Mythical journey and human trajectory: ethnopsychological considerations on oracular games in brazilian afrodiasporic space

Abstract

In the scope of studies and researches on the relations between humans and other living beings, in the field of Ethnopsychology, there particularizing the participation of the Yoruba ethnic group (West Africa) in Brazil, there are descriptions of the relationship of people with deities and with the living dead (‘already-gone’). In Afrodiasporic oracular space, the association of the game of whelks (erindilogun), of the black-African symbolic universe, with the cartomancy (tarot in some of its modalities), of the white-European symbolic universe, is frequent. Having established the general objective of contributing with new subsidies for the debate of the themes Psychology and Religion and Relations between belief and human development, the specific objective of verifying possible convergence of mythical narratives with biographical narratives in this space was established. The framework of interpretation included theorists of Ethnopsychology, the Fourth Force of Psychology and the Western Hermeticism and ethnotheorists of Traditional Yoruba Wisdom. Primary data were obtained in the capital of São Paulo through the observation of oracular consultations performed with the erindilogun and the tarot and interviews with leaders of religions of Yoruba origin. It was possible to conclude that despite the differences between these games, both allow the analog reading between, on the one hand, scenarios, beings and mythical scenes and on the other hand, scenarios, beings and scenes of biographical trajectories of the consultants, a process favored by the significant causality, governed by laws of synchronicity. Since the divinatory resources and events of human life belong to the material universe and obey patterns of organization, the principle of synchronicity enables a relationship of significant serendipity between such resources and events, so that existential events can be identified by observing patterns of the divinatory game performed.