pitfalls of theocracy, holy war, and ecclesial imperialism, on the one hand, and the threat of nihilism, on the other. When an aggressive version of the sacred overwhelms and anathematizes the secular, as in some of the most violent fundamentalist reactions to modernity, the inclination is to bar the revelations that may occur outside the sacred realm, and that may happen unexpectedly in any number of experiences; when the profane is the sole and dominant motif, however, the inclination is to strip the human and natural world of mystery and to replace them with mechanistic and material ideas that are flat, predictable, and soulless.
The main lesson here is that such separations (“soul and body” and “supernatural and natural” can be added to the pairing “sacred and profane”) are products of contingent historical genealogies in modern Western Europe and should not predetermine how we understand the meaning of “soul” in Judaism or Christianity or its meaning in African American or Latin American traditions.14 This is an important point to keep in mind in my study, because conceptions of soul in African American and Latin American traditions, as in premodern Christianity, wantonly trespass across these borders, breaching the barriers that try to keep them apart. I insist, then, on the curious juxtaposition and intermingling of the sacred and profane in these Afro-Latin traditions and hope that the reader can see the redemptive possibilities of both ideas of soul. For this reason, the metaphors of the crossroads and a border are illuminating for my study, insofar as they demarcate regions in between the sacred and profane, somewhere on the transitional boundaries and open plains of these binary oppositions, where contrary and divergent winds breathe life into the idea of the soul.15
In this regard there is something richly suggestive about the Yoruba deity Elegua, god of the crossroads, trickster figure, and patron of drumming and rhythm. As the god of the crossroads, he sits at the junction of divergent paths of the sacred and profane, in places where the pious and pompous would never venture, where Robert Johnson once promised his soul to the devil in order to learn how to make his guitar moan and wail. Church folks called a lot of these rhythms and rhymes “devil’s music”; so tempting, pleasurable, and ravishing these sounds must have seemed to their priggish ears. And similar aspersions were cast on Afro-Latin music. The term diablo was in fact a synonym for the mambo. (The word “mambo” derives from Congo religion, where it referred to the concluding chants of a spirit-possession ceremony.) In its secular incarnations, mambo came to mean the final section of a musical or dance performance, when the artist was given free rein to improvise and let loose with an “anarchy in tempo,” a la diabla.16 In these moments the artist was permitted to be unruly, excessive, and profligate in his flow and tempo, as if he, too, were suddenly possessed by wild spirits. Gustavo Perez Firmat writes, “The name connotes excess, outrageousness, lack of decorum. A mambo mouth is a loud mouth, someone with a loose tongue, someone who doesn’t abide by rules of propriety. The mambo is nothing if not uncouth, improper, its musical improprieties sometimes even bordering on the improperio, the vulgar or offensive outburst.”17
In the spirit of these uncouth flurries of emotion, I explore some of the creative possibilities of the music of the profane in this study. One might say that the consideration of soul in this book follows the passage from the sanctified soul of gospel music to the devil’s music of the blues, R & B, soul, and rap, the route from sacred to profane manifestations. The specific genre “soul music” (a term that originated in the late 1950s along with terms like “soul brother” and “soul food”) is an example of the bridge between the two: it was seeded by gospel music but watered and fertilized by the brazen sexual electricity of the blues and R & B.18 The grooves of Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Curtis Mayfield, Jackie Wilson, and Otis Redding muddied the stylistic, harmonic, and lyrical distinctions between gospel and R & B, making for soul sermons that were unlike anything heard before. These artists were, in the words of bluesman Big Bill Broonzy, “crying sanctified.”19
Although I defend this crossroads, it should be clear that I am not arguing that we skirt or run around modernity. While I want to preserve classic Jewish and Christian beliefs on the soul, I also contend that the modern milieu of secularism enabled a degree of creative freedom and artistic inventiveness on this theme, specifically in its forbearing of cultural and musical revelries outside the churches, in the rowdy, disorderly, and bawdy underground of society, in juke joints, chitlin’ circuits, and the like. The blues, R & B, funk, and hip-hop all have sacred influences and motifs, but they also challenge the monopoly of grace claimed by the churches and assume, á la Meister Eckhart, that one cannot muffle God and confine him to a church.20 And the same holds for the literary and cultural creations of Ralph Ellison and Federico García Lorca, both of whom dress up their ideas of soul with a prodigal mixture of the sacred and profane. They surely would have conceded the intuition of John Keats when he defended the poet’s freedom in exploring the darkness as much as the light, the mean as much as the elevated: “What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion [sic] poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one. . . . It enjoys light and shade, it lives in gusto, be it foul and fair, high and low, rich or poor, mean or elevated.”21
On the matter of soul, then, I follow the intuitions of poets and mystics in their daring exploration of the fair and foul, high and low, light and shade, shocking as it might be for the virtuous philosopher or theologian. This Keatsian formulation, it seems to me, has inspired a wide variety of contemporary hip-hop intellectuals, such as Michael Dyson, Cornel West, Anthony Pinn, Imani Perry, Adilifu Nama, Paul Gilroy, and Adam Bradley, as well as numerous others. “Historically,” Paul Gilroy writes, “black political culture’s most powerful notions of agency have been figured through the sacred. They can also get figured through the profane, and there, a different idea of worldly redemption can be observed. Both of these possibilities come together for me in the traditions of musical performance that culminates in hip hop.”22 Or take another example, from Adilifu Nama: “To hip hop’s credit, this sensibility has lessened the artificial and often idealized separations between ‘the good, bad, and ugly’ aspects of the black and brown experience. Consequently, stringent and bifurcated notions of the sacred and profane have been jettisoned for a messy and fluid assessment of right and wrong.”23 In my exploration of the black and brown conceptions of soul, I thus follow the lead of these scholars but with a special focus on the crossroads between African American and Latin traditions in religion, literature, and music. Since Christianity proved decisive in the understanding of soul in these traditions, the yeast that allowed it to rise, I begin my study with the problem of definition, specifically how the idea of the soul was named and interpreted in Christian thought, before moving on to the profane unfolding of soul.
THEOLOGICAL SOUL: IN PLACE OF THE MODERN SELF
Soul as Imago Dei, Icon of Divine Presence and Transcendence
To distinguish theological versions of soul from the modern self, I begin with the fundamental assumption that the human soul is made in the image of God, that it is an icon of both divine presence and transcendence. By virtue of an analogical likeness (similarity in difference), the soul participates in the beauty and goodness of God, though it remains infinitely other than God, weighed down by its heavy mortal coil. By the force of the soul’s temporal condition, the soul is divided and dispersed, conflicted and distracted, twisted and distorted (distentio animi in Augustine’s terms), but it forever remains an image of God, shot through with beauty, wild with divinity, the imago Dei distorted but not destroyed. The soul may be, as William Butler Yeats says about the human heart, a “foul rag and bone shop,” but it still participates in the splendor of divine infinity and reflects the charged grandeur of God, the deep down otherness of God.24
So yes, the soul is an icon of divine presence, of the grace that fills and yet exceeds the soul. Insofar as the soul mirrors the divine in its infinite mystery and resplendence, however, it also shares in the nocturnal depths of God; the soul is also an icon of divine transcendence. While the soul is holy like God, sacred and precious, of infinite worth and dignity (a fact that was revolutionary for slaves throughout
