God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (35 page)

The consultation ends with a recommendation of a sacrifice of some sort. Generosity is a key virtue—the epitome of “cool”—in Yoruba culture, and to sacrifice is to show generosity to the orishas. Any given sacrifice is offered to a particular orisha, but a portion goes first to Eshu, who can be entrusted to deliver it only if he is cut in on the action from the start. Sometimes this offering is a blood sacrifice—a chicken, for example, which in almost all cases is then cooked and eaten. And animal blood is believed in this tradition to be particularly rich in ashe. But “making ebo” can also take the form of an act of charity or renunciation. Often what is sacrificed is a fruit or vegetable, or a drink of some sort. Yemoja, for example, enjoys duck, but she is also quite happy with watermelon. So like Yoruba religion writ large, Ifa divination is reciprocal. It begins with the orishas offering words of wisdom to a practitioner and ends with this practitioner offering a gift of some sort to the orishas: “May the offerings be carried, may the offerings be accepted,” says the babalawo in salutation, “may the offerings bring about change.”
⁵¹

In the New World, Ifa continues to be practiced, but its nuances and complexities have given way in many locales to simpler and blunter oracular techniques. Priestesses are also fully integrated into the divining ranks. In fact, the majority of the two thousand-plus Candomble terreiros in Bahia are run by women. Purists (and even elastic Yoruba religion has a few) deride these innovations as unwarranted, and the simpler techniques as baby stuff. But even in the New World divination continues to be regarded as the “essence of Yoruba philosophy and worship.”
⁵²

Spirit (and Body) Possession

All religions make use of a wide variety of the senses, shaping the body in this direction or that for the purposes of prayer or penitence. It isn’t just that we learn things through our bodies (though of course we do) but that we become and remain Muslims by prostrating in prayer, or Zen Buddhists by sitting in meditation. The Yoruba are particularly adept at putting religion in motion, however. Here spirit and matter dance cheek to cheek. Wisdom is embodied. There is no disembodied self that thinks beyond the confines of bone and breath. In traditional Catholicism, the saint is satisfied with the prayers of the faithful and an occasional candle lit in his name. But in Candomble and Santeria words and intentions are not enough; the orishas must eat and drink. So it should not be surprising that drumming and dance are religious practices. In this tradition, orishas enter into human life by possessing human bodies.

The orishas are associated with particular parts of the body, and therefore with particular illnesses. So it is possible in this tradition to trace illnesses not only to certain organs but also to the orishas who have afflicted those organs and therefore have the power to make them well. If you have come down with herpes in Cuba, it is likely Oshun who has stricken you. But the body is variously mapped across the Yoruba world. In Cuba, the warrior Ogun is associated with the legs, fiery Chango with the penis, and Elegba (aka Eshu) with the feet. In Brazil, Xango (aka Shango) is located in the chest, and whereas Ogun does get the left leg, the right leg (and the penis) belong to Exu (the Brazilian analog to Eshu and Elegba).
⁵³

But the orishas are also recognizable in drumming patterns (slow for ancient Orunmila, fast for fiery Ogun) and dancing steps—Shango’s kicks, leaps, high steps, and tumbles; Obatala’s slow, cool walking; Babaluaye’s erratic jerking (low and cramped, like a sick man). In fact, dance is so central to this religious tradition that some have referred to it as a “dancing religion.” Some orishas never possess anyone. For example, Orunmila comes to earth solely through divination. But Ogun, god of war, dances in the sharp steps and aggressive postures of a warrior, his hands slicing the air on a sharp diagonal like a sword. Ochoosi the hunter pulls an arrow from his imaginary quiver, places it in his imaginary bow, and “reacts in a jerking undulation” from the force of the arrow’s release. Shango “pulls energy from the skies toward his genitals,” playing with his crotch, Michael Jackson–style. Oshun’s movements are more lyrical and less staccato, flowing like the river she represents, sensuous and potent as sex itself.
⁵⁴

Yoruba trance dancing is often referred to as spirit possession, but that is not quite right, since the orisha possess both the body and the spirit of the devotee. Every word, gesture, and movement of someone who has “made the god” manifests the possessor rather than the possessed. Wande Abimbola has suggested that the appropriate metaphor here is to “climb,” since most orishas (Shango is a notable exception) live inside the earth and come up through the ground to enter those they possess (feet and lower legs first).
⁵⁵
The possessed also speak of being caught or grabbed. The most common analogy, however, is to a rider “mounting” a horse—an image that carries with it sexual connotations of a dominant male “mounting” a submissive female. In festivals and initiation rites the orishas “mount” and then “ride” devotees, possessing their bodies in dance and their spirits in trance.

There is a vibrant debate about how much (if at all) gender mattered in traditional Yoruba religion, but there is no debating how slippery and permeable the categories of male and female are for Yoruba practitioners today.
⁵⁶
While worshipping the orishas of their towns, the rulers of Idanre and nearby Owo cross-dress as women. In a festival to the goddess Oronsen, crowds praise their king as Oronsen’s husband Olowo. Pointing to his fat belly, they also praise him for being pregnant—“the prolific banana tree which bears much fruit.”
⁵⁷
On feast days, men can dance as female orishas, and women can dance as male orishas. But even this distinction between “female” and “male” orishas is problematic, since the macho Shango is revered in Cuba as Saint Barbara, the goddess Oya is said to have been male at some point in the past, and the relatively obscure Brazilian orisha Logunede is said to spend half the year as a male hunter in the forest and the other half as a female enchantress in the river. It is also common for practitioners to switch genders when they reincarnate. Many Yoruba girls are called Babatunde (“Father Returns”), and many Yoruba boys are called Yetunde (“Mother Returns). Orishas also switch genders as they move from place to place. Like Buddhism’s bodhisattva of compassion, who is male in India as Avalokiteshvara and female in East Asia as Guanyin, Oduduwa (aka Odua and Odudua), the divine progenitor of all Yoruba kings, takes female form in northeastern Yorubaland and male form in its southwestern cities and towns. Perhaps because of this gender flexibility, many straight men in Brazil and Cuba refuse to become possession priests. They see being “mounted” as akin to playing the submissive role in a sexual encounter, so the possession priesthood in these countries is often filled by women and gay men.

New World Transformations

Many more changes came over Yoruba religion as it migrated to the New World. But these changes were only possible because the Yoruba religious impulse survived. One key to this survival is elasticity. If Yoruba religion had not bent under the unimaginable pressures of capture, passage, slavery, and emancipation, it would undoubtedly have broken to pieces. But another source of the success of Yoruba religion is orality.

Judaism was born when Jews began to shift their sights, after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 586
B.C.E.,
from temple rituals to textual interpretations. This historic transformation didn’t just make Judaism as we know it, it made Judaism more mobile. Whereas temple rituals could only be performed by priests at the Jerusalem Temple, the Hebrew Bible could be interpreted anywhere by anyone who could read. Yoruba religion is similarly transportable and its authority similarly decentralized. In this case, however, authority lies in the oral corpus of Ifa divination rather than in the written text of the Hebrew Bible. “Book knowledge,” writes UNESCO leader and Yoruba Studies professor Olabiyi Babalola Yai, “is devoid of às|e|.”
⁵⁸
So Yoruba religion was able to travel, first, inside West Africa and, later, across the oceans in the heads of diviners and the feet and hips of the god-possessed.

Some of the changes that came over Yoruba religion in the New World have already been mentioned. The orishas were whittled down from hundreds or thousands to dozens, and Ifa has largely (though not entirely) given way to simpler forms of divination. But there are other important differences between traditional Yoruba religion and the Yoruba-derived traditions of the Americas. Many orishas lost their associations with particular places and peoples in West Africa after they migrated to the New World. In West Africa only a chosen few, such as Ogun, Eshu, and Obatala, were truly pan-Yoruba deities. In the New World, however, almost all orishas serve devotees regardless of location. Some relatively unimportant West African orishas were promoted after transatlantic passage. The bow-and-arrow hunter Ochoosi is little known in his homeland but quite popular in Brazil, where in the Rio region he is identified with Saint Sebastian, whose iconography depicts him as shot full of arrows. Meanwhile, many orishas died in the Middle Passage, and many others withered away as slavery wore on. Agricultural orishas largely fell away in urbanized Brazil, though they continued to live and breathe (and eat) in Haiti. Another victim of the transatlantic passage was ancestor worship. Slavery so thoroughly destroyed extended family networks that traditional ancestor devotion became next to impossible.

Another important transformation was the emergence of houses of worship for all orishas. One key difference between Indian and American Hinduism is that in India temples typically house just one god, whereas in the United States temples typically house many. Something similar happened as Yoruba religion crossed the Atlantic. In West Africa, shrines were typically associated with one particular orisha, who was in turn associated with one region or dynastic line. But in the New World, where resources were scarcer and devotees more widely scattered, Brazilian terreiros and Cuban casas typically housed all the orishas, or at least all the orishas with enough ashe to be remembered.

These and other efforts to preserve Yoruba religion by changing it can and should be seen as transformations. But in these transformations there is continuity too. Yoruba culture has traditionally been both elastic and accommodating. While Christians have long concerned themselves with keeping their faith pure by inoculating their doctrines against impurity, the Yoruba tradition has been happily mixing with “outside” influences for millennia. So the so-called syncretism of the New World was, and is, just more of the same.

Flourishing

There is an intriguing debate about the niche religion occupies in human psychology and society. Is religion’s primary purpose to ward off the chill of death? Many believe this is the case—that religions rise and fall largely on how well they address the problem of mortality. But perhaps death and the afterlife are largely male concerns. After all, it is men who have done most of the killing in human history. Might it be that religion’s primary purpose is to make sense not of death but of birth, not of destruction but of creation? After all, the Jewish and Christian Bibles begin not with the deaths of Abraham or Jesus but with the creation of the world. Perhaps where religions really compete is on the question of how to flourish.
⁵⁹

In this debate, Yoruba religion comes down squarely on the side of human flourishing. There is discussion, of course, about reincarnation and about a good and a bad heaven. But the goal is not to be reborn or occupy some otherworldly paradise but to flourish here and now. Today Yoruba religion in both Africa and the Americas attempts to repair our lives and our world by reconnecting earth and heaven, human beings and orishas, and each of us with our own particular destinies and natural environments. This world can never be a paradise, because conflict is endemic to the human condition. Gods and “antigods” are forever at war, and we humans seem forever to be forgetting our destinies. But happily we can consult the orishas through divination, call them to our sides through sacrifice, and dance with them in our own bodies. Such resolutions of our conflicts are temporary, to be sure, and must be repeated. But with proper devotion to the orishas, say the Yoruba, we, our children, and our grandchildren can live long, healthy, wise, and prosperous lives.

Chapter Seven
Judaism

The Way of Exile and Return

Judaism begins and ends with a story. If Christianity is to a great extent about doctrine and Islam about ritual, Judaism is about narrative. To be a Jew is to tell and retell a story and to wrestle with its key symbols: the character of God, the people of Israel, and the vexed relationship between the two.

This story has everything you could ever want in a good read. It has sex, deceit, love, murder, transgression, and tragedy of biblical proportions. It has some of the greatest characters in world literature, not least the adulterer and murderer King David and the capricious and irascible God of the Hebrew Bible. It even has a narrative arc—from garden to desert to city. The Jewish narrative is a story of slavery and freedom, of covenants made and broken and made anew. But above all else it is a story of a people banished and then called home—a story of exile and return.

The Hebrew Bible starts with God’s creation of the world in seven days—six days of labor and one of rest. The conflict kicks in not long after creation with Adam and Eve and God and a serpent all wrapped around one another in the Garden of Eden. In this primordial society God lays down only one law: do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So, of course, Adam and Eve take a bite and are banished for giving in to temptation. In the Christian tradition, this violation infects all of humanity with a sin virus that can only be cured by the crucifixion of Jesus. Here it sets into motion the two great contrapuntal themes in the Jewish story: a rhythm of wrongdoing, punishment, and exile; and a rhythm of covenant, breach, and new covenant. Because God is just, He punishes human beings for their wrongdoing, but because He is merciful, He extends to them the opportunities and responsibilities of a new relationship.