16.15 Ofun-Se

Sorry this post is coming a day late... My friends at NEPA decided to take light early on Saturday morning and didn’t bring it back until even later on Sunday night, so my battery was about dead and I spent all of Sunday night trying to catch up work. They took light again now, but I have some battery left so hopefully it will last until they bring power back!

Today I have officially studied every Odu in the Ifa corpus from Eji Ogbe to Ofun-Se (the last one). To be honest, it was pretty unceremonious. I finished recording the last Odu with the Araba and then he said, “Ki lo to ku?” Which means, what’s left to do, and for the first time I told him that there wasn’t really anything! The only thing left now is the little celebration he wants to have possibly on March 25^th, but after that it’s all done!

After we finished recording the last Odu, the Araba and I went to make some medicine for an Al-Haja in the neighborhood who said business wasn’t going well enough for her. There is a specific medicine in Eji Ogbe that is supposed to attract customers to a business, so the Araba and I went to go prepare it. It required 201 pieces of several things (corn, beans, pepper seeds, and a few others I think), and I learned how hard it can be to do something as simple as counting seeds! I kept starting over every time something would distract me to be sure that I had the numbers just right, but the best part happened at the end. I had counted and recounted everything ot make sure that exactly 201 were in the pot, and when I gave it to the Araba, he took a handful of extra pieces of corn, beans, and seeds and just dumped them in and laughed as he explained to me that there have to be at least 201, but you can have more...

Once everything needed for this medicine was in the pot, the Araba said some prayers over iyerosun (divination powder) printed the symbol for Eji Ogbe on it, put it in the pot, sealed the pot with some special “soap” (or a kind of goo really) and sealed it up. Then he and I dug up the concrete right in front of her front door and pulled out a pot that contained another medicine that she had made for her before by someone else that apparently wasn’t working. Then the Araba put the new one in the hole, sacrificed a rooster over it and covered it up again so nobody would know that it was there. I’m really glad I got to see this one because I had noticed in many houses that there were circular patches on the concrete just inside the doors of many houses here and I had never given it much thought, but now I know that they are medicines, like one the Araba has to prevent people from stealing anything from his house.

I mentioned before that the Araba had done some work for a politician here, but I forgot to mention that the sign that he cast for this guy was Irosun Opinmi. There’s a really interesting story in that odu about how a bunch of people wanted to kill a certain man named Elewi who was destined to become a king and Elewi is the name given to the king of a certain town to this day as a result of it. So just like the story said, this politician became a ruler of sorts, but until last week I didn’t know about any plans to take his life. Apparently there was a lady who also wanted this position (I met her a few days ago!) and she hired the Alfa who always bugs me about giving him money to make medicine that would kill the Araba’s client. This Alfa came to the Araba thinking that the two of them could work together to get rid of this politician and help the woman win the position. Unfortunately for the Alfa, the Araba’s morals are a bit less flexible than his are, and they got into a huge fight. I asked the Araba what was going to happen then, and he asked me what happened in the story. I told him that nobody was able to kill Elewi, and he answered that since they had made the sacrifice and made some other medicine that the Alfa could try as much as he wanted, but he would never be able to kill this client because it was his destiny to occupy the position. That was a pretty crazy soap-opera/nollywood movie type of day. Maybe I should have recorded it, given it a title like “Death and Destiny/Iku ati Ori,” and sold it on the street for 200 Naira!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the stories in Ifa and how they were created and how they are used, especially how time is supposed to be interpreted in them. In general, Ifa is considered the collective wisdom of the Yoruba people, and all wisdom is gained through some sort of experience. So the idea behind every Ifa verse is that with the Babalawo’s help a client can take the important lessons from a vast collective experience of centuries of our ancestors. But recently I have been thinking about how the two arms of each figure act kind of like the double helix on a strand of DNA in that they combine in a way that in theory gives rise to all possibilities of events here on earth. That paired with the fact that time in these myths operates like Divine time, or a time outside of time that has happened, is happening now, and will continue happen in the future, lead me to think that each time a figure (like Irosun Opinmi in this example) is cast, this part of the clients life is actually part of that sign as the archetypes in the myths are supposed to be playing out at the moment Ifa is cast.

To me that made the whole idea of Ifa as a cultural repository make much more sense because each successive time a figure is cast, we’re able to see its nature and its meaning. So for example in one of my favorite stories in Ogbe Yonu, a little girl gives Orunmila lots and lots of trouble, but in the end, because he was patient and kind to her, he finds out that she’s a princess, they get married, and they lived happily ever after. My guess now is that in the past when Babalawos cast this figure for clients they may have watched the events that followed and saw that the person was put through unnecessary trouble with the opposite sex, but when they were patient, blessings followed, and when they weren’t patient, they just got abused and had nothing to show for it. So all of that information and the forces that would help this person to succeed (like a sacrifice to Ifa) were recorded by creating a story that contains all of the important details and supernatural archetypes. That’s pure speculation on my part, but I’m sure Babalawos (at least in the past if not now) came up with these verses and stories because many of them contain issues that have come to Yorubaland well after the legendary Orunmila would have gone back to heaven. The whole creation of this vast corpus seems like a really interesting and fascinating mystery to me, and I wish I could know for certain exactly how they were created.

Who You Gonna Call?

Hey everyone, sorry I didn’t post anything last week... NEPA (Nigerian Electrical Power Agency or No Electricty Practically Always depending on who you ask) too power away for pretty much all day Sunday and didn’t bring it back until sometime on Tuesday. Even then it has been really unstable at best. I think part of the problem is that the rainy season is coming back, and whenever it rains, the power seems to go. I’m just going to keep my fingers crossed that it will get better!

Last week was one of the most interesting weeks as well. I watched the Araba worship Ifa (Bo Ifa) which means make a sacrifice for someone using all of Ifa’s favorite foods, which includes a she-goat! It was quite messy, but it certainly brought the book of Leviticus to life for me! The reason the Araba needed to do it was because a certain Al-Haji in the town who has diabetes had a stroke and was in really serious condition. Fortunately he’s better now, and the Araba said the problem was that one of his four wives used some medicine (oogun or magic charm) in her house so that when he crossed a line she made on her door he wouldn’t be able to cross it to go out again. So the sacrifice for Ifa was used to break the spell and then the Araba made some medicine to cure his blood so he wouldn’t have another stroke and it would help him with his diabetes. I think it would be tough to know if this wife actually made bad medicine for Al-Haji, but after the Araba said that he and one of his other wives said that she really didn’t like sharing him with the other wives and got jealous whenever he left. Also the sacrifice seems to have worked because his wife came back later and said he was doing much better and could get out of bed.

I think I mentioned a politician who had enlisted the Araba’s help a few weeks ago, and the Araba told me he cast Ifa for him and said that he would definitely take the office he was trying to get. Sure enough, last week he won, and since he was going to move into his new physical office, he was worried about bad medicine that the last guy (who really didn’t like him) might have left. So I went with the Araba into his office, we cleared everyone else out, and the Araba took out some things that I hadn’t seen before and rubbed some things all over the place where the wall meets the floor, and then I squeezed some lemon juice that he poured into a horn he has that houses Ifa, and he sprinkled it all over the office. He had someone climb up into the ceiling tiles and sprinkle some other liquid there. Then we all looked everywhere we could think of in the office for anything hidden, but when we didn’t see anything we just let an Alfa pray over the room and then left. It was a lot like Ghostbusters to be honest (Nowak, 2011). When we left and I asked the Araba about all of the various medicines he was using, he just told me that with everything that he put in there, if there was any bad magic there before it won’t be able to work anymore, so ghost busted!

One of the other crazy things that has happened recently is that a man I know fairly well has been thinking about marrying a girl he knows, and the Araba cast Ifa for him and Ifa said that she had just gotten pregnant but he needs to not get angry about it. Then he said it was true! I have no idea who the father is (it could very well just be him, but Ifa didn’t say and I didn’t want to ask), but I could tell he was pretty upset by the news, mostly I think because he will have trouble paying for a baby.

Just yesterday I had my most interesting marriage proposal. This one was interesting not because the woman had a beard or anything like that, but because her husband was there! They had come because she had been having trouble having kids (The Araba had cast Ifa for her by proxy of her older brother and said that she couldn’t have kids), so they decided to come themselves and negotiate a price for making some sacrifices. I felt pretty bad for her, because the husband has another wife who apparently has had several children already and she feels a lot of pressure not from her husband in particular, but just in general. They said they will come back this week, so hopefully the Araba will be able to help them.

Also, I had completely forgotten about the man who was suffering from some kind of sickness but couldn't die, so I asked the Araba what happened to him and he told me that just about a week after we went there he died in his sleep. I thought this was a very interesting case because at first I thought it gave Ifa's stance on Euthenasia, but when I thought about it some more, I realized that the concept of Euthenasia doesn't quite apply. For a traditionalist every person has a time to die chosen by him or her in heaven/dictated by God, although life can get messy and things can happen to disrupt this. Since the appointed time is the time that one should die, in this man's case, there was something separating him from his destiny or appointed time, and the Araba was just helping him to set it right again. I suppose it's still Euthanasia in a sense, but from the traditional perspective, the ethical problem lies in prolonging life after it should end and not the other way around.

I’m getting close to the end of the Odu Ifa now, I think I have just 34 or so left. The Araba told me that whenever someone finishes studying all of the Odu Ifa there has to be a kind of celebration/sacrifice to Ifa and it’s quite a big deal. He said once I’m done he’ll call all the babalawos in town, print up a certificate for me and the whole nine yards. Fortunately I can just give him the money for everything and if there are sacrifices to be made he can do it since that’s not really my cup of tea. At the rate we’re going that might happen closer to the end of the month.

I’m hoping I’ll have a bit more time once I’m completely finished with all of the Odu Ifa to go around and interview either priests and priestesses of a few other deities to get stories about their respective Orisas, or maybe just a few people who know a lot of myths about them. Right now I have learned lots and lots of different stories but I’d like some more about some less prominent gods and goddesses. Well that’s all for now, I’m going to try to sleep a bit more and catch up on transcribing some of the verses the Araba taught me.