God Is Not One

by Prothero, Stephen

  Shango, Oya, Shopona, Yemoja, and Osanyin

  Other important orishas include: Shango (also Xango and Chango), god of thunder and lightning—the “storm on the edge of a knife” according to one praise song21—and, in modern times, electricity, who also embodies virility and male sexuality; Oya (also Iansa), ruler of Ira, goddess of the Niger River, guardian of cemeteries, and owner of the wind, who sends strong gusts in advance of her husband Shango’s storms (“Without her,” it is said, “Shango cannot fight”);22 Shopona (aka Babaluaye, “Father, Lord of the World,” and Obaluaye), god of smallpox and other contagious diseases (but also of healing), who walks with a limp but is so feared that many Yoruba treat him like Voldemort of Harry Potter fame, refusing to utter his name; Yemoja (aka Yemaja and Yemanja), goddess of the ocean and of motherhood, who while dancing sways her hips like the tides; and Osanyin, one-legged, one-eyed, one-armed god of healing herbs who speaks in a squeaky Pee Wee Herman voice and graces botanica signs from Havana to New York City.

  Ashe

  What makes these orishas orishas is power, which in Yoruba religion goes by the name of ashe. Ashe is often described in metaphors that yoke science and religion—as sacred force or superhuman energy or spiritual electricity. So ashe is akin to the life force that the Chinese call qi. The closest rendering into English of this term, which literally means “So be it,” or “May it happen,” is probably just “Amen.” But the best definition comes from Robert Farris Thompson who calls it the “the power-to-make-things-happen.”23

  Yoruba practitioners recognize Ile-Ife, where the orishas created human beings and set the world in motion, as a center of ashe. Ashe also accumulates in Candomble and Santeria centers (terreiros and casas, respectively). But this same sacred power can be found as well in orishas, priests, diviners, chiefs, family heads, and ordinary human beings. It resides in “spoken words, secret names, thoughts, blood, beaded necklaces, ritually prepared clothing, earth, leaves, herbs, flowers, trees, rain, rivers, mountains, tornadoes, thunder, lightning, and other natural phenomena.”24 And it manifests in drumming and dance, poetry and song. Just as Hindus have been criticized for worshipping statues, the Yoruba have been criticized for worshipping rocks. But what the Yoruba approach with awe is not the rock but the sacred power that animates it.

  In whatever form, ashe directs itself toward change. Because Yoruba religion is eminently practical, ashe is about having real effects in the real world—“as luck, power, wealth, beauty, charisma, children, and love.”25 Thompson’s definition emphasizes the fact that ashe makes things happen. But ashe also makes things stop. Every time the palm nuts are cast and an odu is spoken, this tradition testifies to the possibility of growth, not least the possibility of new ways to embody ancient wisdom. Like the orishas themselves, however, ashe is not empowered only toward the good. Its transformative power can be (and is) used toward both good ends and bad. It connects and disconnects. And when it comes to matters of life and death, ashe gives and ashe takes away.

  A Global Religion

  Books on the world’s religions often include a chapter on “primitive,” “preliterate,” or “primal” religions, as if they were one and the same. All these religions really share, however, is a stubborn refusal to be crammed into the boxes constructed to fit more “advanced” religions. Stuffed into these chapters (which often fall at the end of the book) are all sorts of religious traditions that in many cases have far less in common with one another than do the “advanced” religions. As a result, these chapters often read like half-hearted apologies for the tendency of scholars (many of whom are trained in translating and interpreting scriptures) to gravitate toward religions that emphasize reading and writing over speaking and hearing. But the tendency to lump Australian and Native American and African religions with such lower-case religious phenomena as shamanism, totemism, and animism is driven by another, equally important bias. Just as considerations of black and white have dominated conversations about race in the United States, and considerations of Anglophone and Francophone have dominated conversations about culture in Canada, conversations about the world’s religions have been dominated by the East/West divide. In BU’s Department of Religion, our year-long introduction to the world’s religions is split into Eastern and Western semesters. Unfortunately, this approach obscures and often renders invisible religions that do not fall easily along either side of the East/West divide.26

  It should not be surprising, therefore, that while Yoruba language, culture, and art have been studied with care for a century or so, Yoruba religion has been either entirely neglected or dumped into that “primal” religions chapter in standard treatments of the world’s religions. But the religion of Yorubaland and its diasporas is its own thing, as distinct from the religion of the Sioux as Buddhism is from Islam. And it, too, is one of the great religions.27

  Estimates of the number of Yoruba practitioners in West Africa vary widely but doubtless run into the tens of millions. Nigeria, the homeland of the Yoruba people, is Africa’s most populous country, and the Yoruba, who can also be found in Benin, Togo, and Sierra Leone, are one of Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups. According to Harvard professor Jacob Olupona and Temple professor Terry Rey, the Yoruba number about 25 million in West Africa alone.28

  Islam and Christianity are now the dominant religions in Nigeria (with 45 percent of the population each), so most of the Nigerian population speaks reverently of either Muhammad or Jesus (or both), and there have been coordinated efforts among both evangelicals and Pentecostals to demonize Yoruba orishas. But even among the converted it is rare to find someone who has entirely banished Yoruba religion from her repertoire. Practitioners of Yoruba religion challenge cherished notions of what religion is and how it functions by refusing to choose between the orishas and Jesus or the orishas and Allah. Who says religion has to be a zero-sum game? Not the Yoruba, who feel quite comfortable seeing the priest on Sunday and the diviner on Monday. Instead of greeting foreign religions with the either/or of Aristotle, they greet them with the both/and of Eshu. As a result, Yoruba beliefs and practices survive not just on their own, among those who have rebuffed the advances of Islamic and Christian missionaries, but also inside Islam and Christianity, which Yoruba Muslims and Christians have stealthily transformed into distribution channels for Yoruba religious culture. Despite efforts by Muslim and Christian purists alike to root out the bugaboo of “syncretism,” Muslims and Christians in Yorubaland (including ministers and imams) continue to go to Yoruba diviners and participate in Yoruba festivals. This creolization is particularly plain in Aladura Christianity, a Yoruba/Christian hybrid that trafficks in the thisworldly powers of fervent and frequent prayer. In fact, the term Aladura itself attests to even wider religious mixing among the Yoruba, since the word adura derives from the Arabic for intercessory prayer.

  Yoruba religion is by no means confined to its African homeland, however. Yoruba-derived religions are also scattered across the African diaspora created by the transatlantic slave trade—in Brazil and Cuba, Colombia and Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Grenada, St. Kitts and St. Vincent, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, Uruguay and Trinidad and Tobago. Yoruba slaves arrived by the millions in South America, the Caribbean, and the United States, as civil wars beset Yorubaland during the nineteenth century and victors sold off their spoils into slavery. These slaves had a huge impact on economic, cultural, and religious life in the Americas. “No African group,” writes the pioneering Yoruba scholar William Bascom, “has had greater influence on New World culture than the Yoruba.”29

  In the New World, traditional African religions were denounced as “heathen” and often outlawed. Even drumming was prohibited in the seventeenth century in Haiti and severely restricted in later centuries in Brazil and Cuba. So Yoruba practitioners did what the Yoruba have been doing ever since their orisha of iron, Ogun, forged a path for the gods from heaven to earth: they adapted to difficult circumstances with courage and creativity. This was hard going
in the United States, where the ratio of slaves to whites was low, the ratio of American-born to African-born slaves was high, and Protestant slave masters ruthlessly prohibited slave gatherings of any sort. But in Brazil and Cuba, which saw large numbers of Yoruba high priests, frequent arrivals of new slaves from the Old World, a high ratio of slaves to whites, a lingering slave trade (until the 1850s in Brazil and the 1860s in Cuba), and less slave owner opposition to dancing and drumming, Yoruba practitioners kept their religious traditions alive by marrying them to Catholicism. When ordered to cease and desist from the beliefs and practices of their ancestors, Yoruba slaves took their orishas underground and then resurrected them in the guise of the saints: Ogun as St. Peter; Yemoja as Our Lady of Regla; and Oya as St. Theresa. So things changed, and remained the same. Praise songs to these orishas continued to be sung in the Yoruba language and to Yoruba rhythms, but for the most part devotion now went forward in the idioms of Catholicism and the grammars of Spanish, French, and Portuguese. The overall tale, however, is one of continuity. The list of elements of Yoruba religion that survived the horrors of the Middle Passage and slavery runs to divination, spirit/body possession, drumming, dance, initiation, reincarnation, spiritual healing, sacrifice, and, of course, orisha devotion itself.

  Were slaves self-consciously conning religious and political authorities by cross-dressing the orishas as Catholic saints and then celebrating their exploits on these saints’ feast days? Yes, says Soyinka. Their strategy was to “co-opt the roman catholic deities into the service of Yorùbá deities; then genuflect before them.”30 Some slaves may have been just that strategic, pretending to worship St. Peter when they were actually worshipping Ogun. But it is also possible that Santeria, Candomble, and their Yoruba-derived kin evolved in fits and starts, a marriage more of convenience than of cunning and camouflage. Though many practitioners today see the saints as masks put on the faces of orishas, others see orisha and saint alike as manifestations of the divinity that underlies and infuses each.

  100 Million?

  Today descendants of these slaves continue to preserve and practice the ways of their forebears under a variety of (dis)guises, including Santeria (literally “the way of the saints,” also known as Lukumi and La Regla De Ocha) in Cuba; Candomble, Umbanda, and Macumba in Brazil; the Orisha Movement (aka Shango) in Trinidad and Tobago; Kele in St. Lucia; and, to a lesser extent, Vodun in Haiti.31 Many whites and Hispanics without any blood ties to Yorubaland also participate in these traditions, and orisha devotees, who were once almost entirely poor, can now be found among the middle classes. What these traditions share is a marriage to Catholicism plus fidelity to core techniques of orisha devotion such as divination, spirit/body possession, and sacrifice. This marriage has lasted because of the striking similarities between Roman Catholicism and Yoruba religion. Both operate in a cosmos with a Supreme Being at the top, human beings at the bottom, and a host of specialized intermediaries in between facilitating communication and exchange across the divine/human divide. And while intellectuals in both speculate about the afterlife, each is heavily invested at the popular level in everyday life. It is not beneath the orishas (or the saints) to care about our toothaches, our children, our promotions, or our lovers.

  Because there are no central organizations of any sort for Candomble, Santeria, or their kin, there are no official numbers for adherents to Yoruba-derived religious traditions in the diaspora. The Yoruba penchant for secrecy makes even unofficial numbers elusive, and the stigma that these traditions are “primitive” and even “Satanic” keeps many practitioners under cover. Further complicating matters (and challenging deeply ingrained notions of how religion is supposed to work) is the fact that New World orisha devotees do not feel the need to choose between an identity as a Catholic and an identity as a practitioner of Candomble or Umbanda or Macumba or Santeria.

  And then there is that small matter of what exactly we are trying to count. Those who have undergone initiations and had an orisha placed in their ori? If so, the numbers are admittedly quite small. Or those who have gone to diviners on matters of health, work, and love? If so, the numbers are quite large. Joseph Murphy, a professor in Georgetown’s Department of Theology, writes that he has “yet to meet a Cuban of any social class or racial category who has not at least once consulted (or, more circumspectly, ‘been taken to consult’) an orisha priest/ess about some problem.”32

  This distinction may help make sense of the huge gap between census numbers for orisha devotion in Brazil and estimates thrown around by scholars. Yoruba religious traditions are particularly strong in Brazil, which saw the largest slave migrations of anywhere in the New World (about four million between the 1530s and the 1850s) and some of the largest ratios of slaves to free people. As the slave trade ended in the middle of the nineteenth century, slaves accounted for more than a third of Brazil’s total population and enjoyed majorities in cities such as Rio de Janeiro and Salvador da Bahia. So orisha devotion in Brazil is “very pervasive”—“part of the popular culture, and the Brazilian way of life.”33

  Yet Brazil’s 2000 census found only 128,000 people who self-identified as practitioners of Candomble and 397,000 who self-identified as practitioners of Umbanda.34 How to reconcile these modest numbers with books that speak routinely of tens of millions of adherents each for Candomble and Umbanda? Perhaps the census figures reflect those who practice Afro-Brazilian traditions quite apart from any Catholic identity, while the more generous estimates account for people with multiple religious identities—those who, while still on the Catholic rolls, nonetheless attend orisha festivals, consult orisha diviners, and “make ebo” (sacrifice).

  Happily, there is some good data about the institutional dimension of Candomble, which is the earliest, most resolutely African, and (census figures notwithstanding) most popular of the Yoruba-derived religions of Brazil. This data is particularly helpful in the northeastern state of Bahia, where orisha devotion is at least the equal of Catholic faith and probably its superior. Salvador da Bahia, this state’s capital, has been called the “Black Rome” because of its Afro-Brazilian population and its Catholic piety. It is said that there are 365 churches in the city, one for every day of the year. Though this makes a good story, the figure is likely exaggerated. Either way, Candomble terreiros far outnumber Catholic churches. Statewide, total terreiros skyrocketed from 67 in the 1940s to 480 in the 1960s to 1854 in 1989.35 Today there are well over two thousand, and not all of them of the storefront variety. In fact, some resemble evangelical megachurches. Ile Axe Opo Afonja, a terreiro founded in 1910 and run in the early twenty-first century by the charismatic Mãe Stella de Oxóssi, includes “a school, a daycare center, craft workshops, a clinic, and a museum spread across a multi-acre campus.”36 It attracts not just the down-and-out often associated with Afro-Brazilian religions but also prominent and well-to-do leaders in politics, business, education, and the arts.

  One hundred million is the most commonly printed estimate for Yoruba practitioners worldwide, but total adherents—people who seek help from the orishas in some manner—probably top out at eight figures rather than nine. If Olupona and Rey are right, there are 25 million adherents in West Africa, making Yoruba religion the most widely practiced religious tradition on that continent after Islam and Christianity. Brazil, whose total population was 187 million in 2009, is home to at least another 10 to 25 million; Cuba (population 11 million) is home to at least two or three million more; and the United States has a few hundred thousand. Even by these conservative estimates, there are more adherents to Yoruba religion than there are Jews, Sikhs, Jains, or Zoroastrians, placing this tradition, on numbers alone, securely among the world’s top six religions.37

  Yoruba religion is not only great in terms of numbers and geographic reach, however. It is also great in the sense of ancient and monumental. In ancient Africa, the Yoruba, who organized themselves in towns run by a ruler (oba) who also served as a religious head, were among the most urbanized of p
eoples. By the ninth century C.E., their sacred capital of Ile-Ife was a thriving metropolis, and over the next few centuries Yoruba artists were creating objects of beauty out of terracotta and bronze that, according to Thompson, were the wonder of the West. Yoruba culture suffered through the rise of modernity under a combination of internal and external pressures, including foreign missions, colonialism, and civil war. Yet the Yoruba remain, according to Thompson, “creators of one of the premier cultures of the world.”38 And, I would add, of one of its premier religions. Just as the Bible has inspired the art of Bach, El Greco, and Toni Morrison, stories of the orishas have for centuries moved the hands and hearts of dancers, singers, novelists, painters, and poets in West Africa and beyond, including Morrison herself, whose 1998 novel Paradise features a Candomble priestess and a goddess reminiscent of the Candomble water orisha Yemanja (Yemoja in Yorubaland).

  Mãe Stella, Oyotunji, and Africanization

  Not everyone is happy with this diffusion of the Yoruba religious impulse across the New World, of course. Many evangelicals and Pentecostals denounce orisha devotion as witchcraft, sorcery, and demon worship. Many Catholic priests see Santeria and Candomble as bastardizations of the true faith. A lawyer who tried to shut down a Santeria center in Miami called Santeria “a cannibalistic, voodoo-like sect which attracts the worst elements of society.”39

  Some Yoruba practitioners themselves see Santeria and Candomble as bastardizations. But rather than trying to purify their tradition of African superstitions, they are trying to decatholicize it. Like the Puritans of seventeenth-century England and New England, these reformers are intent on divorcing themselves from Catholic influences. But rather than looking to the Bible and the early Christian movement for models, they seek to restore the pristine traditions of the ancient Yoruba kingdoms.