mamaruehh: CONJURE & THE BLACK CHURCH “Africans in the American South found their link
mamaruehh: CONJURE & THE BLACK CHURCH “Africans in the American South found their link to the ancestors in the special knowledge and the ability of the conjurer. In fact, when the Civil War ended, only 15% of the Africans in America were Christians. It took the efforts of white Christians and black African Methodists to evangelize the recently freed populations to make them Christian. Consequently, the African people relied on the spiritual visions and sacred talismans of the conjurer… …Thus by virtue of his omnipresence during slave society, conjurers became, in effect, the spiritual leaders of the masses of black people until the increasing numbers of Christian ministers displaced them during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Indeed, the conjurer and the preacher were often the same person…"—from the entry “Conjurers”, Encyclopedia of African Religion Photo: Bishop C.H. Mason, conjurer and founder of the Church of God in Christ, aka COGIC, currently the largest Black American denomination. Here Bishop is photographed with his most treasured spiritual objects. He found gnarled and twisted wood to be particularly powerful. -- source link