malevolency

However, the state of the body is not directly instrumental with respect to the malevolency or goodness/pureness of Bentian ancestors which is determined much more (although far from guaranteed) by the arrangement of the obligatory secondary mortuary ritual (which may occur long before actual decomposition of the body, and which does only rarely involve exhumation) or other acts by the living demonstrating respect for the ancestors.

The reason for this discussion is that the intermediary divinities (Orichas), along with all other Santeria's Supreme Being (Olodumare) creations, reflect the simultaneous characteristics of virtuosity and malevolency, components of their essential nature.

In his central chapters Hardy discusses the "ugliness" of "black bodies before a white [G]od" and the malevolency of a white God who seemingly condones black suffering (37).

She refuses to attribute the wrongs she saw and suffered in Hollywood during the fifties to some abstract malevolency, but sees them instead as having come from "some named and specified source":