Libation: An Afrikan Ritual of Heritage in the Circle of Life

This book concerns the origins, structure, purpose, meaning, and significance of libation, developments and change within the ritual, and its distribution in the Afrikan world. Libation is a liquid offering by and on behalf of all humanity, those living and those yet-to-be-born, to ancestors, to the Creator, to other divinities, and to the environment. Through this ritual Afrikans affirm and re-establish Ma'at: cosmic harmony, balance, interconnection and interdependence within, between and among humans, the environment, the spirit world, and the Creator. The text connects the practice of libation throughout the prodigious time/space correlation occupied by the Afrikan experience of life, connects Afrikans to their social history, and so to themselves across generations in different spaces and times. The methodology is at once both multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary. The methods and techniques of history, linguistics, cultural studies, literature and other human sciences are deployed to develop a comprehensive reconstruction, description and analysis of a ritual that has been antique for millennia, but has never become antiquated.… (more)