IGBOSCHOLARS INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF IGBO SCHOLARS FORUM, NIGERIA

The African worldview holds a capacity to conceive a mysterious and extraneous potency behind physical elements. According to Parrinder, African world view tends to understand or explain the ‘forces of nature’ in African religions, not as the material energy which is a natural principle of animation (life) in things, but as the supernatural agent that can inhabit any natural element. His analysis therefore shifts scholarship from equating spirits with natural elements, to seeing them as supernatural forces or personages that merely inhabit those elements. Now, to distinguish between natural elements or energy and the spirits or forces of nature, he observes that ‘all trees are thought to have souls of their own, and some are regarded as the dwelling-places of other powerful spirits which take up temporary abode in them’. Among traditional Africans, spirits are still thought to inhabit trees, rocks, hills and water bodies (Idowu, 1973; Quarcoopome, 1987; Sawyerr, 1970). When Idowu speaks of spirits of trees, he simply refers to the spirits that inhabit trees. Africans believe not only in the existence of the Supreme Being but also in the divinities and spirits. Farrow maintains that Africans believe intensely in the spirit world. Evidence of the reality of spirit is apparent, because everywhere one goes in Africa, one finds objects of spirit worship. These objects of worship remind their owners of the reality of the existence of these spirits, whom they worship and to whom they sacrifice, believing these spirits are intermediaries between them and the Supreme Being. To deny the existence of these spirits, is to deny the existence of African religion.

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