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Igbo Religion Essay

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Religion of any society regulates the social order and cultural patterns as cohesive force to bound people together with certain values of traditional aspects. The rituals and the ceremonies activate the reciprocal relations between the people as a bond of the religious identity. The downfall of the Igbo religion by the missionaries through the religious power of Christianity is the responsible factors to pose the questions of the issues of religious identity. The chief priest of the god Ulu, Ezeulu performs the religious rituals, offer prayers and sacrifices to the deity on behalf of the Igbo people of Umuaro. The festival of the Pumpkin Leaves marks the end of the old year and the arrival of the New Year He is considered as the man of religious …show more content…

It made Igbo to believe, “praying that the day would not be far when the priest and all his people would turn away from the worship of snakes and idols to the true religion” (AOG: 214). The missionaries promoted Igbo to abandon the ‘snakes and idols’ and join the church to become civilized and find a salvation. The Christianity provided the stronger protection than the deity, Ulu. The Christ is believed to be the strong, merciful and forgiving and Ulu in compare to Christianity is weak and stubborn; the stubbornness of the native deity caused the religious identity. The missionaries declare, “Ulu who is a false god can eat one yam the living God who owns the whole world should be entitled to eat more than one”. (AOG: 215-216) It is evident in the novel when Igbo people accepted the white man’s religion. it marks the change in the religious identity. The alien indigenous gods were replaces by the change invented by the missionaries. Ezeulu’s power in the beginning to instruct the harvesting had lost its magic at the end subsequently his religious identity and ambition to maintain the Igbo tradition to celebrate the New Year. The narrator explains, ‘Thereafter any yam harvested in his fields was harvested in the name of his (Ezeulu’s) son.”(AOG: 230) The religion of Igbo people got the less importance than the

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