Divining the Self: A Study in Yoruba Myth and Human Consciousness

Abstract

Divining the Self: A Study in Yoruba Myth and Human Consciousness. By Velma E. Love. (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2012. Pp. xii + 152, preface and acknowledgments, a note on the text, introduction, photographs, illustrations, note, bibliography, index. $52.95 hardcover.)What happens to sacred scripture when the emphasis shifts from an unchanging word to a dynamic performance? This shift is a central preoccupation in Velma Love's careful description and analysis of African-American Yoruba practitioners. Love works among communities primarily in New York City, Georgia, and South Carolina, where-at Oyotunji African Village-she encounters practitioners from across the country on pilgrimage to this major center of Yoruba religion and culture. Love's theoretical approach is informed by ethnography, performance studies, and critical pedagogy in the quest to encounter "the dynamic, symbiotic nature of scripture as a religious and cultural phenomenon active in the lives of adherents" (14). As an uninitiated but well-informed outsider, Love interviewed 21 practitioners over the course of four years.The first chapter introduces the idea that performing a scripture enacts it in the life of the practitioner. The enactment of scripture is particularly vital for those practitioners of Yoruba religion who are consciously avoiding many of the numerous African-derived spiritual traditions already practiced in the Americas (most often Lucumi [Santeria], but also Candomble, Umbanda, Vodun, et al.). Love has chosen to focus on a group whose founding members first encountered Yoruba religion through some of these heterodox Christian practices (most directly Lucumi, among Cuban immigrant communities in New York), and who then chose to reject such mediating forms in favor of a form that was "more authentically African" (78). This should not be taken as suggesting that the Yoruba practitioners are hostile to Christianity-indeed, as one priestess says, "A large percentage of orisha worshippers in America are Christian . . . Baptist" (40). Instead, this attitude toward the Caribbean forms speaks to the felt need for AfricanAmerican Yoruba practitioners to reinvent their selves from the ground up, to recreate their identities in a holistic fashion.The book effectively doubles as an introduction to Yoruba religion, which has a complex pantheon of "gods" or orisha, whom Love also presents as archetypal energies or divine principles. These include: Esu/Elegba, the interpreter deity who "opens the way"; Ogun, the deity of iron, metal, and war; Oshun, the deity of water, dawn, and hope; and Oya, the deity of the wind, change, and progress. These deities become known through odu, the sacred scripture. But there is no authoritative canon of odu; instead, the scriptures are retold through an apataki, a story or saying that expresses the meaning of the odu within a performed situational context, usually of healing or self-discovery. Love cites the scholars who documented the authoritative collection of 256 odus as arguing against the mistaken idea that they are written in stone: "Far from being literal and unalterable, the odus are alive. They are complex organisms, waiting to be meshed uniquely with each client's personal energy before being written" (15).Love not only commands a dazzling array of scholarly sources, but she also creatively structures this book itself as an initiatory experience. She begins in Ch. 1 with an overview of the structure of the rest of the book, a homologue to an introduction. The focus of the book is divination, the process through which a healer envisions what illnesses or obstacles are intervening in a person's life. This process involves three steps: flight or deformation, formation or reconstruction, and reformulation/reformation into a new being. The system is open for anyone to participate and in particular to seek healing, but members undergo a series of steps as they initiate. …