In Brazil, the popular and powerful Bahian priestess Mãe Stella has challenged all Candomble practitioners to take off the fig leaf of the Catholic saints and worship African orishas in the open, without apology, guilt, or fear. Catholicism is no longer required, and Candomble is no longer outlawed, Stella reasons, so “the saints should be dumped, like a mask after Carnaval.”40
Another effort to take orisha devotion “back to Africa” is Oyotunji African Village, which aims to re-create what it imagines to be a precolonial Yoruba kingdom in the contemporary American South. Located near Sheldon in rural Beaufort County, South Carolina, Oyotunji (the name means “Oyo Rises Again”) was founded in 1970, but its roots go back to New York and the 1950s. Its founder, His Royal Highness Efuntola Oseijeman Adelabu Adefunmi (aka Walter King, 1928–2005), established the Order of Damballah Hwedo Ancestor Priests in 1956 and the Shango Temple (later renamed the Yoruba Temple) in 1959, both as refuges for African Americans interested in wearing African clothes, taking African names, and living an African lifestyle.
Adefunmi, who was raised on the teachings and institutions of the pioneering black nationalist Marcus Garvey, encountered various forms of African religion on trips he took as a young man to Egypt and Haiti. In 1959 in Cuba he was initiated into the Santeria priesthood of Obatala. But in keeping with his “back to Africa” commitments, his community aimed to purify itself of New World influences. To that end, Adefunmi was initiated into the Ifa priesthood in Nigeria in 1972. On a later trip to Nigeria he was coronated an oba in Ile-Ife in 1981. Despite efforts to strip Catholic (and Protestant) masks off New World Yoruba practice, many influences from Santeria remain at Oyotunji. However, life at this twenty-seven-acre community has diverted from Cuban practice on the gender front, where since the 1990s women had access to the Ifa priesthood, a responsibility out of reach for them in Havana and its environs.
Life at Oyotunji has proved financially and culturally difficult for many, and the population has fluctuated as a result. The number of residents likely peaked at two hundred or so in the early 1970s and stood at a few dozen in the first decade of the twenty-first century.41 Village residents, who rely heavily on Ifa divination to pursue their individual and collective destinies, have been led since Adefunmi’s death in 2005 by his son, now known as Oba Adefunmi II.
The Africanization efforts of Stella and the Adefunmis have prompted an intriguing debate. Flipping the script on those who would decatholicize Santeria, some santeros and santeras (as practitioners are called) believe that Yoruba religion is actually purer today in Cuba than it is in West Africa, given how thoroughly Islam has penetrated Yoruba culture in its homeland.
Desi Arnaz and DC Comics
Though most Europeans and Americans know almost nothing about this great religion, over the last generation or so Yoruba religious traditions have come increasingly to international attention. In the 1950s, Cuban-American actor and musician Desi Arnaz sang repeatedly to the Yoruba orisha Babaluaye on the sitcom I Love Lucy, and in the wake of the Cuban Revolution of 1959 hundreds of thousands of Cuban refugees, many of them Santeria practitioners, flooded into the United States. Beginning in the late 1960s, Nigerian Afrobeat musicians such as Fela Amkulapo Kuti and King Sunny Ade toured the West, creatively translating the Yoruba aesthetic into idioms that lovers of rock and pop could understand. The popular Brazilian film Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1976) brought awareness of Candomble (the orishas come to the assistance of a grieving wife played by Sonia Braga) both to the Portuguese-speaking world and to millions who viewed it in subtitles in Europe and the United States. Black nationalism triggered a search for African roots buoyed by the Alex Haley book Roots (1976) and the twelve-hour television miniseries that followed. The Mariel boatlift of 1980, which brought over a hundred thousand Cubans to the United States, increased both the vitality and visibility of Santeria in the United States. A DC Comics series called Orishas debuted in 1990. Finally, a pathmaking U.S. Supreme Court case, The Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah (1993), legitimated Santeria by ruling that efforts by local authorities in Hialeah, Florida, to outlaw animal sacrifice violated First Amendment guarantees of religious liberty. Since the 1990s, Yoruba religion has also taken to the World Wide Web, where sites such as Orishanet.org do what other religions do online—educate, aggregate, debate, and in some cases confuse. It is now possible to consult with a diviner through cyberspace.
For centuries Muslims and Christians have denounced Yoruba religion as superstition. In the 1970s and 1980s, this tradition was further tarnished by a series of cult scares, epitomized by the 1987 Hollywood thriller The Believers, which equated Santeria with human sacrifice. More recently, a Newsweek story called Santeria practitioners “poultricidal zealots.”42 But this is an ancient religious tradition, nearly as old as Islam, which offers a profound diagnosis of the human problem, a practical solution, and a series of techniques (divination, sacrifice, and spirit/body possession) to reach its goal. Though it puts more truck in the oral than the written (“bookish” is pejorative here), Yoruba religion boasts a vast and sophisticated corpus of sacred stories, historical accounts, morality tales, poems, and proverbs that remind us of our individual and shared destinies, and promise to connect us with one another, with creation, and with the divine.
It should be noted that, while Yoruba culture is ancient, Yoruba identity is modern. Like the term Hinduism, which was a by-product of the arrival of the British in India, the term Yoruba is relatively recent, dating only to the early nineteenth century.43 Before that time, Yoruba peoples identified not as Yoruba but with particular city-states or royal lineages, just as Hindus before the British identified not as Hindu but as speakers of particular languages, residents of particular regions, and worshippers of particular gods. While initially used by outsiders to refer to “Yoruba country” or “the Yoruba people,” this term was eventually taken on as a badge of honor by the Yoruba themselves, first in the New World and then in West Africa, as former slaves began in the last half of the nineteenth century to return to their homelands with allegiances to a new, pan-Yoruba religion and culture rather than to particular city-states and royal lineages.
Elasticity
Like Hinduism, Yoruba religion rests on practice more than faith. In Yoruba the word believer (igbagbo) points to a Christian.44 That is because Yoruba religion, more than a rigid belief system, is a pragmatic way of life. Practitioners care far more about telling good stories and performing effective rituals than about thinking right thoughts. They greet religion’s doctrinal dimension with indifference and demonstrate almost no interest in patrolling orthodoxy, or even in defining its borders. This is a tradition of stories, their interpretation, and their application in rituals and in everyday life—a “religion of the hand” rather than the head, in the words of a Candomble priestess from Brazil.45
Again like Hinduism, Yoruba religion is almost endlessly elastic, greeting foreign religious impulses with a yes rather than a no, adopting, adapting, and absorbing these impulses and reinventing itself along the way. As Christianity came to Yorubaland in the 1840s, and Islam centuries earlier, Yoruba religious traditions mixed with both. And as these reinvented Yoruba traditions sailed across the Atlantic to the Americas, practitioners reinvented them again, picking up not only Catholic influences but also the influences of religions indigenous to the Americas.
Soyinka describes this “accommodative spirit of the Yorùbá gods” as an “eternal bequest to a world that is riven by the spirit of intolerance, of xenophobia and suspicion.” 46 Though in possession of a massive, multigenre oral corpus of sacred literature, Yoruba practitioners have resisted freezing it into dogma or revelation. Perhaps that is because this corpus consists largely of stories rather than Western-style theological argumentation. Or perhaps this corpus is as narrative and nondoctrinaire as it is because Yoruba practitioners couldn’t be bothered to memorize dry theology. For whatever reason, the Yoruba exhibit the same flexibility in adapting their re
ligious practices to new places and times that they exhibit in approaching their oral texts, which include—alongside the all-important divination poems—praise songs, prayers, proverbs, myths, incantations, folktales, and recipes for herbal remedies. “Ifa’s abiding virtue,” writes Soyinka, is “the perpetual elasticity of knowledge.”47
The Yoruba see the complex realities of the cosmos not as revealed from on high once and for all but as forever coming into sight through an equally complex dance between humans and orishas. As a result, Yoruba practitioners are able to see these orishas as exemplars who abide inside the difficulties of human existence rather than lording over and above them, and to see their sacred texts “as no more than signposts, as parables that may lead the mind toward deeper quarrying into the human condition, its contradictions and bouts of illumination.” 48
Perhaps because it recognizes the contradictions and complications of life on earth, Yoruba religion does not evangelize or anathematize. It has no pope, and its leaders have never gathered to squeeze Yoruba beliefs into a creed. “No excommunication is pronounced,” Soyinka writes, “a fatwa is unheard of.” 49
Given all this freedom, what is shared across the elusive and elastic manifestations of Yoruba religion? In a word, practice. From Nigeria to New York, orisha devotees are practitioners more than believers. Their practice consists of various techniques for communication and exchange between human beings and orishas. These techniques aim at connection—narrowing the gap between the earthly and heavenly realms by calling on a series of mediators. The head of a family mediates between that family and its ancestors. The chief of a town or city mediates between the townspeople and the orishas. The orishas mediate between human beings and Olodumare. The babalawo mediates between a client and the orishas. And Eshu mediates between human beings and the orishas.
Most succinctly, Yoruba religion sees the human problem as disconnection. To be human is to be connected, but all too often we are disconnected from one another, from nature, from the orishas, and from the High God Olodumare. We are even disconnected from our destinies, alienated from our truest selves. Yoruba practices seek to reconnect us across all these divides.
An African American sculptor named Lonnie Holley once lived in a modest home bumping up against the airport in Birmingham, Alabama, and throughout his property—on the ground, inside abandoned cars, and up in trees—he connected found-object sculptures with one another via a crazy patchwork of string, rope, fishing line, and telephone cords that turned the entire landscape and everything in it into one interconnected and awe-inspiring piece of art. Yoruba religion also testifies profoundly to the power of connectivity. To our seemingly insatiable capacity to pretend that we are somehow independent atoms, Yoruba religion responds that human beings are connected to the divine, to animals, to plants, to inanimate objects, and to other human beings (both dead and alive).
As Christian missionaries flooded into West Africa in the nineteenth century, they taunted the Yoruba by insisting that “the dead do not speak.”50 This idea that society is for the living is entirely foreign to China, where the dead are very much alive—enshrined in ancestral tablets in the home and consulted on all sorts of important matters of business and the heart. But it is just as foreign to Yoruba culture, where the quick and the dead are connected through all sorts of stories and rituals.
It is difficult to summarize the key practices of any religion, particularly one as elastic as orisha devotion. But this task is even more difficult because of the penchant of Yoruba practitioners for secrecy. The key religious elite in this tradition in West Africa is the guardian of secrets, the babalawo. And, as Yoruba religion migrated to the New World, secrecy became only more important. Slaves were often prohibited from practicing African religions, so those committed to walking in the ways of their ancestors had no choice other than to sacrifice on the sly. Even today New World practitioners of Yoruba religions unveil their esoteric truths through a series of ascending initiations. Adherents play a game of reveal and conceal as seductive as eros itself, flirting with boundaries, resisting closure, and otherwise frustrating the desires of anyone wishing to package up its treasures in paper and bow.
While it is impossible to know everything that goes on inside a Candomble terreiro or Santeria casa, it is possible to generalize about the techniques Yoruba practitioners use to reconnect themselves with other human beings, with their ancestors, with the orishas, with their own destinies, and with the natural world. These techniques include initiation, when you receive an orisha into your ori and in the process take on his or her ashe. But the most foundational practices in this “religion of the hand” are divination and spirit/body possession.
Ifa Divination
Ifa divination, which has been compared to China’s Yijing (I Ching), is a consultation between a devotee and the orisha of wisdom and destiny Orunmila (aka Ifa). Orunmila is consulted via Ifa divination on important occasions such as births, marriages, and deaths, and whenever an orisha devotee is struggling with a conflict he or she wants to see resolved. Nothing like eternal salvation is at issue here. Yoruba practitioners do speak of a “good heaven” (orun rere) and a “bad heaven” (orun apadi). They also hope for reincarnation, which in this tradition is a good thing. (Cruel people and suicides are not reborn.) But the focus, as with Israelite religion, seems to be living long and well on earth rather than attaining immortality elsewhere. The presenting problems in Ifa divination are unapologetically thisworldly: sickness or lovesickness, bad fortune or bad blood. A daughter may be performing poorly in school. A grandfather may be dying. A mother may have trouble finding a job. It is also possible for entire communities to consult with babalawos, particularly in times of crisis. If the United States were a Yoruba nation, its leaders would have gone to Orunmila about the financial meltdown of 2008. From the Yoruba perspective, no difficulty is entirely secular. Each has its origin in an orisha who has been neglected, or perhaps in a witch or sorcerer, so each can be addressed by spiritual means.
Ifa divination begins literally in the hand, with a babalawo (or iyalawo) holding sixteen palm nuts or a divining chain vibrating with the power of ashe. The divining chain is quicker and more portable than the traditional palm nut method, and, for some, it doesn’t carry the power or authority of the original. In the original technique, the babalawo holds the palm nuts up to the ori of the client. He then shakes these nuts randomly from hand to hand until either one or two is remaining in the left. He does this sixteen times, in each case noting the results in the sand of his divining tray. He then repeats it another sixteen times, which enables him to arrive at one odu (signature) out of 256 (16 x 16) possible combinations. At this point, the babalawo, who has gone through rigorous multiyear training that includes memorizing in excess of a thousand Ifa poems, recites at least four stories for this odu, beginning with “Ifa says.” The client decides which of these poems best fits his situation. The babalawo goes on to chant all the verses he knows for that story—the actions of the orishas, the consequences of those actions. The client then tries his best to apply these verses to his circumstances.
The consultation ends with a recommendation of a sacrifice of some sort. Generosity is a key virtue—the epitome of “cool”—in Yoruba culture, and to sacrifice is to show generosity to the orishas. Any given sacrifice is offered to a particular orisha, but a portion goes first to Eshu, who can be entrusted to deliver it only if he is cut in on the action from the start. Sometimes this offering is a blood sacrifice—a chicken, for example, which in almost all cases is then cooked and eaten. And animal blood is believed in this tradition to be particularly rich in ashe. But “making ebo” can also take the form of an act of charity or renunciation. Often what is sacrificed is a fruit or vegetable, or a drink of some sort. Yemoja, for example, enjoys duck, but she is also quite happy with watermelon. So like Yoruba religion writ large, Ifa divination is reciprocal. It begins with the orishas offering words of wisdom to a practitioner and ends with this practitio
ner offering a gift of some sort to the orishas: “May the offerings be carried, may the offerings be accepted,” says the babalawo in salutation, “may the offerings bring about change.”51
In the New World, Ifa continues to be practiced, but its nuances and complexities have given way in many locales to simpler and blunter oracular techniques. Priestesses are also fully integrated into the divining ranks. In fact, the majority of the two thousand-plus Candomble terreiros in Bahia are run by women. Purists (and even elastic Yoruba religion has a few) deride these innovations as unwarranted, and the simpler techniques as baby stuff. But even in the New World divination continues to be regarded as the “essence of Yoruba philosophy and worship.”52
Spirit (and Body) Possession
All religions make use of a wide variety of the senses, shaping the body in this direction or that for the purposes of prayer or penitence. It isn’t just that we learn things through our bodies (though of course we do) but that we become and remain Muslims by prostrating in prayer, or Zen Buddhists by sitting in meditation. The Yoruba are particularly adept at putting religion in motion, however. Here spirit and matter dance cheek to cheek. Wisdom is embodied. There is no disembodied self that thinks beyond the confines of bone and breath. In traditional Catholicism, the saint is satisfied with the prayers of the faithful and an occasional candle lit in his name. But in Candomble and Santeria words and intentions are not enough; the orishas must eat and drink. So it should not be surprising that drumming and dance are religious practices. In this tradition, orishas enter into human life by possessing human bodies.
The orishas are associated with particular parts of the body, and therefore with particular illnesses. So it is possible in this tradition to trace illnesses not only to certain organs but also to the orishas who have afflicted those organs and therefore have the power to make them well. If you have come down with herpes in Cuba, it is likely Oshun who has stricken you. But the body is variously mapped across the Yoruba world. In Cuba, the warrior Ogun is associated with the legs, fiery Chango with the penis, and Elegba (aka Eshu) with the feet. In Brazil, Xango (aka Shango) is located in the chest, and whereas Ogun does get the left leg, the right leg (and the penis) belong to Exu (the Brazilian analog to Eshu and Elegba).53
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