Ashé, the Cosmic Spiritual Energy

Ashé, also called Ache, is presented as the spiritual energy of the universe: a force invoked collectively and associated with the movement of matter, life, and the elements. Its brief appearance links a public ritual to the novel’s larger interest in energies that may sustain or threaten life.

Meaning and Invocation

During a street performance, the crowd calls out Ache to everyone present. Manuel explains that Ache, or Ashé, is the universe’s spiritual energy. The term thus names more than an individual’s private feeling: it is spoken as a shared invocation within a communal ritual.

The performance includes invocations addressed to Yemaya for purification and love, and to Oya for deliverance from death. These appeals give the gathering a practical and spiritual dimension, while the cry of Ashé places its participants within a wider account of energy moving through the world.

The Elements in Motion

Loïc watches dancers enact the four elements and recalls his earlier reading of Bachelard: water and dreams, air and reverie, earth and the imagination of will, and the psychoanalysis of fire. He also remembers having written poems about the elements in his youth. The dance makes their symbolism physical, as the elements circle, follow and intermingle.

For Loïc, this movement figures the changing interplay of matter, energy, and life. Good and evil circulate within it, and the struggle between them has no final victory: the triumph of good must continually be renewed. Ashé’s description as universal spiritual energy resonates with this vision, though the passage does not reduce the dance’s complex elemental symbolism to the term alone.

The Gem and Harmful Forces

Elsewhere, Rodrigo Lerbier gives a darker account of energy in connection with a gemstone. Speaking from his understanding of Santería, he describes the stone as revealing harmful waves circulating in the air that year and concentrating them like a lightning rod conducts and gathers discharges. He proposes placing it in quarantine.

The juxtaposition gives the gem an active role in a world where energy can be gathered and directed, but it does not identify Ashé itself as malign. Rather, the two moments set a universal spiritual force beside a particular object understood as concentrating evil, preserving a distinction between energy as a condition of life and its harmful concentration.