Why the shift from Egyptology to voodoo language and symbols?
IR: Well, there are a lot of parallels. Egyptology can be seen in voodoo. I m just trying to modernize the whole thing, bring it out of the backwoods, use it as an approach to and a technique of art. I ve been able to use some of the symbols and rituals associated with voodoo. I think this is a fundamental aesthetic of Afro-Americans, invented by Afro-Americans in this hemisphere. It doesn t have that much of an African antecedent. There’s a new book called “Africa s Secret Power,” and it shows that voodoo has now gone back to Africa to be used by them. Their religions have become very syncretic–Indian symbols, rituals, African, European cosmology. It s a kind of synchronicity that you found in the West with the Greeks. But it was revived by people like T.S. Eliot, and they get the credit for it. Afro-Americans have been practicing synchronicity for as long as they ve been here, but because Eliot was a white man, he gets credit for its revival. RM: The subtext of “Mumbo Jumbo” seems t
