God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (31 page)

So Yoruba religion is reciprocal—a system of communication and exchange between human beings and the divine mediated by a vast pantheon of powers (many of them former human beings) with one foot in the natural realm and the other in the supernatural. Here both sides speak and both sides listen. As in Hinduism, both sides give and both sides receive. Without the orishas to empower them, human beings would die. But without human beings to feed them, the orishas would die too. As a Yoruba proverb puts it, “If humanity were not, the gods would not be.”
⁵

Since Yoruba culture is oral by tradition, you might think that there would be an extensive iconography built up around the orishas. Not so. Classically, orishas are represented in shrines through natural rather than artistic objects: stones and herbs rather than paintings and statues. In the New World, the orishas were traditionally worshipped via images of the Catholic saints with whom they were identified. Only in recent decades have images of the orishas themselves started to circulate. This is because the Yoruba approach the divine largely through stories. If, as Régis Debray contends, “to lack a legend is also to lack dignity,” then the Yoruba are a dignified people indeed.
⁶

Yoruba stories can be found in the massive Ifa corpus memorized and chanted by babalawos
.
Here the orishas seem to be “one of us” rather than sacred in the sense of “set apart.” In addition to the full range of human emotions, they exhibit a full complement of virtues and vices. Like the Hindu gods, they do not present themselves as either wholly good or wholly evil. They can be generous and petty, merciful and vengeful. They can harm as well as heal. And so they challenge us not to eradicate evil but to balance it with good, and not only “out there” in the world but also inside ourselves (where good and evil coexist). This complexity has long troubled Christians, Muslims, and scholars alike, who all too often fail to see the lessons lurking underneath the orishas’ moral failings, as if they have stumbled upon a double bill of
King Lear
and
Othello
and have nothing more to say than that Edmund and Iago don’t seem to be proper gentlemen. Of course, Yoruba practitioners have no trouble unearthing these lessons, just as Shakespeare’s audiences saw the complexities of human existence acted out on the Elizabethan stage. But the fact that the gods stumble and stir is one of Yoruba religion’s glories. The Yoruba corpus, writes art historian Robert Farris Thompson, provides a “limitless horizon of vivid moral beings.”
⁷

Ashe is the key concept in Yoruba thought, and its central meaning is the awesome power to make things happen. But secreted inside this power is the equally awesome power to make things change. So to observe that the orishas change—to see that they are, to borrow from Karen McCarthy Brown, “larger than life but not other than life”—is not to find fault.
⁸
It is to praise them for drawing near to the human condition, for refusing to hold themselves above and beyond the rest of us. After all, the biblical God is only
said
to be good. He does evil things, or permits them, which for an omnipotent being is almost as bad, leaving believers scurrying to justify God’s actions (or inactions). In Yoruba religion no such theological gymnastics are necessary.

While traveling in Bali, I was struck at how much could be (and was) made by Balinese Hindus of their vast system of correspondences of gods to the cardinal directions, to colors, to parts of the body, and to foods. The system of correspondences in orisha devotion is even more extensive. At least in the New World, the orishas are most famously associated with Catholic saints, but they are also associated with numbers, colors, emblems, virtues, herbs, clothing, jewelry, temperaments, land formations, bodies of water, parts of the body, days of the week, occupations, natural forces, drum beats, songs, dance steps, foods they will not eat, and foods they cannot do without. To take just one example, Cuban devotees of Oshun associate her not only with Our Lady of Charity (the patron saint of Cuba) but also with love, rivers, gold, fertility, the lower abdomen, seduction, fans, seashells, brass, the color yellow, the number five, and pumpkins.

So Yoruba religion is not simply a system of communication and exchange between the divine and human realms. It is also a map to every mountain and valley of human experience, a system of signs and wonders out of which one can make meaning from seemingly small and unrelated things. One Candomble practitioner in Brazil refracted the television show
Gilligan’s Island
through the prisms of two goddesses, Oxum (Oshun) and Iansa (Oya). To Candomble devotees, these two goddesses embody very different feminine forces—the “cool” coquette Oxum and the “hot” bombshell Iansa. But to this practitioner (and TV aficionado) Oxum was Ginger and Iansa, Mary Ann.
⁹
The net effect of this net of correspondences is to make everything, everyone, and everywhere potentially sacred. Every moment presents a possibility to reconnect with the orishas and, through them, with your destiny and the harmony that pursuing it brings.

Devotees disagree about just how many orishas there are. One reason the orishas are hard to count is that, like Hindu divinities, they answer to different names in different places, so it is often unclear when you meet a new orisha whether she really is a new acquaintance or someone you have already met under another name. The accounting traditionally runs to either 401 or 601—with the plus-one gesturing at the fact that in Yoruba culture there is always room for one more at the table. But one text speaks of 3,200, and some claim there is really only one divinity—that the “lesser” divinities we call orishas are all manifestations of the High God Olodumare.
¹⁰

Keeping up with the orishas is easier in the New World than in West Africa, because in the transatlantic passage many orishas went missing. Most Brazilian and Cuban practitioners recognize only one or two dozen orishas. Some whittle that pantheon down to the “Seven Powers” (typically four men and three women), which sounds helpful until you realize that, like the Ten Commandments, these
siete potencias
vary depending on who is reciting them.
¹¹

Orishas can be classified into male and female, sky and earth, hot and cool, forest and town. But Yoruba practitioners, in keeping with their strong preference for action over belief, do not typically worry themselves about such things. Neither do they fret about the afterlife. What really matters is how to get the orishas to intervene on your behalf in thisworldly matters of love, luck, and work. In order to do that, you need to get to know them—what they eat, what they wear, and how they sing and dance.

Olodumare

The Supreme Being for orisha devotees is Olodumare, also known as Olorun (“Owner of the Sky”), who rules the cosmos from on high. Like the God of Deism, Olodumare is as remote, distant, and difficult to approach as your steely great-grandfather. Unlike the God of Deism, he did not create the world, choosing to delegate that job to others.

Though practitioners will occasionally send prayers in his direction, they don’t worship Olodumare directly. He has no temples, no liturgy, and no priests. He does not possess devotees in festivals. Although all sacrifices in some sense run through him, no one sacrifices to him directly. Like the abstract Hindu creator god Brahma, Olodumare is respected more than he is revered. When it comes to the day-to-day concerns that stand at the center of Yoruba religion, practitioners go to “lesser” agents for help. So Yoruba devotion focuses on them.

There is some disagreement about whether Olodumare was present at the creation of Yoruba religion or whether he is a relatively recent invention—a nod to the same monotheistic imperative that pushed Hindu intellectuals under British rule to shrink the Hindu pantheon to one. There is also disagreement about whether the orishas are emanations of Olodumare or whether he is an abstraction of them. A parallel conversation concerns whether other orishas do the heavy lifting when it comes to answering prayers or whether those boons come from Olodumare himself (with the orishas acting merely as intercessors). Regardless of the details of the relationship between this sky god and these “lesser deities,” Yoruba practitioners today speak of Olodumare as the chief source of power—“the supreme quintessence of
àshe
”—in a religious tradition that is all about power.
¹²

Eshu

Of all the orishas, Eshu and Orunmila are the most important. In this religion of communication and connection between
orun
and
aiye
(heaven and earth), Orunmila the diviner delivers messages from above to humans, while Eshu the messenger delivers (or refuses to deliver) sacrifices from below to orishas and other spiritual beings. Without Eshu, interactions between heaven and earth would cease and human existence would spin into chaos. Though there is no priesthood devoted to him, images of Eshu can be found in almost every Yoruba home, and all shrines make at least a small place for him. That is because every sacrifice must include what gamblers call a rake for Eshu. If you don’t feed him a little palm oil or tobacco (both personal favorites) at the beginning of a sacrifice, he won’t have the energy, or the inclination, to do your bidding. For this reason Eshu is also known as Elegbara (or Elegba or Legba), which means “owner of the power” (of ashe).

Like Hinduism’s Ganesha, Eshu is associated with crossroads, because as the holder of ashe he has the power to take almost any situation in whatever direction he pleases. Crossroads are important in many religious traditions. Jesus, of course, is remembered by the sign of the cross, and the most popular Hindu divinity, Ganesha, is lord of the crossroads. The crossroads is the meeting place of the natural and the supernatural, the visible and the invisible, the known and the unknown. It is heads and tails, left and right, where power lines cross and sparks fly. Here two roads diverge, and we determine our destinies by choosing the road less (or more) traveled.

As the guardian of crossroads, Eshu clears the way for those who attend to him and puts up roadblocks for those who neglect him. He inserts uncertainty and unpredictability into a world otherwise governed by fate, and he then sits back and laughs at the chaos that follows. So Eshu is a trickster, too, an ambiguous figure—both policeman and troublemaker—whom Christians have long confused with the devil. The Yoruba divide their pantheon into two halves, which my former colleague Wande Abimbola refers to as “gods” and “anti-gods”—the orishas on the right, who represent benevolence, and the
ajogun
on the left, who represent malevolence. As someone who straddles the two, Eshu isn’t above getting into a little mischief now and then. Or, as an Ifa verse puts it, “Death, Disease, Loss, Paralysis, Big Trouble, Curse, Imprisonment, Affliction. They are all errand boys of
Esu
.”
¹³

One of his most popular tales tells of Eshu stirring up trouble yet again. His colors are red and black, so he struts down the middle of the street with a trendy cap (impossible not to notice) colored red on one side and black on the other. People on one side of the street admire his fashionable red cap, but people on the other side of the street insist that his cap is black. The row that ensues (quite bloody in many versions) brings a wry smile to Eshu’s lips, solidifying his role as a maker of mischief and disturber of the peace.

Today this messenger orisha is associated with the Internet, and with travel and transportation. If your car is hit at a crosswalk, or your hard drive wipes out all your emails, you may have crossed Eshu. But perhaps more than anything else, Eshu is associated with change. Every day we stand at a crossroads of some sort. It is Eshu whose provocations jerk us out of drift. He helps us find which way our destiny is calling us and gives us the courage to move forward in that direction.

Orunmila

As the mastermind behind Ifa divination, Orunmila (aka Orula and Orunla) is, according to some devotees, the “preeminent orisha” and “the cornerstone of Yoruba religion, metaphysics, and spirituality.”
¹⁴
There is some disagreement about whether Orunmila, the orisha of wisdom, and Ifa, the orisha of destiny, are different people, or whether the two are just different names for the same ancient sage—the Yoda of orisha devotion.

Orunmila is the owner of the Ifa corpus, the great storehouse of wisdom of Yoruba mythology, philosophy, ethics, and theology. Because he was present at creation, Orunmila is said to know the destinies of humans and orishas alike. Given his omniscience, which includes the ability to predict the future, he is, according to many Yoruba, second only to Olodumare, though partisans of Eshu will dispute this interpretation. For some Yoruba practitioners, Orunmila, who is associated with harmony and stability, and his friend Eshu, who is associated with chaos and change, form, along with Olodumare, a sort of trinity. Although Orunmila is said to be short and very dark—“black as Ifa” is a common Yoruba saying—he is almost never represented in sculptures. That is because the spoken word is his métier. Although he will occasionally possess his priests in West Africa, he does not do so in the New World, where he is typically associated with St. Francis.

Oshun

Oshun, the “Ginger” of the Yoruba pantheon, is the orisha of rivers and sweet water, particularly of Nigeria’s Osun River with which she is closely associated. She was the only female present at creation and the first to perform Ifa divination. In West Africa she is an orisha of fertility and childbearing, but in the New World she becomes something of a goddess of love. A great beauty, covered with brass bling and awash in husbands, lovers, and children, Oshun is the “Yoruba Venus” and the Shakti of the New World.
¹⁵