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...
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