Lwa Quotes

Let me tell you something, I have never stated this, but you idiots refer to me as some moroon, I have a aster and a lwa degree. I simply cannot take the bar because of my stupid past in my 20’s. You people do not want to go up against m on education because most of you will lose badly.

Najazd to coś więcej niż drobna niedogodność czy przykrość. Nasza opowieść powiada, że Król przegrywa bitwę. Najwidoczniej psychika nie potrafi ochronić swego terytorium. Wróg zaktywizował się, a dusza zostaje bez pomocy i oparcia, traci harmonię wewnętrzną, nie jest już in har-monium, jak powiedziałby Wallace Stevens.    Przypominając sobie pole walki Wojownika Nieśmiertelnego moglibyśmy przyjąć, że wrogiem, który wtargnął do naszej psychiki, jest samo zło, ale byłoby to uproszczenie. Najeźdźcą może być chaos; rzecz w tym jednak, że wróg może również uważać, iż jest częścią naszej duszy. „Lew i plaster miodu, jak to powiada Pismo?" Pszczoły wyrabiają miód na padlinie wrogiego lwa.   Jeżeli Król rzeczywiście przegrywa bitwę, wojownik będący w nas powinien nauczyć się walczyć. Warto zaznaczyć, że wojownik walczy do końca, nie dopuszczając żadnych półśrodków, żadnego pobłażania.

It’s so the stories go that the Ginen tell. If you find a beautiful fairmaid swimming in the river, her fish tail flashing; if you follow her down into her water home with her, she will make the water like air so you can breathe. But then she’ll ask you, playful, You eat salt, or you eat fresh? And if you say salt, she will let you go back home, but if you say fresh … “It’s my business,” he said. Pouted. Looked at the ground. If you only eat unsalted food, fresh food, we believe you make Lasirèn vexed, for salt is the creatures of the sea, and good for the Ginen to eat, but fresh—fresh is the flesh of Lasirèn, and if you eat that, it’s pride. You’re trying to make yourself as one of the lwas. Makandal never eats salt. He, a living man, giving himself powers like a lwa. That’s why he couldn’t hear the voice of the lwas.

If you only eat unsalted food, fresh food, we believe you make Lasirèn vexed, for salt is the creatures of the sea, and good for the Ginen to eat, but fresh—fresh is the flesh of Lasirèn, and if you eat that, it’s pride. You’re trying to make yourself as one of the lwas. Makandal never eats salt. He, a living man, giving himself powers like a lwa. That’s why he couldn’t hear the voice of the lwas.

Nagle uświadamiam sobie, że ten kto bezustannie żyje w strachu, komu zawsze grozi niebezpieczeństwo, najłatwiej to zniesie, zmierzając prosto w paszcze lwa.

Two people may look at an image of a beautiful woman dressed in blue and disagree: one sees the Christian Mary, while the other recognizes the same image as the Vodou lwa Ezili Freda Dahomey. If they bring over a third person to look at the same image and decide between them, that person may see the Yoruba orisha Yemaya. Similarly, someone viewing a statue of a mother with babe in arms carved from black wood will recognize the Egyptian goddess Isis and her son, baby Horus. Someone else sees that same statue and recognizes Mary and baby Jesus. Yet another person will recognize the Vodou matriarch, Ezili Dantor, with her daughter, Anaïs.

The term Loa (Lwa), the Vodou term for their Gods, seems at once to derive from the Yoruba term oluwa, or ‘lord’, and from the French loi, law, a providential semantic convergence, because each Loa is at once a primordial lord of being, and also provides a law, or organizing principle, for the cosmos. The Loa are also ‘ancestors’, because this is how They are taken up into or appropriated by the mortal individual. That is, They are not ‘ancestors’ in the mundane sense, but rather express a sense of ancestrality inseparable from the process by which mortal beings actualize themselves. Experiencing the Gods as ancestors establishes Them within a material continuum which is local and intimate, but also renders Them fully portable, ensuring that They were brought along with the enslaved, within their very bodies, whatever other ties had been broken, and allowing the Gods to form the basis for new family and community structures in their place. Hence in Dahomey, whence the core elements of Vodou theology are derived, there is a hypostasis of the God Legba born with and dying with the individual, a personal Legba.