heaven or to hell, the spirits of the departed live a human life that is a continuation of their preferred life here on earth—a life of mutual love, understanding, and service in community if in heaven, and a life of self-centeredness and conflict with others if in hell.

Swedenborg’s conception of heaven and hell, then, is more like the continuation of life in the spirit world as seen in ATR than it is like the traditional Christian concept of heaven as eternal beatific praise of God and hell as eternal torture in fire. A full consideration of Swedenborg’s concepts of heaven and hell is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that Swedenborg reads the Bible’s descriptions of the afterlife as largely metaphorical rather than literal.

Practically speaking, in Swedenborgian belief our family members and friends who die not only continue their life immediately in the spiritual world, but they also continue as the exact same person they were before, both body and soul—only their body is made of spiritual substance rather than of physical matter. If we were to meet our mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, and so on in the spiritual world, we would immediately recognize them as the same person we had known on earth, because they are the same person we had known on earth. Yes, they do go through some changes over time, but mostly to grow younger and more vigorous, as they were in their youth (see Heaven and Hell #414).

Of course, this also represents a difference with some conceptions of the spirit and the afterlife in ATR, which see the departed spirit as somewhat wispy and tenuous, and dependent upon the sacrifices of living descendants for their continued existence. But the relevant point for the current discussion is that in Swedenborgian belief, our ancestors continue to be the same person that we knew earth. This means that if Africans commune with their ancestors, they are not communing with some altered and radically different being, but with the same parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents that they knew and loved during their lifetimes on earth. This accords with the most important ATR belief about the spirits of their ancestors, which is that they remain the same person they were on earth:

People imagine that even if the body remains behind, the spirit is still distinguishable by more or less the same features as it had when the person lived. This does not mean that the spirit puts on another body. African ideas are not clear on this point. But at least the spirit does not lose the identity it had when it was a living person. (Mbiti 1991, p. 124–125)

And:

While surviving relatives remember the departed, the spirit more or less leads a personal continuation of life. It has become what we have called the living dead. People regard it as being much like a human being although it is dead. If it appears to members of the family, they will say that they saw ‘So and so’. Up to that point it has not lost its personal name and identity. (Mbiti 1991, p. 125)

It also means that all the wisdom that the ancestors gained during their lifetime on earth is still with them and in them. They can continue to provide the wise guidance that they provided on earth. And of course, it also means that they still love their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and want every good thing for them—that is, if they were wise and good people on earth. But these are precisely the ancestors that Africans look to for help, guidance, and protection.

Spirits and people on earth are closely connected

As mentioned earlier, Swedenborgians do not have any practice as part of their religion of contacting their departed relatives and loved ones. However, Swedenborg did teach that the spiritual world, and the spirits in it, are closely connected to people who are still living on earth—so much so that one cannot survive without the other.

This connection is between the angels and spirits in the spiritual world and the inner mind or spirit of people living on earth. Even though people on earth do not normally see their departed loved ones, nor do their departed loved ones normally see their relatives and friends on earth according to Swedenborg (though there are exceptions), they are still present with one another in spirit.

In a sense, Swedenborg’s teachings about this are a spiritualized version of the more concrete ATR beliefs about the necessity of sacrificing animals to feed the spirits of the ancestors. In Swedenborgian belief, animals represent our loves and affections, and sacrificing them represents offering our love and affection, and the actions that flow from them, as a gift to God. When we think of our departed parents and grandparents with love and affection, and strive to follow in their footsteps as they have guided us from their wisdom, we provide a foundation on earth for their existence in heaven. Meanwhile, they continue to inspire and guide us toward what is good by their influence on our unconscious mind.

For a fuller account of the connection between people on earth and people in the spiritual world, see Heaven and Hell #291–302.

In ancient times, people did have a conscious connection with the angels

In Swedenborg’s conception of the afterlife, the word for departed loved ones who are good people is “angels.” Yes, there is a time of transition after death before departed spirits rise up to heaven and live as angels. But this is only a matter of sloughing off any parts of themselves that didn’t accord with their inner good heart and wisdom of mind. For all practical purposes, good people have already become angels even before they depart from this life.

Swedenborg rejected the traditional Christian idea that angels are a separate race of beings, nor does the Bible say anything about God creating angels separately. Rather, according to Swedenborg, all the inhabitants of the spiritual world, both angels and evil spirits, were once humans on earth. Therefore if we have contact with angels and spirits, we are having contact with people just like us who have gone on to live in the spiritual world.

Today, such contact is rare among Christians. But in ancient times, according to Swedenborg, people on earth had regular contact with angels, usually through the elders of the family—and this was where they received their knowledge of God and spirit, as well as instruction on how to live a good and spiritual life. He writes:

I have been told from heaven that the earliest people had direct revelation because their inner natures were turned toward heaven, and that this was the source of the Lord’s union with the human race at that time. After those times, though, there was not the same kind of direct revelation. (Heaven and Hell #306)

How did this direct revelation work? Here is a fuller account:

People who talk with heaven’s angels also see the things that are in heaven because they are seeing in that light of heaven that surrounds their inner levels. Not only that, through them angels see things that are on our earth. For people who talk with angels, heaven is actually united to our world and our world to heaven; for as already noted (246), when angels turn toward us they unite themselves with us so completely that it seems to them exactly as though whatever is ours is actually theirs. This applies not only to elements of our language but to what is involved in our sight and hearing. In addition, it seems to us exactly as though the things that are flowing in through the angels are really ours.

The earliest humans on our planet enjoyed this kind of union with heaven’s angels, which is why their times are called the Golden Age. Because they acknowledged the Divine in human form and therefore were acknowledging the Lord, they talked with heaven’s angels as they did with members of their own family, and heaven’s angels talked with them in the same way; and in them heaven and this world were a single whole. (Heaven and Hell #252)

Though he begins with a rather abstract account in the first paragraph of this quotation, in the second paragraph he gives a description of the living relationship between people on earth and in heaven that is strikingly similar to the practice of communing with the ancestors in ATR.

Unfortunately, this living relationship with the spiritual world and with angels there did not last. Swedenborg goes on to say:

But after those times, people moved step by step away from heaven by loving themselves more than the Lord and the world more than heaven. So they began to feel the pleasures of self-love and love of the world separately from the pleasures of heaven, ultimately to the point where they did not know there was any other kind of pleasure. Then their deeper levels were closed, the levels that open into heaven, while their outer levels were open to the world. Once this has happened, we are in the light in respect to everything in this world and in darkness in respect to everything in heaven. (Heaven and Hell #252)

And yet, for people who follow ATR, this relationship between earth and heaven continues even to this day in the practice of communicating with the ancestors. It seems that in Africa, the Golden Age never entirely died. Though there is also darkness and conflict in Africa, as there is among all cultures and peoples on earth, the light of connection with the higher realm continues in Africa even while it has been largely snuffed out in the European Christian areas of the world.

And this, I believe, is something African Traditional Religion can offer to Christianity, and to the rest of the world.

Part 4. Bringing Spirit Back into Life on Earth

“This is why, child, those of our people who follow the ways and the religions of the foreigners can never make good witchdoctors and they only become cheap, bewildered and benighted charlatans. This is because they have exposed themselves to the beliefs and the ways of life of the aliens. They have become nothing but puppets with shallow minds, no longer guided along the footpath of Life by their souls as we are. A man who lives with his soul and who lets his soul, rather than his brain, guide him, is better equipped to face the mysterious and supernatural things, because the soul understands these things while they bewilder the brain. The brain drags them into the quicksands of materialism.” (Mutwa 1998, p. 612)

This is how Credo Mutwa’s instructor, in his acerbic and uncompromising way, sums up one of the main differences between African Traditional Religion and Christianity. ATR has a living relationship with the soul and the spirit realm. Christianity as it exists in the world today mostly does not.

This, I believe, is why the various Christian missionaries and churches have been largely unsuccessful in stamping out the living relationship with the ancestors as it has existed among Africans for thousands of years. Yes, there are some aspects of ancestor veneration among common, uninitiated Africans that may be best left to fade away with time and instruction in a deeper understanding of ATR cosmology and religion. Yet I believe God’s hand is at work in preventing the relationship with the ancestors from dying away altogether in Africa.

I am not the only one to have this thought.

Balcomb (2008:7–10) contends further that what characterises and serves as the distinguishing features of African evangelical theology are the nature of its faith, its orthodoxy in relation to foundational doctrines of the Christian faith and its countenance of the powers. He describes faith here not in a soteriological sense or in terms of adherence to the rubrics of a particular church tradition but rather as ‘the propensity to believe’ primarily in God and also belief in unseen spiritual realities. Such belief in unseen spiritual realities, which, according to him, have been long lost in the west through ‘secularisation’, enables African evangelical theology to engage such issues theologically. (Magezi and Igba 2018, p. 3)

And more succinctly:

As Bishop Mogoba . . . observes: the ancestors in all their richness may be ‘one of the great contributions African Christianity can make to world Christianity.’ (Wanamaker 1997, p. 296)

Further, the predominantly Christian West seems to be groping its way toward a greater engagement with the spiritual realm:

For the signs of what appears to be a post-modernist rejection of the Enlightenment in the West, which can be seen partly in the resurgence of the phenomenon of the occult as well as in the various ‘quests’ for spiritual experience and wholeness—even without explicit reference to God—all bear the marks of elements of a primal world-view. These are sufficient indicators that a primal world-view, suppressed rather than encountered, redeemed and integrated, rises to haunt the future. In this connection, the viability of a Christian consciousness which retains its sense of the spiritual world of primal religions, as well as the theological encounter between the primal world-view and Christian faith that is evident in African Christianity, constitutes an implicit challenge to the notion that humanity can be fully defined in exclusively post-Enlightenment terms. (Bediako 1994, p. 18)

Put more simply, the Christian West lacks precisely what ATR offers: a living sense of relationship with the spiritual realm and its inhabitants.

Most Christian churches these days shy away from any open talk of spirits and angels. As Bediako suggests, the rationalism and materialism of the Enlightenment has caused European and American Christians to be embarrassed about anything that might be perceived as “superstitious.” It is certainly not a coincidence that as covered above, African Pentecostals, who belong to a church that does believe in and practice a connection—albeit largely impersonal—with spirit are among the African Christians most likely to reject “ancestor worship,” as they call it.

And yet, from a Swedenborgian point of view, reviving a sense of the real presence of angels and spirits in our life is a necessary step in leaving behind the “quicksands of materialism” that for several centuries now have been dragging the Western world, and Western Christianity along with it, steadily away from a living relationship with God and spirit.

Emanuel Swedenborg sought, based on his own extensive experience in the spiritual world, to bring that living relationship back into the life of Christians in the West. And yet, even Swedenborg’s own followers tend not to have a daily sense of that relationship with their departed loved ones. Perhaps it will be Africans, whom Swedenborg said are so loved in heaven due to their higher interior vision, who will make this great and sorely needed contribution to Christianity, and to the rest of the world.

For further reading:

• What Happens To Us When We Die?
• Who Are the Angels and How Do They Live?
• If there’s One God, Why All the Different Religions?
• A Swedenborgian in Dialog with Black Consciousness and Black Liberation Theology
• Heaven, Regeneration, and the Meaning of Life on Earth

Bibliography

(Note: it is standard practice to refer to passages in Swedenborg’s works by section numbers, which are uniform across all editions, rather than by page numbers. Bracketed dates, where present, are the date of original publication of that work. For the reader’s convenience, this bibliography includes entries for works cited within quotations used in the above article.)

Anderson, Allan (1993) “African Pentecostalism and the Ancestor Cult: Confrontation or Compromise?” In Missionalia 21:1 (April 1993) 26-39

Balcomb, O. (2008) “African theology: Contextual & evangelical,” in W.A. Dyrness & V.M. Karkkainenn, Eds., Global dictionary of theology: A resource for the worldwide church, pp. 7–10, IVP Academic, Downers Grove, IL

Bediako, Kwame (1994) “Understanding African Theology in the 20th century.” In Themelios 20:1, October 1994

Berglund, Axel-Ivar (1976) Zulu Thought-Patterns and Symbolism. London: C. Hurst and Company.

Busini-Dube, Dudu (2020) Iqunga (book 4 in “The Hlomu Series”). Centurion, Pretoria: HlomuPublishing

Buss, J.F. (1924) The Romantic Story of the South African Mission. London: General Conference of the New Church in Great Britain

Dole, George F., and Robert H. Kirven (1992) A Scientist Explores Spirit: A Biography of Emanuel Swedenborg with Key Concepts of His Theology. West Chester, Pennsylvania: Swedenborg Foundation

Ela, Jean-Marc (1987) Mein Glaube als Afrikaner. Das Evangelium in schwarzafrikanischer Wirklichkeit. Freiburg, Germany: Herder

Evans, Jean (2019 [1993]) A History of the New Church in Southern Africa 1909–1991, and a Tribute to the Late Reverend Obed S.D. Mooki. Cheyenne, Wyoming: Spiritual Insight Services

Ferdinando, Keith (2007) “Christian Identity in the African Context: Reflections on Kwame Bediako’s Theology and Identity.” In Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, March 2007; 50:1; ProQuest Central

Kingslake, Brian (2019) Inner Light: Swedenborg Explores the Spiritual Dimension. Cambridge, Massachusetts, J. Appleseed & Co.

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