The Name, “Trinidad”
Columbus renamed our
island with a term which reflected Europe’s religious fundamentalism. The three
peaks of the Southern Range were the first thing that the European mariners
sighted. It reminded them of the central mystery of Christianity, the three
persons in one God, the Trinity. In Spanish the term Trinity is expressed as La Trinidad, precisely the name of our
island.
The religious
fundamentalism of Christendom prevented, and indeed still prevents, the vast
majority of Christians from realizing that it was in the Nile Valley where
human beings first formulated the idea of a Supreme Being who is One but Three
at the same time. The doctrine of the Trinity which Africans from the Nile Valley
elaborated thousands of years before Christianity is to be found in a hymn to
Amen contained in a papyrus now housed in the Netherlands National Museum of
Antiquities in Leiden (Allen 182). The following is a contemporary English of
the version of the hymn reproduced in Egyptian hieroglyphs in Allen’s text
(183):
There are three
gods:
Amen, Ra, and Ptah.
There is no god like unto them.
He is Amen in so
far as He is distinct from the universe.
He is Ra in so far as He is visible in and rules over the
universe.
He is Ptah in so far as He created everything that exists. (My
translation)
We are, then, especially
blessed to live in an island named after the Trinity, a truth about the nature
of the Supreme Being first revealed to Africans thousands of years ago. The
Spanish conquerors intended to use the name of the Supreme Being as a mechanism
for stealing other people’s property. Now that we know the truth, we can be set
free from the limitations of Eurocentric religious fanaticism.
TO BE CONTINUED
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