Spirits

A remarkable thing about spirits is that they are not spiritual. In its ontological sense, the term “spiritual,” even in common language, has a distinctly Cartesian sense: the spiritual is the immaterial. But neither in Western nor in African thought are spirits – note the plurality – conceived as immaterial; they are uniformly thought of as quasi-material or para-physical. That is to say, they are basically conceived on a material model. For example, they are endowed with shape, color, voice, and sometimes even with smell. But they are exempted from the limitations that circumscribe the motion of familiar bodies. Thus, standardly, spirits are credited with powers of unconstrained appearance and disappearance and with the ability to affect persons, often gravely, without visible contact. Orthodox Christianity, for instance, demonstrates no shyness about such quasi-material beings, priding itself, in fact, on “tidings” of an eventual resurrection of the bodyand of the soothing effect...