S2E14: Creole Culture and The West African Tradition

0:00In the year of our Lord, 2004, mid-March, Ralph Potts, a storied traveling reporter for the likes of National Geographic Traveler, the New Yorker, Travel Channel, NPR and many others, found himself having lunch at Leo's Market in Rosedale, Mississippi, home of the Crossroads Blue Society. While enjoying this meal, his waitress told him a tale of the origin of the famous Delta Blues. She produced a typewritten transcription of a vision, had by Henry Goodman, a Bluesman, while he was traveling the road from Rosedale to Angola. In an article recounting this diner experience, Potts provides Goodman's vision in its entirety. Quote, Robert Johnson been playing down in Yazoo City, and over at Bula trying to get back up to Helena. Brad left him out on the road, next to the levy, walking up the highway guitar in his

1:01hand, propped up on his shoulder. October, cool night, full moon filling up the dark sky, Robert Johnson, thinking about sun-house preaching to him, put that guitar down, boy, you driving people nuts. Robert Johnson needing, as always, a woman and some whiskey. Big trees all around, dark and lonesome road, accrazed, poisoned dog, howling and moaning in a ditch alongside the road, sending electrified chills up and down at Robert Johnson's spine. Coming up on the crossroads, just south of Rosedale. Robert Johnson feeling bad and lonesome, knows people up the highway in Gunnison, can get a drink of whiskey and more up there, man sitting off to the side of the road on a log, at the crossroads says, your late Robert Johnson. Robert Johnson drops to his knees and says, maybe not, the man stands up, tall, barrel chested, and black as the forever closed eyes of Robert Johnson's stillborn baby, and

2:06walks out to the middle of the crossroads where Robert Johnson kneels. He says, stand up Robert Johnson, you want to throw that guitar over there in that ditch with that hairless dog and go on back up to Robbinsville and play the harp with Willie Brown and son, because you just another guitar player like all the rest. Or you want to play that guitar like nobody ever played before. Make a sound nobody ever heard before. You want to be the king of the Delta Blues and have all the whiskey and women you want? That's a lot of whiskey and women, devil man. I know you Robert Johnson says the man. Robert Johnson feels the moonlight bearing down on his head and the back of his neck as the moon seems to be growing bigger and bigger and brighter and brighter. He feels it like the heat of the noonday sun bearing down and the howling and moaning of the dog in the ditch penetrates his soul, coming up through his feet and the tips of his fingers through his legs and arms, settling in that big empty place beneath his breastbone,

3:11causing him to shake and shutter like a man with the palsy. Robert Johnson says, that dog gone mad. The man laughs, that howl belonged to me. He ain't mad, he's got the blues. I got his soul in my hand. The dog lets out a low, long, soulful moan, a howling like never heard before, rhythmic, syncopated grunts, yelps and barks, seizing Robert Johnson like a grand mall and causing the strings on his guitar to vibrate hum and sing with a sound dark and blue, beautiful, hopeful chords and notes possessing Robert Johnson taking him over, spinning him around, losing him inside of his own self, wasting him, lifting him up into the sky. Robert Johnson looks over in the ditch and sees the eyes of the dog reflecting the bright moonlight, or more likely so it seemed to Robert Johnson glowing on their own, a deep violet penetrating glow. And Robert Johnson knows and feels that he is staring into the eyes of a hellhound as

4:15his body shudders from head to toe. The man says, the dog came for sale Robert Johnson, but the sound can be yours, that's the sound of the Delta Blues. I got to have that sound devil man, that sound is mine, where do I sign? The man says, you ain't got a pencil Robert Johnson, your word is good enough, all you got to do is keep walking north, but you better be prepared, there are consequences. Prepared for what devil man, you know where you are Robert Johnson, you're standing in the middle of the crossroads, at midnight, that full moon is right over your head. You take one more step, you'll be in Rosedale, you take this road to the east, you'll get back over Highway 61 in Cleveland, where you can turn around and go back down to Bula, or just go to the west and sit up there on the levee and look at the river. But if you take one more step in the direction, you're headed, you're going to be in Rosedale at midnight, under this full October moon, and you're going to have the blues, like

5:20never known to this world. My left hand will be forever wrapped around your soul, and your music will possess all who hear it. That's what's going to happen, that's what you better be prepared for. Your soul will belong to me, this is not just any crossroads, I put this ex here for a reason, and I've been waiting on you. Robert Johnson rolls his head around, his eyes upwards, in their sockets to stare at the blinding light of the moon, which is now completely filled, tie pitch black, delta night, piercing his right eye like a bolt of lightning as the midnight hour hits. He looks, the big man squarely in his eyes and says, step back, devil man, I'm going to Rosedale, I am the blues. The man moves to one side and says, go on Robert Johnson, you're the king of the delta blues, go on home to Rosedale, and when you get on up into town, you get you a plate of hot tamales because you're going to be needing something on your stomach where

6:23you're headed." This chilling tale of an alleged meeting between Robert Johnson and the devil is the inspiration for one of his most famous songs, Crossroads, which has become a staple of blues music for generations at this point. In a post script to the article by Pots, the Crossroads Blues Society had the following to say, quote, people say that the Crossroads where Robert Johnson made the pact with the devil is in Clarksdale, where Highway 49 intersects with Highway 61, but as can be seen from the events described above, that's not the case. The Crossroads, the one and only Crossroads where the delta blues emerged as a manifest entity in the person and music of Robert Johnson is at the south end of Rosedale, where Highway 8 intersects with Highway 1. This will be disputed as some people will dispute that Robert Johnson ever even made a deal with the devil. But the preacher man's son house knew, even though he wasn't a preacher.

7:27And if son house were alive today, he would set the story right. Truth is, nobody was there when the deal went down, but Robert Johnson and the devil. This statement will likely cause some people to say, well, just where in the hell did the events describe above come from if nobody was there to witness them? A reasonable question about a spiritual event. Realms must be observed or at least felt. The events described were witnessed in a vision with a capital V. Not just any vision, but a visual spiritual experience more real and true than the reality and truth encountered on a day-to-day basis in the everyday physical world in which life goes on. A spiritual vision about a spiritual event, both in the same realm. Plus, the devil hangs close to the Mississippi River and putting down his exes far away from the river as Clarksdale is simply something that would not happen. Voodoo oozes from New Orleans for a reason. There will be always naysayers and doubters.

8:30But most of these can be counted among those people who would have you define the blues. Well, you can't define the blues. You feel the blues. You are seized by the blues. You are possessed by the blues. The blues is music like a Cadillac is a car. There's just more to it than that. Transcendence and Essence, unmeasurable, unspeakable. The Essence of Rosedale is the Essence of the Delta Blues. Rosedale is not just a Delta town. Come on down and see. The Crossroads Blue Society is headquartered in Rosedale at Leo's Market sitting alongside Highway 1 where Highway 8 intersects, right across the highway from where the log was so many years ago. Right at the spot where the devil put the ex and sat to wait on the soon to be great Robert Johnson. Where else could such a society be headquartered except here the Crossroads Blue Society is dedicated and devoted to celebrating and experiencing the Delta Blues. There's no understanding or defining the Delta Blues but experiencing the blues, feeling

9:32the blues, theorizing about the blues, discussing and talking about the blues and listening to the blues. All spiritual experiences of differing degrees of intensity. This occurs in Rosedale and when this occurs in Rosedale you are riding in a Cadillac top down with Robert Johnson at your side. The source of the Delta Blues is the Crossroads in Rosedale. Rosedale is the city of the blues. The blues have been in the Mississippi Delta forever, hovering over the land like an ether, a vapor. The blues were here before Hernando de Soto, before the planters and their slaves, even before the Indians, who were indeed floating down the Great River when De Soto discovered the Mississippi. The blues in the river were already there and people still don't and never will understand either one nor the essential connection between them. Both can be experienced in Rosedale. The blues is one of the most distinctly American traditions.

10:35It grew up out of the Mississippi, on the heels of the slave trade, its lyrics include descriptions of events like the infamous one described in this vision, where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil. The voodoo connections to the blues are often simply overlooked, as superstitions, and folktales from former slaves. But where did these folktales come from? And did Robert Johnson really meet the devil on the Crossroads that night? Travel with me down the Mississippi to where it all began. The West African traditional religions disguised and adapted by slaves in their new homes in Haiti and Cuba, and imported to the United States through the city of New Orleans. The home of Creole culture, and one of its most infamous contributions to our land, voodoo witchcraft. I'm your host, Coleman Barber, and welcome to the Sword and Staff Revenant. This is Pegan America, Creole culture, and the West African tradition.

11:40Much like we discussed earlier this year with the Native Americans, West African traditional religions are diverse. Each people group has unique explanations in, their origin story, different names for their gods, etc. But along with the Native Americans, or even the Greeks and the Romans, they have many gods or spirits who serve similar functions as the gods of other related traditions in relationship to the world. Here Yeruba have Ola Run, the ruler of heaven and supreme deity, while the Aja, Away and Fawn, who practice the Vodan religion, have Nana Baluku, a divine feminine with androgynous characteristics, who is the primordial creator. One of Nana Baluku's offspring, Mao Alisa, another androgynous deity, is comprised of two parts, Maou, the female side, and Lisa, the male side.

12:40Maou, bore seven children, Sekpata of the earth, Kevioso of thunder, Agbe of the seas, goo of iron and war, Age, agriculture and forests, Joe of the air, and the most well-known and most pertinent to our discussion today, the infamous Legba of unpredictability. Just like the Greeks and the Romans, the West African cultures began to syncretize. Yes, they had some unique gods among them, but as contact increased, and in particular when they began to share the same spaces, a sort of mapping of gods began to occur. The Yeruba had their Orisha, as their Pantheon, and the Vodan religion derives its name from their gods, the Vodan. While proximity in West Africa provided some opportunity to come together, the real melding of the gods came with the slave trade, but we're not in the United States yet.

13:40One of the things that I find interesting here is that there is a pattern playing out that we see in a lot of places. Distinct and disparate cultures are forced together and find that they have some things in common. I'm more familiar with this in the Western European tradition because, well, that's my tradition. I mentioned the Greek and Roman Pantheons, and how they basically said Zeus's Apollo, and when the Norse came along, you have Odin or Thor as the corollary, depending on how you interpret things. Revelation 2.13 refers to the city of Pergamum, where the altar of Zeus was located as where Satan has his throne. And here we have, in the Vodan, a spirit of thunder, a common association among them. Some I suggest that Kevioso, the West African spirit god of thunder, is Satan himself, not necessarily. Not every culture has a perfect mapping of gods, either. The point is not to seek out the myths and genealogies to figure out who is who.

14:41The point is to show the same kind of thing is happening all over the place. And this jibes with a divine council, or Deuteronomy 32, view of scripture, that there are real spiritual beings that were set over different peoples over the earth, with the Lord reserving Israel for himself. Quote, Remember the days of old, considering the years of many generations, ask your father and he will show you your elders and they will tell you, when the most high gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples, according to the number of the sons of god. But the Lord's portion is his people, Jacob, his lauded heritage, Deuteronomy 32, 7 through 9, ESB, end quote. If we take this view, we should not be surprised then to find that when we look into the myth over religious history of any people group, we find similarities. When I was in seminary, I took a world religions course, and I think they had the right idea,

15:44even though they would have disagreed with some of my treatment of this passage here. These courses on religions start with Darwinian assumptions about humanity and apply these to religious thought. They believe that religion was a concept that grew up from primitive forms into more robust forms, starting with things like simple animism and spiritual explanations for physical phenomena, up into ancestor worship, deification of those ancestors into gods, into polytheism, monotheism, and ultimately progressing to the death of religion and atheism. This view takes a highly-scientistic approach to the spiritual. Myth and religion then are simply a more and more robust approach to explain natural and random chance phenomena, which happen to look like order because of naturally emerging patterns in the cosmos. My class however rejected this approach. The Christian assumption must be, if we are to believe the Bible, that there is one original source to all religion, the Creator God and the worship of Him, as given to our

16:49first parents, Adam and Eve, and handed down through time encapsulated and preserved, progressively revealed through the inspired word of God in the Bible. This true religion has been bastardized and corrupted all over the world, leading to these disparate practices, yet preserved in the Christian faith. The question for Christians when looking at other religions is not whether it's been corrupted, but how, into what degree? What forces have been at work? And what purpose is there for this particular brand of corruption? While my Southern Baptist professors may take a much more man-centric approach to explaining this corruption as originating simply by man's propensity to sin, which I do not deny has had its effect. I hold that there is a nefarious spiritual aspect to that corruption. I don't simply give lip service to the idea of nefarious spiritual realities, but rather my view gives hefty weight to the fact that these gods of the nations have been about

17:51the work of corruption in conjunction with their leader, the original deceiver, Satan, that serpent of old. And if we take the Bible seriously and we read Deuteronomy 32 in this light, then we believe that this was a global event. Not simply some nations, but all nations have been under this influence, particularly before the victory of Christ on the cross. Why do I say all this? Well one, it's good to have a refresher for those who already know and believe this. Two, there are some who are not working with these assumptions. And three, because this is pagan America, and because we are rooted in the Western tradition, then those of us who do hold to these beliefs. Forget to think about things outside of our tradition. Let alone apply them outside of our tradition. We therefore know that something is off when we look at voodoo witchcraft, but don't think critically about it or seek to understand it in the ways we would with the Greeks, the Romans, or Nordic paganism.

18:53The West African traditional religious context is the backdrop of what some call the slave religions. But the greater backdrop is Deuteronomy 32, Genesis 6, etc. Their history and tradition interact with scripture at these points, even if their traditions didn't run through Rome. This dispels two potential pitfalls for us as we look at them. First, it dispels the Darwinian idea that the religious tradition is immature in the sense that it is early or primitive in its development. Rather, it may insofar as it represents a departure from the true religion, represents something like a greater falling away from the truth. The assumption that this religious tradition has simply not advanced upward to the degree that Western religious traditions have has within it Darwinian presuppositions about evolution applied to societies and cultures. Second, it dispels the Russoian fallacy of the noble savage.

19:53A concept taken for granted today, the biblical narrative does not provide a category for the noble savage, and holding the West African religious tradition up to the light of a divine council worldview makes this even more abundantly clear. In 2005, UNESCO designated the Odo-Efa tradition, the oral scriptures of the Yeruba tradition, as one of the world's masterpieces of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity. Despite this, and despite the complexity and impressive feat that this oral tradition is, it is a tradition built on the lies of false gods. The Deuteronomy 32 worldview gives a clear account for this deception and protects Christians from falling into the trap of giving warrant to the worship of false gods under the guise of the noble savage. With an eye to avoid these pitfalls, let us start a conversation about some specifics in the West African traditional religions.

20:54The vote in tradition seems to be in the thousands of years old, and documented veneration of spirits predates the slave trade. The kingdom of Dahomi, a fun, dominated kingdom popularized it regionally, and elements of it were later absorbed into the Oyo Empire. Though suppressed by Christianity through the 19th century, it has seen a resurgence since the 90s, through cultural preservation efforts, a national holiday in January, and various festivals. Vote in emphasizes, belief in a single supreme creator under whom lesser spirits order themselves. The religion is characterized by pragmatism, favoring efficacy, and results over abstracted faith or doctrine. We already covered some about their supreme deity, Aunt Mahulisa, and its androgynous character. An interesting note came out in my research here. As we see in many traditions, Mahulisa, the feminine, is associated with the moon.

21:55While Lisa, the masculine, is associated with the sun. Quote, And God said, let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years. And let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth. And it was so. And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night, and the stars, Genesis 1, 14 through 16 ESV, end quote. It is interesting to me that in both the West, represented by Apollo and Artemis, and this West African tradition, there is an association of the sun and moon with the masculine and feminine respectively. I posit that this is an artifact of the reality of Romans 1, and it is claimed that God's workmanship and design can be understood to the point of culpability of every human being. It would make sense then that the stronger and brighter ruler of the skies would be associated

22:56with the stronger sex, the man. The one who, according to scriptures, is to rule over his house and is the one primarily responsible for the dominion of the world. And that the moon would be associated with the woman, a celestial help me, powerful and strong in her own right, yet gentler on the eyes of any who look upon the reflected glory of her Lord, seen in her bright face. The greater to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night. Points of contact like this provide Christians with opportunities to engage those who practice or practice religions downstream from the voting on the grounds of the evidence of nature. We just don't typically know what those contact points are and think that they either don't exist or are too afraid to consider them. Understanding some basics about a people helps us to understand and correct practices where they are not in line with biblical belief. For example, voting practices are infused throughout their life, shrine building, animal

24:00offerings, possession, transes, divination, and charms are all common. Some of these we would see and know immediately, but others we may not understand. Trans-divination and possession rituals may look similar to Native American ritual and come wrapped in the guise of cultural heritage or preservation of tradition, herbal magic dominates, and authority is decentralized. All practices are infused with the idea of appealing to or invoking various deities who live in the unseen world, but can be called upon in the scene. The most prominent of these lesser gods goes by the name legba, the god of the crossroads, a gatekeeper of sorts. Legba shrines often depict him seated in the nude with an exceedingly large and erect phallus. There's no way to say that in a more family friendly way. Despite his seemingly overtly sexual depiction in the traditional religion, legba is primarily

25:04the vote in who controls directions and has come to be understood in later pop culture as deceptive and a trickster. So he is the keeper of the crossroads where you make decisions which direction to go. He often gives you an enticing option, fame, money, and success, but it always comes at a price. The yiruba know him not as legba, but as issue. Originating potentially as early as 500 BC, the yiruba religion, practiced as Onocece, has grown to somewhere around 70 million participants if you include its synchrotistic forms. It is the primary root of Santeria and has had significant influence on Haitian voodoo through the slave trade. While the vote in have a semi-dualistic primed deity, the yiruba have a singular supreme deity, yet this deity is more abstract than personal. Similar to an Aristotelian unmoved mover, it is refreshing in one sense to see a truth

26:07displayed here that so many other religions have lost. There is an uncreated creator. Yet, he has revealed himself not as Ola Dumare, a distant supreme creative force, but as the triune god of scripture. Nevertheless, the reality of the uncreated creator, though marred, remains intact in the yiruba religion. There are over 400 gods within the yiruba religion. They are divided into primordial deities, deified ancestors, and personified forces. Like the vote in, practice is the focus, divination, offerings, animal sacrifices at times, and the festivals are important. One aspect that I found particularly interesting is a practice shared with the American Indians, drum and dance for the purpose of possession. I don't want to get into that at the moment, but put a pin in it, priesthood, sacred objects, festivals and altars are also part of the practice in the yiruba religion.

27:13Now before we go any further into the specifics of yiruba practice, I want to step back for a second and look at something bigger, because one of the things that strikes me most, as I've worked through this material, is how consistent the story is. Not just with yiruba religion, not just with the vote in, but across the entire sweep of West African and Afro-Caribbean religion, as it moved from one context to the next. Some of these traditions didn't survive the slave trade. They adapted, and not in the way that something weakens when it gets stretched thin. More like the way a river changes shape when it hits a rock, the water doesn't stop. It just finds another way through, and I think that's actually important to understand before we go any further. Because what we're about to trace is not a story about one religion. It's about how a family of spiritual forces moved through history, changed their clothes when they had to, and found new homes and new cultures.

28:14And as you've been listening to this show for a while, that pattern is going to look very familiar. Let me start with something simple, shrines. In the vote in tradition, the shrine is not primarily a symbol, it's not a memorial, it's not the West African equivalent of a photo on the mantle or something like that. The shrine is a point of contact. It's a physical location where the boundary between the scene and unseen is made thin, and where the practitioner can make contact on purpose. Every household in a traditional voting community has shrines. Shrines to the voting associated with that family's lineage. Shrines to the ancestors shrines to legbuss specifically because nothing happens without legbuss permission. He has to be addressed first, always. Or any ceremony before any spiritual work, before any interaction with any other spirit, legba is invoked. He's the door. You don't get past him without his say so.

29:17So what goes on a legbuss shrine, offerings, food, rum, tobacco, palm oil, and these shrines are not kept in some sacred room behind a locked door, often they're right at the threshold, at the entrance of the house, at the crossroads. You pass legba on the way in and out. He is always there, always present at the boundary between inside and outside, between here and there, between this world and the next. The shrine is not just a religious practice, it's a liturgical practice. It's a physical action that participates in a spiritual reality. When you build a shrine, when you tend it, when you make offerings at it, you are, whether you know it or not, establishing and maintaining a relationship with whatever is on the other side of that contact point. And here is where I want to think a little bit more critically. Because I think Christians, and I'm including myself here, can fall into one of two equal and opposite errors when looking at shrine practice. The first error is to say it's all fake, superstition, these are just objects, they have no power,

30:22the people who maintain them are caught up in full practice, and it has no spiritual content. But that's not quite what Paul says, is it? He says what pagan sacrifice they offer to demons, not to God. The idol is nothing, the contact it facilitates is very real. The second error is to over-correct and treat every shrine as if it's the thing itself. When you look at a legbush shrine, you're not looking at legbush. But I may go so far as to say that you are inviting a demon to take up residence if you have one. Mechanically though, the shrine itself isn't the demon or the spiritual force. The intention matters in how you use it, participation matters, and context matters. What it is is an open door. An open doors are consequential, whether or not you fully understand what's standing on the other side.

31:23So we have these traditions among the voting, the fawn, and the a-way. The yiruba religion among the yiruba, and we have the slave trade. Beginning in the 16th century and reaching its peak in the 18th, somewhere between 12 and 15 million people were forcibly removed from West Africa and transported across the Atlantic, mostly to the Caribbean and South America, with a smaller but significant number eventually reaching North America. And here is what people sometimes miss. The enslaved people who came to Cuba and Haiti in Brazil were not a homogenous group. They came from different peoples, different languages, different traditions. You might think that that would have produced a total collapse of those traditions. You can't maintain a religion without your priests, your sacred objects, your shrines, your community structures, and all of those things, right? But something pretty remarkable happened instead. These traditions found each other. The yiruba and the fawn and the a-way thrown together in the same conditions, discovered

32:27that their gods were not so different from one another. They began to do what the Greeks and Romans had done. They began to map their traditions onto each other. Your legba, we call him Asu. Your Shango, we call him Kevioso. And I want to be clear, this syncretism was not invented by oppression. This process was already happening in West Africa before the slave trade. The slave trade accelerated it by concentrating these groups together. But the impulse to find a common spiritual language was already there. Which if you hold to the Deuteronomy 32 view makes a certain kind of sense. The same spiritual beings, known by different names to different people groups, were always present. The names were different, the beings were the same. Now into all of this comes the Catholic Church. And I want to be careful here, because I've heard this story told in a way that casts the Church as simply a villain.

33:27I don't think that's an honest representation of the facts. This Manish and Portuguese colonial powers required baptism, and they required at least nominal adherence to Catholicism. Yes, it was forced. That's not in dispute. But there were also genuinely Catholic missionaries and priests who believed with their whole hearts that they were doing enslaved people a profound good by bringing them the sacraments. They were wrong about many things, catastrophically wrong about a lot of things. But the priest who baptized enslaved people in the Caribbean and taught them to pray was not in his own mind in the agent of suppression. He was in his own mind, saving souls. And that distinction matters. And here's a strange thing. The enslaved people who received Catholic instruction were not passive recipients. They were active interpreters. When a Uruba Man who had prayed to El Agua, his whole life was told about Saint Anthony of Padua, the founder of Lost Things, the one who opens the way, he didn't discard El Agua.

34:33He filed the information under a heading he already had. These are the same person. I can maintain my relationship with El Agua while calling him by his other name in front of the men who own me. Some scholars call this religious camouflage. And in some cases, it was deliberately that. In others, it was something more complex, a genuine attempt to hold on to what was real and familiar within the framework of something imposed by something foreign. Either way, the result was the same. The Orisha did not disappear. They just put on new clothes. This became Santa Ria and Cuba. And in Haiti, it became what most English speakers mean when they say voodoo, Haitian voodoo, the tradition that would find its way to the city at the mouth of the Mississippi. In 1804, Haiti became the first black republic in the western hemisphere after the Haitian revolution. The French colonists who fled, and there were thousands of them, took their enslaved

35:35people with them. Many of them came to New Orleans, which was already a city shaped by French and Spanish colonial culture with deep roots in Catholic practice, a significant free black population, and a particular kind of openness to the blurring of cultural and spiritual lines that you simply did not find in Protestant New England. The spiritual atmosphere that emerged in New Orleans was unique in North America. It had a density to it, a weight. Those that were practiced quietly elsewhere were practiced more openly here. Or at least the conditions for those things were more openly maintained. Congo Square, it's now part of Louis Armstrong Park. It was a public space in New Orleans where uniquely among antebellum southern cities enslaved people were permitted to gather on Sundays. They drummed, they danced, they sang. White observers described it as a spectacle, an entertainment, a cultural oddity.

36:35What they were watching, what they didn't have the categories to understand, was actually ritual. Those drums were doing what drums in this tradition have always done, creating the conditions for contact. I want you to hold on to that, I'm going back to it. The Mississippi River was the highway that carried all of it north, and if you go back and read the Crossroads Blue Society statement that opened this episode, pay attention to one line in particular. The devil hangs close to the Mississippi River. They say it almost offhandedly, like it's just something everyone in the tradition knows. I don't think they are speaking metaphorically though. So by the time we get to the Mississippi Delta in the early 20th century, we are not in a spiritually neutral environment. We are in a place that has been downstream from New Orleans for over a hundred years. A place where West African spiritual tradition arrived in compressed, syncretized form.

37:38A place where people still knew, in ways they may not even be able to articulate theologically, but they knew that the Crossroads was where you went if you wanted something you couldn't get any other way. And the Crossroads, in the Voting tradition, in the Urubic tradition in Santa Ria, is where you go to meet Legba, to meet Eshu, to meet Elegua. He is the gatekeeper. He controls the intersection of all paths. He decides who gets through and what price they pay, and he is capable of great gifts, but always, always at a cost. The man who sits on a log at the Crossroads south of Rosedale, waiting for Robert Johnson. He is not simply a Christianized devil imported from European imagination. He is Legba. He has been at Crossroads before this one. He will be at Crossroads after. The Mississippi Delta was simply the particular place in American history, where the European Christian conception of the devil and the West African conception of the Crossroads

38:40deity converged and recognized each other as the same person. Which, if you take the Deuteronomy 32 World View seriously, is exactly what you'd expect. Same entity, different names, different cultures, same deal and offer. Now I want to bring you all the way forward to today, because this is not just ancient history. In 2024, a Philadelphia drill rapper who goes by Skrilla released a song called Doot Doot. The hook was two numbers, six seven, that's it. The song got attached to basketball highlight edits, particularly of Lamello Ball, who is six foot seven. And it spread the way most things spread now, virally. Dictionary.com named six seven, their word of the year for 2025. They called it deliberately meaningless. The kid who went viral screaming it at a basketball game has his own corner of the internet now. NFL player started doing it after touchdowns. It is unfortunately in every household, on every playground, and in the mouths of every

39:46middle school student everywhere. Now Skrilla is not simply a rapper who stumbled onto a catchy phrase. He has spoken openly about Santoria in his music and in interviews. He has a track called Santoria. His album is called Santos, a direct Santoria reference. In interviews, he has described petitioning Ogan, the Yeruba warrior Oresha of Iron and War, by putting people's names in a pot. That is a real Santoria practice. This is not someone using spiritual imagery as an aesthetic. This is someone who by his own account practices this tradition. So here's the thing. In the Yeruba and Santoria tradition, numbers are not decorative. They are sacred. They are associated with specific Oresha, and they carry the presence of those Oresha when invoked. The number six is the sacred number of Shango, the king of Santoria, the Oresha of Thunder,

40:49lightning and kingship who maps closely to Kavioso in the voting tradition. The number seven is the sacred number of Ogan, the warrior, the opener of Rhodes, the one who clears the path once Elegua has given permission to proceed. Six, seven. Do I think that every kid screaming six, seven at a basketball game is performing a Santoria invocation? Not necessarily. I want to be clear about that. Most of these kids have no idea what Ogan and Shango are, and intent matters, context matters. I'm not claiming millions of unsuspecting people have been secretly initiated into a Yeruba ceremony. But here's what I am saying. There is a man who practices a Santoria, who names his music after Santoria, who publicly describes petitioning specific Oresha by name, and the song that made him a household name has, as its entire hook, the sacred numbers of two of the most powerful warrior Oresha

41:52in his tradition. And that song became the most culturally contagious phrase in America in 2025. The Deuteronomy 32 World View does not require us to believe that this was all consciously orchestrated. It requires us to believe that there are spiritual beings who have been present in human culture for thousands of years, beings who understand music, and repetition, and collective participation. In ways that we in the modern western church have largely stopped taking seriously. Go back to those drums at Congo Square. What were they doing? Creating the conditions for contact. A rhythm gets into you. A phrase gets into your head, a gesture becomes reflexive and collective. The veil gets thin, not through formal ceremony, not through a priest, just the accumulated participation of millions of people doing the same thing at the same time, over and over again. Its memes is magic.

42:53I'm not saying six seven is a spell, I'm saying pay attention. Pay attention to where things come from because the blues did not appear in a vacuum. It came from somewhere specific, and it went somewhere. It became rock and roll. Rock and roll became all of western popular music, and now here we are, with a Santoria practitioner producing the most viral content in the country, and his sacred numbers on the lips of every kindergartener and NFL linebacker. The river is still running north from New Orleans. It did not stop. Let's go back to Rosedale one more time. October night, full moon Robert Johnson walking up the highway with his guitar on his shoulder, coming up on that crossroads, just south of town, the man waiting on the log. He wasn't there by accident. He had been at crossroads before this one. He has been at crossroads since. The offer is always the same, power, talent, transcendence, everything you want, and the

43:56price is always the same too. And he is extraordinarily patient. So what is the Christian response to all of this? I want to be direct here because I think there are a few wrong answers that feel right. Wrong answer one, panic. Brought your records, banned the content, cancel everything downstream, that's not discernment, that's just fear with a theological veneer. Wrong answer two, dismissal. This is all folktale and superstition, and besides I'm covered by the blood so none of it can touch me. Listen the protection of Christ is real, but the posture of a soldier who refuses to study the enemy because he's confident he'll win is not courage, it's foolishness. The right answer is discernment, slow, careful, prayerful knowledge of where things come from and what they carry, so that when you encounter these things in music and culture and a meme on your phone, in the spiritual background of the person you're talking to

44:56about the gospel, you actually know what you're looking at. The longing is real, the capacity for transcendence. The thing in a man that makes him walk to a crossroads at midnight and feel like he'd give anything to be more than what he is, that is not an error in human design, that is Romans 1, that is the fingerprint of the image of God on a man who doesn't know what to do with it. Those are bridges, Paul saw that, he didn't avoid the aereopagus because it was full of idols, he stood in the middle of it and said, you have been reaching for something, I know who it is, he has a name, and unlike every other deal made at every other crossroads this one didn't extract the price from the seeker, this one paid the price himself. Robert Johnson died at 27, allegedly poisoned, allegedly the consequence devil man warned him about. His music outlived him by a century and will outlive all of us, and somewhere in those

45:57recordings, in that voice that sounds like it's coming from somewhere deep in the earth, there's a cry that was never fully answered. The answer is older than the blues, older than Rosedale, older than the crossroads, even older than the Yeruba and the Voden, and unlike the deal on that October 9, it doesn't cost your soul, it saves it. I'm Colman Barber, elder proclam church in Bonersprings, this has been Sword and Staff from then, stay tethered.