Tag: Voodoo

Numbo-Jumbo

What becomes of theory when it ceases to comment and begins to conjure?

The CCRU would tell us it becomes hyperstition: the idea that makes itself real, the spell that enters circulation disguised as theory, infecting the circuits of belief until belief itself becomes infrastructure.

Are the members of the CCRU sorcerers? If so, should we regard them as houngans or bokors? Are their theory-fictions spells?

The group explicitly described its work as “hyperstition” and “theory-fiction”: concepts that blur the boundary between philosophy, science fiction, and occult ritual. They often styled themselves less as scholars than as conduits for outside forces: jungle rhythms, numogrammatic entities. In a sense, then, yes: they framed their practices as sorcery. Their “spells” were written as essays, communiqués, fragments. But these writings were designed to propagate, to spread virally, to “do things” rather than merely describe. In that sense, CCRU’s writings are absolutely spells: sigils in textual form, engineered to infect the reader and reprogram the future.

To read CCRU is often to undergo a kind of initiation. Like Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, their texts are written in the mode of enchantment: nonlinear, mythic, contagious. They cultivate confusion not as a failure of clarity but as a technique — an opening for other agencies to slip in and act through the writing.

Yet it often seems like the magic practiced here is the magic of the colonizer. “Ccru uses and is used by Hyperstition,” says the group, “to colonize the future, traffic with the virtual, and continually reinvent itself” (CCRU Writings 1997-2003, p. 12). The register here is neither priestly nor pedagogical, but bokor-like. Not houngans sustaining community, but sorcerers who cut deals with entities, riding the dangerous edge where control and contagion blur.

Reed saw clearly how colonizers fear the vitality of the colonized, branding it nonsense — mumbo jumbo — while secretly dreading and desiring its power. His novel reminds us: Jes Grew was already here, a virus of joy and dance, a counter-language that undermined empire.

CCRU’s “numbo-jumbo,” meanwhile, is Mumbo Jumbo’s shadow twin. Where Jes Grew is insurgent, collective, irreducibly black, CCRU’s hyperstitional sorcery veers toward the appropriative and the machinic: coded to “colonize the future” rather than decolonize the present. If Jes Grew is jazz as contagion, CCRU’s numbo-jumbo is jungle reframed as algorithmic virus. One blooms from the oppressed; the other traffics in the occult economies of empire.

So we read them carefully. Not to dismiss, but to discern: how much of their sorcery is truly liberatory, and how much is a glamour cast by the very forces it pretends to resist? Bokor-scribes, traffickers in theory-fiction, CCRU remind us that not all spells are equal. Some liberate; others bind. Some open the future; others colonize it.

Much of this, I suspect, is to be credited to Land. Given what becomes of him, I’m wary.

CCRU acknowledge as an influence on their cosmology William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. Gibson’s trilogy, says the group, “spreads voodoo into the digital economy” (CCRU Writings 1997-2003, p. 10).

“Numbo-jumbo” is one of the group’s hyperstitions. Propagated through their writings, it attracts, it bends the line between fiction and reality, invoking futures into being through text, rhythm, and affect.

Connections form between Afrofuturism and what the group refers to as “Neolemurian sorcery.”

Land, with his necro-libidinal economics, was the loudest in this register. His sorcery traffics in acceleration, meltdown, colonization of time itself. Easy enough, then, to point accusingly and declare Land alone the bokor of the bunch. But what of the others? Wasn’t Fisher caught, spellbound, in circuits of melancholy and collective desire? And Plant’s weaving of zeroes and ones: is that not also a kind of spell, a textual conjuring of feminine technicity? To read their theory-fictions is to be drawn into ritual spaces where clarity blurs into incantation.

In contrast, I hold fast to Mumbo Jumbo. Reed’s novel spins an alternative mythos: Jes Grew, the dancing epidemic of Black culture, a contagion of joy, rhythm, and refusal, pitted against the Atonists who would lock the world into stone. Reed’s satire insists that the true sorcery belongs not to the colonizer but to the people’s improvisations, to Jes Grew’s unruly proliferation.

Set against the latter, CCRU’s numbo-jumbo reveals its doubleness. As hyperstition, it propagates, it attracts. It wants to be contagious. But what does it spread? Is it Jes Grew’s liberatory dance, or Land’s necromantic colonization of futures? That undecidability is its pharmakon: its poison and its cure.

For me, the task is to discern which. To let Jes Grew’s laughter and Reed’s satire remind us: the future doesn’t belong to those who colonize it, but to those who dance it otherwise.

PaPa LaBas, Hoodoo Detective

Reed clearly prefers PaPa LaBas’s approach to Berbelang’s. Why does the one succeed where the other fails? LaBas is the 50-year-old owner of the Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral, a peculiar psychic detective agency / “mind haberdashery” (23) / head shop, situated in the Harlem of the 1920s. LaBas is the proprietor of this “factory which deals in jewelry, Black astrology charts, herbs, potions, candles, talismans” (24). But he’s also the novel’s “Hoodoo detective.”

I find it useful to consider the figure of the “Hoodoo detective” through comparison with neighboring hero-types: “social detectives,” “spuren-gatherers.”

Hoodoo is a form of folk spirituality that emerged in the southern United States from a mixture of African, Native American, and Christian influences. It was practiced in secrecy under slavery and has a long history of being tied to class struggle, hardship, and looking to one’s ancestors in trying times. It’s both a body of esoteric knowledge (much of it involving “rootwork”) and a rebellion against mental and spiritual domination.

Hoodoo resembles Vodun folkways, except it’s less standardized.

Reed wrote a series of poems called “The Neo-HooDoo Manifesto” and “The Neo-Hoodoo Aesthetic.” Both are included in Conjure, a collection of poems published in 1972, the same year as Mumbo Jumbo.

LaBas is also an embodiment of Legba. In Vodou rituals, Legba is the god practitioners call upon first. It is through him that the other gods manifest and do their work. Legba is a variant upon the Pan-African trickster god Esu-Elegbara, “the guardian of the crossroads.”

LaBas is the wise one in the novel; Berbelang studied under him for a time, but lacked the patience to stay with it. LaBas is hopeful and powerful. He’s the novel’s houngan. He maintains the rituals, retains the wisdom, whereas Berbelang operates from scarcity, fighting to retrieve what was stolen.

Berbelang, Faust, Mu’tafikah: in the end, these all prove to be distractions. Halfway through the novel, they all but disappear from the plot, replaced by LaBas’s casework.

LaBas’s investigation of Jes Grew leads him toward the Book of Thoth.

When he and his companion, the real-life stage magician Black Herman, interrupt the debut of the Talking Android by revealing its true identity as Hubert “Safecracker” Gould, an Atonist in blackface, they move to arrest Gould and his sponsor, Von Vampton. LaBas and Herman are interrupted in turn, however, when a Guianese art critic named Hank Rollings rises from his seat and demands that they give an account. “Explain rationally and soberly,” he says, “what they are guilty of. This is no kangaroo court, this is a free country” (160). To satisfy the critic’s demand, LaBas and Herman launch into a tale of ancient Egypt. Parodying detective fiction’s famous “scene of recognition,” (the unmasking of the villain, as in Scooby Doo), LaBas discourses at length through the entirety of the book’s final third, explaining the arrest of Gould and Von Vampton through reference to Ancient Egypt.

We learn of an ancient theater involving ritual magic — one that “influenced the growth of crops and coaxed the cocks into procreation” (161). In this pre-Greek theater, prior to what Nietzsche called “the birth of tragedy,” “The processes of blooming were acted out,” Reed writes, “by men and women dancers who imitated the process of fertilization” (161). The best of these dancers was Osiris.

History is reimagined here as an ongoing conflict across the ages between followers of Osiris and followers of Osiris’s brother, “the stick crook and flail man” Set (162). “People hated Set,” writes Reed. “He went down as the 1st man to shut nature out of himself. He called it discipline. He is also the deity of the modern clerk, always tabulating, and perhaps invented taxes” (162).

We can think of the long “recognition” scene at the end of Mumbo Jumbo as an extralegal, “extraordinary rendition” — a presentation of black culture’s case against Western Civilization, a case that (like Frederick Douglass’s) must be brought before the court of public opinion, as it can’t be heard impartially within “official” (i.e. Western, Judeo-Christian-derived) courts of law.

It’s not so much that LaBas succeeds: the Book eludes him, and Jes Grew lays dormant by novel’s end. But LaBas survives. And the wisdom traditions survive with him.

Mumbo Jumbo

“Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands…theirs [is] the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling even on their refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.” — Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932)

“We are as gods and might as well get used to it.” — Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968.

A mysterious Book of Thoth appears as a central object of concern among the warring secret societies that populate Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo. The novel’s villainous Christian supremacist faction fears that this book will bring about “the end of Civilization As We Know It” (Reed 4).

Berbelang is the leader of the Mu’tafikah, the radical “art-napping” group featured in Reed’s novel.

Reed attended the University at Buffalo, but withdrew during his junior year to move to New York City. Arriving there in 1962, he participated in the Umbra Writers Workshop, a collective of young black writers whose members helped to launch the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Reed also cofounded The East Village Other, one of the most important underground newspapers of the 1960s counterculture.

The Mu’tafikah’s aim is to “liberate” ancient art from western museums, with plans to return each piece to its place of origin. By these means, members of the group hope to “conjure a spiritual hurricane which would lift the debris of 2,000 years from its roots and fling it about” (88). “We would return the plundered art to Africa, South America and China,” explains Berbelang: “the ritual accessories which had been stolen so that we could see the gods return and the spirits aroused” (87-88).

The group’s name is derived from the Koran, explains Reed in a footnote early in the novel. “According to The Koran,” he writes, Mu’tafikah were “inhabitants of the ruined cities where Lot’s people had lived. I call the ‘art-nappers’ Mu’tafikah because just as the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah were the bohemians of their day, Berbelang and his gang are the bohemians of the 1920s Manhattan” (15).

Of course, “Mu’tafikah” also sounds like “Motherfucker.” Much of the brilliant satiric energy of Mumbo Jumbo comes from Reed’s allegorization of his own late 1960s and early 1970s moment by way of the 1920s. I like to think of Reed modeling the Mu’tafikah in part after the Motherfuckers: members of Ben Morea’s late 60s New York anarchist art group Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (name derived, BTW, from “Black People!,” a poem by Black Arts Movement founder Amiri Baraka. Jefferson Airplane would later quote the same line in their 1969 song “We Can Be Together”). The Motherfuckers appeared prominently in the pages of Reed’s East Village Other. The paper ran from 1965 to 1972.

Berbelang views Faust as a “bokor.” The latter word, a term from Vodou, refers to a witch for hire who serves the loa “with both hands.”

Puzzling over Faust’s motives, and wondering why such a legend had become “so basic to the Western mind,” Berbelang offers the following.

“He didn’t know when to stop with his newly found Work,” explains Berbelang. “That’s the basic wound. […]. What is the wound? Someone will even call it guilt. But guilt implies a conscience. […]. No it isn’t guilt but the knowledge in his heart that he is a bokor. A charlatan who has sent 1000000s to the churchyard with his charlatan panaceas. Western man doesn’t know the difference between a houngan and a bokor. He once knew the difference but the knowledge was lost when the Atonists crushed the opposition. When they converted a Roman emperor and began rampaging and book-burning” (91).

Atonists are the villains in Reed’s novel: a secret, conspiratorial, white-supremacist Order dedicated to monotheism. Atonists are defenders of Western Civilization. Freud is an Atonist, as are fictional baddies like Hinckle Von Vampton. Von Vampton is the ripest of the novel’s Fausts. By novel’s end, we learn that Atonism originates among worshippers of Set.

As for Faust:

“His sorcery, white magic, his bokorism will improve. Soon he will be able to annihilate 1000000s by pushing a button,” predicts Berbelang, edging now into the realm of the prophetic. “I do not believe that a Yellow or Black hand will push this button but a robot-like descendent of Faust the quack will. The dreaded bokor, a humbug who doesn’t know when to stop” (91).

Berbelang voices his concern about Faust over coffee with Thor Wintergreen. Thor is the Mu’tafikah’s sole white member. Others in the group oppose Thor’s involvement, fearing he’ll betray them — as indeed he does. What are we to make of this betrayal?

For those who think “mumbo jumbo” just means “superstitious nonsense” or “gibberish,” a note on the novel’s title page reveals otherwise. The phrase enters English, writes Reed, by way of the Mandingo phrase mā-mā-gyo-mbō, meaning “a magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away” (7).

Berbelang suggests that the ancestors who need to go away are bokors like Faust. “We must purge the bokor from you,” he tells Thor. “We must teach you [Western man] the difference between a healer, a holy man, and a duppy who returns from the grave and causes mischief. We must infuse you with the mysteries that Jes Grew implies” (91).

Mu’tafikah member José Fuentes compares Thor to conquistadors like Cortez, Pizarro, and Balboa. He tells Thor, “You carry them in your blood as I carry the blood of Montezuma; expeditions of them are harbored by your heart and your mind carries their supply trains […]. The costumes may have changed but the blood is still the same, gringo” (86).

Fuentes’s view is based on the idea of “racial soul.” “Race-soul” was a concept from Nazi ideology. Fuentes’s use of this concept seems to betray a kind of reverse racism underpinning his suspicion of Thor.

Berbelang, meanwhile, rejects this view and decides to trust Thor. Berbelang’s hope or belief — Reed’s, too, I suppose — is that the “racial soul” is a fiction. Otherwise, if there is such a thing, if there is “a piece of Faust the mountebank residing in a corner of the White man’s mind,” warns Berbelang, “then we are doomed” (92).

What does it mean, then, for Reed to have Thor betray the Mu’tafikah soon thereafter, leading to Berbelang’s murder? Is Reed’s decision to kill off Berbelang an expression of Afropessimism?

Thursday March 25, 2021

Time: an odd phenomenon in light of the way it communicates, deposits emblems, plays hide-and-seek with consciousness. “Let Your Dreams Set Sail” says one such emblem, printed on the wall above the bed in which I’ve slept of late. A box on the ground displays the Paramount logo, a mountain pointed toward an outer sphere, like a Bucky dome lined with stars. Outside the sphere pokes SpongeBob SquarePants: the Flammarion engraving rejoined or reversed.

SpongeBob disrupts the first sphere’s fourth wall, smiles at consciousness, injects among solemnity a spirit of mirth set free to roam the cosmos. He, too, partakes of the image’s directionality, the vertical ascent narrative involving spaceships: the thing toward which the parts of the emblem incline. Let us imagine among these ships of possibility that which is prophecied in the mythology of the Dog Star — black anti-slave ships, lines of flight like Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line. Nathaniel Mackey fuses these symbolisms in his poem “Dogon Eclipse.” The poem ends “as if by then I’d / been thru / Hell / and back.” As if the “I” of the poem were Orpheus, the poet of ancient Greece, founder of the Orphic mysteries. Orphics revered Dionysus. He, too, is said to have descended into the underworld and to have returned. Through his poem, Mackey initiates those who read. So sayeth Michael S. Harper in his preface to Eroding Witness: “These poems are about prophecy and initiation.” Poems like “Dogon Eclipse” hint at mysteries; they transmit a secret knowledge. Other poems in the collection conjure loas from Voodoo and Vodou. Loas are the “mystères,” “the invisibles.” They act as intermediaries between worlds.

Friday August 14, 2020

Ishmael Reed may have been present at the founding of the East Village Other — indeed, he seems to have been the one who gave the paper its name! — but many of his poems of the 1960s, the ones gathered in Conjure: Selected Poems, 1963-1970, are quite scornful in their assessment of the counterculture. In his “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto,” for instance, Reed calls out Theodore Roszak, noting that in the latter’s famous book The Making of a Counter Culture, “there is barely any mention of the Black influence on this culture even though its members dress like Blacks talk like Blacks walk like Blacks, gesture like Blacks wear Afros and indulge in Black music and dance” (20-21). Speaking of neglected black influences upon the counterculture, why am I only just now learning that the acid trip sequence in Easy Rider was shot at or near Voodoo priestess Marie Laveau’s tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1? Hopper and Fonda filmed the sequence guerrilla-style, without permission … while tripping on acid. Reed’s collection also includes a poem called “catechism of d neoamerican hoodoo church” — a self-conscious response of sorts, I imagine, to Millbrook resident Art Kleps’s Boo Hoo Bible: The Neo-American Church Catechism and Handbook. Several of Reed’s associates were participants in the psychedelic revolution — including East Village Other co-founder and publisher Walter Bowart. Bowart’s second wife was Peggy Hitchcock, the director of Leary and Alpert’s International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF). Peggy’s brother Billy is the one who arranged for the Leary crew to live on the Hitchcock Estate in Millbrook. Bowart went on to publish an important book on MK-Ultra in 1978 called Operation Mind Control.