“A canoa virou marinheiro, e no fundo do mar tem dinheiro

Translating the heading: “The ship turned over, in the depths of the sea there is treasure.”

This traditional folkloric capoeira song is an apt metaphorical lyric to represent Kongolese religious ideas that have been described by T.J. Desch Obi. He explains that the counter-clockwise roda, or elola, was essential to central African cosmology, which “linked human combat to the interplay of spiritual forces from across the kalunga, or the threshold between the lands of the living and the dead.”

Kalunga in Central Africa, in N’Bunda language, meant the sea. The word also means rivers and the kingdom of the ancestors. In Kongolese cosmology, the counter-clockwise circle represents a solar cycle. If a cross were drawn within the circle, the horizontal east-to-west line is the kalunga. The kalunga divides the material world from the spirit world or afterlife. East represented birth, north was the peak of strength, west was death at the intersection with the kalunga line, and regeneration came at the southern extreme of the cross.”

-Gerard Taylor (Capoeira: The Jogo de Angola from Luanda to Cyberspace)

more will come tomorrow on this theory