The Riddle at Bizmoune

Perhaps it is our ancestral connection to Mysteries that has allowed us to endure the traumas and institutionally induced amnesia incited by the violence of coloniality. According to the mystical understanding of Ifá, when one comes to know something rationally, it ceases to be a mystery. Therefore, to live among the Mysteries of Nature—the Loa, the Orisha, and Egungun, our ancestors themselves—it is imperative to accept that there is an architecture to existence that one can never fully grasp or conceive.In the same vein, the cacophony of our personal histories, scattered and lost across the ages of the Atlantic World, may also never be fully understood through reason and logic alone. To exist within the phantasmagoria of the African diaspora is to accept that there may forever be a mysterious component to our heritage. Here, one must view oneself through the eternal eyes of an inherited imagination in order to glimpse the full scope of our collective existence.Thus to discern the patterns woven throughout our ancestral sagacity by way of storytelling is to shed light on the shapes that the Mysteries take as they manifest around us. Constantly speaking to us, the apparitions of Mysteries tell a story about our past, present, and future all at once.My ongoing artistic research practice purports to map this Black Imagination of the Atlantic World, yielding an atlas of archetypes that help bridge the liminal spaces of our seemingly fractured and haunted realities. In this segment, I propose to you a map charting ancestral jewels: from the legend of the Gnawa and their jinn in Alkebulan, to the jumbees and the Holy Spirit in the Sea of Kalinago.Let me be your griot.When you think of your ancestors, how far back does your story begin?This story begins in the western heart of the Maghreb, Al Maghrib al Aqşá, during the most ancient times of Alkebulan. In the lands known today as Morocco, we find a civilizing spirit, fast asleep—dreaming—beneath the earth, in the grotto of Bizmoune. Buried for 150 millennia, this spirit has become a Mystery, leaving behind only shards of its existence—an Atlantic riddle in the guise of a buried treasure.Today, Bizmoune Cave forms the archaeological site where Amazigh professor Abdeljalil Bouzouggar and his team unearthed the world’s oldest known jewelry: marine shell beads, perforated and painted in red ochre, dating back one hundred and fifty thousand years. Remarkably, one might even surmise that these beads, plucked from the ancient Atlantic, are echoed in the later use of cowrie shells by our more recent ancestors.Yet the story here transcends time-bound artifacts, for the riddle at Bizmoune yields far more than meets the eye, a testament to cultural continuity and the transmission of ancestral memory. Across Afro-cosmologies, there exists an archetype that embodies the beginnings of things—a trickster figure symbolized by the gate, the doorway, the crossroads, and, most notably, the color red.The trickster archetype, known as Elegba, is the African messenger spirit who sits at the gate between the mystical realm and the human world. The Mystical school of Ifá suggests that our earthly existence begins with the arrival of Elegba. He is the first spirit to descend from the ancestral plane and is associated with the color red, coinciding with the first pigment to emerge. It is perhaps no coincidence that Elegba, as a messenger spirit, is symbolically linked to communication, just as the red-painted shell beads unearthed at Bizmoune appear to have served a similar purpose. These ancient artifacts, imbued with communicative meaning, extend the earliest evidence of human symbolic behavior into the late Middle Pleistocene.Following the wisdom of African cosmology, the second Mystery to arrive in our realm is Ogun, the Spirit of Iron. Ogun brings forth the technical innovations that allow civilizations to thrive. Notably, the red pigment of Bizmoune’s symbolic beads is composed of iron ore. Even the slope where Bizmoune Cave lies bears witness to this connection: it is called Jebel Hadid, meaning “iron mountain” in the local vernacular.Millennia later, it was the nomadic Amazigh, descended from Stone Age tribes of the lands surrounding Bizmoune in North Africa, who learned to cross the desert by way of camel caravans. Serving as intermediaries between North and West Africa, Amazigh traders ushered Bilād as-Sūdān into an era when Maghreb salt was exchanged for the gold dust from West African mines.These caravans carried more than material goods; they brought Islamic influences from the Maghreb that merged with Indigenous sub-Saharan animism. This syncretism led Muslim merchants to see sub-Saharan deities through the lens of Quranic jinn—invisible spirits that coexist with humans in a world governed by Allah.Over time, the shifting paradigms and power dynamics of Islamic empires birthed in sub-Saharan Africa gave rise to the trans-Saharan slave trade. Through this trade, the syncretized Afro-Islamic belief systems of enslaved peoples traveled back across the Sahara and took root in the Maghreb. In Morocco, the land of Bizmoune Cave, they emerged as the Black mystical order known as the Gnawa. They believe that communication with God can be achieved only through the spirit world, where ancestors and jnun, or jinn, act as intermediaries. The Gnawa use musical instruments, primarily the guembri—a three-stringed lute—to invoke jinn.Meanwhile, in the Atlantic World, Islam crossed the Middle Passage alongside animism, traveling from Senegambia—the ancient homeland of the Gnawa—to the Americas. In this new world, the spirit of Islam inspired rebellion and resistance, as seen in the 1835 Malê Uprising in Brazil. Traces of syncretic belief systems survived within Brazil’s folkloric landscape, where we encounter Saci-Pererê, the elusive trickster figure. Characterized by his single leg and mischievous nature, Saci reflects the temperament and colors of Elegba, the trickster spirit, donning black skin and a red cap. Known to stir up dust devils, Saci—like the Quranic jinn—can be captured in a basket or a bottle. Embodying the iconic trope of the jinn, upon his release he grants his captor a wish.Perhaps it can be argued that in the Caribbean, traces of the syncretic Afro-Islamic belief systems are found in the phonetic and conceptual similarities between the terms jinni and jumbee. Both describe invisible beings that can be trapped in vessels and released to fulfill one’s bidding or wishes. This is especially true of the bacoo, a jumbee known for its association with bottles. Furthermore, the Gnawa’s guembri, used to invoke the jinn, also bears phonetic resemblance to the word jumbee. In Morocco, the famed jinn Aicha Kandicha strikingly mirrors the Caribbean jumbee La Diablesse, in both appearance and lore. Additionally, in the ancient sub-Saharan homelands of the Gnawa, the term for spirit is obi—the etymological root for the mystic traditions of Obeah in the Caribbean.Thus what is woven into the riddle at Bizmoune is the spirit of continuity. It introduces the Mysteries who sew our memories together—from the liminal spaces they occupy in our collective imagination. It invites us to witness the process of creation by way of storytelling.For as long as we can remember, the Caribbean has been a place where magical thinking intertwines with reality. That is our truest heritage. It is a place imbued with an uncanny ontology, where beings are said to exist who shed their skins at night and take astral flight in their truest form—smokeless balls of fire, pure consciousness associated with a misty light.In the mystic traditions of Ifá, the ultimate source of this astral light is the cave. This Mystery of Light has a name: Ě̌la, the spirit of wisdom who bears witness to fate itself. She is said to be the light that dwells within the earth.And so the cave itself comprises the ultimate answer to the riddle at Bizmoune: the mystic trope that represents both the spiritual—and symbolic—center of Earth. For the ancient Taino of the Caribbean, caves were the source from which humanity first emerged. In Ifá, the cave is the crossroads—a portal from which the luminescent mist of wisdom emanates. Hidden within the caves, Ě̌là is the Mystery that gifts us the memory of our fate. She is the Ifá conception syncretized with the Holy Spirit—the eternal lens through which to view ourselves and to witness our destiny beyond the confines of coloniality.Thus, by way of jinn and jumbee, the riddle at Bizmoune invokes the arrival of Ě̌là—an eternal light, reminding us of who we are and where we come from.