Mana

Mana-like Power Elsewhere

If supernatural beings are conceptualized as ranked hierarchically in a society, gods will have more power than other kinds of spirits and the Supreme Being will have the greatest concentration of power. The intensity of divine power is illustrated in the biblical concept of God's “glory,” famous as the cause of the shepherds' terror in the Christmas story. In Exodus, Moses asks God to reveal Himself, but God replies, “You cannot see my face, for no one can see me and live”; nevertheless, when Moses came down from the mountain, his people were frightened because his face was shining from being so close to God. Subsequently, after his talks with God, Moses veiled himself to protect his people from the contagious divine power.

Some well-described cultural concepts of mana-like power include Iroquois orenda, Algonquian manitou, Sioux wakan, Malay kramat, Indian brahma,Greek dynamis, Chinese qi, West African Yoruba àshé and its Caribbean derivatives (aché and axé), Islam baraka, Hindu and Buddhist healing systems' karmaand chakras, the alleged “energies” in Therapeutic Touch and Reiki, and ideas of flowing streams of power in the earth such as “leylines” in Britain and Europe and variants of qi as earth energies addressed in the Chinese geomantic system of feng shui. For reasons similar to those in Polynesian monarchies, some African kings were veiled, carried in public, and otherwise separated from commoners. In popular use today, the term mana sometimes means an inherent power to bring good luck or good health. New Age adherents to the health food movement of the 1970s and 1980s regarded some “natural” foods as containing mana, charged with a beneficial life force, whereas certain sugary or processed foods were taboo and harmful. In Melanesia, found rocks or other objects with unusual or suggestive shapes might be presumed to have beneficial mana and would be used magically. Similarly, the southern U.S. African American concept of mojo, as a beneficial power vested in certain things and behaviors, is a mana-like concept.

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