or punished. Our earliest ancestors painted remarkably lifelike aurochs on the walls of their dimly lit caves, presumably in the hope of attracting prey into the path of their hunting party. Models of wood or clay representing women, men, and beasts were prominent features of early magic. Sometimes these effigies were burnt, impaled, or crushed underfoot. At other times they were blessed and protected by amulets and talismans in order to keep the subject whom they represented safe.
Today, the territory of the Yoruba nation is located towards the south of modern Nigeria, and the traditional African beliefs in a universe inhabited by spirits are still strong there. Animals and birds, rocks, rivers, and waterfalls, and trees and plant life — especially “healing” and “magical” herbs — are all regarded as the dwelling places of spirits with varying degrees of power. The most powerful spirit of all in the minds of the Yoruba was their great goddess Yemanja. They believed she was the mother of the sun and moon, and one of a dozen gods and goddesses who made up the ancient Yoruba pantheon. The making of small figurines as votive offerings to Yemanja became an integral part of Yoruba worship.
Some four centuries ago, the Portuguese were searching for slave labour to run their new South American plantations, and it was the Yoruba’s tragedy to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thousands of them were shipped out as slaves. The only (very minor) redeeming feature was that the Portuguese tended on the whole to be less cruel and more tolerant than most other slave owners of that era. Unlike certain more rigidly fanatical Christian slave owners, the Portuguese allowed their captives to practise their own African religion. As the centuries passed, however, well-meaning but theologically blinkered Christian missionaries tried to force their rigid and exclusive ideas about faith on to the Yemanja-worshipping Yoruba descendants. Their attempts to persuade the Yoruba of the importance of Mary the Virgin, however, met with success beyond their wildest dreams — or their worst nightmares. To the Yoruba, this new “Queen of Heaven” figure was simply their beloved Yemanja wearing a thin Christian disguise, so Yemanja s Feast Day on August 15 became Mary’s as well — or vice versa.
Statuettes of Yemanja — perhaps as a kind of “Black Madonna” figure — are ubiquitous throughout Brazil. It is also common practice for offerings to be left out in Brazilian streets for Yemanja, and even the hungriest and most desperate beggars will not touch them; such is the power of Yemanja’s grip on the hearts and minds of her people.
Apart from the large-scale celebrations to honour Mary and Yemanja on August 15, there is an even more spectacular event on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro on December 31. An enormous crowd of Yemanja worshippers wearing white and carrying candles wade into the sea chanting her praises and throwing flowers into the water.
The true identity of the central character of this strange Yemanja narrative has to be protected, but the records are all in the rigorously kept scholarly archives of the Society for Psychical Research in London. An eminent and trustworthy SPR investigator was working in Brazil a few years ago when the subject (whom we shall refer to simply as “Belinda” to protect her real identity) was brought to his attention. She had studied psychology at the University of Sao Paolo, and this may have led her into a scientific, pragmatic, and, perhaps, rather materialistic paradigm.
One day, however, Belinda accompanied some other members of her family to an attractive beach near Santos, less than one hundred kilometres from Sao Paolo. Here she found a small statuette of Yemanja that had apparently been thrown up by the sea. Very little paint was left on the tiny figurine after its exposure to the action of the sea for so long, but such paint as was left was highly significant when studied in detail in the light of later developments. The jaw and neck still retained some pigment, as did the arms, together with a little more between the shoulder blades. In addition, one eye still retained its bright blue colour. Belinda took the curious little statuette home, despite the remonstrance of the more superstitious members of her family, who believed that it was a votive offering to Yemanja and, as such, should be left severely alone. Within days, Belinda became so ill that she was taken to a hospital and tested for tuberculosis. The test was positive, but she was lucky, and, following some excellent medical treatment, she was cured. The X-ray had revealed what looked like a sinister patch on her right lung, just below the equivalent spot where the statuette had been painted between its shoulder blades.
Her doctor ordered her to take a long rest, and she stayed with her parents for several months, a long way from Sao Pâolo — too far away, some psychic practitioners might suggest, for the Yemanja figurine to influence her. During the time that there were several hundred kilometres between them, the sinister figurine seemed powerless to injure Belinda.
As soon as she returned home, however, her pressure cooker exploded and severely scalded her arms, face, and neck — precisely where the flecks of paint still adhered to the Yemanja figurine. A few days later, her gas oven exploded, much as the pressure cooker had done. But worst of all, she began to feel continual urges to commit suicide — to throw herself into the road in front of a bus or heavy lorry, or to jump from her apartment window, which was more than a dozen storeys above the street.
For Belinda, the most loathsome and mysterious part of her prolonged ordeal was a sensation of being raped repeatedly by something invisible that nevertheless felt totally solid and real. She knew, of course, about the medieval legends of incubi and succubi — the sexually-oriented demons and demonesses who ravished human victims — but this was the twentieth century, and Belinda was a pragmatic university graduate. Scarcely able to believe the evidence of her own senses, she now felt in desperate need of help.
This, she decided, was a problem that her orthodox scientific paradigm could not adequately contend with. Terrified and reluctant, Belinda went to the nearest Umbanda Centre.
Umbanda was the traditional spirit-based religion that had crossed the sea with Belinda’s distant Yoruba ancestors. In the opinion of the local Umbanda leaders, Belinda should take the statuette of Yemanja as close as she could to the spot where it had been found. It was also explained to her that the run of “bad luck” leading to one injury or illness after another coincided in a quite remarkable way to the areas of pigment that still remained on the model of Yemanja. The tuberculosis was in an area of her lung that corresponded to where the pigment remained between the shoulder blades of the tiny statue. The marks on the arms, the jaw, and throat corresponded, closely enough, to the burns she had received when the pressure cooker had exploded.
Once the strange statuette had been returned to the beach and then — presumably — carried away again by the waves, Belinda’s life settled down to a safe, normal, routine existence once more.
The Yemanja statuette certainly qualifies as an extremely mysterious object — but it is as nothing compared to the mysteries that lurk within the darker recesses of the human mind. There is no doubt that every reader will have in his or her own experience at least one memory of an occasion when sheer willpower and determination brought him or her through a difficult, dangerous, or unbearably tedious and monotonous situation that nevertheless had to be endured somehow.
We have all heard of spectacular examples of the power of a determined mind to control a body that is sick, injured, or exhausted. The massively determined Ray Kroc, founder of the multi-million-dollar MacDonald’s restaurant chain, is on record as saying that persistence is the key to success; and a famous oil millionaire is also on record as saying that the secret of his vast fortune was to carry on drilling when his rivals had all given up. If the power of the mind can be with us on such benign occasions, it is perfectly logical to assume that it can also work against us on other occasions.
Stress in the mind can all too often lead to physical problems in the body. The woman or man who is blissfully happy, fulfilled, and contented is likely to enjoy radiant health and to be filled with dynamic energy combined with practically limitless stamina. The mind that is listless, with no interests, hobbies, or goals that it wants to pursue is likely to find itself — sooner rather than later — as the skipper of a leaking, listing, unseaworthy hulk of a body.
One of the most deleterious things that can happen to any of us mentally is to have ambivalent feelings about the same object, person, or set of ideas. In Iris Murdochs brilliant novel A Severed Head, the title was chosen to indicate just such ambivalent feelings. The cryptic meaning