The African sacrificial kingship ritual and Johnson's 'Middle Passage.'

In a recent article, Ashraf Rushdy laments that the Allmuseri tribe and its god in Johnson's Middle Passage do not exist in this world, but rather "exist only as a fictional product of Charles Johnson's fertile imagination" (373). He reads the Allmuseri strictly as a vehicle for Johnson's Husserlian phenomenological poetics intended to resolve the "Caliban dilemma" of the black writer who has the difficult task of asserting a genuine black identity while using a language that is itself fundamentally alienating, since it is perceived to be wholly a product of white, Western European culture. Johnson's solution to this dilemma is to recommend adopting a posture of complete self-surrender, to surrender completely one's subjective experience, whereby the writer "encounter[s] the transcendence of relativism" in an appreciation of the unity of Being and the intersubjectivity of "the same cultural Lifeworld" shared by all humanity (Being 44). According to Rushdy, then, while the Allmuseri ideal "that the individual is rendered 'invisible' in the 'presence of others'" may appear to have a certain affinity to tribal communalism (377), it is in fact simply the articulation of a strongly postmodern integrationist theory, which has little or nothing to do with anything particularly African (386).

But Johnson is undoubtedly aware that his own critical disposition of self-surrender in order to bridge the gap between subject and other, in order to absorb and reflect the unity of a shared cultural Lifeworld, derives from a long history of religio-philosophical thought and mythology shared by both Africa and the West. Elaborate self-sacrifice, death, and resurrection ceremonies, for example, are central to many initiation societies throughout Africa (Zahan 128), which, as Evan Zuesse notes, are intended to bring about a "displacement of the self" by breaking down the ego and body image "into a new transcendental universe in which the center is outside the self" (152). In the popularly studied Bambara kore initiation society, the postulant sacrifices his egocentric orientation to the world, purges himself of his limited terrestrial life through symbolic death, becomes "savory nourishment" for the mouth of God (Zahan 63), and is reborn a new man "spiritually enlightened and endowed with the 'Word,' that is, possessing an immortal soul that bears the form of the universe and God himself" (Zuesse 152). This same progression of sacrifice, death, and resurrection into "direct relation with the Deity or other unifying principle of life" is also characteristic of Western mysticism and religious contemplation; it ends similarly with the knowledge of "the immanent God as dwelling within the soul . . . to be found by going deeper into one's reality" (Bridgewater 1350). This "cross-cultural experience" answers the main concern Johnson articulates in Being and Race - namely, that many of the definitions of the African personality embraced by the Black Arts Movement and Cultural Nationalism remain immersed in a Platonic legacy of the bifurcation of Mind and Body, which has become for some an all-too-rigid dividing line between the two cultures. African psychology is often interpreted as emotive, intuitive, grounded in the earthy, "sensual feeling of rhythm," whereas the psychology of the Westerner is interpreted as cold, rationalistic, analytic, lifelessly detached and abstracted from the wholesome realities of the body (18). Johnson's phenomenology and the Allmuseri of the Middle Passage are an attempt to balance the "Divided Landscape" (Being 85) of the racial world with "a nonfragmentary sense of Being" (26) that is part of the religio-philosophical history of both cultures.

Far from not existing in the real world, then, the Allmuseri, as "the Urtribe of humanity itself" in Middle Passage (61), is an amalgamation of Bambara, Dogon, and Egyptian religion and mythology. The Bambara initiation rite, the Dogon creation myth, and the Egyptian Osiris-Horus-Seth myth all employ the ritual sacrifice, death, and resurrection of the god-king through which, in many African cosmologies, the unity of the kingdom and the universe were established and continue to be sustained.(1) The relationship between the dying Reverend Chandler and the two contrary brothers Jackson and Rutherford is deliberately modeled on the relationship between the dying Osiris-king and the contrary brothers Horus (magnanimous soul) and Seth (self-centered soul), who contend for their father's inheritance and dramatize the disorder and unification of the world, via the sacrifice of Seth. By consciously making the Reverend Chandler, a Thomist theologian and mystic, the god-king figure and surrogate father to Jackson and Rutherford, Johnson underscores the affinity between African and Christian religiosity. Rutherford's Middle Passage over "that thrashing Void called the Atlantic" (36) is likewise modeled on the Dogon myth of creation, in which Yurugu (a Seth figure) breaks with the gestating order of the universe and descends into the void in a failed attempt to create his own ego-centered world. It is also conflated with the Bambara initiation to the secret kore society. On his journey Rutherford, like the initiate, aborts his Yurugu ego-world, sacrifices his Sethian self, becomes food for the Allmuseri god, and learns to "transfigure all . . . make . . . peace with the recent past by turning it into Word" (Middle Passage 190). After this initiation to divine knowledge, Rutherford has reconciled with his Jackson/Horus alter-ego and returns to Illinois to take his place on the farm as the Osiris god-king and father to a future generation.

The god-king in many African tribes represents the perfect union between God and man, body and spirit. He is also the re-embodiment of the first culture-.hero/god who conquered primordial chaos and created the order of the universe as well as of the community that has sustained humanity since the beginning of time (Zuesse 117). However, as the incumbent king, with age, loses his power to maintain order, his failure to live up to kingly ideals is regarded symbolically as the rebellion of a rival king, the return of the spirit of disorder challenging the spirit of the first culture-hero (Zuesse 118). His personal concerns, his failing body inhibit his capacity to extend himself to the larger outside world; and so, the last selfless service that the failing king must perform is to sacrifice himself bodily, and transmit his spirit to the new king in order to renew social order. But before the new king can take the throne and reestablish order, he too must first be "killed," sacrificed in a mock battle. That is, he must first explicitly perform the role of the present rebellious spirit of primordial chaos unleashed by the failure and weakness of the former king. After the mock battle, he is captured, taken "dead" into the capital, wrapped in a shroud as if a body prepared for burial, and later arises as the reunited god-king, body and soul reconciled (Zuesse 119). The actual bodily sacrifice of the dying king and the symbolic sacrifice of the new king, then, represent a sacrifice of the self oriented to the limiting demands of the physical world and a resurrection of orientation to transcendent order.

This African sacral kingship ritual is clearly related to the Osiris-Horus-Seth myth of ancient Egypt.(2) In one version of the myth, Osiris is drowned by his rival brother Seth, thereby dividing the kingdom into Lower (northern) and Upper (southern) halves and brings about general chaos. Osiris is resurrected and unity in the kingdom is restored by his son Horus, who defeats Seth and makes a sacrifice of him. The new Osiris-king (who is one with Horus) rules again over a vast celestial and earthly kingdom (symbolically, the divided Egypt reunited) (Griffiths 4-9). In another version, Horus and Seth are brothers who contend for the inheritance of the dead Osiris's kingdom. Horus is identified as the god of light and rules over Lower Egypt (the northern half), whereas Seth is identified with the god of darkness and rules over Upper Egypt (the southern half) (Griffiths 126-27). Seth again is the instigator of strife in the kingdom, for he has mutilated the eye of Horus, who in retaliation has mutilated the testicles of his brother Seth (Griffiths 24, 12). Seth clearly represents the lower orgiastic earthly world and the return of primordial chaos, while Horus, whose right and left eyes are the sun and the moon, represents the world of divine order (Griffiths 109, 125). The kingdom is reunited under Horus after he retrieves his eye from Seth and gives it over to his father Osiris, which resurrects and protects the kingship against further violence from Seth and his followers (Griffiths 4). Although Horus inherits the kingdom and is now one with the resurrected Osiris, Horus and Seth are portrayed in many of the pyramid texts as reconciled and embodied in the Osiris-king; together they cooperate in building the king a ladder to heaven (Griffiths 23-26), and each brother, under the direction of the Osiris-king, heals his mutilation with his enemy's spittle (Griffiths 2).

Seth as brother and arch-enemy to both Osiris and Horus, who is both sacrificed and yet reconciled in the newly resurrected king, suggests that he is the inner alter-ego of the king figure. For Horus, the new king, Seth represents the organic, self-gratifying appetitive drive associated with the bodily realm that must be sacrificed for the resurrection of the deeper human impulse toward an embrace of higher spiritual, Other-centered realities. For Osiris, the dying king, Seth represents the return of this limiting, organic, physically oriented self, as his failing body overwhelms attempts to remain Other-centered. This sacrifice of the Sethian character in both, however, does not amount to an abandonment of the body, but rather a healing embodiment of body and spirit within the resurrected Osiris-Horus figure. Both human impulses that the brothers represent are true, but spirituality and community beyond personal desires take precedence for the survival of all. To emphasize the point, the brothers have female counterparts called the "Two Truths"; as J. Gwyn Griffiths points out, "the Two Truths," the goddesses in the Great Council that settle the conflict between Horus and Seth, "allude to the rival claims of [the] two litigants" (57) - that is, of the brothers themselves. And just as the two brothers are associated with Upper and Lower Egypt, so are the two sister Truths. Chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead, for example, associates the "Hall of the Two Truths" with Osiris, "'He-of-Two-Daughters'" and ruler of Upper and Lower Egypt united (Lichtheim 2: 124-25). This complementary binary opposition of male and female, body and soul, land and ruler symbolism is likely a carry over from "The Memphite Theology" of the Old Kingdom, in which Horus, one with Ptah (here an Osiris figure), "pacified" Seth and united the "Two Lands; the Two Ladies . . . Upper and Lower Egypt" (Lichtheim 1: 52; italics added). Hence, body and soul, earth and heaven, the "Two Truths," the "Two Ladies," the two brothers, Upper and Lower Egypt - all unite in the eternal cyclical sacrifice and renewal of the god-king, the Osiris-Horus-Seth drama of humanity's conscious beginning.

Johnson unquestionably models his characters in Middle Passage on Osiris, Horus, and Seth, and structures the setting of the novel (the North and antebellum South of eighteenth-century America) on the dualism of the "Two Lands," Upper and Lower Egypt. The New Orleans port, like southern Egypt, is ruled by a Seth figure, Papa Zeringue. He is, like Seth, the god of disorder, "the very Ur-type of Gangster," and as if he had killed his brother the god-king, his headquarters "had the atmosphere you feel in houses where some great 'Murder of the Age' has taken place" (13). True to Seth's domain over the sensuous and purely physical, the city he rules is a place of "the excessive, exotic fringes of life" (1), "a town devoted to an almost religious pursuit of Sin, . . . to a steamy sexuality" (2). Papa is "a fallen angel who, like Lucifer," and like the arch-enemy Seth, "controlled the lower depths of the city . . . his dark kingdom." He is the rebellious Sethian character, "wicked and self-serving," enjoying "subterfuges and schemes, deceits, and Satanic games of power" that disrupt the order of the community (13).

Conversely, like northern Egypt, the Reverend Chandler's Illinois farm is ruled by a benevolent, self-sacrificing Osiris-king figure. Like Osiris, the ruler who transcends the egocentric immediacy of existence and achieves a higher understanding of the unification of body and soul, self and Other, Chandler is portrayed as "a Biblical scholar" with a broad vision of the spiritual order imbued in the natural world. He despises "the evils of nominalism" and preaches "disquisitions on Neoplatonism, . . . the genius of Aquinas, and the work of . . . Jakob Bohme" (3). He rejects nominalism, of course, because it insists that only the material world of particulars exists, that there are no unifying principles in the mind or in the world. And he praises the efforts of Neoplatonism (not to be confused with Platonism), Aquinas, and the mystic Jakob Bohme since they all develop systems of thought that attempt to reconcile concepts of general and particular, subject and object, spirit and body. Moreover, like the self-giving god-king who works toward unity, Chandler too is "a fair, sympathetic," self-giving man (111), "generous with his slaves for their years of devoted service" (109), a man who "though a slaveholder . . . hate[s] slavery" (8) and cares for his slaves as if they are his children, educating and then freeing them. His sensitivity to the well-being of others is also reflected in his espousal of the principle that "'love is infallible; it has no errors, for all errors are the want of love'" (111) and in his belief that "'wealth . . . isn't what a man has, but what he is'" (118). There is without a doubt a definite effort to portray the Reverend Chandler as a man initiated to the knowledge of God and the unity of Being, who, however provisionally, attempts to better the lives of those around him. But the most striking feature that makes the Reverend Chandler an Osiris figure is that, like the aging king who must pass on the kingship, Chandler is "old and full of days" (114), on his death-bed, and Jackson and Rutherford are the two brothers Horus and Seth who "stood to inherit everything he had" (109).

Like Horus and Seth, Jackson and Rutherford are contrary brothers. Horus is a falcon-god, which reenforces his association with sky and heavenly order, and his eye is the sun, the light that gives life to the world. Alluding to these associations, Johnson describes Jackson as having an uncanny "way with birds," they would even, Rutherford imagines, "let him lie down upon them . . . then take off in formation like a magic feathered rug," and flowers would "explode into bloom from the blink of Jackson's eye." And, again, just as the god-king sacrifices himself for the sake of the community, Jackson was "so gentle, so self-emptied" (112) and, "rightly or wrongly, he thought it possible to serve his people by humbly being there when they needed him - whites too . . . [for] he was incapable of locking anything out of his heart." Furthermore, like Seth, Horus's worldly alter-ego, Rutherford was Jackson's "shadow-self, the social parasite, the black picklock and worldling" (113). Rutherford explains that Jackson was "a negative of myself . . . the possible-me that lived my life's alternate options, the me I fled. Me. Yet not me. Me if I let go. Me if I gave in" (112). While Jackson, with his openness of heart, was dedicated to "plodding reform" and social order, Rutherford was dedicated to "outright sedition" and disorder: "setting Peleg's barn on fire once, breaking things, petty theft, lies, swearing, keeping bad company, . . . fighting, . . . small acts of revolt." Jackson met Rutherford's "every irresponsibility with a selfless deed" (114). Jackson confronts his condition of slavery by projecting himself outward to the order and concerns of the community; Rutherford confronts his condition of slavery by turning inward to his personal pain and to his personal desire for alleviating it by adding to the disorder around him.

Naturally, Rutherford disdains Jackson's "obsequious" behavior toward Chandler (113). He sees his brother's generosity of heart as nothing but being "shackled to subservience" (9). But Johnson makes it clear that it is this disposition of generosity and selflessness that makes one kingly, that ultimately frees a people from suffering and servitude. The relationship between the aging Chandler and Jackson's "role of manservant" (111) bears a deliberate resemblance to Ptahhotep and his servant/son in "The Instruction of Ptahhotep," which is itself based on the African ritual drama of the death of the aging divine king (Osiris), whose spirit is resurrected in the installment of his successor (Horus). Ptahhotep laments that, for him, "Age is here, old age arrived, / Feebleness came, weakness grows / Eyes are dim, ears deaf . . . / What age does to people is evil in everything." And he declares of his successor: "May this servant be ordered to make a staff of old age [a metaphor for a son or successor to the king] . . . / So that strife may be banned from the people . . . / May obedience enter him, / And devotion of him who speaks to him" (Lichtheim 1: 61-62).

Like Ptahhotep, an Osiris / divine-king figure, the Reverend Chandler is afflicted with the evils of age, "hard of hearing in his right ear and damned near deaf in the left," "dying - or damn near dead" (110), and he desires to pass on his whole estate to the servant that he considers his son. Jackson's obedience is not a sign of weakness and oppressive subservience, but rather a sign of a reciprocal magnanimity with a man who exhibits the Ptahhotep "cardinal virtues" of "self-control, moderation, kindness, generosity, justice, and truthfulness" (Lichtheim 1: 62). He is the Horus / son figure to a surrogate father / god-king, and in his handling of the inheritance of Chandler's estate, he exhibits the same selfless, royal concern for easing the strife of the community. Rather than providing for just himself and Rutherford, Jackson declares that "'the property and profits of this farm should be divided equally among all your servants and hired hands, presently and formerly employed, for their labor helped create it'" and "'the fixed capital spread among bondmen throughout the country . . . and whatever remains donated to that college at Oberlin what helps Negroes on their way north'" (117). In spirit, Chandler and Jackson are one, the Osiris-Horus culture hero incarnate. As radical (and perhaps unpalatable) as this portrayal of a white slaveholder may seem, Johnson is suggesting that the virtues of Christian and African religion may share a common cultural inheritance, or at the very least a parallel common concern for the well-being of others.

It is fitting, then, that Rutherford, like Seth, in an act of rebellion against the selfless giving of his brother, flees south to the sensuous city of New Orleans, the stronghold of that other Seth figure, Papa Zeringue. Not surprisingly, he declares to himself "'Here, Rutherford is home'" (2). Unlike the unifying temperament that marks the African divine king, Rutherford alias Seth - admits, "I have always been drawn by nature to extremes." In the Sethian character of a ruler over the physical, purely appetitive world, Rutherford "hungered - literally hungered - for life . . . hooked on sensation, . . . a lecher for perception and nerve-knocking thrill, like a shot of opium, of new 'experiences'" (3). And just as Upper and Lower Egypt are identified with the "Two Truths," the "Two Ladies," goddesses of body and spirit, women in this Southern realm are "the most exquisitely beautiful women in the world," representative of the pure physicality of femininity, who, to Rutherford, are "thoroughbreds of pleasure" (2). The goddess of this place and "Truth" of physical desire is "Madame Marie Toulouse, a Creole who had spent her young womanhood as . . . [a] mistress" (5), who possessed that "chin-lifted hauteur of Beautiful People" (6). Her sister "Truth" is Isadora Bailey, "a Northerner" (6) who was "as out of place in New Orleans as Saint Teresa would be at an orgy" (5). She is the truth of "an inner brilliance, an intelligence and clarity of spirit" (7), an emissary from the Northern spiritual realm that has come to reconcile the two Lands and reconcile Rutherford to his Horus-like brother Jackson. In this capacity of unification, she is "a women grounded, physically and metaphysically, in the land" (5).

This reconciliation of the "Two Truths" is also suggested in Rutherford's reaction to Isadora's presence in, of all places, Papa's headquarters: "Of a sudden, I had that special feeling of dread that comes when you enter a cafe and stumble upon two women you used to sleep with - who you'd sworn were strangers but were now whispering together" (12). She reminds Rutherford that he has a communal responsibility "'to settle down and start a family so [he] can give to others in even greater measure'" than what Chandler and his older brother had given to him (8). The marriage means more than settling down with Isadora, it means becoming, like his brother, more than "'common'" (9); it means a marriage between personal interests and the interests of community, a unification of body and soul.

To avoid such an outcome, Rutherford jumps aboard the Republic, a ship run by another Seth figure, Ebenezer Falcon. His name even suggests his antithetical role; like Horus, a falcon-god, he too may be a god, but an "Ebenezer" (Scrooge) Falcon who hoards power, refusing to share his wealth with others. In fact, as the reader later discovers, the ship is actually an extension of Papa Zeringue's Sethian domain. But Falcon is presented as the quintessential Seth. For him peace and unity are impossible, and "'. . . war is divine . . . .'" According to Falcon, the "'mind was made for murder,'" and "'conflict . . . is what it means to be conscious'" because "'dualism is a bloody structure of the mind'" - to think requires opposition between "'subject and object, perceiver and perceived, self and other,'" body and soul, which can never be reconciled."' They are signs of a transcendental Fault, a deep crack in consciousness itself'"; hence, war, slavery, and political disorder are the inevitable "'social correlate[s] of a deeper, ontic wound,'" one that by definition never heals (97-98). Rutherford, reluctantly admits, ". . . I saw something . . . of myself in him and hated that," for, like Falcon, Rutherford "enjoyed . . . any experience that disrupted the fragile, artificial pattern of life on land" (33) - any experience that disrupted the bond between people. The Republic, then, is a fitting name for Falcon's ship, since Plato is the first Western philosopher to insist on this "transcendental Fault," the "Divided Line" between the divine, fixed realm of Forms and the corrupt, lower realm of earthly existence.

Linking Rutherford's rebellion to a ship called the Republic, a society that is "perpetually flying apart and reforming" over the "Void" (35-36), Johnson conflates Egyptian and Dogon mythologies to develop the global, cosmological implications of Rutherford's Sethian character. As Diop points out, "the myth of the Dogon's . . . yurugu . . . recalls the myth of the Egyptian god Seth . . . who, like him, introduced the creation of disorder" (320). Moreover, the "principle of twinness or binary opposition" (Karenga 215) that structures the Dogon creation myth corresponds to that of the Egyptian myth of Osiris-Horus-Seth. Summarizing the Dogon myth, Karenga explains that Amma, the Supreme God, "transforming the egg of the world into a double placenta, . . . placed two sets of twins, male and female in each" (215). This double placenta corresponds to the two Lands of Egypt, North (Lower) and South (Upper), and the male and female twins in each placenta correspond to the two brothers (Horus and Seth) and the two daughters (the Two Truths) who are the sons and daughters of Osiris placed in the Two Lands. Johnson uses this same binary opposition of the double placenta and double twins to develop the "two lands" of America, North (Illinois farm) and South (New Orleans port), and to develop the disparity between the male-female representatives of the spiritual/intellectual Northerners (Chandler/Jackson and Isadora) and the physical/sensual Southerners (Papa/Rutherford and Madam Toulouse).

The binary order in Middle Passage, like the Dogon celestial egg, is nonetheless "gestating," however precariously, toward reconciliation (the marriage of Isadora and Rutherford). Before the order of things finished its gestational period in the egg, however, Yurugu (Seth) rebelled in defiance of Amma and "descended into the void in an attempt to create a world himself" out of the placenta that he broke from the "celestial egg-womb" (Karenga 215). Symbolically, then, placing Rutherford aboard the Republic over the "Void" - to break free of the developing order on land and to escape an arranged marriage with its "physical and metaphysical" emissary, Isadora - represents Yurugu/Seth's rebellion and descent into the void to create an ego-world of his own.

Johnson explicitly alludes to this Dogon myth just before the ship sinks. Rutherford "squat[s]" over the orlop to relieve his bowels and brings up "black clumps I can only liken to an afterbirth or a living firing aborted . . . shaped like the African god, as if its homunculus had been growing inside me" (178). According to Karenga, the world and the individual are made in the image of God: "Amma was the egg of the universe and the universe and Amma were one" (214). Appropriately, then, Rutherford's attempt to perceive the world wholly on his own selfish terms becomes an aborted effort, a lifeless "afterbirth," Yurugu's placenta, which is a "homunculus" of Amma, a failed miniature of the gestating universal order at large.

If the middle passage represents the moral failure, "abortion," of Rutherford's and Western culture's selfish, opportunistic individualism founded on a Platonic bifurcation of the mind, it also represents the protagonist's initiation into a higher unity, an other-centered consciousness. According to Zahan, the initiate undergoes a "death and resurrection" which "corresponds to the idea of the renewal of the human being who, owing to this symbolic trauma, sheds the 'old man' that he was in order to be transformed into the 'new man' of his new spiritual state" (60). (Here again are echoes of the old king resurrected in the new king.) Each initiate to the priest societies or to the candidacy of chieftainship is isolated from the tribe, "regarded as a 'corpse' [and] wrapped in a shroud," which symbolically represents the initiate's "entombment" (Zahan 130). As Zuesse explains, this symbolic burial that temporarily deprives the individual of his immediate, known surroundings is designed to achieve "a radical recentering of experience"; the "self-centered," body-centered disposition of childhood is "drawn into the Otherness of life" (149). Johnson clearly uses the symbolism of this initiation ritual to structure Rutherford's journey to self-discovery. Rutherford stows away aboard a ship that is "a wooden sepulcher" and, with "hands crossed on [his] chest" in the manner of a corpse, lies beneath a "canvas on a flat-bottomed launch . . . which was long and narrow," resembling a tomb (21). Awakening from this symbolic death, "the deepest sleep I'd known in years" (22), he begins to feel peculiarly disoriented. The formlessness and tumult of the sea serves to "decentralize" Rutherford's simplistic connection with the physical world; riding the "flux" of the ocean, the deck of the ship frequently "dipped and rose dizzily, and with that motion . . . [Rutherford's] center of gravity was instantly gone" (24). Later he describes his stay aboard this floating sepulcher as "unsettling and claustrophobic," a "dizzying entrapment" that deprives him "of such basic directions as left and right, up and down" (45). This entombment and disorientation prepare the way for an openness to the concerns of the larger world around him.

The next stage of the initiation process is a series of "tests" intended to purify the initiates "of the pollution contracted during their previous, terrestrial life" and "to remind them of their weakness and lack of power in the face of divine knowledge" (Zahan 63). Rutherford reaches his moment of powerlessness and purgation in Falcon's cabin as he realizes that, "with so many men at odds, each willing something so different from the others, like the factions of war," death and disaster for all aboard the ship is imminent, an outcome he is too weak to stop. In a moment of "surrender and bone-felt frailty in the face of troubles so many-sided [his] mind trembled to think of them," he "involuntarily" falls down in prayer, asking God, "'Is this some kind of test?'" For the first time, he relates, "I knew . . . the personal devastation that was my brother's daily bread: burning for things to work out well" (126). He understands for the first time that his brother's selflessness, self-sacrifice was not a sign of subservience but of an empowering generosity that alone transformed the lives of his loved ones. With his "worldly wits . . . gone," Rutherford has "no power or techniques or strategies left except this plea for mercy," which itself, ironically, is an act of empowering self-surrender that brings about "an inexplicable calm" and a cleansing release of "the poisons built up since I left southern Illinois; I cried for all the sewage I carried in my spirit, my failures and crimes, foolish hopes and vanities . . . in a cleansing as good as prayer" (126-27). This "test" purges Rutherford of the "pollution" of his selfish "terrestrial life" and reveals his weakness in the face of the "divine knowledge" that only an openness of heart and generosity extended to others can change the complex course of events for the better.

The final stage of initiation is another series of "exams" that "represent the definitive completion of the man, who lets himself be fashioned by the initiatory practices and who thereby becomes worthy and savory nourishment for the 'mouth' of the divinity." The divinity "'consumes' the postulants" and "grind[s] their spirit[s], giving [them] special qualities, such as receptivity, vivacity, docility, and stability" (Zahan 63). In Johnson's novel, this second set of exams comes in the form of helping to alleviate the suffering of others after both the Africans and Americans are badly beaten during the struggle to take over the Republic. After his humbling revelation in Falcon's cabin, Rutherford is reaching completion as he meets the suffering of others with the magnanimity characteristic of his brother: "The first thing I was forced to do was forget my personal cares, my pains, and my hopes. . . . Though tired and sleepless, I clowned and smiled for the children. . . . I prayed, like my brother, that all would be well" (161). To calm the injured, he tells a "lie" - that all will be well - yet they are "calmed, not by the lie . . . but by the urgent belief they heard in [his] voice, and soon [he] came to desperately believe in it [him]self, for them [he] believed [they] would reach home" (163). He has fully learned to define himself and his beliefs according to the well-being and survival of the community of others aboard the ship. This transformation makes him "savory" nourishment for the Allmuseri god kept below, and so he is given the honor to be the "first of the Americans" to feed it (166).

To understand what occurs in the passage in which Rutherford is "eaten" by the Allmuseri god, it is necessary to take a closer look at the initiatic transformation of the kore society of the Bambara tribe, a Mande people of Mali (closely related to the Dogon), and the one Johnson has been principally following up to this point. The parallels are complex and difficult to paraphrase, so it is worthwhile, here, to quote Zuesse's useful study at some length. To ultimately know God is to know "the mysteries surrounding the Word," which is the source of the universe and of humankind:

All of the universe is generated by the primal (and still continuing) vibrations that make up the Word. Out of this primal energy matter and finally form condensed. . . . It produced from the center the seeds of all things. . . . Yet the world was not known until the vibrations doubled back on themselves in thought . . . [which] is yo, thought or will. It is the "spirit of nothing," the Bambara say, for in itself the will is utterly empty; it takes form in what it creates. Yo is the internal, ever silent word or voice that "speaks" all that we know and see. . . . All is yo, Bambara elders believe, and all is essentially nothing. The entire universe is an emanation from nothing (fu, "zero," "voidness"). Man is the image of yo. (153-54)

This nothingness, silence at the center of the universe and of the individual does not carry the modern sense of nihilism. Rather, since everything comes from this central energy, this cosmic will, to describe it as any one thing would be hopelessly inaccurate, "noise," and so only "nothing," "silence" can come close to describing it. The initiate joins the Bambara elders in returning to the primal silence, in adopting a posture of complete openness, selflessness, being symbolically "devoured" in order to free the will and create out of the noise and confusion that exist in the community the perfect image of harmony which amounts to peaceful silence (154).

Johnson makes deliberate use of this Bambara paradox that the Word of the universe is silence, a nothingness that is the source of everything, in his depiction of the Allmuseri god. As Rutherford enters the chamber of the god, he explains that "it stood before me mute as a mountain, preferring not to speak, I suspected, because to say anything was to fall short of ever saying enough" (168). Everything is contained in its silence. The pain, hurt, and hate that Rutherford harbors toward his father are likewise "silenced," devoured as the god places his father's crime, abandoning his children, into a larger context of "the antecedent universe to which my father, as a single thread, belonged" (169). His father's voice becomes "a thousand soft undervoices . . . a mosaic of voices within voices, each one immanent in the other, none his but all strangely his . . . ; I had to listen harder to isolate him from the We that swelled each particle and pore of him . . .." His father's life no longer stands out in his mind as a painful, despised inheritance of weakness and failure, but rather it is harmonized with a deeper, more generous understanding of the complexity of humanity. At this moment, Rutherford declares, "Suddenly I knew the god's name: Rutherford." That is, he discovers that this divine energy, this power to create a more harmonious, sympathetic world is the power of his own magnanimous will, his yo, which by being "utterly empty" is capable of bringing the "noise" of disparity into the music of silent unity:

. . . every molecule of matter in [the ship] vibrated gently, almost imperceptibly, and the effect of all this was that from bowsprit to stem she seemed to sing . . . . A long, long interval passed in the most unimaginable quietude. Silence as deep, as pervading as the depths of the sea. (171)

This gentle vibration of molecules alludes to the Bambara and Dogon primal energy, Word, that creates and sustains the universe. In this brief glimpse of God as Word, as the cosmic will, which is self-knowledge, Rutherford unites in his mind the divided Republic, a society perpetually flying apart because it is founded on Falcon's philosophy of the divided self, the "ontic wound" between body and soul, self and other. Rutherford has discovered an alternative philosophy, that a self-emptied, empathetic heart can heal such a wound; doing for others without complaint, raising oneself "above likes and dislikes, . . . a Way . . . to solder that deep schism Falcon believed bifurcated Mind" (175-76).

In light of this analysis, it is apparent that Johnson's depiction of the Allmuseri is also consistent with the Bambara understanding of the relationship between God and the individual. Like the kore priest's belief that God and humankind are co-creators of the world, share in a cosmic will, "an old Allmuseri belief" holds "that each man outpictured his world from deep within his own heart," that "a man's soul was an alchemical cauldron where material events were fashioned from the raw stuff of feelings and ideas" (164). This depiction of Allmuseri tribal belief is also consistent with the Egyptian conception that Ptah as heart and tongue (Divine Word) created the universe and exists in every living thing:

From Ptah, there took shape in the heart, there took shape on the tongue the form of Atum. . . . Thus heart and tongue rule over all the limbs in accordance with the teaching that it (the heart, or: he, Ptah) is in every body and it (the tongue, or: he, Ptah) is in every mouth of all gods, all men, all cattle, all creeping things, whatever lives, thinking whatever it . . . wishes, and commanding whatever it . . . wishes. (Lichtheim 1: 54)

Johnson's Allmuseri god (All-Muser-I), then, could be the Bambara Faro (Zuesse 154), the Dogon Amma (Karenga 215), or the Egyptian Ra, Ptah, or Atum (Lichtheim 1: 54), all of which are the Divine Word, Logos, Will that created and sustain the universe and that exist in the form of personal will in the god-man/woman or god-king/queen.

After attaining peace of mind, thoroughly knowing one's will, the ultimate outcome of the initiatory transformation is to be "reborn" as this god-man or, if chosen to fill the office, god-king. The "tomb" of the "old man" becomes the "womb" of the "new man" (Zahan 138). Like a newborn, the postulant is washed with water, dressed in new clothes, and assigned a new name (Zahan 64, 139). And so, like the postulant who has endured the "tests" and purgation of the "death" stage of the initiation ceremony and is now ready to be "reborn," Ruttherford, after his visitation with the Allmuseri god, "lay at the foot of the berth" (here both the "belly" of the ship and suggesting 'bearing,' 'birth'), "a quivering jelly" whose "eyes felt filmy," like a fetus in a mother's womb (178-79). Moreover, he confesses, "try as I might, I could not remember my full name" (179). Later, the ship throws him naked into the cold water of the sea, a symbolic cleansing of the newborn (182-83). Significantly, Baleka, one of the Allmuseri children, brings "fresh clothes" to Rutherford and names him; his name is not mentioned after being delivered from the sea, until Baleka calls him "'Ruth'ford' . . . two Saturdays after our rescue" (190). Dropping the er in his name is important here: Ruth, meaning compassion for the misery of others, and ford, meaning to pass or cross a body of water, accurately name his new state of self-emptied community consciousness and identity. Furthermore, like the fully initiated kore secret-society priest, he has learned how to "transfigure all we had experienced" and "make . . . peace with the recent past by turning it into Word" (190), referring to the story of his experience written in the ship's log but also alluding to Word as the cosmic will, the transforming power of the human will.

Now reborn as a new man, fully aware of his own divine will, he decides to "'go back to Makanda[,Illinois,] and look for some land to settle on - solid ground for once'" (204) - to become the benevolent, self-giving god-king figure, like his brother Jackson and the Reverend Chandler, dedicated to the well-being of the community. Seth has become reconciled to Osiris-Horus, and this reconciliation is symbolically represented as a marriage to Isadora - just as the rebellion involved a running away from marriage. In keeping with the balanced binary structure that is so much a part of Egyptian and Dogon mythology, Isadora and Rutherford in outward appearance are inversions of their former selves. At the beginning of the novel, Isadora has "an inner brilliance . . . and clarity of spirit" but "let herself get fat . . . to end the pressure women feel from being endlessly ogled and propositioned" (6-7). Now she is playing the "temptress" with a "come-hither expression" (206), and she is "so much slimmer . . . a figure of such faint-inducing grace any Odysseus would have swallowed the whole ocean . . . to swim to her side" (207). Similarly, at the start of the novel, Rutherford is quite the ladies' man but lacking in spiritual and intellectual development. By the end of the novel, however, he clearly has evolved spiritually, but physically he is a "broken down sea dog" (205).

On the character level, start and finish of the novel, then, complement each other in a kind of inverse chiasmus. Jackson and Rutherford, Isadora and the mistress Madam Toulouse become reconciled, like the twined brothers Horus and Seth, and twined sisters, the "Two Truths." Isadora plays the seductress out of genuine love for Rutherford, giving him what she thinks he wants; but Rutherford is no longer purely motivated by physical desire. The Middle Passage, he explains, reduced "the velocity of [his bodily] desire, its violence" and replaced it with a calm and enduring desire to have "our futures blended, not our limbs, our histories perfectly twined for all time, not our flesh" (208). Physicality is not so much denied in this future as its importance is subordinated to a spiritual union.

Behind this drama of division and unification in Middle Passage lies Johnson's criticism, in Being and Race, of the Black Cultural Nationalist's charge that Black art must be "useful," a "tool or weapon" in the Black Revolution (23). Answering this call has led to the unfortunate oversimplification of European culture as "equated with reason, analysis" and of African culture with "sympathetic feeling" (19), a "bodily closeness to the earth" (128). As Johnson sees it, these efforts have given the division between the races the appearance of a metaphysical imperative - and a Western "primordial Platonic dualism" at that (27). The "evils" of thinking in these divisive terms transcend race and time; the division of body and mind, which has as its social correlate a divided kingdom (North and South), is embedded in the mythology of ancient Africa, in Greek philosophy, and in Christian religion. Thus, Rutherford, Papa Zeringue, Ebenezer Falcon, and Zebediah Singleton (the corrupt financier supporting Falcon) - black and white characters in Johnson's novel - become Sethian dualistic thinkers, driven to dangerous extremes. But, according to Johnson, while "the contemporary racial world is still a Divided Landscape . . . to see only division is to see one-sidedly" (85). Unity between body and mind as well as its social correlate of a united kingdom are embedded in both cultures as well. Thus, for "interpretive completeness" (Johnson, "Phenomenology" 152), the Reverend Chandler, Jackson Calhoun, Peter Cringle (the white sailor who sacrifices his life and body to feed the ship's survivors), and the initiated Rutherford - black and white characters - are self-sacrificing Osiris-Horus god-king figures dedicated to unity.

Johnson's own phenomenological critical theory, articulated in Being and Race, which demands a complete self-surrender in order to register the nuances and complexities of a shared "cultural Lifeworld" (44), is designed to step outside this Platonic legacy and "polarized level of race-think" (85) in an attempt to catch an alternative, more complete view of both Africa and the West. Such an attempt need not diminish any particularity of any culture, rather the intent is to capture a richness of specificity. It may be, as Rushdy claims, that the similarities between the intersubjectivity of the Allmuseri tribe and Johnson's disposition as a writer make the Allmuseri "a symbol for the postmodern condition" (393) - a desperate "integrationist" solution to our fragmented modern world - but its author spares no details in revealing that such a condition of fragmentation and desire for unity is as old as ancient African tribal kingship rituals and crosses all cultural barriers. The solution of self-sacrifice is similarly as old, transcending race and time.

Notes

1. The kingship ritual that I outline in the next two paragraphs of the text describes the general practice of many African tribes, not just that of the Bambara and Dogon. My contention throughout this paper, however, is that, while Johnson has the African kingship ritual generally in mind, he uses the details of the Bambara kore initiation ceremony structured on that ritual in particular to develop the plot of Rutherford's "middle-passage" journey of spiritual growth over the Atlantic. Symbolic death and resurrection or spiritual rebirth into a state of esoteric knowledge may be part of many African kingship and priest initiation rituals, but the steps of Rutherford's initiation follow too closely those of the Bambara practice to be mere coincidence.

Likewise, Johnson specifically uses the Dogon creation myth to develop the setting of Rutherford's spiritual journey. Again, it is beyond coincidence that the binary structure in Middle Passage - between the North and the South in post-Civil War America - closely, mimics in its details the binary structure of the Dogon celestial egg divided into a double placenta and gestating violently toward a precarious union.

2. Many scholars have speculated on this relationship, but see, for example, Meyerowitz, Van Buick, Seligman, and Diop, African and Civilization. Later, it will become clear that Johnson consciously models his characters on Osiris, Horus, and Seth. Here, I am attempting to explicate the "cross-cultural" theme of divine self-sacrifice shared between African kingship rituals and Egyptian religion (and later between these two and some Western religions/philosophies) that has directly influenced Johnson in the development of his characters, especially given his own philosophy of self-surrender and shared cultural "Lifeworld" intended to bridge the racial divide.

Works Cited

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-----. Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology. Trans. Yaa-Lengi Meema Ngemi. Ed. Harold J. Salemson. Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill, 1991.

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Johnson, Charles. Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988.

-----. Middle Passage. New York: Atheneum, 1990.

-----. "A Phenomenology of On Moral Fiction." Thor's Hammer: Essays On John Gardner. Ed. Jeff Henderson. Little Rock: U of Central Arkansas P, 1985. 147-56.

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Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. "The Phenomenology of the Allmuseri: Charles Johnson and the Subject of the Narrative of Slavery." African American Review 26 (1992): 373-94.

Seligman, C. G. Egypt and Negro Africa: A Study in Divine Kingship. London: Oxford UP, 1934.

Van Blunck, V. "La place du Roi Divin dans les circles culturels d'Afrique Noire." The Sacral Kingship: Studies in the History of Religions. Supp. 4. Leiden: Brill. 1959. 98-134.

Zahan, Dominique. The Religion, Spirituality, and Thought of Traditional Africa. Trans. Kate Ezra Martin and Lawrence M. Martin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970.

Zuesse, Evan M. Ritual Cosmos: The Sanctification of Life in African Religions. Athens: Ohio UP, 1979.

Celestin Walby is a doctoral student in English at the University of Missouri-Columbia.