God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (55 page)

9
. Paul Christopher Johnson,
Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 38. Of course, this is not an exact comparison. As Jacob Olupona reminds me, Oshun by no means relies (as Ginger does) on her male friends to make things happen, and our plans succeed only with her blessing.

10
. Are orishas gods? Some resist referring to orishas as divinities, perhaps because they do not want to taint Yoruba religion with the stigma of polytheism. I see nothing wrong with polytheism, but I refer here to orishas as orishas, leaving open the question, contested among the Yoruba themselves, of whether this tradition is monotheistic or polytheistic.

11
. Here I call the orishas by their most popular Yoruba names. The messenger god Eshu, who is known in Brazil as Exu, Cuba as Elegba, and Haiti as Legba, I refer to here simply as Eshu, unless I am invoking specifically Brazilian, Cuban, or Haitian circumstances.

12
. Thompson,
Flash of the Spirit
, 5. There is also some controversy about the ways and means of Olodumare. In
Olodumare, God in Yoruba Belief
(London: Longmans, 1962), E. Bolaji Idowu argues that this High God is anything but remote. Convinced that orishas are manifestations of Olodumare, Idowu describes Yoruba religion as “diffused monotheism.” Idowu, an ordained minister who led the Methodist Church Nigeria for over a decade in the 1970s and 1980s, has been criticized, however, for reading too much of Christianity and its monotheistic imperative into Yoruba religious traditions. For a concise discussion of Idowu, his “highly theological” Ibadan School of interpretation, and his supporters and detractors, see Jacob K. Olupona, “The Study of Yoruba Religious Tradition in Historical Perspective,”
Numen
40, no. 3 (1993): 246–47.

13
. Wande Abimbola, “Gods Versus Anti-Gods: Conflict and Resolution in the Yoruba Cosmos,”
Dialogue & Alliance
8, no. 2 (1994): 76.

14
. BioDun J. Ogundayo, “Ifa,” in
Encyclopedia of African Religion
, eds. Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009), 1.331.

15
. William Bascom,
The Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria
(Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1969), 90. On Oshun, see also Joseph M. Murphy and Mei-Mei Sanford, eds.,
Ò.s.un Across the Waters: A Yoruba Goddess in Africa and the Americas
(Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2001).

16
. Jacob K. Olupona, “Imagining the Goddess: Gender in Yorùbâ Religious Traditions and Modernity,” in
Dialogue and Alliance 
18, no. 2 (Fall/Winter, 2004/05): 71–86. See also Diedre Bádéjo,
Osun Seegesi: The Elegant Deity of Wealth, Power and Femininity
(Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1996).

17
. Soyinka,
Myth, Literature and the African World
, 13.

18
. On this incident, which the Cuban newspaper
Diario de la Marina
called “an act of Providence,” see Miguel A. De La Torre,
Santería: The Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 197.

19
. Wole Soyinka, “The Tolerant Gods,” in Olupona and Rey,
Òrìs¸à Devotion
, 43; Soyinka,
Myth, Literature and the African World
, 141, 145. Soyinka is a devotee of Ogun. See also Sandra T. Barnes, ed.,
Africa’s Ogun: Old World and New
, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1997).

20
. Soyinka,
Myth, Literature and the African World
, 26.

21
. Thompson,
Flash of the Spirit
, 85.

22
. William Bascom,
Sixteen Cowries: Yoruba Divination from Africa to the New World
(Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1980), 45.

23
. Thompson,
Flash of the Spirit
, 5.

24
. Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara,
Manipulating the Sacred: Yorùbá Art, Ritual, and Resistance in Brazilian Candomblé
(Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 2006), 35.

25
. Johnson,
Secrets, Gossip, and Gods
, 56.

26
. For a spirited, book-length critique of the tendency of scholars to divide religious phenomenon into a “venerable East,” which “preserves history” and a “progressive West,” which “creates history,” see Tomoko Masuzawa,
The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005), 4. Although I agree with Masuzawa’s skepticism about the still widespread assumption that “all religions are everywhere the same in essence” (9), I do not agree with her claim that the concept of “world religion” (however invented and sooted up in colonial desires) is beyond redeeming. I, too, am uncomfortable in the face of the inevitable value judgments that seem to follow from this phrase (e.g., Christianity the “universal” religion is better than Judaism the “ethnic” religion). But like the term
religion
,
world religion
has taken on a life of its own outside academe, so killing it is not an option. All scholars can do is bend it, which I hope to do here by joining many scholars and practitioners of Yoruba religion in arguing for the way of the orishas as one of the great religions.

27
. I have been influenced on this point especially by Olupona and Rey,
Òrìs¸à Devotion
, and by conversations with my friend Onaje Woodbine, a PhD candidate in the Division of Religious and Theological Studies at Boston University. I am also grateful to my former Boston University colleague Wande Abimbola for subtly awakening me to the importance of this tradition. In addition to being a scholar, Abimbola is a Yoruba priest and babalawo who was installed in 1981 by the
ooni
of Ife as Awise Awo Agbaye (World Spokesperson for Ifa and Yoruba Religion). Finally, I am grateful to an Akan woman, initiated years ago by Abimbola, who challenged me at a public talk in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2009 to attend to African religions with the seriousness they deserve.

28
. Olupona and Rey, “Introduction,” in their
Òrìs¸à Devotion
, 4. Other estimates for West Africa’s Yoruba population run from 20 million to 50 million.

29
. Bascom,
Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria
, 1.

30
. Soyinka, “The Tolerant Gods,” in Olupona and Rey,
Òrìs¸à Devotion
, 44.

31
. As Miguel A. De La Torre argues in
Santería
, orisha devotion also found common cause with Protestantism—“in the Jamaican groups
Revival
and
Pocomania
,” and “in the Trinidadian group known as Spiritual Baptists or Shouters” (xiv). Other Protestant carriers of Yoruba culture include “the Cumina and Convince in Jamaica, the Big Drum in Grenada, and Carriacou and Kele in St. Lucia” (Leslie G. Desmangles, “Caribbean, African-Derived Religion,” in
Encyclopedia of African and African-American Religions
, ed. Stephen D. Glazier [New York: Routledge, 2001], 78).

32
. Private communication with Joseph Murphy, July 21, 2009. According to a 1954 study, one quarter of Cuban Catholics went to a santero or santera at least occasionally. See Agrupación Católica Universitaria,
Encuesta Nacional sobre el Sentimiento Religioso del Pueblo de Cuba
(Habana: Buró de Información y Propaganda de la ACU, 1954), 37, cited in De La Torre,
Santería
, 170–71.

33
. Akintunde Akinade, “Macumba,” in Glazier,
Encyclopedia of African and African-American Religions
, 177.

34
. “Brazil: International Religious Freedom Report 2007,” Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, U.S. Department of State, http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2007/90244.htm.

35
. Johnson,
Secrets, Gossip, and Gods,
198.

36
. Murphy, “Òrìs¸à Traditions,” in Olupona and Rey,
Òrìs¸à Devotion
, 472.

37
. Many who toss out the 100 million figure claim that there are that many practitioners in the New World alone. See, e.g., Migene González-Wippler,
Santería: the Religion: Faith, Rites, Magic
, 2nd ed. (Saint Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1994), 9; and De La Torre,
Santería
, xiv. The more modest estimate of 100 million worldwide appears in Kólá Abímbólá,
Yorùbá Culture: A Philosophical Account
(Birmingham, UK: Iroko Academic, 2005), 24. At the Congress of Orisa Tradition and Culture, held in Havana in 2003, Wande Abimbola also claimed 100 million Yoruba practitioners worldwide. See John Rice, “African Religious Leaders Pay Homage to Cuba,” Associated Press, July 8, 2003.

38
. Thompson,
Flash of the Spirit
, xv.

39
. George Volsky, “Religion from Cuba Stirs Row in Miami,”
New York Times
, June 29, 1987.

40
. Quoted in Johnson,
Secrets, Gossip, and Gods
, 71.

41
. See Carl Hunt,
Oyotunji Village: The Yoruba Movement in America
(Washington, DC: Univ. Press of America, 1979); and Kamari Maxine Clarke,
Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities
(Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2004). For more recent treatments, see, e.g., Ikulomi Djisovi Eason, “Historicizing Ifá Culture in Ò|yó|túnjí African Village,” 278–85; Kamari Maxine Clarke, “Ritual Change and the Changing Canon: Divinatory Legitimization of Yorùbá Ancestral Roots in Ò|yó|túnjí African Village,” 286–319; and Tracey E. Hucks, “From Cuban Santería to African Yorùbá: Evolutions in African American Orisa History, 1959–1970), 337–54, all in Olupona and Rey,
Òrìs¸à Devotion
. Oyotunji Village seems to be a classic example of “the invention of tradition”—in this case the invention of an ancient African tradition by a twentieth-century American. See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds.,
The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983).