The World of Man and the World of Spirits

According to Uchendu (1965: 11), the Igbo world could be divided into two: the world of man peopled by all created beings and things, animate and inanimate; and the spirit world,

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which is “the abode of the creator, the deities, the disembodied and malignant spirits, and the ancestor spirits”. Ikenga-Metuh (1985: 6) also presents a similar view:

The total world of Igbo experience, consists of two closely linked sections-ubwa [sic] (visible world) and ani mmuo (spirit-world). The visible world is a manifestation and as it were a carbon copy of the invisible world. Everything in the visible world has an invisible counterpart in the spirit-world. Chukwu is the creator of the whole world.

The idea of “creation” from nothing and Chukwu as the creator are here presented as part of the pre-Christian Igbo worldview. However, the analysis in Chapters 5 and 7 demonstrate that the belief in “creating out of nothing” was one of the outcomes of the Igbo contact with Christianity, and that Chukwu was initially an Igbo local deity that, through contact with Christianity, is now bestowed with the attributes of the Christian God.

According to Uchendu (1965: 12), in the cosmology of the Igbo, “the world of the ‘dead’ is a world full of activities; its inhabitants manifest in their behaviour and thought processes that they are ‘living’”. So, in the Igbo worldview, the dead continue to live. As also suggested by Ikenga-Metuh (1985), the world of the spirits is a replication of the world of humans.

Afigbo (2006: 214) elaborates on this thus: the world of the dead “replicated in its every detail the territorial geography and ecology of the physical world with its flora and fauna, its hills and valleys, its rivers, forests, scrublands, and waterless deserts”. In other words, the dead continue their existence in a world that is similar to that of the living and engage in activities that are similar to those of the living.

Afigbo (2006: 214) identifies three “parts” of this world of the dead: 1) an upper part inhabited by people that lived well in this life and, at death, had received full burial rites; 2) a middle part occupied by people who lived well in this life but are yet to be properly buried; and 3) the third part inhabited by those who, while living, belonged to “the scums of the earth – witches and wizards, thieves and robbers, and so on”. Afigbo’s (2006) “parts”

of the world of the dead seems to be labelled based on the supposed value of their inhabitants, rather than on some vertical criterion. The idea of an “upper” part is to indicate that members of this group are valued highly and positively by the living. They are dead

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people for whom complete funeral rites have been performed and who now belong to the ranks of the ancestors. Members of the middle part are potential candidates as ancestors pending when their funeral rites are performed. However, members of the third part do not belong to the rank of the ancestors because they transgressed against the Earth goddess while alive and so are not given proper burials. To this group belong spirits known as akalogeli, “evil spirits and malevolent ghosts of dead ones who for one reason or the other are still hanging around in this dimension of consciousness, wreaking havoc, causing illness, disasters and other misfortunes on living people and/or their possessions” (Umeh 1999: 200).

The ancestors are called mmụọ or ndị ichie. They are believed to “watch over the interests of their children, reincarnate in the young ones to ensure that their respective lineages are continued” (Kalu 2002: 356). On their part, the living recognize the important roles the ancestors play in their lives and so maintain communication with them. According to Ubah (1988: 75), the ancestors are

regarded as members of their lineages whose leaders communicated with them through offerings and sacrifices. The annual festivals were also occasions for offering sacrifices to the ancestors, heads of families always acting as priests for this purpose. The sacrifices were a duty incumbent on family heads, and if they defaulted the angered ancestors would inflict appropriate punishment, usually ill-health or even death.

These views emphasize the central place of the ancestors in the Igbo cosmology. In many Igbo communities, the ancestors are incarnated in the mmọnwụ (masked spirits) in an elaborate ceremony (c.f. Reed and Hufbauer 2005). These incarnated spirits, of which the Odo is one, are believed to bring some blessings on their offspring:

Like many Igbo masquerades, Odo manifests the support and blessings that flow from the elder dead to the living and back again as the generations pass.

Economic, religious, and family responsibilities work together in Odo, supported by a broadly held feeling that these beautiful and beloved masked spirits have come home to bless the living. (Reed and Hufbauer 2005: 135)

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Interestingly, this Igbo veneration of ancestors posed a major obstacle to the Christian missionaries because it contributed to the Igbo resistance to Christianity. Thus, the missionaries discredited the practice in a bid to distract the people from their commitment to the ancestors. According to Ubah (1988: 76), the missionaries taught that

[t]he religious attention paid to ancestors was also of no value. These dead people, it was contended, had lost all connections with the world and were incapable of influencing the affairs of men one way or the other. All those sacrifices made to them, like those to the deities, were a waste of time and resources, and the people should neither look up to the ancestors for help nor believe that they had ever been, or would ever be, reincarnated.

Divination was therefore a useless and wasteful exercise, and those who claimed to have the power to tell the wishes of the deities and the ancestors were cheats.

The missionaries went on to give the concept of mmụọ a pejorative meaning by using the term to denote negative concepts in Bible translations, like the use of ọkụ ala mmụọ “fire of the land of the ancestors” to represent “hell” (c.f. Section 4.1.1.3).