Orí: the head the Yoruba choose before they are born

The three previous articles in this section follow the soul after death: the Tibetan Bardo speaks to the dead, the Egyptian papyrus weighs their heart, and in Mictlan what decides their fate is the way they died. This article looks the other way, at what happens before birth. And it comes back to the same point at the end, because for the Yoruba of West Africa death and birth are the same door seen from both sides.

I read three things. The first, The History of the Yorubas, by Samuel Johnson, pastor of the Anglican Church at Oyo, who signed his preface "Oyo, 1897" and explains that he wrote it out of "a purely patriotic motive, that the history of our fatherland might not be lost in oblivion".¹ The second, a 2019 article by Babajide Dasaolu and Kehinde Obasola, lecturers in philosophy and religious studies at Olabisi Onabanjo University, in Nigeria.² The third, a 2020 master's thesis in philosophy by Esther Adekanye, which gathers what several Yoruba authors have written on the subject, among them Wande Abimbola, the great scholar of Ifá.³ I did not read the Ifá verses in Yoruba, in an edition of my own, and what I did not read I say at the end.

Johnson's book has its own story, and it fits this section. According to the preface by his brother, Dr O. Johnson, who edited it, the manuscript —"more than 20 years of labour"— was sent in 1899 to "a well-known English publisher through one of the great Missionary Societies", and nothing more was heard of it: the publisher said it had been misplaced and offered to pay for it. Johnson died in 1901 without seeing it in print, and his brother had to rewrite the whole work from the notes and rough copies he had left. It was published in 1921.¹ In the first two articles of the section, the title of a text about death was given by a Westerner; here, an English publisher lost the text, and it was a Yoruba who remade it.

A person made in three stages

According to what Adekanye gathers, a person is not made all at once. First Orisanla, the god of creation, moulds the body —ara— out of earth, on behalf of Olódùmarè, the Supreme Being; and he moulds them in different shapes, with their beauty and their flaws. In the version an Ifá priest gave the philosopher Akin Makinde, Orisanla does not make the hands or the legs: it is Ogun, the god of war and hunting, who cuts the fingers and the legs out of a shapeless trunk.³

Then Olódùmarè breathes the emi, the breath, into the body: the part that does not die. Adekanye puts it like this: that is why we speak of dead bodies but never of dead souls; at death, the emi leaves its dwelling and goes back to Olódùmarè.³

And the third thing is still missing, the one that makes this story Yoruba: the head.

The house of Àjàlá

Orí means "head", the one of flesh and bone. But there is another, the orí inú, the "inner head", which is the one that carries destiny. So that no one mistakes it for a symbol, Johnson counts it among the gods: "The Ori (head) is the universal household deity worshipped by both sexes as the god of fate", and he explains that in each house it was represented by forty-one cowries strung together in the shape of a crown, kept in a coffer that was destroyed when its owner died.¹

The inner head is not made by Olódùmarè. It is made by Àjàlá, the potter of heads. And Àjàlá, in Abimbola's words as quoted by Adekanye, "is believed to be an incorrigible debtor, a drunkard and irresponsible creature". He finishes his heads and keeps them in a storehouse, but not all are well made: some are overburnt, others badly shaped. Each person goes to his house to fetch theirs, and chooses it freely; but since most come out badly, anyone may take a bad one.³

That is the whole idea. Whoever chooses a good head is olori rere, "one with a good head"; whoever chooses a bad one, olori buruku. And because it is chosen kneeling, destiny has names that say so: àkúnlẹ̀yàn, "that which one chooses by kneeling", and àkúnlẹ̀gbà, "that which one receives kneeling".³ Dasaolu and Obasola record a saying about the first: "A destiny one kneels down and chooses it is that which one finds on getting to the world, but when one gets to the world one becomes impatient."²

The gatekeeper, and the tree of forgetting

With the head chosen, it remains to cross. At the gate waits the Onibode, the gatekeeper. According to what Adekanye takes from the theologian E. Bolaji Idowu and the philosopher Segun Gbadegesin, he asks the one about to be born who their parents will be, where they live, what they do, whether they will marry or not, be rich or poor, live long or die young. To all of it the gatekeeper answers àṣẹ gùn: "it is sealed". Then he tells them to touch the igi igbagbe, the tree of forgetfulness, and the gate of the earth opens for someone who no longer remembers anything of what awaits them.³

So everyone is born with a destiny they chose and do not remember. It is an extraordinary idea, and Dasaolu and Obasola give it its philosophical turn: if destiny was chosen, each person is responsible for it; and if it was chosen badly, something can still be done in life. That is why, they write, the Yoruba are determinists, but not fatalists.²

What Ifá is for

That "something" has a name. Dasaolu and Obasola write that "the Yoruba believe in the consultation of the god of divination (Orunmila) to now know the kind of ori one had chosen and to perhaps alter an unfavourable destiny", with the help of certain spiritual forces and the right offering, the ẹbọ.² Ifá is, then, the way to read what was forgotten at the tree.

Johnson describes how it was consulted in his time: sixteen palm nuts were shaken together in the hollow of both hands, and marks were traced with the index finger on a flat bowl dusted with yam flour or powdered camwood. Each mark suggested to the priest the deeds of some hero, which he recounted in order "until he hits upon certain words or phrases which appear to bear upon the matter" of the one consulting.¹ Becoming an Ifá priest required, he says, "a long course of serious study".¹ The priest is called babaláwo, "father of the mysteries".³ There are sixteen principal signs, which combined give 256, the odù; and UNESCO inscribed Ifá in 2008 on its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.⁴

Johnson records one tradition about its origin: that it was brought to Ile-Ife by a man called Setilu, who came from the Nupe country, and that it was King Ofiran who officially recognised it. There are other traditions —the most widespread says it was Orunmila himself who gave it to humankind— and I did not compare them.¹⁴

An Ifá verse, by the way, does not sound like a prophecy. Adekanye quotes one —taken from another author, who in turn took it from a third— which has the shape of almost all of them: first the names of the diviners, then "Ifá divination performed for Orunmila", who was "about to go and buy emi"; he was told to make an offering, he made it, the divinities accepted it, and he understood: "If emi does not fail / There is hope of having all good things of life".³ It is a story with its remedy: what happened to someone else, and what they did.

The head does not walk alone

There is a detail Adekanye takes from Abimbola that prevents reading all this as fatalism. Choosing a good head is only a possibility: to fulfil it you need the ẹsẹ, the leg, which the Yoruba also regard as part of the person, "both in a physical and spiritual sense", and which receives part of every offering made to the head. The story that explains it is almost a fable: once all the heads gathered to decide something they wanted to achieve and did not invite the leg; when they had finished deliberating, they discovered there was no one to carry them.³

And the return

Now, the end of the section. Johnson writes that the Yoruba believed in an account after death, and gives the saying: "Whatever we do on earth we shall give an account thereof at the portals of heaven."¹ And they believed too that the dead come back: "after a period of time, deceased parents are born again into the family of their surviving children. It is from this notion that some children are named 'Babatunde', i.e., father comes again. 'Yetunde', i.e., mother comes again."¹

So a child born into a Yoruba family may carry in their name the grandparent who left. And before arriving they knelt in the house of a drunken potter, chose a head, heard a gatekeeper say it was sealed, touched a tree, and forgot.

What we do with this

The four texts in this section speak of what the soul carries and of what it forgets. Anima Mundis does not ask anyone what they chose before birth, nor divine anything for them: it only asks how they are now, and puts them together for ten minutes with other people who feel the same, without anyone knowing who anyone is. The only thing counted, in the Observatory, is how many voices arrived and at what hour UTC.

What I could not read

I read, in English, the chapter on religion of Samuel Johnson's The History of the Yorubas (the pages on Orí, Ifá, the return of parents and the saying about heaven), the whole article by Dasaolu and Obasola, and the chapter of Adekanye's thesis on the person (body, emi, orí, Àjàlá, the gatekeeper and the leg). I did not read Wande Abimbola, Idowu, Makinde or Gbadegesin directly: I know them through Adekanye, who quotes them, and I say so each time. The Ifá verse I mention reaches me third-hand. I did not read any Ifá verse in a complete Yoruba edition, and the work that would have been the natural source, Abimbola's Sixteen Great Poems of Ifá (1975), is under copyright. I do not write Yoruba names with all their tones except where my sources do, and I did not compare this with Ifá as it is practised today in Cuba, Brazil or Benin, which is another story.