Young male Vodun initiates from Benin, West Africa. Religious initiation and educational plan in the context of Vodun Àgbasa-yiyi: access to the living room and discovering the joto The Àgabasa-yiyi is of capital importance in the lives of Fon men. It is the first of a series of three rites of initiation to the Fá through which the Fon pass. Of the three, Àgabasa-yiyi is fundamentally the most important one through which everyone must pass. Young girls and boys can be initiated to the second degree of Fá, but only men can reach the third degree of initiation. Initiation, as Fr B. Adoukonou points out, represents one of the essential means invented by Africans to transmit in a lively and existential way what for lack of a better expression we shall call the fundamental parameters of life. These three initiations to the Fá are in religious terms of a type that is intermediate between a purely profane initiation to history… and a consecration to Vodun which can go as far as a crisis of possession. The Àgabasa-yiyi ceremony has no rigorously fixed date. It never takes place before at least three lunar months after birth. The purpose of Àgabasa-yiyi is to introduce the child to the family community in the living room (Agbasa) of the representative of the eponymous Ancestor. It is the rite of the integration of a child or of several children of the same generation within the family community including the deceased members, the living and the Spirits which protect the family. The consultation of the Fá by theBokonon, Diviner-Healer, reveals the child’s Joto, in other words, the Vodun, divinity or theMêxo (Ancestor; sometimes deified) who, in him, is sent to the family by the Great Sê. The Joto is a reference to a protective force. It is… a dynamic element which intervenes in the constitution of the individual’s personality. The Joto is the Ancestor whose vital influx animates the child. He is referred to as Sê-Joto or Sê mêkokanto (Sê gatherer of the earth of the human body); he who presents to the Creator-God the clay out of which has been fashioned the body of the newcomer to the Land of Life (Gbê Tomê). He is the force, the vital and spiritual energy, which models and directs the existence of the person; hence the title Sê (Protector) that is given to him. The Joto is Father of the coming into existence, the direct collaborator of Mawu in the generation of the child. Once the Joto is known, he is given a welcome: Sê doo nú wè (You are welcome, O sê!), and as his other self and under protection, he is welcomed through the rite of Jono Kpikpé (encounter, welcome of the stranger, the guest). In principle, the child does not receive the name of his Joto. He can however be addressed by this name from time to time in order to remind him of it. This name can sometimes prevail if the person concerned is one day called and consecrated to the cult of his Joto. In such cases, the name becomes a real name in religion. It is formally forbidden, under severe penalties, for the individual to be called by another name. Despite the terminological ambiguities inevitably encountered in the formulation of the term Joto, any idea of reincarnation should be absolutely discarded: the child is not the reincarnation of hisJoto Ancestor. The Fon religious belief holds that the individual Sê is immortal. When a person dies and enters the Yêsùnyimê (world of the Spirits, metaphysical world), the individual Sê goes back to Sêgbo (the Great Sê), in other words, to his origins, his original state. In his role as Joto, it is he who places his hand on the head of the candidate to life (Alodotanumêto) to take him in a way under his protective shadow. There is no reincarnation in the proper sense, but a transmission of the personality. The individual soul of the Joto does not become incarnate in his protégé, but theJoto transmits to the latter his sociological part, his status and his role. A proof of this is that several persons living at the same time can have and indeed most often do have the same Joto. The Sê-mekokanto (the ancestor who gathered the clay with which the body of the new-born child has been fashioned) imprints on the child his social personality, what he has become through his social and active commitment in the historical process which he embodied in his lifetime and which is maintained by the group that will educate the new-born child in accordance with the master ( … ) The social personality, the active commitment and the historical conscience that the ancestor hands down to his descendant constitute a psychological heritage which gives meaning to his life and coincides with the above-mentioned directives. The protector ancestor comes to materialise the right to safeguard and maintain life as well as that to act in such a way that it flourishes and develops fully. In this way the Sê-mekokanto (the protector ancestor) ensures the growth of the family life of which he was the first or one of the first important links…. The Joto is sometimes assisted in his task by another Ancestor or Divine Spirit, acting as an auxiliary Joto or companion to the first one. This arrangement is fully consistent with the link-strengthening process, a reality that is viewed by the Fon as an inalienable value
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 01:06:01 +0000
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