The Mystic Stream of Virility

The Mystic Stream of Virility

Nobody knows how long “Odinga,” a ghostly sculptured human skull with a complete set of bloody teeth and what looks like a watery eyeball has been sitting in the king’s fire mantle. Both King Jaja11, 95, and Malua Okenga, the greatest storyteller in the community and 115 years old have vowed that this half-dead, half-alive skull has been there before they were born.  Folklore has it that their great, great grandfathers used to sacrifice human beings periodically to the gods through Odinga as a means. of appeasement, for fertility and bumper harvest

Amafa Ancient Kingdom was a community mired and intertwined in prehistoric customs, culture mysterious deities. Adherence to their beliefs was sacrosanct.

On the night of the eve of Odisha, the African Festival of Deities commemorating the gods of fertility, it was customary for the king to assemble a beehive of virgins in the kingdom and choose two “lucky “ones to join his platoon of wives. Twenty-four white rams would be slaughtered and the celebration would extend for four days and four nights.

His Royal Majesty King Jaja11, an indomitable figure of the Ancient Kingdom with a population of two million would declare a public holiday to coincide with the end of the Odisha Festival. The event would be marked with the Traditional Prime Minister and the Council of Chiefs trouping out in their best regalia, eagle feathers, elephant tusks, and leopard skin coral hand-quitted fans. The topless maiden dance troupe, the “Gisele” with glittering waist beads and very little to cover their modesty would be gyrating seductively before the dignitaries and would provide another provocatively tantalising and entrancing display. The climax of the celebration was a wrestling competition to settle who was the best and most powerful wrestler in the kingdom, with all twelve autonomous communities participating. The expected trophy would be a white ram and a black ewe, an elephant tusk, and dried lion teeth crafted like waist beads. and the privilege of having dinner with the King, his 25 wives, 15 concubines, and 127 children. The rather exotic menu is served with bowels of crabs, red snails, dog meats, ram testicles, the roasted vulva of lionesses, and crocodile livers in garnished local herbs.

The final day would mark the day when the king will pick his choice of two beautiful damsels. Prior to this day, a select group of elderly women called the Kingress would be assigned the diminutive but demeaning tasks of carrying out an intimate invasive examination to determine which among the girls were virgins. How do they do it? And how do they reach their verdict? It is as both mesmerising and creeping daunting as the thought of bearing witness. The king shall never marry a girl that has previously lost her virginity. It is sacrilegious and the gods would be appeased to avert calamity in the kingdom.

The Amafa Kingdom is revered and distinct from other ancient kingdoms in its originality because of its “religious” pantheon, which hugs included over two hundred gods and deities, with different weird names. One of the notable gods was the god of Gibraltar which was attributed to the supreme and omnipresent powers of reproduction and virility. Every newly married woman to the kingdom would first go through the humiliating ritual of being publicly bathed at the river shrine of Gibraltar to cleanse her of the impurities of her past lives. This would also prepare the woman for the herculean tasks associated with motherhood. Motherhood in the Amafa Kingdom is revered and celebrated.

The ancestral belief is that for a woman to be traditionally crowned as “Ezinne” translated as “The Good Mother” she is expected to give birth to at least ten children. The elevation to this “stardom” is more gracious and celebrated if the woman has given birth to more male issues than female. This has been the concrete foundation on which this kingdom has persisted for centuries. One of the lesser-known gods in the same era but was equally revered and eulogized just like Odinga was “Abanta” the winged penis god of virility. Or as the inhabitants have concluded, Abanta is the only son of the god of Gibraltar. Abanta, as was represented by sculptures from the wooden statue, was literally all penis, taken to the spectre degree of penis-hood: his body was an erect penis and testicles, spotting a huge and extraordinarily erect penis, with a penis for a tail, and penises for legs, the eyes are scrotum shaped with the teeth spotting tiny penises of all shapes and sizes. The Abana is fitted with wings, like the Biblical Angel which according to the weird beliefs could fly around and spurt his blessings upon lucky mortals, especially virgins who have known no man. The age of adolescence was initiated by taking the maidens to the stream of Virility where water literally being sprayed via the penises offers the believers their first weird sexual experiences. Some would swear on the gods of Abanta for their ecstatic and orgasmic experiences. Hence out of the stream, the obvious question would be, “Did you come”?

As the legendary folklores sprouted in the Abana Kingdom, the first great, great, great grandmother “Ezinne Gata” was supposedly impregnated by the gods of Abanta and was an uncorrupted and untouched maiden at the time. As the legend went, Gata was a virgin, and one day, while performing the sacred rites of the Virgins at the stream shrine of Virility, a disembodied winged penis flew in and impregnated her. Sounds more mysterious than the Virgin Birth, as many would concede. Gata then went on to give birth to twelve male issues and three females, thereby setting a pace that nobody has been able to surpass in generations.

This idol worship and fictitious beliefs in the Amafa kingdom went into decline with the rise of Christianity and eventually vanished, along with the rest of antiquity’s pagan pantheon. Nonetheless, a trace of the “Ezinne” or Good Mother” culture is still with us today in the Amafa Kingdom. The difference today is that the celebrations of being in the rank of the Ezinne club are now being crowned with church services in the community where many herds of the cow are slaughtered for the entertainment of everybody, especially some women who would be attempting and praying to reach the milestone of giving birth to ten or more surviving children. On the part of the maidens of the Amafa kingdom, the ritual of the pilgrimage to the Stream of Virility is one that you must make at least once in your lifetime. After all, beliefs and customs do not die easily, no matter how westernized a people are, neither is the dream of the Amafa women to be celebrated in the ranks of “Ezinne”