The Original Source

We are not praying to the same God. I watch the people in power right now, looking at what they do in this current administration just as I watched what they did during their last term, and it is clear that they are bad business for the average American but in particular, Black folks. They stand at podiums and invoke a higher power, claiming righteousness while passing policies and upholding systems that actively crush communities. The God of Christianity that Black folks cry out to in those pews on Sunday mornings has no knowledge of them and does not understand them. Their God does not recognize Black people. The God that white people built this nation’s power structure around and the God that Black people desperately petition for relief are not the same God. They never were. Black people and white people do not share a deity. One God was constructed to justify empire, to bless conquest, and to sanctify chains. The other is a cry into the void from people who were handed that God at the end of a whip and told to be grateful for it.

But if we are going to be honest about the root of our suffering, we have to look past the politicians and look straight at the religion itself. The suffering of Black people across the diaspora, along with all non-white and Indigenous people, is deeply tied to being forced to believe in a God that validated our enslavement while forcing us to collectively forget the Gods, Goddesses and myriad deities that empowered us. We were stripped of our names, our lands, and our spiritual practices, only to be handed a holy book that told us our bondage was divine will. The colonizers and the enslavers built their empires on the backs of our ancestors while preaching a gospel that demanded our submission. It is a profound tragedy that so many of our people still cling to the very weapon that was used to break us.

And here is where the deepest betrayal lives. While our ancestors were being beaten into abandoning their traditions, while they were told that their sacred practices were the work of heathens and devils, the very people condemning them were stealing that knowledge and using it for themselves. This is not speculation. This is widely known. The same colonizers who forced Christianity onto Black and Indigenous people with one hand were reaching into African and ancient Egyptian spiritual traditions with the other, extracting the wisdom, the mysticism, and the esoteric power and putting it to work in their own lives. The knowledge of the ancient Egyptians, who were African people, built the philosophical and spiritual architecture that much of the Western world quietly operates on to this day. The sacred geometry, the cosmology, the understanding of the stars and their relationship to human destiny -- all of it was taken, repackaged, and used by those who publicly denounced such things as witchcraft.

Consider the Yoruba tradition and its Orisha. Long before any missionary set foot on African soil, the Yoruba people of West Africa had constructed one of the most sophisticated spiritual systems the world has ever known. The Orisha are not primitive superstitions. They are divine forces, each governing a domain of human and natural life with extraordinary precision. Yemoja holds the waters and the womb of creation. Oshun governs love, fertility, and the sweet abundance of rivers. Shango commands thunder, lightning, and divine justice. Ogun is the force of iron, labor, and liberation from bondage. Obatala presides over creation itself, purity, and the molding of human form. These are not myths told around a fire. They are a complete cosmological and moral framework that guided entire civilizations. When the enslaved Yoruba people were brought to the Americas, they did not abandon their Orisha. They hid them beneath the names of Catholic saints (syncretism) to survive the violence of forced conversion. They kept the sacred alive under the very nose of the oppressor. That is not the behavior of a people who believed in nothing. That is the behavior of a people who knew exactly what they carried and refused to let it die.

The Dogon people of Mali are another testament to the profound depth of African spiritual and intellectual knowledge that the world has tried to erase or explain away. The Dogon possessed detailed astronomical knowledge of the Sirius star system, including the existence of Sirius B, a star invisible to the naked eye, centuries before Western science confirmed it with telescopes. Their cosmology, centered on the Nommo, amphibious ancestral beings connected to water and the origins of life, mapped the heavens and the earth in ways that continue to confound and fascinate researchers to this day. The Dogon did not stumble upon this knowledge. It was given, cultivated, and protected across generations through an oral and spiritual tradition that colonizers dismissed as folklore. The same Western world that mocked their beliefs has spent decades trying to understand how they knew what they knew. That is the pattern. Steal, suppress, then quietly marvel at what you tried to destroy.

Nancy Reagan is a clear and documented example of this hypocrisy. While her husband’s administration aligned itself with the religious right, a movement that condemns astrology, divination, and fortune telling as ungodly, Nancy Reagan was privately consulting an astrologer to guide the scheduling of the President of the United States. She was not an outlier. People in power have always quietly sought the very knowledge they publicly forbade. The religious zealots who stand in pulpits and in Congress railing against mysticism and the occult are the descendants of people who built secret societies, studied ancient texts, and used the spiritual technologies of African and Indigenous civilizations to accumulate and maintain power. They called our traditions primitive. They called our healers witches. They burned and enslaved and colonized in the name of a righteous God, all while helping themselves to the sacred table they told us we had no right to sit at.

I removed myself from all of that decades ago. Even as a teenager, I sat in those church pews and felt troubled to the point of physical illness. I knew then that Christianity was nothing more than bondage wrapped up in biblical threats. I listened to the sermons demanding obedience and promising fiery retribution for stepping out of line, and I saw it for what it was. It was a system designed to keep us docile, to make us wait for a reward in the afterlife while they stole everything from us in this one. I refused to let my spirit be held hostage by a doctrine that required my subjugation.

Because I chose to be free, my eyes were opened to a truth older than their scriptures. I know that Black women are the original source. We are the womb of humanity, the creators, the sustainers, and the profound spiritual center of this world. Our suffering is not a punishment from a wrathful God but the direct result of being cut off from our own divine nature. They knew that if they could sever us from our ancestral power, if they could make us bow to their image of the divine, they could control the world. And they knew that knowledge because they took it from us first.

We suffer because we have been disconnected from the very essence of who we are. But the moment you realize that the source of all life and power resides within you, the illusion shatters. We do not need their religion, their approval, or their politicians. We only need to remember ourselves, to reclaim the spiritual authority that was stolen from us, and to walk in the undeniable truth that we have always been the sacred ones.