The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/lucumi)
Coverage of the fourth annual African Drum Festival, held in Ogun State, Nigeria, in which performers collaborated and celebrated the history of African drumming traditions and discussed the future of the music.
In the African Traditional Religions, such as Lukumí, the social community and religious community are one in the same. There was and is no instance where the social space fails to overlap the religious space. Through Lukumí, I inherited that world-view. The sacred is immanent in the world and not in some distant place separated by complex spiritual mechanisms such as the concept of salvation. In a world that is whole, where spirit, matter and time are equally present, there is nothing to traverse, nor bargain to make, in order to access the divine.
Today has been declared World Goddess Day. As described by the organizers, it is a day for all Goddess-worshiping people worldwide to come together and openly celebrate or pay tribute to the Goddess in all her forms. The website says, “The purpose of the Project is [to] grant to the Goddess one day of visibility to share Her many myths, stories and worship diversity.” The World Goddess Day project was founded by Brazilian author Claudiney Prieto, who has written a number of popular books on Wicca and Witchcraft. Prieto is a priest of the Dianic Nemorensis tradition in Brazil and was recently acknowledged by Z. Budapest for his spiritual work within that tradition. As he writes on the project’s website:
Nowdays, in a staggered society impaired by centuries of patriarchy, heteronormativity and sexism, the Goddess is considered by many people the only way to reunite ourselves with the true Self, with our most inner Self.