Keeping the Faith

Sorry it’s been so long since the last post. I don’t have a good excuse, I just didn’t update it! At any rate a lot of really interesting things have happened recently, which probably makes it worse that I haven’t updated this site, but oh well. To make sure you read the whole thing, I’m going to save the most interesting parts for the end. Although since you know that now, if you get bored, you can skip down to tha last few paragraphs...

First, I have become very aware of the fact that I lucked out in being able to work with the Araba. I knew I was lucky because he is just a genuinely good person who is most concerned about my welfare, but he is also very very knowledgeable. Nowadays it is very rare to find a Babalawo who knows a verse in all 256 chapters of Ifa, and we have gone through over a quarter and he hasn’t drawn a blank yet! Sometimes he gets stuck, and has trouble remembering a verse, but he’ll either have me come back the next day, or suddenly he’ll just start chanting a verse and tell me that he has it. Furthermore, over the past two weeks I’ve seen the Araba making a lot more Oogun or traditional “medicine.”

Now the word Oogun, while translated as medicine, could maybe be better translated as medicine/charm/magic/talisman etc. It is not always medicinal in the western sense of the word. For example, someone broke into the house of the Araba’s former teacher who has unfortunately passed away. His wife came to the Araba to tell him about it, so he came up with a whole bunch of materials (I wrote them all down, but I remember hair from a dead body is one of them!) and put them into little calabashes and made medicine to prevent thieves from being able to enter the house. He showed me where he has them in his house and said nobody has ever robbed him of anything, in any of his houses, even during the Ife-Modakeke wars.

He has made medicines for all kinds of things and I have to admit that I get pretty lost when trying to follow him on them. When he mixes plants and all kinds of other ingredients together it always ends up looking like the same dark brown paste to me. There is one really cool medicine I watched him make for a woman who came from a town called Ilesa (this story is incredible and found at the end) that he said works for many different things, from the common cold to diabetes! He also made one this week with peppers and several plants that makes people like you. He said hot peppers were the key ingredient because even though they can be caustic, people always seek them out and everybody wants to have them. I thought that was very insightful and I wonder about whether or not all of the medicines have some kind of physical or mundane characteristics that are mirrored on a metaphysical level and that is what gives them power.

At any rate two days ago, we went walking around the neighborhood and the Araba started picking up weeds that we just growing everywhere, and told me that they were important for the medicine he was making and that they would be gone soon since the dry season is in full swing. As we were walking around I was really proud of myself that I recognized it somewhere, but they had already been pulled up by someone. I’m sure this person knew they were weeds and didn’t want them growing by his/her house where I found them, but I thought about what a shame that was. These “weeds” have an incredible amount of power to help people, but they just got killed for almost no reason and were now no good to anyone. Then I thought about how many plants we have like that elsewhere in the world that have either disappeared or are heading in that direction because we just don’t know how to use them. I can’t lie it made me pretty sad, especially since there are so few people studying this type of thing anymore.

That is another thing the Araba told me recently when he found some old papers with Ifa verses on them in his village of Ode Omu. He said he has forgotten so many Ifa verses because there is nobody coming to study them seriously anymore. Before when people were always coming to learn from older Babalawos, a bit like I am now, the Babalawo were forced to recall many verses from all of the Odu on a regular basis so they were kept fresh in their memory. But now when nobody come to ask about a specific Odu, he only thinks about them if or when they come up in divination mostly. This made me sad too for two main reasons. First it means that lots of these verses and medicines are being lost, but also that the few people who still take Ifa very seriously will not be able to know it as well as their predecessors.

One change that I have noticed which I find to be much more positive is that fewer and fewer people seem to be wearing ties in the huge quadruple windsor knots that only reach halfway down the shirt. I don’t know why, but they always make me want to adjust them for whoever is wearing one. Instead I have noticed more and more people wearing skinny-ties, of which i happen to be much more of a fan, and since everything is much cheaper here I think I will pick up a few before I come back.

Now for the most interesting part. I have to admit that I always believed in the power of Ifa and traditional religion even if it sounds like mumbo-jumbo or simple superstition to others, but after the past two weeks any lingering doubts I may have had are now gone. Last week a lady from ilesa was brought to the Araba by her three children because she was so sick she could barely walk. When she came, I honestly thought she was about to die at anytime and she even had trouble drinking the water we gave to her to drink. It was really painful just to see her, and she couldn’t even speak to us. Her children had taken her to numerous hospitals and none of them had been able to do anything for them, so after spending a small fortune trying to heal her, they decided to come to the Araba.

So the Araba cast Ifa for her and Odu Oyeku-Ika came out. I learned that this verse states that the person in question has a sibling, most likely an older sibling, who is jealous of him/her because of what this person has accomplished in life and is trying to ruin or even kill him/her. The Araba told her this and also said that this sibling either has or is going to invite her to go somewhere with him/her and that she should not go because it is a trap.

To make a long story short, the woman’s children answered that there was indeed an older sister who had not done as well as they had in life and had stopped talking to them for some time, but had asked their mother to go with her somewhere. Since she was feeling sick she hadn’t gone on the trip, but they asked if the Araba was really sure that this person was using charms or medicine to make their mother sick. The Araba answered that that is what Ifa said, but that if they made the sacrifice they would know for sure. So they got all of the materials for the sacrifice and not long after it was finished she was able to talk again. They left after that, but they called the next day and said that she had been able to sleep for the first time in weeks the previous night, and I was pretty impressed. The next day they called and said that she was now eating food and looking much healthier. When I looked surprised again, the Araba just laughed. After that he started getting medicine ready for her because even though the supernatural aspect of her affliction had been treated, there was still a medical issue to deal with, so he made the medicine and gave it to her children that weekend.

I learned a bunch of other crazy things as well, like how shortly after I left one day, a man came to the Araba and after casting Ifa for him, the Araba said Ifa said he was a thief. The man was really surprised but had to admit that he was indeed a thief. Needless didn’t want to have much to do with him, and in fact wanted to make medicine to stop him from being able to steal anymore, but said he couldn’t make it because he didn’t have a chicken that had been killed by the god Ogun (which translated means hit by a car or something similar to that).

I also learned about another Odu Oguna-Mo Ro Gbe or 8.1 as I call it. The general meaning of this Odu is impending death. It means that sudden death is ahead of this person, and in certain cases within a period of no more than four days. The Araba said that he had cast this figure twice for someone, and that each time the person had died. In one of the cases the person didn’t make the prescribed sacrifice for some reason and on the fourth day he just fell down dead on the side of the road. Nobody found anything wrong with his body, but Ifa says that it was the work of Aje (witches or people/spirits that use supernatural powers for evil purposes).

While I found that one to be a bit scary, it makes it very clear to me why people still patronize Babalawo so often, and also the last thing I want to post on the blog: how even though Ifa is changing, not much has changed in Yoruba religion in my opinion. After spending lots of hours in prayer, church, and talking to people of all three major religious traditions here (Christianity especially, Islam, and traditional worship) I have noticed that people’s prayers and interpretations of religion seem to be almost verbatim what the Araba has been telling me are the words of Ifa. I have seen lots of very passionate speeches, sermons, and prayers in real life and on TV/radio that are regurgitations of the predictions of Ifa if people make sacrifices, but this time they requirements is praying, fasting, or tithing. They usually revolve around financial success, defeating enemies and supernatural powers that may be working against a person, gaining honor and glory, having children, living a long life, etc. Pretty often when I am with the Araba and I head the predictions I think of specific people I have heard making that same prayer in church...

Ifa for President!

While I learn the different messages of Ifa from the Araba I like to imagine situations in which they are applicable and it’s absurdly easy for some of them. For some like in Oturupon Meji, where Ifa warns against the treachery of a hunchbacked friend or Irete Agbe where Ifa says a person should make a sacrifice with a friend who possesses the same red piece of headgear as the client, very little imagination is required. But my favorite this week was in Irosun-Agbe. Since elections are looming here, I thought this one was incredibly pertinent. It tells the story of two birds who are brothers and goes like this:

Their father went to a Babalawo to cast divination to see the future of his sons. The Babalawo told him that they would become important and successful provided they made a sacrifice he prescribed and were never greedy. The elder brother was a little cocky and full of himself and didn’t bother to make it. The younger brother, however, was a very meek person and made the sacrifice right away.

A short time later their father died and the king announced that a title had become vacant. This title was hereditary and had to be occupied by someone in that family. Usually there are power struggles for a title or chieftaincy, but the younger sibling knew how much his brother would want it and also that he must not be greedy, so he didn’t even offer his name for consideration. So the elder became the new chief and thoroughly enjoyed himself there.

One day there was a huge festival in the town, and the townspeople made lots of food. The elder brother had a great time sitting on his throne, eating all of the wonderful food prepared for him, but out of the corner of his eye he noticed a butterfly getting caught by thorns in the bush not too far away. Now it just so happened that butterfly was this bird’s favorite food, so he naturally exclaimed that he was going to go eat it. All of his attendants begged him to stay put, after all it was a festival and there was no shortage of delicious food. No matter how much the people begged, the elder brother wouldn’t listen and flew out to eat the butterfly. Unfortunately for him he too got caught in the bush while he was trying to get to the butterfly and died there. Since his office was now vacant, the younger brother became the new chief, fulfilling what the Babalawo had said at the very beginning.

Lots of the politicians here employ Babalawo to help them gain power, so I hope some of them will cast Irosun-Agbe for them and they listen. Especially some of our friends from a certain political party that has recently had lots of “birds” who have been caught by “thorns” while trying to catch “butterflies” when they already had plenty of food. Oju kokoro...

Politics aside, I think I am starting to really get a grasp on Ifa. I’ve seen the Araba cast Ifa for clients tons of times, and he always seems to have a grasp on the situation even though he hasn’t been told... The most fun part for me is that several times this week when certain signs have come up, I have recognized them and known exactly what the Araba was going to say about them. He even had me cast the Opele for his daughter a few days ago. I didn’t really have much to do with the whole process, I just dropped the Opele, and he interpreted everything, but it is pretty cool to be able to look at a chain and have so much information pop up. I’m only about 3/16ths of the way through the whole corpus and I already have so much of it in my head sometimes when I think about it, it feels like my head is going to explode...

I also thought I noticed that a lot of the messages were the same (I can’t even remember how many of them say for example that this person is having trouble having children for example), but when I went back and started studying my notes some more, I realized that they are almost all at least slightly different. While the description of the problems are almost identical (the problems are usually, enemies, death or sickness, lack of children, lack of money or respect or some variation thereof) but the solutions to these problems are usually different. Sometimes a sacrifice needs to be made with special objects (like the red hat I mentioned earlier or another in which two statues need to be carved and buried in front of the front and back door so death will try to take them instead of the inhabitants of that house), sometimes the sacrifice needs to be made to different deities, and sometimes it is attributed to the work of enemies. When I realized that I was really fascinated, especially in the case of the ones that had herbal remedies attributed to them, and I wished western medicine were a bit more like that. We tend to try to come up with a one-size-fits-all prescription drug for every disease when every person needs something a bit different and reacts to treatment differently.

The dry season has officially hit, even though it’s very late this year. It has stopped raining every day, and it’s gotten a bit too hot for my liking, especially since NEPA (Nigerian Electrical-Power Association or Nigerian Electrical Paralysis Organization depending on whom you ask) went on strike and we were without power for about two and a half days. It also means that everyone is going to be trying to have parties and celebrations. The reason I knew was because there was little chance of it literally raining on someone’s party, but the Araba told me that people with farms will also start having more money for their crops now so they will want to spend it. The Araba has gotten invited to too many parties already and he’s pretty sick of it already. On Friday he wanted to run away to his unfinished house to avoid everyone but there was too much work to do. I’m pretty glad I don’t have to show up to too many.

Well that’s all for now. I think I am going to go out and buy some red hats for all of my friends, just in case a Babalawo every casts Irete-Agbe for me (just kidding).

I Don't Have a Golden Ticket

This week I’ve been focusing on trying to memorize the messages I have learned from each divinatory sign, which I found was surprisingly easy. It’s still amazing how some of these Babalawo can start spitting them out, but after getting very familiar with them, I have learned some of the parts that are the same in many of them, and I am able to recite them with the Araba as he’s telling me for the first time. Most of the Odu (chapters) have second names like Odu Ogbe-Osa is also called Ogbe Ri Ku Sa, or Ogbe-See Death Run, and these names are often tied to the verses or stories. So in Ogbe Ri Ku Sa there is a story about how Ram was pretending to be Rabbit’s friend until he put him in a box and ran with the box on his head to a place where he planned to kill Rabbit. It’s pretty tough to forget the meanings in that way. There’s also another one called Ogbe-Tomopon, and anyone who speaks Yoruba won’t be surprised to know that the verses in this Odu largely deal with having children, so there’s two down already!

What I’ve been doing, is casting the Opele for myself and trying to see what Ifa says about whichever sign comes up. Since I’ve really only done the twins, and all of the verses in Ogbe, I know about 1 eight of them so I have to cheat a bit and change some of the signs, but it makes it a lot easier to remember them that way. Maybe just because I’m more of an hands-on learner, but I started learning them more quickly that way than I ever did when I was just reading them on a piece of paper. The Babalawo who developed the Ifa Corpus were really smart in how they set it up, because the more I learn the easier it seems to be to keep it all straight, relatively speaking. I’m starting to see how it’s possible for one person to have memorized literally a quantity of information that would literally take months to recite.

Since so many of the stories are about animals, I am also reminded practically every day of some of them. For example, every time I see a rooster or chicken they are often kicking their feet around in the dirt and it reminds me of the story of Oduduwa coming down from heaven and spreading the earth with such a rooster. I also noticed a specific kind of weed called Odogbo, and how it used to have trouble growing until it made a sacrifice to its destiny on a river. From that day its future became brighter and even the river lets it grow in the water because it liked the sacrifice. I’ve come to realize how some Babalawo (especially the really knowledgeable ones generations ago) really did see the world differently. They knew stories about the nature of everything in the world, and supposedly they knew/know secret names for all of these plants, animals, etc. that give them power to control them to a certain extent. I am going to ask the Araba about that this week to see if he can explain how that works and/or if he knows some of them.

I have also noticed that even though the Ifa corpus is completely oral in nature and the Babalawo memorize the words exactly to preserve it, it is still remarkably malleable so it can stay relevant. First, since the advice Ifa gives is somewhat vague in nature like, you will succeed in your business if you do this, it is easily transferable to more modern settings. What is really interesting though is that some of the interpretations have now changed to include issues like politics, international travel, and using more modern items in sacrifices based on the prescriptions in the verses. I think the idea here is that even though Ifa says some very specific things like, “You have a hunch-backed friend who is plotting to destroy you behind your back,” the Babalawo view these messages as having their own meaning within a certain context, and when the context changes the message must also be adapted to fit it.

You might remember that when I came the Araba told me Ifa said to watch out for people related to Ifa who want to take my money, well he was right again! The Araba’s son pulled me aside one day and gave me a story about how a flashdrive he was using for school had broken (he just got it a few weeks earlier), and he needed a lot of money to buy a new one. I honestly didn’t remember the advice of Ifa at first, I was just used to people trying to take money from me, so I told him I’d get him a bit of money later, but not much. So I gave it to the Araba and waited for him to bring it up again. Sure enough a few days later he came asking for the money, and I asked the Araba to give it to him. In the end he got 200 Naira, but I don’t think he’ll be asking me for any more money when he doesn’t need it.

I also met with Dele, the guy I worked with the last time, and of course he was asking for more money, and I gave him some even though he never gave out the money I sent for lots of different people. When I asked him about it, he said he didn’t give it out because he thought they would suspect him of stealing it. I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I think his story is unlikely because he never told me there was any problem, and I could have straightened it out pretty easily if that were the case. At any rate, Dele like several other people I have met, seems to think he is Charlie and I am a golden ticket to get to the US. We had a 90 minute conversation yesterday about how the best thing for him to do to come to the US was to enter the visa lottery and there is literally nothing else I can do to help him. Just this week I have had about 3 or 4 people I don’t know, but who just see me somewhere ask me in all seriousness to take them to the US, and while I thought I was used to it, I’m starting to get sick of dealing with it every day. Maybe I should just tell people that my number is the number for the US embassy...