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 25th, 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment