![]() ![]() When religious and natural explanations conflict, mythical narratives are used to overcome contradictions.ĭuality. After they look for wrongdoing on the part of humans, they seek scientific explanations for crop failures. In a year of drought or other agricultural misfortunes, the people undertake ritual processes meant to examine how they may have angered Ala and caused her to withhold her blessings. Before planting and harvest, they hold days of ritual ceremonies to appease Ala so she will facilitate the growth of healthy crops or to thank her for making possible the abundant harvest soon to begin. The Igbo, an agrarian people, regard her as the “mother” of all crops. Ala is also the “womb” that holds and nurtures and renews when necessary. While Chukwu is the giver of the moral law, Ala is the enforcer of the law. While Chukwu is in charge of creation, Ala is in charge of conserving that which is created. Parallel to the idea of Chukwu as a masculine deity associated with the Sun is the idea that the Moon is feminine and closely associated with the goddess Ala-Earth. Great Messenger of the Creator! Take care that the ashes of the world rising daily from this pyre may not prove enough when they descend again to silt up the canals of birth in the season of renewal.Ĭhukwu is also often referred to as Chineke-a shorter version of “Chi-na-eke,” the God who creates-suggesting that Chukwu is the creator of Nature, in its spiritual and physical aspects.Īla. Remember: Single Eye, one-wall-neighbor-to-Blindness, remember! … Single Eye of God, will you put yourself out merely that men may stumble in your darkness. Relent then for your own sake for that building eye of madness that may be blinded by soaring motes of an incinerated world. Undying Eye of God! You will not relent, we know it, from compassion for us. Your crimson touches fire the furnaces of heaven and the roaring holocaust of your vengeance fills the skies. Wide-eyed, insomniac, you go out at cock-crow spitting malediction at a beaten, recumbent world. Thereafter, it is represented physically in the man’s compound until the day of his death when the shrine must be destroyed.” In various prayers the Sun is called “The Face of God,” “The Great Carrier of Sacrifice to the Almighty,” and “The Single Eye of God,” as in the following prayer in Achebes Anthills of the Savannah (1987): According to Chinua Achebe, “Among the Igbo of Awka a man who arrives at a point in his life when he needs to set up a shrine to his chi will invite a priest to perform a ritual of bringing down the spirit from the face of the Sun at daybreak. The central relationship between Chukwu and the Sun is evident in the people’s cosmology and traditional prayers. Chukwu is not believed to have human attributes, but is often referred to as “He.” Chukwu is believed to inhabit the sky and is often associated with the Sun, which is believed to be God’s “eye” on the Earth. Transcending the multiplicity of gods in Igbo religion is a high god called Chukwu (or Chi Ukwu), whose name may be translated as “The Great Spirit.” The Igbo religionist thinks of Chukwu as an all-powerful, allknowing divinity, the maker of the cosmos as well as all the minor gods that make up the Igbo pantheon. Egharevba point to similarities in Igbo and Hebrew customs and religious rituals, such as the circumcision of the male child eight days after birth, systems of marriage and inheritance, and ideas about ritual purity and impurity.Ĭhukwu. A second group, however, asserts that the Igbo, along with some ethnic groups in Zimbabwe, are descended from the Jews, using linguistic and even genetic analysis to bolster their claims. One group of scholars, including Elizabeth Isichei, claims that the Igbo are original to the place where the majority of them still live, southeastern Nigeria. The best historical evidence produces two conflicting interpretations. ![]() The origins of the Igbo, like those of many other ethnic groups in West Africa, are shrouded in myth. ![]()
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