THE WESTERN AND JEWISH ORIGIN OF THE CHRISTIAN DEVIL AND THE CONNECTION TO IGBO TRADITIONAL EKWENSU

Abstract

The Devil, thought of as Ekwensu among Igbo Christians is both a new-comer and old-resident in Igbo religious consciousness. The Igbo Christians have made such an enemy out of Ekwensu that it has become the cause of everything negative among them. They blame him for their failures, natural occurrences, witchcraft, accidents, sicknesses, even the malfunction of electrical appliances and internet network instability. The current profile of Ekwensu can be traced to the advent of Christianity; before then, Ekwensu was known differently. The present work traced the origin of the Devil in western and Jewish culture, elicited how the Devil became the enemy of God and the various representations of the Devil in those cultures and how Christianity borrowed that trend and finally imposed it on Igbo religious consciousness. The work is a textual analysis and an abstraction from concrete religious practices. The analysis was done using phenomenological method. Results shows that Ekwensu only acquired the status of the Judeo-Christian Devil/Satan as a result of the Christian borrowing of the western presentation of Devil in the Jewish and Western cultures.