African Shrines as Channels of Religious Communication in Traditional Religion

Abstract

African shrines are basically channels of religious communication between the living and the spiritual world. In Africa, shrines may be purely in natural form, such as confluence of two rivers, forests, grooves, caves, rocks, mountains and trees, where it is believed that gods and spirits dwell therein. In African landscape, sacred places of this kind are the spiritual focal point of ritual activity. Man-made shrines vary in form; and whatever its form, shape or design, the shrine demonstrates its symbolic function as ritual crossroads or interlinks between two worlds. Also, they act as instruments of social unification. This paper examines how these shrines have become indigenous sacred temples of mortality that bind the Igbo communities in ritual symbology of brotherhood and serve as visible reminders of the covenant between the villagers and their gods in the belief that the deities will respond by sending down breeze of blessings upon them.