Are Indigenous Religions Still Practiced Today

YORUBA RELIGIOUS FREEDOM MODEL FOR WORLD PEACE

The YORUBA of West Africa and Diaspora practice religious freedom to a fault remaining the most tolerant community of every religious belief in the world. It is always fun to study, admire and live the way Yoruba celebrate various religious events even those adverse to their well beings during the Slave Trade in the hands of their Arab Muslims or European Christian brothers. In contrast, Yoruba remind us that the same way a slave is born, so is a free child. The only community where a slave can aspire to be a king and a king can reduce himself to a slave. Though Africa remains the only Continent without its indigenous religion practiced freely and openly, Yoruba religious culture has not been so consumed.

The reason most Yoruba practice free religion can be seen in their children. These kids cannot wait for every religious holiday to contest with goat horns or on sticks, feast, dance, and put on Africanized masks in celebration. There are different masquerades and festivals that generate great interest amongst those that have been taken by other religions. They all celebrate at one another's houses. In short, they party all weekend on streets. Children grow up with this accommodating religious culture and pass it on to their children. Religious freedom became a cultivated custom from an early age.

The advantage of this religious freedom is that Yoruba have been able to get along without holy war in the name of Crusade or Jihad. Instead of war, Yoruba make love and marry across religious lines. As much as the rest of the world is obsessed with religious superiority or inferiority complex, those type of feelings exist but at a minimum in Yoruba communities. Whenever they are away, they miss religious freedom taken for granted at home and are constrained within religious tolerance in other communities.

When Yoruba claim that the world started from Ife, many people ridicule such belief as myth. The same people, however, cannot explain how Adam and Eve were created, if that is not myth by scientific standard. Before Adam and Eve, there was life in Africa as a scientific fact. It is the Continent where Eledumare created Obatala. The point here is not to ridicule or create any more controversy as we see daily between parents that insist their children should be thought traditional creationism of the Bible or Koran and those going for evolution in scientific theory or both.

Some Quick Context On the Wiccan Belief System

In 1954, a former UK government worker named Gerald Gardner proclaimed that he had received initiation into an archaic nature religion which was a survival of indigenous European faiths. The practitioners of this religion were calling themselves the New Forest Coven. Gardner launched an effort to repopularize and revive this witchcraft religion by writing and publishing a book named “Witchcraft Today,” in which he tied together the fragments of remaining tradition from the New Forest Coven.

Gardner referred to the spiritual system as “witchcraft,” and termed its practitioners “the Wica.” He explained that this latter term was introduced to him by existing initiates of the Coven, and that its use was what introduced him to the likelihood that “the Old Religion still existed.” Gardner asserted, like most current historians, that the name “Wica” came from the early English term “wicca,” which is the etymological forerunner of the contemporary term “witch.”

There is a good deal of debate about the reality of his idea that he was resurrecting an indigenous, original, goddess-based European pagan religion. A couple historians have made the case that Gardner had simply invented the traditions of the Wica, compiling features of a number of known archaic religions and from modern occult practices as needed. Regardless, most historians concur that Gardner made his assertions in good faith. It is believed that Gardner had actually been initiated into a 1900s revival of the ancient paganism that Gardner been seeking, instead of a pure survival of an ancient European spiritual tradition.

Even though he produced the craft’s beliefs in order to conserve witchcraft for his generation’s descendants, Gardner understood “witchcraft” as a mystery cult that required initiation to be completely assimilated and practiced. An English expatriate named Raymond Buckland gained an initiation into the new mystery tradition from Gardner’s own coven, which he had called the Isle of Man, and then introduced the traditions of the Isle of Man back to the United States. The new religion accrued support at a very nice pace in the new world, where a devotional and spiritual revolution was on the horizon.

Since the early 1960s, a wide variety of new incarnations of Wicca-based spiritual practice have spread widely. Most of them have been the creations of Gardner’s own disciples who went on to start their own covens and developed their own pools of initiates. Other widespread forms of Wiccan practice have derived from self-initiated practitioners and witches who set up their own conceptions of Wiccan religion that center around the the works of Gardner and those who followed after him. Today a number of these descendants of Gardner’s Wicca are in widespread practice around the world.

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