Kissi People - Religion and Spiritual Beliefs

Religion and Spiritual Beliefs

Although many Kissi have converted to Christianity, most of them continue to practice their traditional ethnic religion. Ancestor worship or praying to deceased relatives is a common practice among the Kissi. The Kissi believe that ancestral spirits act as mediators between them and the creator god. Small stone statues are used to represent the spirits. They are worshipped and offered sacrifices by the village headmen.

The Kissi constantly live in fear of the supernatural. They wear charms in order to protect themselves from the evil spirits. Witchcraft is also practiced by sorcerers and witches. Some of the elders and religious leaders communicate with spirits through trances and hypnosis. The biriye and other rituals are held in the forest, since this is thought to be a sacred setting.

An interesting corruption of the name Kissi linked Christmas Mass to it to become Kissy Mess Mess, a neighbourhood of Freetown, SL.

Read more about this topic:  Kissi People

Famous quotes containing the words religion, spiritual and/or beliefs:

    People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practised.
    Samuel Butler (1835–1902)

    The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation, and not in augmenting animal existence. Nor is the man enriched, in repeating the old experiments of animal sensation; nor unless through new powers and ascending pleasures he knows himself by the actual experience of higher good to be already on the way to the highest.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    To a first approximation, the intentional strategy consists of treating the object whose behavior you want to predict as a rational agent with beliefs and desires and other mental states exhibiting what Brentano and others call intentionality.
    Daniel Clement Dennett (b. 1942)