God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (32 page)

But Oshun, whose beverage of choice is maize beer, is not all sweetness and light and grace on the dance floor. As with so many orishas, her power cuts both ways. Yes, she helps women in childbirth, but she’s also good with knives and deadly poisons. Oshun is even more ruthless in love, however. She doesn’t just play the field, she tears it up. She dumped Shango because he started to drink a beer she hated. She dumped Orishanla because he started eating snails. In the end, she tired of all the drama and got herself out of the love racket entirely by turning herself into a river.

One wonderful story about Oshun tells of Olodumare sending seventeen gods to order the earth. Only one of these orishas, Oshun, was female. So the male gods, who could count and thought that women were weak anyway, refused to involve her. She retaliated by withholding water from the earth. Without rain and rivers, crops could not grow, mothers could not drink, and babies could not nurse. So everything went to hell, and the old-boys’ network went to Olodumare to gripe. But Olodumare would have nothing of it. He rebuked the male orishas for refusing to work with Oshun. So they apologized to her, and she accepted their apology, but only after they promised to respect her authority in the future.
¹⁶

Obatala

Obatala (“king of the white cloth”) or Orishanla (“great orisha”) is the god of human creation who first fashioned clay into human form. Although Oshun is sometimes credited with human conception, it is Obatala who molds the stuff of the embryo into the shape of a human being. Obatala (Oxala in Brazil), the oldest and wisest of the orishas, is the quintessence of “cool,” one of the central values in Yoruba culture. A model of the sort of patience that makes for peace, he has “the aesthetics of the saint.”
¹⁷
As his name suggests, Obatala is associated with whiteness. His devotees dress in white and wear lead bangles. His temple walls are whitewashed, and he enjoys white fruits, white yams, white birds (especially doves), and other white foods such as rice and coconuts (though, for the record, he does
not
like salt, or for that matter pepper).

The most commonly told story about Obatala (who also has a serious aversion to dogs) speaks of his getting drunk on palm wine while he was supposed to be creating the world. As a result, that job had to be taken over by Oduduwa, who used a five-toed chicken to spread sand over the water in all directions, as far as the eye could see. When Obatala woke up from his drunken stupor, he swore off palm wine not only for himself but also for his followers. When it came to making human beings, however, Obatala fell off the wagon. Botching this job, too, he created albinos, dwarfs, hunchbacks, and other physically deformed people, who to this day are sacred both to him and to the Yoruba—
eni orisha
, god’s people.

Obatala also played a role in legitimizing the Cuban Revolution of 1959. On January 8, 1959, just days after Castro and his guerrillas took Havana, a white dove alit on his shoulder during his speech for national unity. The white dove symbolizes Christianity’s Holy Spirit, but it also symbolizes Obatala, so in his first public act as leader of this new nation, Castro saw the support of both Catholicism and Santeria literally land on his shoulder.
¹⁸

Ogun

Worlds apart from cool Obatala is hot Ogun, the orisha of iron. Ogun (Ogum in Brazil and Ogou in Haiti) has classically been associated with tool making, hunting, and war—the sword, the spear, and the soldier. Because he made the first tool, he is also the god of creativity and technology. In a wonderful example of the elasticity of Yoruba religion, Ogun came in the modern period to be connected not just with iron but with metals of all sorts. Today he is the orisha of both the locomotive and the speeding bullet, patronized by not only blacksmiths and barbers but also train conductors, auto mechanics, truck drivers, airline pilots, and astronauts. If you were injured in a car accident, you may have offended this orisha of creation and destruction, who in the New World is worshipped as St. Peter, St. Anthony, and St. George.

Although Ogun put in an occasional appearance in the 1980s television series
Miami Vice
, his big moment in the Yoruba story came in primordial time. Kabbalistic Judaism speaks of a lonely God who creates humans in order to know and be known, love and be loved. In the Yoruba story human beings have already been created, but the orishas are lonely nonetheless because with the shattering of the original unity of the cosmos their realm has been cordoned off from the realm of us mortals. Eventually the orishas decide to reunite with human beings. But the abyss separating
orun
(sky) from
aiye
(earth) has been choked by chaotic overgrowth of cosmic proportions. So, try as they might, the orishas cannot make passage. At this point brave Ogun comes to the rescue. He snatches iron ore out of the primordial chaos and fires it into a tool powerful enough to whack his way across the abyss; in so doing, he clears a path for the other orishas to descend to earth behind him.

Ogun eventually made his way to Ire, in modern-day Nigeria, where he was lauded as “he who goes forth where other gods have turned.” But soon he made a huge mistake. He went into battle while under the influence of palm wine, and in a drunken rage slew friends and foes alike. Although the people of Ire still wanted him to serve them as king—who better to administer justice than someone who was himself so intimate with injustice?—he was not so quick to forgive and forget. Withdrawing to the surrounding hills, he spent his time beating swords into plowshares as a farmer (and/or a hunter). He did not give up alcohol, however, and neither do his devotees. In another version of the story, Ogun turned his sword on himself after he saw what he had done and then disappeared into the earth. Either way, Ogun is one of the Yoruba’s great tragic figures. The celebrated Nigerian Nobel laureate, poet, and playwright Wole Soyinka sees him as an embodiment of “Dionysian, Apollonian and Promethean virtues”—“the first actor . . . first suffering deity, first creative energy, the first challenger, and conqueror of transition.”
¹⁹

Ogun has been depicted largely as a god of violence and blood (his color is red), but like the bellicose Hindu goddess Kali he is also a god of justice who uses his pathbreaking abilities to uproot oppression. Praise songs refer to him as a “protector of orphans” and a “roof over the homeless,” and in courts traditional Yoruba swear to tell the truth not by putting a hand on the Bible but by kissing iron.
²⁰
Ogun’s abilities in war, commitments to justice, and capacities of creative transformation have made him even more popular in the Americans than in Africa. He was a major figure in the drives for Cuban independence in 1959 and Nigerian independence in 1960. Some claim that in the Cuban Revolution Ogun mattered more than Marx himself.

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 song
²¹
—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.