Gods & Spirits

Form19 entries

Being · African Traditions · the 1650s

Ọ̀rúnmìlà

The Witness Behind Ifá

Witness to the destiny each person chose; his verses weigh conduct and press ìwà pẹ̀lẹ́, good character.

Who they wereHe is elérìí ìpín, witness to the choosing — present when each person selected the destiny they then forgot on being born. The verses do not simply report it back: they press ìwà pẹ̀lẹ́, gentle character, as the one thing that makes a chosen destiny liveable.

The FindingIfá is the divination system and its 256 odù, and in Yoruba usage also a praise name for Ọ̀rúnmìlà himself — so English writing that treats 'Ifa' as simply the god's name, UNESCO's 2005 proclamation included, collapses a corpus of verse into a personality.

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Being · 945 CE

Perun

Two Oaths and a Demolition

Known almost entirely from the account of his destruction, by the church that destroyed him.

Who they wereOak, thunder and the axe: a sky god sworn by on weapons, whose tree was the oak and whose weapon fell as lightning. What survives is mostly the account of his image being dragged to the river — a god known through the record of his removal.

The FindingAlmost all that survives of Perun is the account of his demolition in 988; the famous duel with Veles is Ivanov and Toporov in 1974, resting on their own equation of the chronicle's Volos with Veles, and no Slavic source records the combat.

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Being · African Traditions · 1852

Ògún

Old Metal, New Machines

The òrìṣà of iron: work made holy, and the same metal is the blade. Still taking new trades.

Who they wereHe cleared the path for the other òrìṣà with his blade, and the tradition keeps both halves of that: the same iron makes the road and the wound. He takes in new trades as they appear — drivers, surgeons, mechanics — because his domain is what metal does, not which metal it was.

The FindingCrowther's 1852 vocabulary glosses Ògún as the god of "iron, implements of war, and hunting", and Sandra Barnes's argument is that a god held to a material rather than a domain never acquires a closed list of trades: the smith and the hunter, then the lorry driver and the mechanic — and an iron oath for which Nigeria's Oaths Act of 1963 still leaves room.

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