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![6 JACOB K. OLUPONA AND TERRY REY
globalization studies.» Among his many poignant insights, Robertson
has demonstrated that because of globalization “the pressure to revi-
talize societies has become a major feature of the modern world ...
[and] society as such experiences both internal and external pressures
to define its vital cores.’’ Thus “religion . . . is encouraged by this new
circumstance” (Robertson 1989: 72).° In the case of Yoruba religious
culture, Ifa has served well over and again in diverse societies as a “vital
core” that has allowed communities who serve the drisd to revitalize
themselves and their religion.’
Following Robertson, David Venter stresses that “globalization uni-
versalizes the particular (distinct national/individual identities) and par-
ticularizes the universal (global order/mankind)” (Venter 1999: 115).
Thus, a particular “national” religious identity (Yortba), vis-a-vis the
vital core of If4 and the drisd, becomes universal and revitalized in glo-
balized Yoruba religious culture. Or, as Peter Beyer puts it, globaliza-
tion serves “to reorient a religious tradition towards the global whole
and away from the particular culture with which that tradition identified
itself in the past,” which quite accurately reflects the unfolding of glo-
balized Yoruba religious culture (Beyer 1994: 10).
For Yoruba tradition, the genesis of this revitalization process is
to be located in Africa, where Islam and Christianity have long spear-
headed globalization. In Africa, conversion to Islam and Christianity has
been an entryway into a “global system” that revitalizes the “vital core”’
of Yoruba religion. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa and especially in
South Africa, African Independent Churches have Africanized Chris-
tianity and revitalized African identity by creating “inter-ethnic and
transcultural associative networks” that are held together by “‘overarch-
ing symbols and doctrines” (Jules-Rosette 1989: 157). Bennetta Jules-
Rosette’s terms designate quite accurately globalized Yoruba religion:
an “inter-ethnic and transcultural associative network” (Nigerians, Cu-
bans, African Americans, Trinidadians, etc.) united by “over-arching
symbols and doctrines” (Ifa and the orisd).
Notably, globalized Yoruba religious culture represents an alterna-
tive modality in the contemporary landscape of globalization, wherein
Western (and especially American) cultural, linguistic, economic, politi-
cal, and religious forces take root and flourish in the farthest reaches of
the globe.* Globalized Yortba religious culture is thus a prime example
of what Peter Berger means by arguing that globalization “‘is neither uni-
form nor unchallenged”’: “It is differently received in different countries,](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/18237183-250525155413-804fa5a9/75/R-Devotion-As-World-Religion-The-Globalization-Of-Yorb-Religious-Culture-Jacob-Obafemi-Kehinde-Olupona-24-2048.jpg)
![14 JACOB K. OLUPONA AND TERRY REY
Ela—is the ultimate expression of Yoribé religious culture, and that hu-
man cognizance of this expression relies upon language. This religious-
cultural expression’s worldwide spread (i.e., its globalization) further
relies on a prophetic metaphor of human duty, or moral imperative, to
be of truthful and of cool character to realize the ultimate good that the
Supreme Being intends for humanity on earth.
Part 2: Yoruba Religious Culture beyond Africa
Beyond Africa, Yortba religious culture is a major influence on religion
in the Americas, on Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, and, much less, even
on European Christianity. The seventeen essays in this section take us
from West Africa’s Yortbaland to Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, New York, Mi-
ami, South Carolina, Great Britain, Germany, and elsewhere in a collec-
tive demonstration of the impressive variety of shapes and forms that
Yoruba traditions have taken outside of the Mother Continent. Along the
way, the authors show us that for Yoruba religious culture, the globaliza-
tion process is more complex than it might at first appear.
It is equally important to see that this process actually began in Af-
rica long before the transatlantic slave trade, as Olabiyi Babalola Yai
reminds us in chapter 11, “Yoruba Religion and Globalization: Some
Reflections.” Yai outlines “three stages and modalities in the globaliza-
tion of Yoruba religious traditions, namely West African, Atlantic, and
post-Atlantic.”” Because attention to this important historical reality is
lacking in much scholarly discourse on the modern African diaspora, we
should recognize with Yai that “Yoruba religion [first] became global
by sharing its drisa with the immediate, West African neighbors of the
people who have come to be collectively designated as Yoruba.” Dei-
ties in precolonial West Africa belonged to no single ethnic group but
through their centuries-old “pendulum movement” became the common
property and cultural production of several peoples, such as the Yoruba,
Igbo, and Fon.
Such pendular cultural diffusion in Africa prior to and during the
arrival of enslaved Africans in the Americas demands a “revisionist”
or “African-centric” approach to Afro-Atlantic history, as advocated
by Paul Lovejoy: “An “African-centered’ focus, in contrast to the one
centered in Europe or the Americas, reveals the often neglected and
misunderstood impact of the African background upon the societies of](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/18237183-250525155413-804fa5a9/75/R-Devotion-As-World-Religion-The-Globalization-Of-Yorb-Religious-Culture-Jacob-Obafemi-Kehinde-Olupona-32-2048.jpg)
![20 JACOB K. OLUPONA AND TERRY REY
received several e-mails from drisd devotees demanding that their baba-
lawo or “godfathers” be invited to present papers or receive our homage.
One went so far as to threaten that if his gba from Los Angeles were not
brought to the event, there would be tragic consequences! This e-mail
also linked us to the gba’s colorful Web site. George Edward Brandon
is following such contentious exchanges among the neo- Yoruba com-
munity on the Internet, noting that with over “160 Web sites devoted
to one aspect or another of Yoruba religion,” it would appear that “the
orisha have begun to colonize cyberspace.” In chapter 23, “From Oral to
Digital: Rethinking the Transmission of Tradition in Yoruba Religion,”
Brandon traces the complex history of the production of oral and literary
texts in Yoruba and Yoruba-derived religion to contextualize and theo-
rize the meaning of cyberspace and the rise therein of “cyber-elders”’ in
Yoruba religious culture and the forceful role that the Internet is begin-
ning to play in its globalization.
Joseph M. Murphy likewise critically analyzes the impact of the In-
ternet on the spread of Orisa traditions in chapter 24, “Orisa Traditions
and the Internet Diaspora.” Because “new patterns of devotion to them
[the drisa] have been developing beyond any single person or house’s
ability to quantify or sanction them,” unprecedented and at times unde-
sirable changes are occurring in the religion. For one example, the Inter-
net tends to anthropomorphize the risa, thus removing the spirits “from
the ceremonial context where the orisd have traditionally ‘lived.’” One
serious implication of this is the detachment of the drisd from “‘stones
and herbs so fundamental to traditional drisd devotion.”
One of the most heated debates at the Florida International Univer-
sity conference concerned the meaning of gender in Yoruba religious
culture. The tenor of this debate is well reflected in Rita Laura Segato’s
essay (chapter 25, “Gender, Politics, and Hybridism in the Transnation-
alization of Yoruba Culture”). Segato engages the analyses of Oyewumi
Oyeronke, who argues that gender distinctions were unknown in Yordbaé
culture before the colonial era, and J. Lorand Matory, who disagrees
strongly with Oyewumi’s argument. Segato weaves her own rich experi-
ence as an ethnographer of Yoruba traditions in Brazil into this debate,
demonstrating, among other important insights, that the “complex gen-
der system” working “in the traditional Yoriba religious polis was one
of the pillars . . . of the solid expansion of Yoriba religion and cosmol-
ogy in Brazil, and from Brazil to other countries.”
Both the conference discourse and the voluminous e-mail corre-](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/18237183-250525155413-804fa5a9/75/R-Devotion-As-World-Religion-The-Globalization-Of-Yorb-Religious-Culture-Jacob-Obafemi-Kehinde-Olupona-38-2048.jpg)
![22 JACOB K. OLUPONA AND TERRY REY
averted in our rapidly globalizing world are questions that, far from be-
ing merely academic concerns, loom large and belie the existential ques-
tion as to whether Yorba or any other religious culture will actually see
the next millennium.
Notes
1. Although we cannot know with any precision the number of Yoruba
victims of the transatlantic slave trade, since most contemporary records indi-
cate port of origin and often erroneously group varied ethnic groups under ge-
neric headings. Eltis (2003) has developed methodologies that suggest “Yoruba
speakers made up less than 9 percent of Africans carried to the New World,”
over two-thirds of them to St. Domingue, Cuba, and Bahia. For other useful
discussions of ethnic demographics among African victims of the transatlantic
slave trade, see Curtin 1969; Lovejoy 1982, 1989, and 2003; Eltis 2001; and
Eltis et al. 2000.
2. We respectfully recognize that many practitioners of Yoruba-derived re-
ligions in Cuba and the United States prefer “Lukumi” or ““Regla de Ocha” to
“Santeria” as the name for their religion. For the sake of brevity, we nonetheless
group them all under the title “Santeria” in this introduction.
3. Besides support from the Department of Religious Studies and the Afri-
can—New World Studies Program, funding for the conference was also received
from the FIU College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Transnational and
Comparative Global Studies, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center,
and the Asian Studies Program.
4. We agree with Olufemi Taiwo’s caution in his essay in this volume that
the term “African Traditional Religion” (or “Yoruba Traditional Religion’)
“1s conceptually problematic, perhaps vacuous . . . [since] the liturgies, icons,
etc., of much that is identified as ‘African Traditional Religion’ have not only
changed, their representations show that they have been importing foreign bod-
ies and assimilating same.” J. D. Y. Peel reflects Taiwo’s concern in writing
of the impact of Christian missions on the Yoruba in the nineteenth century,
at a time when ‘Yoruba traditional religion was less precisely that than part of
communal furniture, an omnipresent facility which nearly everyone turned to
for protection and empowerment” (Peel 2000: 13). By “Yoruba religious cul-
ture’ we mean then more this “communal furniture” that is now global than any
putatively pure, pre-contact indigenous Yortba traditional religion. As such,
Yoruba expressions of Christianity and Islam are included in the term ““Yortba
religious culture,” whose foundation and thrust remain nonetheless, at least in
spirit, Ifa, and the Orisa.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/18237183-250525155413-804fa5a9/75/R-Devotion-As-World-Religion-The-Globalization-Of-Yorb-Religious-Culture-Jacob-Obafemi-Kehinde-Olupona-40-2048.jpg)
![Introduction 23
5. See in particular Hammond 1985; Beckford and Luckman 1989; Buhl-
mann 1990; Robertson and Garret 1991; Bruce 1992; Lechner 1992; Beyer
1994; Ahmed and Donnan 1994; Poewe 1994; Kurtz 1995; Van der Veer 1996;
Berger 1999; Haynes 1999; Stackhouse and Paris 2000; Esposito and Watson
2000; Bayes and Tohidi 2001; Peterson, Vasquez, and Williams 2001; Coleman
2001; Hopkins et al. 2001; Wolffe 2002; Prebis and Bauman 2002; Moham-
madi 2002; Center on Religion and Democracy 2002; Reid 2003; Jenkins 2003;
and Juergensmeyer 2003.
6. See also Robertson and Chirico 1985.
7. As Peter Beyer (1994: 3) explains, “the global system . . . encourages the
creation and revitalization of particular identities as a way of gaining control
over systemic power. It is in the context of this last feature that religion plays
one of its significant roles in the development, elaboration, and problematiza-
tion of the global system.”
8. On the complexities of this process in Brazil that are beyond the scope of
the present essay, see Matory 2005, and in the United States see Clarke 2003
and Capone 2006. On methodological issues in the study of the globalization
of Yoruba culture in general, also beyond the present essay’s scope, see Childs
and Falola 2004.
9. By “globalized” we mean quite simply “become global.”
10. Some recent world religions textbooks offer brief comment on the ef-
fects of globalization on religion. For example, with perhaps a measure of ex-
aggeration, Robert Ellwood and Barbara McGraw (1999: 2) claim: “In today’s
pluralism and world community, almost any faith from anywhere is a presence
and option throughout the world.” They do not, however, go so far as to say
this would make all religions world religions; neither do they offer a definition
of what precisely a “world religion” is. Michael Molloy (1999: 457) offers this
reflection: ‘““We cannot help but wonder how this cultural unification will affect
religion. So far, most of the world’s religions have remained fairly separate
traditions—even those that have spread to different countries and cultures. But
globalism may make it impossible for separate religions to remain separate. ...
Globalism will also challenge parochialism and thus will contest any incom-
plete visions of reality offered by traditional religions.”
11. “Perhaps the best known explicit typology was brought to life by Weber
and elaborated by his followers as the great and the little traditions. Because
these categories were grounded in an evolutionary perspective, the tendency
when the two types of systems were studied in the same frame of reference—
and here is where the legacy persists—to give the great traditions [i.e., ‘the
world religions’], such as Islam or Christianity, a central position and the little
traditions a peripheral ones. . . . When these attributes are compared, global ide-
ologies are seen to influence; little ideologies, to respond” (Barnes 1989: 21).
12. “More than 70 million African and New World peoples participate in, or](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/18237183-250525155413-804fa5a9/75/R-Devotion-As-World-Religion-The-Globalization-Of-Yorb-Religious-Culture-Jacob-Obafemi-Kehinde-Olupona-41-2048.jpg)
![x
X
is
The Tolerant Gods
WOLE SOYINKA
I shall begin by commenting that this gathering of minds on the eve
of the millennium [Conference on the Globalization of Yoruba Relli-
gious Culture, held in December 1999], to explore the Yoruba world,
one that I hope proves to be a quest beyond a mere academic exercise,
was extremely timely. By that comment, I do not wish to contribute to
the triumphalist hijacking of Time by one specific religion—the judeo-
christian. Fortunately for my cultural peace of mind, however, I believe
that any recognizable watershed of human history, and even a mere cal-
endar notation, deserves to be seized upon and made to serve even those
whose mores and cultures maintain their suspicious distance from the
genesis and cultural implications of such an epoch—if only as a moti-
vation for their own internal stock-taking, and the relationship of their
history to the other world in celebration. You will find, for instance, that
many christians today follow, if only partially, the annual moslem dis-
cipline of fasting; they see in it an opportunity to embark on an internal
spiritual dialogue, or reflection, through a mortification of the flesh, an
exercise that is made easier when it takes place within the supportive
context of the extended family of faiths. Mind you, it must be conceded
31](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/18237183-250525155413-804fa5a9/75/R-Devotion-As-World-Religion-The-Globalization-Of-Yorb-Religious-Culture-Jacob-Obafemi-Kehinde-Olupona-49-2048.jpg)
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- 7. Orisa Devotion asWorld Religion
- 9. Orisa Devotion as WorldReligion The Globalization of Yoruba Religious Culture Edited by Jacob K. Olupona and Terry Rey THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS
- 10. This book waspublished with the support of Temple University and the University of California, Davis. The University of Wisconsin Press 1930 Monroe Street, 3rd floor Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059 www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/ 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LvU, England Copyright © 2008 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved 245 3 1 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Orisa devotion as world religion : the globalization of Yorub4 religious culture / edited by Jacob K. Olupona and Terry Rey. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-299-22460-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 0-299-22464-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Orishas. 2. Gods, Yoruba. 3. Yoruba (African people)—Religion. I. Olupona, Jacob Obafemi Kehinde. II. Rey, Terry. BL2480.Y60755 2007 299.6'8333—dc22 2007012910
- 11. This book isdedicated to Professor John Pemberton III and to the memories of Professor Cornelius O. Adepegba, Professor Ikulomi Djisovi Eason, Professor Christopher T. Gray, Babatunde Olatunji, and Connie Francés Rey.
- 13. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction JACOB K. OLUPONAAND TERRY REY Part One: Yoruba Religious Culture in Africa I. The Tolerant Gods WOLE SOYINKA Who Was the First to Speak? Insights from Ifa Orature and Sculptural Repertoire ROWLAND ABIODUN . In What Tongue? QOLASOPE O. OYELARAN Orisa: A Prolegomenon to a Philosophy of Yoruba Religion OLUFEMI TAIWO . Associated Place-Names and Sacred Icons of Seven Yoruba Deities CORNELIUS O. ADEPEGBA Twice-Told Tales: Yortba Religious and Cultural Hegemony in Benin, Nigeria FLORA EDOUWAYE S. KAPLAN Vil Xi 31 51 70 84 106 128
- 14. Vill Contents 7. Meta-CulturalProcesses and Ritual Realities in the Precolonial History of the Lagos Region 164 SANDRA T. BARNES 8. The Pathways of Osun as Cultural Synergy 191 DIEDRE L. BADEJO 9. Religious Encounter in Southwestern Nigeria: The Domestication of Islam among the Yoruba 202 H. O. DANMOLE 10. Yoruba Moral Epistemology as the Basis for a Cross-Cultural Ethics 222 BARRY HALLEN Part Two: Yoruba Religious Culture beyond Africa 11. Yoruba Religion and Globalization: Some Reflections 233 OLABIYI BABALOLA YAI 12. Clearing New Paths into an Old Forest: Aladura Christianity in Europe 247 AFE ADOGAME 13. Globalization and the Evolution of Haitian Vodou 263 LAENNEC HURBON, TRANSLATED BY TERRY REY 14. Historicizing If4 Culture in Oy6tanji African Village 278 IKULOMI DJISOVI EASON 15. Ritual Change and the Changing Canon: Divinatory Legitimization of Yortba Ancestral Roots in Oyotanji African Village 286 KAMARI MAXINE CLARKE 16. The Dynamic Influence of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and African Americans in the Growth of Ocha in New York City 320 MARTA MORENO VEGA 17. From Cuban Santeria to African Yortba: Evolutions in African American Orisa History, 1959-1970 337 TRACEY E. HUCKS
- 15. Contents 18. 19, 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. Santeria in theTwenty-first Century MERCEDES CROS SANDOVAL La Santeria: An Integrating, Mythological Worldview in a Disintegrating Society JUAN J. SOSA Myth, Memory, and History: Brazil’s Sacred Music of Shango JOSE FLAVIO PESSOA DE BARROS, TRANSLATED BY MARIA P. JUNQUEIRA Yoruba Sacred Songs in the New World JOSE JORGE DE CARVALHO Axexé Funeral Rites in Brazil’s Orisa Religion: Constitution, Significance, and Tendencies REGINALDO PRANDI, TRANSLATED BY MARIA P. JUNQUEIRA From Oral to Digital: Rethinking the Transmission of Tradition in Yoruba Religion GEORGE EDWARD BRANDON Orisa Traditions and the Internet Diaspora JOSEPH M. MURPHY Gender, Politics, and Hybridism in the Transnationalization of Yoruba Culture RITA LAURA SEGATO, TRANSLATED BY ERNESTO IGNACIO DE CARVALHO Is There Gender in Yortiba Culture? J. LORAND MATORY Postscript JOHN PEMBERTON III Glossary Contributors Index 1X 355 372 400 416 437 448 470 485 513 559 573 581 589
- 17. Acknowledgments It requires agreat deal of time, effort, and, of course, money to unite sev- eral dozen scholars from four continents for a three-day conference, and then to create a book out of, and worthy of, their efforts. The December 1999 event at Miami’s Florida International University (FIU), “From Local to Global: Rethinking Yortba Religion for the Next Millennium,” which served as foundation and inspiration for this book, was made pos- sible thanks to a generous grant from the Ford Foundation, for which we particularly thank Dr. Constance Buchanan. The FIU College of Arts and Science, African—New World Studies Program, and Department of Religious Studies also provided substantial support, and we thank accord- ingly and respectively Dean Arthur Herriott and Professors Carole Boyce Davies and Nathan Katz. Several other scholars at FIU supported the conference in various ways, from chairing panels to promoting the event through their contacts, and likewise we express our sincere gratitude to them: Professors Ginette Ba-Curry, Isabel Castellanos, Christopher T. Gray, Christine Gudorf, Codjo Ochode, and Jean Muteba Rahier. Local leaders of the 6risa community provided us with invaluable and greatly appreciated assistance and advice, especially Oba Ernesto Pichardo, Oba Miguel “Wille” Ramos, Chief Adedoja Aluko, and Adeyela Albury. Graduate students from our African and Caribbean religions seminars at FIU in 1999 helped out in ways too numerous to recount here (from formatting the conference program to finding a taxi big enough to bring Olatunji’s drums from the airport!); thanks thus to Chanelle Rose, Patricia Sprinkle, and Erin Leigh Weston. For her tireless, knowl- edgeable, and pacifying collaboration throughout the entire sometimes maddening affair, we heartily say to our dear friend Iyalorisa Maria de Oxala: Muito Obrigado!!! And finally—here especially we feel that we speak for everyone who attended the 1999 conference—we profoundly Xl
- 18. xii Acknowledgments appreciate thecritical contributions of Professors Charles Long and Michele Foster, who carefully listened to all forty-three presentations and offered their provocative summary insights during the closing panel. Our evenings in Miami were beautifully animated by drisda-inspired creative arts, and the event would certainly have been far less enjoyable were it not for the splendid contributions of poets Eintou Pearl Springer from Trinidad, Miriam Alves from Brazil, and Oba Adrian Castro from Miami. Charo Oquet, from the Dominican Republic, likewise delighted us with a slide presentation featuring some of her intriguing and color- ful paintings and sculptures. And, of course, there were drums. Neri Torres’s celebrated Ifé-Ilé Afro-Cuban Dance Ensemble danced the Orisdas to the drums of the ancestors, while later the legendary Babatunde Olatunji drummed ase (ashe) into us all. We are as edified as honored for having been graced by all of these artists’ remarkable talents at FIU as the second millennium drew to a close. As for the book itself, we sincerely thank everyone, from the con- tributing authors and our editors at the University of Wisconsin Press, especially Gwen Walker and Matt Levin, to our families and colleagues for their patience and support. We are also deeply indebted to Temple University and the University of California, Davis, for their financial support for the publication of this somewhat unwieldy book. Special thanks are also highly in order to Marilu Carter, who painstakingly proofread and extensively helped prepare the entire manuscript for pub- lication. Thanks also to Professors Akin Ogundiran and James Sweet for their helpful commentaries on select chapters and to the anonymous reviewers who recommended our book for publication. In sincerest appreciation, we dedicate Orisé Devotion as World Religion to Professor John Pemberton III for his wholesome friendship to Yoruba people in Nigeria and abroad, for his exemplary and ground- breaking scholarship in Yoruba arts and religion, and, more generally, for his inspirational love for Africa. Finally, because in some very real (though however abstract) sense everything of worth that we do in life we do for, and thanks to, our el- ders and our ancestors, and because we who knew them and learned from them are all better human beings thereby, we dedicate our personal efforts in bringing this book to fruition to the memories of Babatunde Olatunji, to Professors Cornelius O. Adepegba, Ilukomi Djisovi Eason, and Christopher T. Gray, and to Connie Francés Rey, who despite her illness was of tremendous support and inspiration during the conference. Ase!
- 19. Orisa Devotion asWorld Religion
- 21. Introduction JACOB K. GLUPONAAND TERRY REY I got high john in my pocket, Got mud on my shoes, Walked all the way from Ilé-Ifé, I’m gonna spread the news. —Cassandra Wilson, “Voodoo Reprise” In Detroit, an African American woman visits a babaldwo (diviner), who reads Nigerian ikin (oil-palm nuts) to advise her on marriage pros- pects. In Miami, crowds of Cuban-Americans dance for the goddess Yemaya to the animating rhythms of a bata (drum) ceremony at the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye. In Brooklyn, a Puerto Rican cabdriver makes his sunrise ebo (sacrificial) offerings at the shrine of Ogiin in his apartment before another day’s work. In Trinidad, local men draped in red scarves sacrifice a goat for Sangé to protect their homes and crops as a hurricane approaches. In southern Nigeria, masqueraders lead the annual Odun Egtingiin procession to honor the ancestors. The differ- ences between these religious events are no greater than those between a Greek Orthodox monk in contemplation on Mt. Athos and a poor farmer taking up snakes at a Pentecostal revival in Jolo, Tennessee. Just as the monk and the farmer are both embodiments of Christianity, so are the above-listed drisd devotees all embodiments of Yoruba religious culture, which, like Christianity, should now be considered a world religion.
- 22. 4 JACOB K.OLUPONA AND TERRY REY The Yoriba-speaking peoples of West Africa have cultural roots more than two thousand years deep, thus being one of the oldest iden- tifiable ethnic groups of the African continent (Pemberton 1995: 535). In contemporary Africa’s most populated country, Nigeria, their con- centration is greatest. Including the several million others who reside in Benin, Togo, and Sierra Leone, the total Yoruba population in West Africa is roughly 25 million (Abiodun 1987 as cited in Drewal 1992: 12). Descendants of Yoruba victims of the transatlantic slave trade now live throughout the Americas, where Yoruba religion, often in combi- nation with elements of Native American, European, and/or other Af- rican religious cultures, is a taproot of African diasporic life.’ In West Africa, meanwhile, where the Yoruba have encountered Islam since the fourteenth century and mission Christianity and colonialism since the nineteenth (Peel 2000), indigenous religion has in large part shaped or filtered Islam and Christianity, which concomitantly have strongly in- fluenced indigenous tradition. Manifest in Afro-Cuban Santeria,” Afro- Brazilian Candomblé, Shango tradition in Trinidad, African American Yoruba revivalism, and (to a lesser degree) Vodou in Haiti, New World Yoruba religion likewise continues to refashion cultural and religious landscapes, as it has since the transatlantic slave trade. This phenom- enon has long drawn the attention of anthropologists and historians. Ifa divination and the drisd (spirits) have inspired poets, novelists, painters, sculptors, musicians, and dancers to creative genius throughout Africa and the African diaspora, just as biblical mythology and the saints have done for artists throughout the Christian world. To explore all of this critically was the motive for our conference, “The Globalization of Yorba Religious Culture,”’ held December 9-12, 1999, at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, and represents the collective endeavor of this book. Thanks to the Department of Reli- gious Studies, the African—New World Studies Program, various forms of assistance from other FIU entities,*? and a generous grant from the Ford Foundation, scholars from four continents were able to gather to present their latest research and to discuss issues central to understand- ing Yoruba religious culture. Both the conference and these resultant essays ride a twenty-year wave of widespread popular and scholarly interest in Yoruba and Yoruba-derived religious traditions, a “‘transna- tional,” “diasporic,” and “global” religious-cultural ensemble that we, the editors, call “Yortba religious culture.”
- 23. Introduction 5 Globalization, WorldReligions, and Yoruba Religious Culture Ulrich Beck defines globalization as “a dialectical process ... which creates transnational social links and spaces, revalues local cultures and promotes third cultures.” In order to succeed, globalization requires three things: “(a) extension in space; (b) stability over time; and (c) so- cial density of the transitional networks, relationships, and image-flows” (Beck 1999: 12). Regarding globalized Yorba religious culture: (a) its extension in space is concentrated mainly in West Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States; (b) its stability over time is as old as Christianity’s; and (c) the social density of its “transnational networks, relationships, and image-flows” is high, transcending and including doz- ens of “ethnic,” “national,” “transnational,” and “diasporic’”’ cultures and communities. As Kamari Clarke explains, this process in which a once local religious tradition in West Africa has become a veritable world religion is fraught with complexities: Globalization is producing culturally portable practices through which new forms of innovations are being legitimated in new localities using various forms of knowledge. Not only are these shifts enabling changes in techniques of legitimacy, but ontologies of modern identities are in- creasingly finding expression in sociohistorical imaginaries alongside biological forms of identity. These identities are deeply embedded in historically constituted strategies of power through which the move- ment of capital, people, and ideas have spread throughout the modern world. (Clarke 2004: 1) Clearly, advances in technology and communications have abetted today’s increasingly unrestrained flow of cultures, peoples, and ideas, such that the term “global village” is transformed from cliché into real- ity. Our globe becomes a “village,” in effect, because geographic and now virtual space, with ever-increasing momentum, becomes “deterri- torialized.”’ Thus, across such deterritorialized space, in the twenty-first century our notion of what constitutes a “world religion” will radically change. If not, the concept itself will be rendered useless for describing little at all that is unique about certain religions as distinct from others. The literature on religion and globalization frequently cites the work of Roland Robertson, who helped pioneer this important subfield of
- 24. 6 JACOB K.OLUPONA AND TERRY REY globalization studies.» Among his many poignant insights, Robertson has demonstrated that because of globalization “the pressure to revi- talize societies has become a major feature of the modern world ... [and] society as such experiences both internal and external pressures to define its vital cores.’’ Thus “religion . . . is encouraged by this new circumstance” (Robertson 1989: 72).° In the case of Yoruba religious culture, Ifa has served well over and again in diverse societies as a “vital core” that has allowed communities who serve the drisd to revitalize themselves and their religion.’ Following Robertson, David Venter stresses that “globalization uni- versalizes the particular (distinct national/individual identities) and par- ticularizes the universal (global order/mankind)” (Venter 1999: 115). Thus, a particular “national” religious identity (Yortba), vis-a-vis the vital core of If4 and the drisd, becomes universal and revitalized in glo- balized Yoruba religious culture. Or, as Peter Beyer puts it, globaliza- tion serves “to reorient a religious tradition towards the global whole and away from the particular culture with which that tradition identified itself in the past,” which quite accurately reflects the unfolding of glo- balized Yoruba religious culture (Beyer 1994: 10). For Yoruba tradition, the genesis of this revitalization process is to be located in Africa, where Islam and Christianity have long spear- headed globalization. In Africa, conversion to Islam and Christianity has been an entryway into a “global system” that revitalizes the “vital core”’ of Yoruba religion. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa and especially in South Africa, African Independent Churches have Africanized Chris- tianity and revitalized African identity by creating “inter-ethnic and transcultural associative networks” that are held together by “‘overarch- ing symbols and doctrines” (Jules-Rosette 1989: 157). Bennetta Jules- Rosette’s terms designate quite accurately globalized Yoruba religion: an “inter-ethnic and transcultural associative network” (Nigerians, Cu- bans, African Americans, Trinidadians, etc.) united by “over-arching symbols and doctrines” (Ifa and the orisd). Notably, globalized Yoruba religious culture represents an alterna- tive modality in the contemporary landscape of globalization, wherein Western (and especially American) cultural, linguistic, economic, politi- cal, and religious forces take root and flourish in the farthest reaches of the globe.* Globalized Yortba religious culture is thus a prime example of what Peter Berger means by arguing that globalization “‘is neither uni- form nor unchallenged”’: “It is differently received in different countries,
- 25. Introduction 7 and itis modified, adapted, and synthesized with local cultural tradi- tions in many, often startlingly innovative ways. What is more, there are cultural movements, many of them religious, that originate outside the West and that have an impact on the West. These movements constitute alternative globalizations, opening up the intriguing possibility of alter- native modernities” (Berger 2002: 8). Historically, religions have become globalized’? mainly through peoples’ migration, missions, or conquest, some of them thereby becom- ing “world religions.” Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have all spanned the globe in these three primary ways, which each effect and include conversion. Invariably the product of “first world” scholars and presses, world religions textbooks often also include chap- ters on Jainism, Sikhism, and Zoroastrianism, while woefully overgener- alizing and unsoundly grouping “primitive” (or “primal,” “tribal” “oral,”’ “nonliterate,” or “basic’’) religions and offering the reader slender and derivative examples thereof from anthropological accounts of particu- lar “tribal customs” of Africa (often of the Yorttba), Native America, and/or the South Pacific. Such a demographic and geographic imbalance has virtually kept closed the entryway into the ranks of world religions and, because it gives the false impression of the putative world religions (and, in fact, all religions) being stagnant monoliths, renders the term itself anachronistic.’° It is our contention that the term “world religion” is only salvageable (and can only move beyond its “‘East’’/““West” cen- trism) througha critical rehabilitation in light of today’s global religious landscape, and through an uprooting of the evolutionist premise of such Western typologies: such as “high” versus “low” religions, “scriptural” versus “primitive,” “big traditions” versus “little traditions.””"’ Tomoko Masuzawa (2005: 4) argues that in spite of shifts in termi- nologies driven by concerns with political correctness, the very notion of “world religions” itself, and the ways in which it is used and taught, 1s structured by “some underlying logic silently at work in all variations”: At its simplest and most transparent, this logic implies that the great civilizations of the past and present divide into two: venerable East on the one hand and progressive West on the other. . . . In contradistinc- tion from both East and West, the tertiary group of minor religions has been considered lacking in history, or at least lacking in written history, hence its designation as preliterate. . . .On the strength of this assump- tion, these societies are relegated to a position in some sense before history or at the very beginning of history, hence primal.
- 26. 8 JACOB K.OLUPONA AND TERRY REY What happens to the notion of “world religions,” however, when a rep- resentative of the “tertiary” category, following this logic, spreads so widely and attracts millions more adherents than, say, Judaism, Sikhism, Jainism, or Zoroastrianism? This is precisely what has resulted with the globalization of Yoriba religious culture, which forces the discipline of religious studies to carefully rethink or reconstruct its categories of anal- ysis. For Masuzawa (2005: 328), in other words, our “historiography must always include historical analysis of our discourse itself.” So, rehabilitating the term “‘world religion” and freeing it from the obvious evolutionist bias of such typologies would likely expel certain demographically minor religions such as Jainism and Zoroastrianism (whose globalization largely has been limited to a handful of relatively insular immigrant communities) from the ranks of world religions and add other normally excluded traditions whose practitioners number into the tens of millions across several continents.'* Such is especially the case with Yoruba religious culture, whose central components of drisd devotion and Ifa divination have crossed oceans and continents to take root and blossom in Santeria, Candomblé, Shango, and African Ameri- can Yoruba revivalist movements. Still further afield, one scholar has reported a nascent Japanese movement that incorporates 6risd devotion, as Yoruba religious culture also takes root in the Far East. Orisa Devotion as World Religion is thus overarchingly concerned with the relationship between globalization and an emerging world re- ligion, and more generally with one of the richest religious streams of the African diaspora, which itself is clearly a central piece to the whole globalization puzzle. Thomas Tweed’s (2006: 54) carefully constructed definition of religion will be useful for our readers (and for ourselves) to keep in mind while reading the chapters that follow: “Religions are confluences of organic cultural flows that intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing on human and suprahuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries.” For all of the variation in forms of practice that Yoruba religious culture demonstrates, it is nonetheless a “confluence” of diverse “cultural flows” unified in its appeal to “suprahuman forces” known as the Orisa and the Ifa oracle, which have enabled its practition- ers to “make homes” and not only “cross boundaries” but also oceans. Unlike most diaspora scholarship, which often focuses on identity and cultural retention, thereby failing to recognize the significance and importance of commodification in the emergence of diasporic cultures, many authors in this volume are centrally concerned with the impli-
- 27. Introduction 9 cations ofthe commodification of knowledge about Yorba religion and culture in the Afro-Atlantic world and beyond. And, of course, the term “diaspora” is too limited for our purposes, for we are speaking of a global religious community whose membership is in part composed of individuals who cannot claim bio-hereditary membership in any Yoruba or African diaspora. To borrow Arjun Appadurai’s term, in a word, it is thus the religious dimension of the global Yoruba “ethnoscape” that is the collective focus of this book.'? Or, better yet, the global Yortiba “religioscape.”’ Organization and Content In our letter of invitation to conferees, we posed three questions as a framework for this project: (1) What are the dominant, normative, and essential components of Yoruba religious culture’s production of mean- ing? (2) What kinds of texts continue to legitimize Yoruba religion in its local and global contexts?’ (3) How are these texts validated, contested, and/or manipulated by the practitioners and other relevant agents and/or institutions? Of the more than forty papers delivered at the FIU confer- ence, twenty-seven, most in revised and expanded form, make up Orisd Devotion as World Religion. All of the scholars who presented papers at our conference were invited to contribute their essays to this book. Most accepted this invitation, and all of their contributions were accepted in kind. Several other presenters, for various reasons, opted not to contrib- ute to this collection, including Oyeronke Oyewumi, whose influential argument regarding gender in Yoruba culture is nonetheless discussed in the respective chapters by Rita Segato and J. Lorand Matory. Before briefly introducing the chapters that follow, we wish to note that so much valuable conference discourse, as is usually the case at academic gatherings, was the product of informal discussions among participants and attendees and thus for the most part escapes the essays in this book. Also missing here is a record of the authoritative presen- tations delivered during the practitioners’ panel by Oba Ernesto Pich- ardo, of Miami’s Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye; Iyalorisa Maria de Oxala, from Bahia; Chief Adenibi S. Ajamu, of Oy6tinji Village, South Carolina; and Chief Adedoja E. Aluko, a Miami-based African American babaldawo. Yorub4-inspired creative arts were powerfully represented at this
- 28. 10 JACOB K.OLUPONA AND TERRY REY landmark gathering. There were poetry recitals by Trinidad’s Eintou Pearl Springer, Brazil’s Miriam Alvez, and Miami babaldwo Adrian Castro; a slide presentation of the drisd-inspired art of Dominican painter Charo Oquet; a dance recital by Neri Torres and her Ilé-Ifé Afro- Cuban Dance and Music Ensemble; and a masterful drum performance by Babatunde Olatunji. With an invocation, Miami-based orisd priest (ilari oba/ilari oriate) and scholar Miguel “Willie” Ramos opened the entire gathering. Our sincere gratitude belongs to all of these people. The impressive variety of thematic concerns represented here forces us to resort to two broad geographical categories in organizing this vol- ume: “Africa” and “Beyond Africa.” Whatever their geographic focus, numerous essays in this volume are pertinent to the liveliest debates at the 1999 conference, which were on the questions of legitimacy and gender. As Yoruba religious culture becomes more heterogeneous, in part because of what Clarke (2004: 22) refers to as a “growing decen- tralization of knowledge production,” a struggle over the legitimacy to represent the Orisa and interpret Ifa deepens for religious leaders, scholars, and “lay” practitioners alike. This struggle is raising many im- portant questions, such as: How could an African American be taken seriously in her criticism of something about Yordba religious culture that the Yoruba themselves do not recognize as a problem? What roles do homophobia and machismo play in the production and interpreta- tion of Yoruba religious thought and practice? Is there any merit to a Cuban Santero’s claim that Yoruba religious culture in its purest form is found today in Cuba and Miami but not in Nigeria, where exposure to Islam has weakened “tradition”? Or is there validity to Oydtinji Vil- lage’s general theological position that Yortba-derived traditions in and from Cuba are somehow “contaminated” by Catholicism? Ultimately answers to these questions rely on answers to underlying epistemologi- cal questions such as: How is something “known” in Yortba religious culture? How is this knowledge transmitted, and what does it lose and/or gain in transcultural transmission? Who has the authority to represent this knowledge, and how is such legitimacy acquired and maintained?! What should the world most urgently learn from Yoruba religious culture? Part 1, “Yoruba Religious Culture in Africa,” comprises ten chapters, and part 2, “Yoruba Religious Culture beyond Africa,” comprises sev- enteen. The chapters begin with the conference keynote address, Wole Soyinka’s compelling essay, “The Tolerant Gods.” The chapters are fol-
- 29. Introduction 11 lowed bya postscript by John Pemberton III, and in recognition of his great contributions to Yoruba studies, we dedicated our conference to him. Part 1: Yoruba Religious Culture in Africa The keynote address is one of the highlights of any academic confer- ence, and ours was especially dignified in this regard by a Nobel Lau- reate for Literature, Wole Soyinka. Soyinka’s address, “The Tolerant Gods,” is included in its entirety here as chapter 1. In his characteristi- cally eloquent prose, Soyinka impresses upon us that the risa are a gift to humanity, being examples of how power and tolerance can blend har- moniously: “The accommodative spirit of the Yoriba gods remains the eternal bequest to a world that is riven by the spirit of intolerance, of xe- nophobia and suspicion.” Reflecting the beauty of the religion, which is itself as much as anything responsible for its appeal and hence its spread, Soyinka convincingly submits that this is a tradition that is capable of nothing less than the promotion of peace and the unity of humankind. In chapter 2, “Who Was the First to Speak? Insights from Ifa Ora- ture and Sculptural Repertoire,’’ Rowland Abiodun reveals the meanings embedded in Ifa ritual paraphernalia, such as the tkin (sixteen palm-oil nuts), iroké (divining bell), and osuin babaldwo (a diviner’s iron staff), firmly grounding his analysis in affirmation of the Ela deity/principle that empowers both explication in Ifa and Yoruba artistic expression. Abiodun convincingly argues that African art history in general must be grounded in African thought rather than Western intellectual typolo- gies; more particularly, he shows that understanding Yoruba art requires thorough knowledge of Ifa. After thus answering the question “Who was the first to speak?” Abiodun concludes his essay with the equally important question, “In what tongue?” which is both the title and the subject of Olasopé O. Oyélaran’s subsequent paper in chapter 3. Oyélaran demonstrates how Yoruba religious culture has enjoyed “‘a secure means of . . . survival” in language, “the storehouse of our essence.” Following an insightful analysis of several odu (sacred Ifa verses) that reflect language’s “piv- otal position in the Yorba cosmology and worldview,” Oyelaran as- serts that “any strategy for a systematic intervention in the promotion of the Yortba culture on the global level will most likely expose it to
- 30. 12 JACOB K.OLUPONA AND TERRY REY misappropriation and unhappy misapprehension, unless language fea- tures instrumentally in sucha strategy.” Olufemi Taiwo’s philosophical exploration of Yoruba religion in chapter 4, “Orisa: A Prolegomenon to a Philosophy of Yortba Religion,” rejects the historically problematic distinction between “traditional” Yoruba religion, Islam, and Christianity. Instead, we should perceive of Yoruba tradition as “a compendium of phenomena” that is inspired by a transcendent, “unsolvable mystery.” In their quest to understand and es- tablish harmony with this mystery, which would ultimately be revealed to them in Ifa and the risa, the Yoruba arrived at several religious prac- tices, such as esin (worship), ebo (sacrifice, offerings, and propitiation), and ni Orisd (to have an Orisa). In effect, Taiwo has laid the groundwork for a rich phenomenological understanding of Yoruba religious culture’s past, present, future, and diversity. The next three chapters in part 1 concern themselves with history. Those by Cornelius O. Adepegba (chapter 5, “Associated Place-Names and Sacred Icons of Seven Yoruba Deities’’) and Flora Edouwaye S. Kap- lan (chapter 6, “ Twice-Told Tales: Yoruba Religious and Cultural He- gemony in Benin, Nigeria”) explore archaeological evidence and oral tradition to theorize the emergence of certain deities and the question of Yoruba religious hegemony over Benin. The subsequent chapter by Sandra T. Barnes (chapter 7, ““Meta-Cultural Processes and Ritual Re- alities in the Precolonial History of the Lagos Region’’) analyzes con- temporary communal ritual in Yorubaland to provide “a spatial map of historical memory.” Both Adepegba and Kaplan are cautious of the “‘il- logicality” of much oral tradition that problematizes the reconstruction of Yoruba religious history. All the same, Adepegba deftly traces the or- igins and early geography of seven major Orisa, concluding significantly that belief in Ol6dumaré predates their deification. Likewise avoiding the pitfalls of reconstructing history from oral sources, Kaplan critically challenges the long-standing assumption in Africanist scholarship that Benin originally derived its religious traditions from the Yortba. The case of the 1983 ceremonial installation of the Olorogun Adodo (hereditary chief) in Lagos, as analyzed in chapter 7 by Barnes, reflects a cultural and religious flow in the opposite direction, as the new chief’s “warrior ancestors came to Lagos from the Kingdom of Benin,” and not vice-versa. This case thus supports Kaplan’s argument. Barnes demon- strates how the procession route in this installation ceremony “repre- sented a ‘chapter’ in the history of Lagos and revealed how one histori-
- 31. Introduction 13 cal layerafter another had been added to the community’s constitution.” Such a “meta-cultural” experience and production reflects the liberal flow of ideas and ritual practices that characterized West African reli- gion on the eve of the tranSatlantic slave trade. In chapter 8, “The Pathways of Osun as Cultural Synergy,” Diedre Badejo expounds upon the meanings and ways of the Yoruba’s most popular goddess, Osun, the Orisd of rivers. As “healer, diviner, and war- rior whose transmutability of form and substance canonize a “dialogical’ view in Yoruba thought,” for Badejo, Osun’s cult and mythology reveal how “essential to Yoruba thought is its ‘dialogical’ view of perpetuity and mutability.” This sense is nowhere more palpable than in Yoruba’s encounter with Islam, for, as H. O. Danmolé explains in chapter 9, “Re- ligious Encounter in Southwestern Nigeria: The Domestication of Islam among the Yoriba,” Yortba traditional religion “continues to express itself in the practice of Islam.” Effectively this means that Islam has for centuries been “domesticated” by indigenous religion in West Af- rica, in much the same way as has, more recently, Christianity. Both of these originally exogenous religions have undergone and continue to undergo a thorough process of commodification with indigenous Yor- uba religion. Surely one of the strongest points of agreement among Islam, Chris- tianity, and traditional Yoriba religion—apart from a shared belief in the divine origin of creation—is the great value that each tradition places on spiritually grounded human character. In each case, moreover, this is rooted in a fundamental concern for some kind of higher good and moral imperative. Barry Hallen further elucidates in chapter 10, “Yorba Moral Epistemology as the Basis for a Cross-Cultural Ethics,” the complexity and range of such ultimate values in Yoruba religious culture by explain- ing the interplay between “epistemic, moral, and aesthetic values” that constitutes this religious culture’s very cohesion. Ultimately, Yoruba’s high estimation of “coolness” in human character is the measure of both beauty and truth. Notes Hallen, here the Yoruba have offered humanity a “noble, inspiring, challenging” way of ascertaining “what should and should not be involved in one’s being and becoming an admirable hu- man being.” Together, the essays in part 1 concern the origins, modes of expres- sion, and flexibility of Yoriba religious culture in West Africa. One of the central teachings of this section is that Ifa—and especially its gener- ator of words and all other forms of human creativity, the deity/principle
- 32. 14 JACOB K.OLUPONA AND TERRY REY Ela—is the ultimate expression of Yoribé religious culture, and that hu- man cognizance of this expression relies upon language. This religious- cultural expression’s worldwide spread (i.e., its globalization) further relies on a prophetic metaphor of human duty, or moral imperative, to be of truthful and of cool character to realize the ultimate good that the Supreme Being intends for humanity on earth. Part 2: Yoruba Religious Culture beyond Africa Beyond Africa, Yortba religious culture is a major influence on religion in the Americas, on Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, and, much less, even on European Christianity. The seventeen essays in this section take us from West Africa’s Yortbaland to Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, New York, Mi- ami, South Carolina, Great Britain, Germany, and elsewhere in a collec- tive demonstration of the impressive variety of shapes and forms that Yoruba traditions have taken outside of the Mother Continent. Along the way, the authors show us that for Yoruba religious culture, the globaliza- tion process is more complex than it might at first appear. It is equally important to see that this process actually began in Af- rica long before the transatlantic slave trade, as Olabiyi Babalola Yai reminds us in chapter 11, “Yoruba Religion and Globalization: Some Reflections.” Yai outlines “three stages and modalities in the globaliza- tion of Yoruba religious traditions, namely West African, Atlantic, and post-Atlantic.”” Because attention to this important historical reality is lacking in much scholarly discourse on the modern African diaspora, we should recognize with Yai that “Yoruba religion [first] became global by sharing its drisa with the immediate, West African neighbors of the people who have come to be collectively designated as Yoruba.” Dei- ties in precolonial West Africa belonged to no single ethnic group but through their centuries-old “pendulum movement” became the common property and cultural production of several peoples, such as the Yoruba, Igbo, and Fon. Such pendular cultural diffusion in Africa prior to and during the arrival of enslaved Africans in the Americas demands a “revisionist” or “African-centric” approach to Afro-Atlantic history, as advocated by Paul Lovejoy: “An “African-centered’ focus, in contrast to the one centered in Europe or the Americas, reveals the often neglected and misunderstood impact of the African background upon the societies of
- 33. Introduction 15 the Americasand hence the relationship of slavery to modernity itself’ (Lovejoy 2000: 1-2). Such a revisionist approach to the globalization of Yoruba religious culture would thus show with Yai that by the time of the transatlantic slave tradé spirits such as Ogtn, Elegba, and Odiduwa had long been “both Fon and Yoruba, issues of origin and nationality being of little interest to practitioners, even as they may preoccupy many academics.” Revisionist or other, so much scholarship of African diasporic reli- gion focuses on indigenous African “survivals” in the Americas, whereas Afe Adogame in chapter 12, “New Paths into an Old Forest: Aladura Christianity in Europe,” reminds us that Yoruba Christianity is also a significant African agent in the globalization of Yoruba religious culture in Europe. Established by Yorttba Christians, Aladura churches have secured strong footholds throughout West Africa and in Europe and as such are contributing to the present transformation of world Christianity. As J. D. Y. Peel (2000: 1) writes: “The large scale adoption of Christian- ity has been one of the master themes of modern African history; and as the third millennium beckons, it may well prove to be of world historical significance too, contributing to a decisive shift in Christianity’s geopo- litical placement, from North to South.” Since Yortba’s encounter with Christianity is a “noteworthy segment of this process,” and since Yoruba Christianity (like Yortba Islam as seen in Danmolé’s essay in chapter 9) is integral to Yoruba religious culture, this process contributes signifi- cantly to its globalization. To adopt Lamin Sanneh’s (2001: 115) termi- nology, traditional Yoriba “ways of thought and patterns of life” served “as the functioning frame for Christianity” and Islam in Yortbaland. In the early decades of the twentieth century, around the time that an African American Pentecostal movement was being planted in Los Angeles the seeds of revival that would in one century transform world Christianity, a group of independent African churches in Nigeria emerged around various charismatic leaders, which effectively opened a new and important stream for the globalization of Yoruba religious culture.!6 Today Aladura churches count millions of members in West Africa and thousands more in Europe. Adogame explores “their vitality, their dynamism. . . and great capacity for incorporating change” behind the spread of Alddura Christianity in Great Britain and several other European countries. In a remarkable twist to the globalization saga in the religious field, Aladura Christians “have been embarking on a mis- sionary task to propagate their religious message to a wider world.” This
- 34. 16 JACOB K.OLUPONA AND TERRY REY Africanized expression of Christianity not only provides West African immigrants a sense of home in the diaspora but also becomes an impor- tant element of Europe’s Christian landscape, providing a wide variety of social services for the downtrodden of all ethnic groups. It is thus not surprising that Aladura churches attract many European converts and offer joint services with local European churches. Taken together, the chapters by Yai and Adogame underscore the great complexities to the spread of Yoriba religious culture in its myr- iad forms—complexities that are as deep today as they were during the era of the transatlantic slave trade. Laénnec Hurbon provides further indication of this in chapter 13, “Globalization and the Evolution of Haitian Vodou,” with attention paid to the changes that globalization has wrought since the Second World War in the Haitian religious field, especially through the impact of North American Pentecostalism. Like the focus of most of the essays in this section Hurbon’s focus is thus on the “post-Atlantic”’ (to use Yai’s terminology) phase of the globalization of Yordbé religious culture. Hurbon explains that post-Duvalier Vodou has become more visible in Haiti's public sphere, which has allowed for some marked changes in the religion. For instance, there are Vodou “churches” in Port-au-Prince that now feature weekly Sunday “worship” services that include the typically Pentecostal components of sermon, witnessing, faith-healing, and speaking in tongues. This is surely one of the most striking developments in Haitian Vodou since the nineteenth century—that a /wa, or an erstwhile drisa, such as Ogou, might possess a devotee in a ritual space that looks everything like an urban storefront Pentecostal church. As Mercedes Sandoval in chapter 18 (discussed be- low) believes will be the case with Santeria, in the future Hurbon sees Vodou becoming more heterogeneous, though drawing from its rich spirit of resistance to ultimately thwart any attempts to “normalize” or “unify” the religion in Haiti and abroad. Being very much a “nodal point” for African religious globalization in the Americas, it is no surprise that Haiti would greatly inspire Oba Os- eljeman Adefunmi I, the African American founder of both the Yortba Temple in New York and Oy6tinji Village in South Carolina, arguably the most significant Yoruba revivalist movement in the United States. As Ikulomi Djisovi Eason (chapter 14, “Historicizing Ifa Culture in Oyotinji African Village”) and Tracey E. Hucks (chapter 17, discussed below) explain, Adefunmi had traveled to Haiti to study Vodou and returned to establish in New York a Vodou temple in 1957, well over a decade
- 35. Introduction 17 before foundingOyotanji Village in South Carolina. While Eason com- pares Oyotanji Village with the mythic history of the origins of Ilé-Ifé, Kamari Clarke, in chapter 15, “Ritual Change and the Changing Canon: Divinatory Legitimization’of Yortba Ancestral Roots in Oyétanji Afri- can Village,” is concerned with the function of divination rituals in the creation of “traditional Yorba imaginaries” in the Oy6tinji experience. Using several rich case studies, Clarke ably demonstrates “how micro- levels of personal ritual enable people to imagine themselves as part of a community that is culturally different from their own” and “how people employ these religious techniques in conjunction with larger cultural and economic frameworks to produce larger transnational movements of Yoruba practitioners claiming cultural descent to Africa.” No single American has contributed more to the growth of drisd de- votion in the United States than Adefunmi, the late king of Oydtinji Village. That Adefunmi was initiated into the religion in Cuba in 1959, and that his earlier temples in New York initially relied heavily on Cu- ban priests to perform initiations (Capone 2006: 135), is reflective of the central role that Cuban drisd devotion has played in the establish- ment and growth of the religion in the United States, especially in New York and Miami. In chapter 16, “The Dynamic Influence of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and African Americans in the Growth of Ocha in New York City,” Marta Moreno Vega traces the early development of New York’s La Regla de Ocha, or Santeria, the most voluminous stream of Afro-Cuban religion. Initially, La Regla made an impact in the city be- ginning in the 1930s. Vega’s chapter is an important step toward un- derstanding the unifying role of Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and African Americans in developing “new possibilities in the growth of African spiritual consciousness” in New York, and by extension throughout the United States. Tracey Hucks’s essay, chapter 17, “From Cuban Santeria to African Yoruba: Evolutions in African American Orisa History, 1959-1970,” sheds additional light on the spread of Yoruba religion from Cuba to Har- lem and throughout the United States during the crucial historical period of 1959 to 1970. It is important to understand this spread, she argues, as located within the African American struggle against oppression, for the “African American story within the Yoruba tradition is one of deliberate agency and choice continuously mediated by symbolic interpretations of the continent of Africa, racialized notions of self-identity, and religious encounters with Spanish-speaking Caribbean communities.”
- 36. 18 JACOB K.OLUPONA AND TERRY REY The essays by Eason, Clarke, Vega, and Hucks thus illustrate the ma- jor influence of Santeria on the spread of Yorba religion in the United States and permit us to call Afro-Cuban religion one of the richest streams down which Yortba religious culture has become globalized. In colonial Cuba, this stream was fed by Catholic-sanctioned cabildos that grouped Africans of common ethnic origin and thereby facilitated communal ceremony. After the cabildos, it may be that the Castro Revo- lution of 1959 has been the most catalytic sociopolitical influence on the development of Santeria. As demonstrated by Mercedes Cros Sandoval in chapter 18, “Santeria in the Twenty-first Century,” the Revolution would result in a remarkable change in Santeria’s racial and class com- position, as white Cuban elites turned to the religion by the thousands to secure their cubanidad in the Miami exilic experience. Meanwhile, converts from other Hispanic immigrant groups are further diversifying the ethnic tapestry of the religion. Sandoval attributes Santeria’s remark- able growth in the United States to the protection offered by the drisa to those negotiating the “uprootedness”’ of the immigration experience, and by providing for its members, through divination, initiation, and the use of magico-religious ritual paraphernalia, a veritable “mental health delivery system.” Agreeing with the basic premise of Sandoval’s assessment, Juan J. Sosa concludes in chapter 19, “La Santeria: An Integrating, Mythologi- cal Worldview in a Disintegrating Society,” that for Cubans in Miami, Santeria “becomes a guiding social mechanism, which brings empha- sis on past heritages and historical roots, allowing for some form of identity,” much like Yoruba religion had functioned for enslaved Afri- cans throughout the colonial New World. Using a rich theoretical para- digm influenced by Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, and Peter Berger, Sosa demonstrates the powerful function of symbols to be essential to Santeria’s spread. Santeria’s “dominant symbols” (Ochun, Chango, and Babalu-aye) place Yoruba religious culture at the very center of popular Cuban American Catholicism in syncretized form, respectively as the Virgin of Caridad del Cobre, Cuba’s patron saint, San Lazaro, and Santa Barbara. Like Santeria, the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé represents a major stream for globalized Yorba religious culture. In both cases, mu- sic and dance express and thereby maintain the meaning of dominant symbols such as Shango. This notion is cogently articulated by José Flavio Pessoa de Barros, who discusses Brazil’s sacred Shango music
- 37. Introduction 19 in chapter20, “Myth, Memory, and History: Brazil’s Sacred Music of Shango,” illustrating how music is one of the keys to Brazil’s memo- ries of Africa and its identity as the largest national community in the modern African diaspora. In his careful analysis of chants sung around this drisd’s bonfire, Pessoa de Barros reveals the source of Shango’s elevated place in the Candomblé pantheon: as “Shango unaffected by death”’ he is “chief of earth.” In a groundbreaking essay (chapter 21, “Yoruba Sacred Songs in the New World”’), José Jorge de Carvalho traces the lineage of Recife’s most important Xango house, Sitio of Agua Fria, to a Yoruba priestess in the nineteenth century. Within a few generations of her death, com- mand of the Yortba language was lost to the community, opening up new avenues of mythopoetics in the Recife Yoruba corpus that has been preserved over the years in sacred chants committed to memory among priests. Having worked with this corpus for more than twenty-five years, Carvalho demonstrates the central place of such chants in “the extraor- dinary resilience of the Yortba diaspora religious community” and lays a solid foundation for the comparative analysis of Yoruba mythopoetry from sources throughout the New World, such as Cuba, Trinidad, and New York City. One of the essential components of and explanations for the spread of Yoruba religion is its provision of meaning. In whatever form, Yoruba religious culture is ultimately a worldview that explains to its practi- tioner the meaning of life and how to live and die accordingly. Accord- ing to Reginaldo Prandi, in chapter 22, “Axexé Funeral Rites in Brazil’s Orisa Religion: Constitution, Significance, and Tendencies,” Candom- blé in Brazil is a combination of mostly Yorba traditions consisting of “ritual aspects and concepts of humanity and the world, including attitudes toward life and death. These concepts explain and guide the fundamental rites of initiation, especially the most significant, the fu- neral rites called axexé (djéjé).” Yet one of the costs of the rapid spread of Yortbé religious culture the world over, notes Prandi, is a loss of the essential initiation-dependent meaning of the axexé, especially in Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro, where Prandi has observed the recent prolif- eration of thousands of drisd “houses,” many of which are founded and led by dubiously trained priests who nonetheless claim authority. With the advent of the Internet, questions of representational author- ity in Yorba religious culture have become even muddier, especially in the United States. In the year leading up to the Miami conference, we
- 38. 20 JACOB K.OLUPONA AND TERRY REY received several e-mails from drisd devotees demanding that their baba- lawo or “godfathers” be invited to present papers or receive our homage. One went so far as to threaten that if his gba from Los Angeles were not brought to the event, there would be tragic consequences! This e-mail also linked us to the gba’s colorful Web site. George Edward Brandon is following such contentious exchanges among the neo- Yoruba com- munity on the Internet, noting that with over “160 Web sites devoted to one aspect or another of Yoruba religion,” it would appear that “the orisha have begun to colonize cyberspace.” In chapter 23, “From Oral to Digital: Rethinking the Transmission of Tradition in Yoruba Religion,” Brandon traces the complex history of the production of oral and literary texts in Yoruba and Yoruba-derived religion to contextualize and theo- rize the meaning of cyberspace and the rise therein of “cyber-elders”’ in Yoruba religious culture and the forceful role that the Internet is begin- ning to play in its globalization. Joseph M. Murphy likewise critically analyzes the impact of the In- ternet on the spread of Orisa traditions in chapter 24, “Orisa Traditions and the Internet Diaspora.” Because “new patterns of devotion to them [the drisa] have been developing beyond any single person or house’s ability to quantify or sanction them,” unprecedented and at times unde- sirable changes are occurring in the religion. For one example, the Inter- net tends to anthropomorphize the risa, thus removing the spirits “from the ceremonial context where the orisd have traditionally ‘lived.’” One serious implication of this is the detachment of the drisd from “‘stones and herbs so fundamental to traditional drisd devotion.” One of the most heated debates at the Florida International Univer- sity conference concerned the meaning of gender in Yoruba religious culture. The tenor of this debate is well reflected in Rita Laura Segato’s essay (chapter 25, “Gender, Politics, and Hybridism in the Transnation- alization of Yoruba Culture”). Segato engages the analyses of Oyewumi Oyeronke, who argues that gender distinctions were unknown in Yordbaé culture before the colonial era, and J. Lorand Matory, who disagrees strongly with Oyewumi’s argument. Segato weaves her own rich experi- ence as an ethnographer of Yoruba traditions in Brazil into this debate, demonstrating, among other important insights, that the “complex gen- der system” working “in the traditional Yoriba religious polis was one of the pillars . . . of the solid expansion of Yoriba religion and cosmol- ogy in Brazil, and from Brazil to other countries.” Both the conference discourse and the voluminous e-mail corre-
- 39. Introduction 1 spondence surroundingthe event made it clear that many practitioners only trust the work of initiate scholars. There was also revealed a tendency among practitioners and even some academics to favor the opinions and insights of native Yoruba scholars over and above those of non- Yoruba scholars. In chapter 26, “Is There Gender in Yoruba Culture?” J. Lorand Matory challenges any facile acceptance of scholarly portrayals of gender in Yoruba religious culture that may result from such prejudice. Drawing from a rich assortment of ritualistic and linguistic examples throughout the Yoruba-Atlantic world, Matory argues that gender distinctions are quite rigid in Yoruba culture, thus challenging claims that Yoruba reli- gious culture is “flexible” and “tolerant.” For Matory, this entire dispute is part of a larger contest for authority between Africa and its diaspora. Reflecting on over thirty years of study of Yoruba religion in Nige- ria, John Pemberton III happily reports that his ‘“‘own experience has not been one that has suffered such a dichotomy,” being instead an “intel- lectual and spiritual sojourn” of “respectful dialogue.” Initially drawn by “the remarkable artistry of the Yoruba people” in the early 1970s, Pem- berton has long engaged in fruitful collaborations with Yoruba priests, artists, and scholars of religion and has written some of the field’s most important texts. We are thus most honored that his postscript concludes this book. In the end, thanks to the outstanding scholarship of the contributors to this volume, Orisa Devotion as World Religion contains important les- sons about who was the first to speak Yoruba religious culture and in what language; about the ultimate goodness and coolness that Yoruba religion offers the world; and about how the multicultural, multilingual, multilayered traditions and expressions of individuals and communities who govern their lives according to Ifa and in harmony with the orisa have indeed helped Yoriba become one of the world’s great religions. To some observers such as Soyinka, this amounts to an offering that Yoriba religious culture places on the altar of humanity: “Orisa is the antithesis of tyranny and dictatorship—what greater gift than this tol- erance, this accommodation, can humanity demand from the world of spirit?” As in virtually all “world religions,” we are taught here that the gods have done their part—the rest is up to us. To the extent that we fail to keep up our half of this cosmological bargain, even the most tolerant gods may legitimate the horrors of injustice, brutality, and exploitation. Why this occurs and how this most tragic of human tendencies can be
- 40. 22 JACOB K.OLUPONA AND TERRY REY averted in our rapidly globalizing world are questions that, far from be- ing merely academic concerns, loom large and belie the existential ques- tion as to whether Yorba or any other religious culture will actually see the next millennium. Notes 1. Although we cannot know with any precision the number of Yoruba victims of the transatlantic slave trade, since most contemporary records indi- cate port of origin and often erroneously group varied ethnic groups under ge- neric headings. Eltis (2003) has developed methodologies that suggest “Yoruba speakers made up less than 9 percent of Africans carried to the New World,” over two-thirds of them to St. Domingue, Cuba, and Bahia. For other useful discussions of ethnic demographics among African victims of the transatlantic slave trade, see Curtin 1969; Lovejoy 1982, 1989, and 2003; Eltis 2001; and Eltis et al. 2000. 2. We respectfully recognize that many practitioners of Yoruba-derived re- ligions in Cuba and the United States prefer “Lukumi” or ““Regla de Ocha” to “Santeria” as the name for their religion. For the sake of brevity, we nonetheless group them all under the title “Santeria” in this introduction. 3. Besides support from the Department of Religious Studies and the Afri- can—New World Studies Program, funding for the conference was also received from the FIU College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Transnational and Comparative Global Studies, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center, and the Asian Studies Program. 4. We agree with Olufemi Taiwo’s caution in his essay in this volume that the term “African Traditional Religion” (or “Yoruba Traditional Religion’) “1s conceptually problematic, perhaps vacuous . . . [since] the liturgies, icons, etc., of much that is identified as ‘African Traditional Religion’ have not only changed, their representations show that they have been importing foreign bod- ies and assimilating same.” J. D. Y. Peel reflects Taiwo’s concern in writing of the impact of Christian missions on the Yoruba in the nineteenth century, at a time when ‘Yoruba traditional religion was less precisely that than part of communal furniture, an omnipresent facility which nearly everyone turned to for protection and empowerment” (Peel 2000: 13). By “Yoruba religious cul- ture’ we mean then more this “communal furniture” that is now global than any putatively pure, pre-contact indigenous Yortba traditional religion. As such, Yoruba expressions of Christianity and Islam are included in the term ““Yortba religious culture,” whose foundation and thrust remain nonetheless, at least in spirit, Ifa, and the Orisa.
- 41. Introduction 23 5. Seein particular Hammond 1985; Beckford and Luckman 1989; Buhl- mann 1990; Robertson and Garret 1991; Bruce 1992; Lechner 1992; Beyer 1994; Ahmed and Donnan 1994; Poewe 1994; Kurtz 1995; Van der Veer 1996; Berger 1999; Haynes 1999; Stackhouse and Paris 2000; Esposito and Watson 2000; Bayes and Tohidi 2001; Peterson, Vasquez, and Williams 2001; Coleman 2001; Hopkins et al. 2001; Wolffe 2002; Prebis and Bauman 2002; Moham- madi 2002; Center on Religion and Democracy 2002; Reid 2003; Jenkins 2003; and Juergensmeyer 2003. 6. See also Robertson and Chirico 1985. 7. As Peter Beyer (1994: 3) explains, “the global system . . . encourages the creation and revitalization of particular identities as a way of gaining control over systemic power. It is in the context of this last feature that religion plays one of its significant roles in the development, elaboration, and problematiza- tion of the global system.” 8. On the complexities of this process in Brazil that are beyond the scope of the present essay, see Matory 2005, and in the United States see Clarke 2003 and Capone 2006. On methodological issues in the study of the globalization of Yoruba culture in general, also beyond the present essay’s scope, see Childs and Falola 2004. 9. By “globalized” we mean quite simply “become global.” 10. Some recent world religions textbooks offer brief comment on the ef- fects of globalization on religion. For example, with perhaps a measure of ex- aggeration, Robert Ellwood and Barbara McGraw (1999: 2) claim: “In today’s pluralism and world community, almost any faith from anywhere is a presence and option throughout the world.” They do not, however, go so far as to say this would make all religions world religions; neither do they offer a definition of what precisely a “world religion” is. Michael Molloy (1999: 457) offers this reflection: ‘““We cannot help but wonder how this cultural unification will affect religion. So far, most of the world’s religions have remained fairly separate traditions—even those that have spread to different countries and cultures. But globalism may make it impossible for separate religions to remain separate. ... Globalism will also challenge parochialism and thus will contest any incom- plete visions of reality offered by traditional religions.” 11. “Perhaps the best known explicit typology was brought to life by Weber and elaborated by his followers as the great and the little traditions. Because these categories were grounded in an evolutionary perspective, the tendency when the two types of systems were studied in the same frame of reference— and here is where the legacy persists—to give the great traditions [i.e., ‘the world religions’], such as Islam or Christianity, a central position and the little traditions a peripheral ones. . . . When these attributes are compared, global ide- ologies are seen to influence; little ideologies, to respond” (Barnes 1989: 21). 12. “More than 70 million African and New World peoples participate in, or
- 42. 24 JACOB K.OLUPONA AND TERRY REY are closely familiar with, religious systems that include Ogin, and this number is increasing rather than declining” (Barnes 1989: 1). Surely, the worldwide total of drisd devotees has increased considerably since Barnes’s estimate in the introduction to her landmark volume on the global expansion of devotion to Ogiin, the drisd of iron and most things closely associate with metals, like war- fare and some dimensions of farming. For a similar volume that focuses instead on global variations in devotion to Osun, the drisd of fresh waters and feminine power, see Murphy and Sanford 2001. 13. “By ethnoscape, I mean the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals constitute an essential fea- ture of the world and appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree” (Appadurai 1996: 33). 14. By “texts,” we of course mean primarily oral texts, or “‘orature.” 15. Beyer (1994: 83) opines that for religion struggles over authoritative representation are a natural byproduct of globalization: ‘““The problem of reli- gious influence arises only when religion tries to encompass too many lives that are manifestly ‘about’ different things.” 16. For an excellent discussion of the rise of Pentecostalism, see Cox 1995. It is noteworthy that the early twentieth century was also the period in African and world religious history that saw the emergence of the Kimbanguist Church in Congo, which like Aladura has enjoyed tremendous success in Europe as well. See MacGaffey 1983 and Asch 1983. In South Africa, Zionist churches were emerging in the 1920s and 1930s, around the very time, moreover, that Ethiopianism gave birth to the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica. See, respec- tively, Sundkler 1961 and Barrett 1988. On the Aladura movement, see Peel 1968. References Abiodun, Rowland. 1987. ‘The Future of African Studies: An African Perspec- tive.” In African Art Studies: The State of the Discipline. Papers presented at a Symposium organized by the National Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution, 63—89. Washington, DC: National Museum of Art. Ahmed, Akbar S., and Hastings Donnan, eds. 1994. Islam, Globalization and Postmodernity. London: Routledge. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Global- ization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Asch, Susan. 1983. L’Eglise du Prophéte Simon Kimbangu: Des ses origines a son role actuel au Zaire. Paris: Karthala.
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- 44. 26 JACOB K.OLUPONA AND TERRY REY Eltis, David. 2001. “The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment.” William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 1: 17-46. . 2003. “The Diaspora of Yoruba Speakers, 1650-1865.” In The Yo- ruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, ed. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs, 17-39. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eltis, David, et al. 2000. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD- ROM. Book & CD-ROM ed. New York: Cambridge University Press. Esposito, John L., and Michael Watson, eds. 2000. Religion and Global Order. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Hammond, Phillip E., ed. 1985. The Sacred in a Secular Age: Toward the Revi- sion in the Scientific Study of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press. Haynes, Jeffrey, ed. 1999. Religion, Globalization, and Political Culture in the Third World. New York: Palgrave. Hopkins, Dwight N., et al., eds. 2001. Religions/Globalizations: Theories and Cases. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jenkins, Philip. 2003. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christian- ity. New York: Oxford University Press. Juergensmeyer, Mark, ed. 2003. Global Religions: An Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Jules-Rosette, Bennetta. 1989. “The Sacred in African New Religions.” In The Changing Face of Religion, ed. James A. Beckford and Thomas Luckman, 147-62. London: Sage. Kurtz, Lester. 1995. Gods in the Global Village: The World’s Religions in So- clological Perspective. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge/Sage. Lechner, Frank J., ed. 1992. “The Sociology of Roland Robertson: A Sympo- sium.” Special issue, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 31, no. 2. Lovejoy, Paul E. 1982. “The Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis.” Journal of African History 23, no. 4: 473-501. . 1989. “The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa: A Review of the Literature.” Journal of African History 30, no. 3: 365—94. . 2000. “Identifying Enslaved Africans in the African Diaspora. ” In Identity in the Shadow of Slavery, ed. Paul E. Lovejoy, 1-29. London: Continuum. . 2003. “The Yoruba Factor in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.” In The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, ed. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs, 40-55. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. MacGaffey, Wyatt. 1983. Modern Kongo Prophets. Bloomington: Indiana Uni- versity Press. Masuzawa, Tomoko. 2005. The Invention of World Religions; or, How Euro- pean Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- 45. Introduction 27 Matory, J.Lorand. 2005. Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomble. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mohammadi, Ali, ed. 2002. Islam Encountering Globalisation. London: Routledge. Molloy, Michael. 1999. Experiencing the World’s Religions: Tradition, Chal- lenge, and Change. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield. Murphy, Joseph M., and Mei-Mei Sanford. 2001. Osun across the Waters: A Yortibé Goddess in Africa and the Americas. Bloomington: Indiana Uni- versity Press. Peel, J. D. Y. 1968. Aladura: A Religious Movement among the Yoruba. Oxford University Press. . 2000. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Blooming- ton: Indiana University Press. Pemberton, John, III. 1995. ““Yortiba Religion.” In The Encyclopedia of Re- ligion, vol. 15-16, ed. Mircea Eliade, 535-38. New York: Simon and Schuster. Peterson, Anna, Manuel Vasquez, and Phillip J. Williams. 2001. Christianity, Social Change and Globalization in the Americas. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Poewe, Karla, ed. 1994. Charismatic Christianity as Global Culture. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Prebis, Charles S., and Martin Bauman, eds. 2002. Westward Dharma: Bud- dhism beyond Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reid, Jennifer, ed. 2003. Religion and Global Culture: New Terrain in the Study of Religion and the Work of Charles Long. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Robertson, Roland. 1989. ““A New Perspective on Religion and Secularization in the Global Context.” In Secularization and Fundamentalism Reconsid- ered: Religion and the Political Order, vol. 3, ed. Jeffrey K. Hadden and Anson Shupe, 63-77. New York: Paragon. Robertson, Roland, and JoAnn Chirico. 1985. “Humanity, Globalization, and Worldwide Religious Resurgence: A Theoretical Exploration.” Sociologi- cal Analysis 46, no. 3: 219-42. Robertson, Roland, and William. R. Garret, eds. 1991. Religion and Global Order. New York: Paragon. Sanneh, Lamin. 2001. “The African Transformation of Christianity: Compar- ative Reflections on Ethnicity and Religious Mobilization in Africa.” In Religions/Globalizations: Theories and Cases, ed. Dwight N. Hopkins et al., 105-34. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stackhouse, Max L., and Peter Paris, eds. 2000. God and Globalization. Vol. 2: Religion and the Powers of the Common Life. Philadelphia: Trinity Press International.
- 46. 28 JACOB K.OLUPONA AND TERRY REY Sundkler, Bengt. 1961. Bantu Prophets in South Africa. London: Oxford Uni- versity Press. Tweed, Thomas A. 2006. Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Van der Veer, Peter. 1996. Conversion to Modernity: The Globalization of Christianity (Zones of Religion). London: Routledge. Venter, David. 1999. “Globalization and the Cultural Effects of the World- Economy in a Semiperiphery: The Emergence of African Indigenous Churches in South Africa.” Journal of World-Systems Research 5, no. 1: 104-26. Wolffe, John, ed. 2002. Global Religious Movements in Regional Contexts. London: Ashgate.
- 47.
- 49. x X is The Tolerant Gods WOLESOYINKA I shall begin by commenting that this gathering of minds on the eve of the millennium [Conference on the Globalization of Yoruba Relli- gious Culture, held in December 1999], to explore the Yoruba world, one that I hope proves to be a quest beyond a mere academic exercise, was extremely timely. By that comment, I do not wish to contribute to the triumphalist hijacking of Time by one specific religion—the judeo- christian. Fortunately for my cultural peace of mind, however, I believe that any recognizable watershed of human history, and even a mere cal- endar notation, deserves to be seized upon and made to serve even those whose mores and cultures maintain their suspicious distance from the genesis and cultural implications of such an epoch—if only as a moti- vation for their own internal stock-taking, and the relationship of their history to the other world in celebration. You will find, for instance, that many christians today follow, if only partially, the annual moslem dis- cipline of fasting; they see in it an opportunity to embark on an internal spiritual dialogue, or reflection, through a mortification of the flesh, an exercise that is made easier when it takes place within the supportive context of the extended family of faiths. Mind you, it must be conceded 31
- 50. 32 WOLE SOYINKA that,for some, it is the ritual breaking of the fast at dusk with its sybaritic dimensions that offers the greatest attraction and fills their hours of self- privation with the anticipation of compensatory excess—don’t take my word for it, just ask some of my christian acquaintances why they put on so much weight during the moslem season of Ramadan! Still, the lesson holds. The millennium is, for the majority, an occa- sion for the Great Global Party; nonetheless, it cannot fail to trigger, for some of us, a reassessment of some of the great ideas that have domi- nated the world till now and, in the process, compel us to revisit those that, comparatively speaking, have either fallen or been pushed to the wayside, as if they have been nothing more than fleeting aberrations in the course of human development. Even if such ideas or systems of beliefs have totally vanished, the sense of the “passing of an era” and the threshold of anew one compel us to reconsider whether or not, in a mo- ment of carelessness or globalization intoxication, some grains that once constituted the basis of our nourishment have not indeed been permitted to fly off with the chaff. Those of us who insist on a belief in the unity, indeed, the indivisibil- ity of the human community, no matter how buffeted such a concept has been within this century, especially by the anti-human excesses of ideol- ogy, religion, and doctrines of separatism such as racism, social darwin- ism, or apartheid, must consider ourselves fortunate if we happen to be heirs to certain systems of beliefs that have survived those overweening themes that appear to have successfully divided up or still contest the world among themselves. Let us name some of these: communism and capitalism, christianity and islam—plus their expansionist organs old and new in the struggle for a shifting world order—the Crusade and the Jihad, fascism and democracy, the judeo-christian Euro-American world and Arabo-Islamic consortiums, etc., plus all their extended families, aggressive offshoots, and client relations—and which, despite demon- strable and glaring errors that prove so costly to humanity itself and constantly disorganize communities, continue to arrogate to themselves the monopoly of Truth and Perfection. This mentality of binary concep- tualization of a world order much, much older than many people bother to recollect makes it easy, on the one hand, to simplify “the Other,” to belittle or vaporize it. On the other hand, it actually serves an ironic and contrary purpose. Even while remaining an instrument of the original he- gemonic project, it eliminates, through a mere wave of the hand or aver-
- 51. The Tolerant Gods33 sion of the eyes, the existence of pluralistic actualities both in ideas and in human organizations, and thus saves up energy for the final onslaught between only two monoliths. To make this concrete: in the struggle be- tween the (communist) East and (capitalist) West, was there ever much of a “worthy opponent” status accorded to any other ideological alterna- tives? No! Every concept of human organization outside these two was something primitive, inchoate, an aberration, a rudimentary form of one or the other, or a needless distraction. Exceptions are few and far between. Traverse human history at any moment from antiquity to the present, and you will encounter this pattern of collaboration between the most powerful contending systems: let us join hands to take care of these minnows so we can then roam the ocean at will, devoid of minor irritants—you take the West side of the longi- tude and we take the East. This has been the pragmatic motivation of nu- merous historic pacts and treaties in both major and minor keys, from the European wars of possession of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the opening up of the New World to the life-and-death struggle of capitalism and communism that has ended in a pyrrhic victory for one. In the process, alternative models and options in the creation of a just community of man are ridiculed, vilified, crushed, or simply rendered unworkable. Let us, in this connection, always call to mind the lessons of the Hitler-Stalin pact, which remains the most notorious and most chastening political symbol of the collaborationist nature of seemingly incompatible mega-themes within this century. In the religious sector, the exemplar for this is no less uncompromis- ing. Respect between two “world religions” but contempt or invisibility for all others. One example: the religion of islam accepts one other, juda- ism (and its gigantesque offspring, christianity) as a partner-rival—the absolute limits of its tolerance—since all others are regarded as offences against the Supreme Deity. Proselytization by its arch-rival is, however, rigidly forbidden, punishable by death in some nations. And conver- sion is equally fatal, being regarded as the capital crime of apostasy. As for the followers of all other faiths, they are obliged to convert or face permanent social exclusion, harassment, and even, in the case of members of the baha’i faith—death. The christians—roman catholics or protestant—for their part routinely relegate hinduism, buddhism, etc., to a framework of oriental quaintness, certainly not to be considered as belonging to the family of faiths with an equal status. Let us constantly
- 52. 34 WOLE SOYINKA recallthat it is within this hegemonic context, the union, not really of opposites but of opposants for the destruction of minor contenders, that our exploration of the Yoruba world is taking place. That world—let us begin where it all begins, within human con- sciousness—that world repudiates the exclusivist tendency, as is demon- strable in its most fundamental aspect—the induction of a new living entity into the world and its dedication to the spiritual custody of unseen forces. A child is born. Quite early in its life, as early as the parents discern in this new organism traces of personality, those rudimentary characteristics that will some day coalesce into what will become known as character—iwd—this newcomer is taken to the babal4awo—the priest of divination—who adds his tutored observations to the signs that have already been remarked by parents and relations. Sometimes, the baba- ldwo will take the child through the actual divination process. Mostly, however, it is his shrewd eyes, extensive experience, and honed intuition that decide for him—this, he observes, is a child of Osun, or this is a child of Sang6, or Obatala. It does not matter that neither parent is a fol- lower of any such deity, or that no one in the entire household or in the history of the family has ever been an initiate of the god—the child, it is accepted, brings his or her own ori into the world. It is futile to attempt to change it or to impose one on him or her. Yet even this allotment of the child’s spiritual aura is not definitive, nor is it exclusive. Some other life passage—a series of setbacks, a dis- play of talent, creative or leadership precocity, or indeed some further revelation of earlier hidden traits such as a tendency toward clairvoy- ance, or simply the child’s habit of enigmatic utterances—may lead the babalawo to conclude that a different guardian deity is indicated for the child, or an additional one. And thus, a new deity is admitted into the household. There is no friction, no hostility. All gods, the Yoruba under- stand, are manifestations of universal phenomena of which humanity is also a part. Ifa is replete with odui—those verses that are at once moral- ity tales, historic vignettes as they are filled with curative prescriptions, verses that narrate at the same time the experiences of both mortals and immortals for whom Ifa divined, advised, and who either chose to obey or ignore Ifa. The skeptics are neither penalized nor hounded by any su- pernatural forces. The narratives indicate that they simply go their way. Of course, If is not without its own tendency toward a little self- promotion, and so we find that Ifa is also filled with verses that speak of the headstrong and cynics who merely fall deeper and deeper into
- 53. The Tolerant Gods35 misfortunes, until they return to the original path already mapped out by OrGnmila. There is a crucial difference, however. It is never Orfin- mila, the divination god of Ifa, or any agent of his who is responsible for their misfortunes—no, it is their ori, destiny, the portion that they brought with them into the world, that very definition of their being that Ifa merely diagnosed before leaving them to their own devices, to their own choices. Nor is it, for instance, the resentment or vengeance of one rejected deity that proceeds to take up his or her own cause by assailing the luckless head of the unwilling acolyte—the gods remain totally in- different toward whoever does or does not follow them or acknowledge their place in mortal decisions. The priest of Ifa never presumes to take up cudgels on behalf of the slighted deity. No excommunication is pro- nounced; a fatwa is unheard of. The gods are paradigms of existence. Monotheism is thus only an attempted summation of such paradigms. Within it, all the inevitable variety and contradictions of human thought and physical phenomena, concepts of which are personified by the multiple deities, aspire to har- monization, representing the ideal to which humanity itself, as a unity, can hope to aspire. We find, therefore, that Revelation as Infallibility is a repugnant concept in Yoruba religion—how can you reveal as infallible the aspects of what are in themselves only the projected ideal of human striving! If the source of such striving—the mortal vessel—is fallible, then its vision, its revelation of ultimate possibilities, must be constantly open to question, to testing, by the elected human receptacle and other human vessels to which such revelations are transmitted. By the same proceeding, the notion of “apostasy” is inconceivable in Yoruba reli- gion, that alleged crime of mortal damnation—in the eye of some ac- claimed world religions—where the only guaranteed cure is execution, preferably by the supposedly salvationist means of stoning to death. It was an unfortunate accident that Religion and Theology were ever linked with philosophy, a paradoxical coupling, since philosophy means a love of —and, consequently, a search for, indeed a passion for—truth. I say paradoxical because the experience of our world has been the very opposite. The dominant religions of the world and their theologies as received in present day have meant, not the search for or the love of, but the sanctification and consolidation—at whatever cost, including mas- sacres and mayhem—of mere propositions of Truth, declared Immu- table Revelation. It has meant the manipulation of Truth, the elevation of mere Texts to Dogma and Absolutes, be those Texts named Scriptures
- 54. 36 WOLE SOYINKA orCatechisms. This failure to see transmitted Texts, with all their all- too-human adumbrations, as no more than signposts, as parables that may lead the mind toward deeper quarrying into the human condition, its contradictions and bouts of illumination, a reexamination of the phe- nomena of Nature, of human history and human strivings, of the build- ing of Community—it is this failure that has led to the substitution of dogma for a living, dynamic spirituality. And this is where the Yoruba deities have an important message to transmit to the world. There is an urgency about this, as the world is increasingly taken over by the most virulent manifestations of dogmatic adhesion, the nur- turing terrain of which even tends to undermine my earlier attribution of such eruptions to Textual or Scriptural authority. In many of these instances, the defenders of the Text have never even seen the Text or are incapable of reading them, yet they swear by them and indeed presume to act on them. The explanation for this, of course, is the power of oral- ity. The interpreters of text—even when read upside down—establish a hypnotic hold on the innate spiritual yearnings of their captive, often illiterate community. Their word is law, and where they claim to in- terpret the Word, their renditions of liturgy and catechisms take on an extra dimension of divinational authority over their adherents. Yoruba “scriptural” renditions reduce this danger of subservience by making the people of Ifa key participants in the processes of divination, taking them through a route where the prognostic verses are selected in suc- cession, intoned, and come to rest only when the suppliant recognizes a parallel of his or her predicament in the invocations of the priest. As for the actual worship of the orisa, their liturgy does not pursue the path of separation between priest and laity, but the very effacement of distances, a communal celebration of the collective, direct intimacy between the gods and their followers. If the sole achievement of our voyage into the world of the orisa is to open a few eyes and ears to the subtle habit of denigration of Af- rican spirituality through the habit of elision, we would have contrib- uted significantly to the ability of the world of knowledge to commence a serious critique of itself. I began by commenting that this voyage is timely, and, of course, that reference was addressed to a global context, the calendar notation that happens to have been universally adopted but remains a religious milestone on a road that is anything but universal. There is, however, a far more specific timing on my mind, one that re- lates to a hundred million people and is filled with retrogressive portents
- 55. Another Random ScribdDocument with Unrelated Content
- 56. That was theeast; it had been the east ever since she was born; it had been the east ever since the the world was made; and it was the sun. It was nothing to see the full moon in the east; the last time she went driving with Miss Marion and Mr. Roger they saw the full moon in the east and he talked about it. This was not the full moon. “Mrs. Evans, Mrs. Evans, quick, quick,” she called, excitedly, fearing that her miracle would vanish. Hurried steps crossed the new kitchen and Mrs. Evans appeared. “What is it, child? Don’t wake Nettie.” “Look,” said Judith, with the dignity of a youthful prophetess, pointing to the apparition; “see the sun in the east in the afternoon.” Mrs. Evans stepped up the plank, and looked. It was the sun in the east in the afternoon. “Well, I declare!” ejaculated Mrs. Evans, “that does beat all I ever saw. Where did it come from? How could it get there?” Startled, she turned, and toward the west, there was the big, round sun shining in all his glory. “Oh, I see,” with a breath of relief; “I thought the world must be coming to an end. It is the reflection. Look, don’t you see? the sun is opposite the window. But it is a wonderful sight. I wish it would stay until I could call the neighbors in.” Judith looked at the west and reasoned about it; she turned toward the east, then to the west, then to the window again. “So it is,” with an inflection of disappointment. Mrs. Evans laughed softly and hurried back to the new kitchen.
- 57. Judith pumped herglass of water with the radiance of two suns in her face. “Little girl, little girl,” called a voice from a buggy in the road, “will you direct me to the parsonage?” “Go on straight up the hill, turn to the right and see the church; the next house is the parsonage,” she replied with ready exactness. “Thank you,” said a second voice, with a foreign accent; the face bent forward was very dark, with dark eyes, and dark beard. Half an hour afterward she found Miss Marion in her own room, and before they went down to the parlor to the piano, she and Miss Marion read together in First Samuel. They were reading the Bible through together; Marion told her brother that it was a revelation to her to read the Bible with a girl, and an old woman; it was looking forward and looking backward. Judith read her three verses and then gave a joyful exclamation:— “‘And as they went up the hill to the city, they found young maidens going out to draw water, and said unto them: Is the seer here? “‘And they answered them and said, He is, behold he is before you; make haste, now, for he came to-day to the city, for there is a sacrifice of the people to-day in the high place; as soon as ye be come into the city, ye shall straightway find him, before he go up to the high place to eat, for the people will not eat until he come, because he doth bless the sacrifice; and afterwards they eat that be bidden. Now, therefore, get you up; for about this time ye shall find him.’ Oh, Miss Marion, that is like me. I was getting a drink of water and I sent two men to find the Bensalem seer.” “Even Saul couldn’t find the way without the maidens,” reflected Marion.
- 58. “And they wereput in the story for all the world to read about; I wish people wouldn’t forget about girls now-a-days.” “Who does?” asked Marion; “this is the girls’ century.” “I wish people wouldn’t forget about girls now-a-days.” “Who does?” asked Marion; “this is the girls’ century.” “Nobody ever thinks about me. I am never in things like the other girls. Aunt Rody will never let me go anywhere; Aunt Affy coaxed her one day, and cried and said she was spoiling my girlhood, but Aunt Rody was worse than ever after that. I cry night after night because she will not let me go to boarding-school. Boarding-school has been
- 59. the dream ofmy life; I make pictures about it to myself. Did you go to boarding-school?” “Yes, for one year, and was glad enough to go home again. I wish you would come to school to me; do you suppose you could?” asked Marion with a sudden and joyous inspiration. “O, Miss Marion,” was all the girl could reply for very gladness. “We will plan about it, Roger and I. If you can come and stay all day and study, and take music lessons, three or four days a week, it will be better than boarding-school for you, and more than you can think for me. You have been on my mind, but I didn’t dare propose anything; I knew Aunt Affy would not be allowed to have her way.” Both Judith’s arms were about Marion’s neck, with her face hidden on Marion’s shoulder. “I’ve wanted a sister all my life,” she said laughing and crying together. Sunday morning on entering church her attention was arrested by a large map stretched across the platform, or half-way across it; the pulpit had been removed and in its stead were flowers, a row of pink bloom and shades of green. A tall gentleman, with the very blackest hair and beard she had ever seen, arose and stood near the map. How her heart gave a throb when he said, touching a spot on the map: “That is Antioch, the place where the disciples were first called Christians. I was born in Antioch, where Paul and Barnabas preached Christ. I was born in Antioch, and I was re-born in Antioch.” Judith held her breath. He was a disciple, a Christian come from Antioch. She drew back, almost afraid; she felt as if Christ must be there standing very near this disciple.
- 60. He talked aboutthe beautiful city and made it as near and real as this little village in which there was a church of disciples. It was like seeing one of the twelve disciples, Peter, or James, or John; or perhaps Paul, because he had been in Antioch. But he said he had been “reborn” there; what could he mean? Re— again; born again. Was he born twice in Antioch? She had been born only once. Must every disciple be born over like this disciple who was born both times in Antioch? For a long time she puzzled herself over this new, strange thing; then, when she could not bear it any longer, she asked Aunt Affy. “When he was born, and for years as he grew up, he did not love and obey Christ, and then the Holy Spirit gave him a loving and obedient heart, and that loving and obedient heart is so new that it is like being born over again,” was Aunt Affy’s simple, and sure unraveling of her perplexity.
- 61. XVI. ONE OFAUNT AFFY’S EXPERIENCES. “O, Master, let me walk with Thee In lowly paths of service free; Tell me Thy secret; help me bear The strain of toil; the fret of care.” —Washington Gladden. The dream of Judith’s girlhood was coming true in a most unexpected way; she did not go to boarding-school, but boarding- school came to her in Bensalem; four days every week she studied at the parsonage with Miss Marion, her cousin Don’s “brown girl”; the dinner was the boarding-school part; often she was persuaded to stay to supper, and sometimes there would be an excuse for her to remain over night. Aunt Rody thought the excuses were much oftener than need be; she said “it seemed” that something was always going on at the parsonage; the parsonage was a worldly place with games, and company and music. Cephas replied that the parsonage folks were not going out into the world, but bringing the world in and consecrating it; she must not forget that “God so loved the world.” Aunt Rody retorted that He commanded his people not to love it, anyway. In his slow way Cephas replied: “He never told His people not to love it His way.”
- 62. The worldliness wasnot hurting Judith; nothing was hurting the little girl her mother left, when she shut her eyes upon all that would ever happen to her. How it happened that she went to boarding-school she never knew; she knew Aunt Affy cried and could not sleep all one night, that for once in his sweet-tempered life Uncle Cephas was angry, and as he told the minister, “talked like a Dutch uncle to Rody”; she knew a letter came from cousin Don to Aunt Rody herself, and that Aunt Rody did not speak to anybody in the house, excepting innocent Joe, for three whole weeks. In spite of Aunt Rody, Agnes Trembly made new dresses from the materials Miss Marion took Judith to New York to select, and a box of school books was sent by express, and another box with every latest thing in the way of school-room furnishing. A bureau in Miss Marion’s room was placed at the disposal of her goods, and one corner of a wardrobe was made ready for her dresses. Still, with all her happy privileges, there was no place she called home; she said: “Aunt Affy’s” and “the parsonage.” Once, speaking of Summer Avenue, she said “home” unconsciously. She rarely spoke of her mother. All her loneliness and desolation and heartaches she poured out in her letters to cousin Don. He understood. She never thought that she must be “brave” for him. Nothing since her mother went away comforted her like her boarding-school. During one heart-opening twilight she confided to Marion about casting lots in the Bible to find out if she would ever go to boarding- school. “What did you find?” asked Marion.
- 63. If she wereshocked she kept the shock out of her voice. She told Roger afterward she was almost too shocked to speak. “The queerest thing that meant nothing: ‘And a cubit on the one side and a cubit on the other side.’” “I am glad you found that,” said Marion, “I think God wanted to help you by giving you that.” “But it didn’t help; how could it?” “It helps me.” “It doesn’t sound like a Bible verse; it is just nothing,” persisted Judith. “God’s words can never be ‘just nothing.’ Those words were something to somebody, and they are a great deal to me. Do you remember something Christ says about a cubit?” “No; did he ever say anything?” “He said this: Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature? You were taking thought to add something to your life. Your thought-taking has not done it,” said Marion, thinking that her own thought-taking had added no cubit to her own life. “No, indeed; I never should have thought of the parsonage boarding-school. Who did think of it besides you, Miss Marion?” “Several people who love you. If you had never thought of it, it would have been thought of for you. In that same talk Christ told the people: Your heavenly father knoweth that ye have need of all these things: for your heavenly Father knoweth; that’s why we do not have to think about the cubits. I think I’ll give Roger ‘For your heavenly Father’ for a text.”
- 64. “I am soglad,” said Judith, with radiant eyes, “I love that ‘cubit’ now.” “So do I. I will certainly ask Roger to preach about our cubit.” “But don’t let him put me in,” protested Judith. “I should look conscious so everybody would know I was the girl. Jean Draper will be sure to know.” “He will not let it be a girl. He will make it somebody who was superstitious, and anxious, and did not trust God, nor know how to learn his will. Trust Roger for that. I always know when he puts people in, for we talk it over together; he puts me in so often that I am accustomed to being made a text of; and his own mistakes and failures are in all the time.” “I thought mine were,” acknowledged Roger’s attentive and appreciative listener. “And Uncle Cephas is sure his are in,” laughed Marion. “I think it is only the outside of us that isn’t alike.” Very often Judith was allowed to sit in the study with her books and writing. Mr. Kenney told her that she never disturbed him, that he would be disturbed if she were not there with her books and table in the bay- window. “Ask me a question whenever you like,” he said one day. But her questions were kept for Miss Marion. The year went on to Judith in household work, in study, in church work and “growing up” with the village girls; Nettie Evans and Jean Draper were her chief friends. The year went on to Marion. June came; the new minister and his sister had been a year in Bensalem.
- 65. Marion told himthat his sermons were growing up, because his boys and girls were growing up. In this year Marion Kenney had discovered Aunt Affy. She said to her one afternoon in the entry bedroom: “I was hungry to find you; I knew I wanted somebody. I knew you were in the world, because if you were not in the world, I should not be hungry for you.” “‘If it were not so, I would have told you,’” said Aunt Affy, in the confident tone in which she always repeated the Lord’s own words. Judith heard the words: the wonderful words, and in her fashion, made a commentary upon them: when things were not so, and couldn’t be so, God told you, so that you needn’t be too disappointed; he wouldn’t let you hope too long for things and build on them—that is, if you were not wilful about them. You might think just a little while about a thing, and not be silly about it, and if it were not so you would soon find out. She had found out about boarding-school—only she had been pretty bad about that all by herself, and did not deserve to have Miss Marion for a teacher. Was Miss Marion paid? She had never thought of it until this moment. It was “rag carpet afternoon.” Judith coaxed Aunt Rody to allow her to take her half-finished ball and pile of rags up garret again, after Miss Marion came, but Aunt Rody sternly refused: “When I was a little girl I did my stent, company or no company. You can see Miss Kenney after you are through.” “But I am so slow,” sighed the rag-carpet sewer. “Be fast, then,” was the grim advice.
- 66. Judith and hercarpet rags were on the floor of the entry between the two bed-rooms; Aunt Rody was sitting in her bed-room in a rocker combing her long gray hair; the door of Aunt Affy’s room opposite was open; Aunt Affy was seated in her rocker mending the sleeve of a coat for Cephas; Marion Kenney in her privileged fashion had come into the back yard and knocked at the open entry door. Lifting her head, Judith saw her in the rush-bottomed chair; she had thrown her hat aside, her face was toward Aunt Affy. Marion Kenney was Judith’s ideal; she was such a dainty maiden, with brown hair and brown eyes, the most bewitching ways, and so true. It was happiness enough for Judith to sit or stand near her to watch and to listen; and, this afternoon, she had to sit in the entry far away from her and sew carpet rags. “Aunt Rody,” called Marion across the hall, in an audacious voice, “may Judith bring her ball and rags in here?” “Affy doesn’t want that room cluttered up,” was the slow, ungracious response. “Oh, yes, I do,” said Aunt Affy, eagerly. “I like it cluttered up.” “Go then, Judith,” was the severe permission; “you are all children together, I verily believe.” With a merry “Thank you” Marion sprang to help gather the rags, and deposited them and Judith on the rag carpet between herself and Aunt Affy. If it had not been for the rags and the ball that grew so tediously, there would have been nothing in the world for Judith to wish for.
- 67. “Aunt Affy, Ibrought a question to-day, as I always do,” began Marion, and Judith’s fingers stayed that she might hear the question and the answer. She did not know how to ask Marion’s questions, but she did know how to understand something of Aunt Affy’s answers. In her spiritual and intellectual appreciation she was far ahead of anyone’s knowledge of her. She had a talent for receptivity and, girl as she was, for discipline. “If you had read the Bible through forty times, as Aunt Affy has, you would know all the answers,” said Judith. “Forty times,” repeated Marion, in amazement. “I did not tell her; she found it out,” replied Aunt Affy, with humility; “I read my mother’s Bible, and Judith found dates and numbers in the back of it, so I had to tell her it was the number of times I had read it through.” “You were as young as I when you began,” said Marion. “I was twenty; I felt so alone somehow, that year, I yearned for it. I read it through in less than a year, then I began again, and next year again, now it is second nature; I should be lost without it.” “What is second nature?” asked the girl on the floor, among the carpet rags. “It is something that is so much a part of yourself,—that comes after you have your first nature—that it is as much your nature as if you were born first so,” answered Aunt Affy with pauses for clearness. “You feel as if you were born the second time, and it would be as hard to get rid of as though you were born the first time with it.” “Carpet rags will never be my second nature,” sighed Judith, picking up a long, red strip. “I wish reading the Bible would.”
- 68. “Aunt Affy, itis only this,” began Marion, again, flushing a little with the effort of bringing her secret into spoken words. “I want somebody to do good to; I have my class in Sunday school, and that is a great deal, but it doesn’t satisfy—and there must be somebody; if it were not so, I wouldn’t be so hungry to do it. I say it with all humility; I know there is something in me to give, and it is growing. But I don’t know how to find somebody.” Judith’s fingers dropped the long, red strip; it would be a story to hear Aunt Affy tell Miss Marion how to find somebody. “Then, you are just ready to hear my story.” “I knew you had it; I saw it in your face.” “It is one of the true stories, the stories as true as Bible stories, that you and I are living every day.” How Judith’s face glowed. Was she living a true story? As real as the Bible stories? “God helps and hears now, as quickly, as willingly, as sufficiently, as he did in the old Bible times; we live in the new Bible times. I heard a woman once wishing for a new Bible, the old Bible seemed written so long ago, and about people who lived so long ago. We are making a new Bible; our life is a new Acts of the Disciples.” And she was in it? How could Judith think of carpet rags? Unless carpet rags were in it, too. “I like that,” said Marion, “for Acts has been called the Gospel of the Risen Lord, and we know He is risen, and with us in the Holy Spirit.” Aunt Affy was silent a moment; like Judith her fingers stayed and would not work. “Yes,” she said, too satisfied to say another word.
- 69. “Aunt Affy’s Bibleis full of marks and dates,” said Judith, “as if she were writing her new Bible in her old one.” “Now I’ll tell you how I found somebody. I wanted somebody to give to, as you do. I felt full of good things to give. The village was more full of young people then; now the boys go to the city, or away off somewhere, then they stayed and married village girls. There were people enough, but I did not know how to find the one willing to take something from me. So I prayed about it: my giving, and the somebody. The first thing I learned when I began to live in the Bible was to pray about everything as Bible folks did—I wanted to do all the right things they did, and shape my life as near to God as some of them did.” Aunt Affy never talked as naturally as when talking to girls; she felt that step by step she had been over their ground. As Rody said, Affy had never grown up. A woman apart from the world, she lived a wide life; every day her clear vision swept from childhood to old womanhood. “Before the answer came I read in the Old Testament (for all these things happened for our sakes, the New Testament tells us, throwing light on the old stories), three verses in the first chapter of Judges. How I studied it. And how much for myself I found in it—and for you. Joshua was dead; the children of Israel had no human counsellor, so ‘they asked the Lord.’ They knew he would speak to them as plainly as Joshua had. They had work to do, as you and I have; God’s own planned work. They asked who should go up first to the work; the Lord said: Judah. That was plain enough. As plain as he says to you: ‘Marion, do this.’” “How does he say it to me?” “In two ways. First by giving you something to give. Then giving you the longing to find somebody, to give to.” “Yes,” said Marion, in a full tone.
- 70. “With the permissionhe gave a promise.” “I like a promise to work on; I feel so sure,” said Marion, brightly. “This promise was: Behold I have delivered the land into his hand. It is given to him, still he must go and get it; he must work and get it. God does not often put ready-made things into our hands; if he did we would not be co-workers.” Judith understood. Aunt Affy would not have thought of telling these things to Judith. “That is his way of working for us, working in us. His work does not interfere with our work, only makes our work sure and strong. We speak the words; he keeps them from falling to the ground. Judah was the strongest tribe; he had been made ready for pioneer work; the first thing he did was to speak to Simeon, his brother, and say: Come with me. He found somebody to work with him. But he had to go first. He chose Simeon. We may choose somebody to work with us.” “But, Aunt Affy, I meant somebody to work for,” replied Marion, who had a mission to somebody. “There is nobody in the world to work for; it is always somebody to work with. We are all co-workers with God. The somebody you wish to find is a co-worker, too. Why not? Has God chosen only you for His work?” Marion looked ashamed; frightened at herself, and ashamed. “How could I be so proud?” “Oh, we all can,” said Aunt Affy, smiling. “And this brings me to my own story.” “The new Bible,” said Judith, eagerly.
- 71. “One day Iasked our Father to bring some one to me; my life has never been a going out, for Rody could never spare me, it has been a bringing in, instead; then I came in here and read about Judah and Simeon, and waited. The waiting is always a part of it.” “Why?” asked Judith impatiently. “Because God says so; that is the best reason I know. And my somebody came. Somebody to help in the work planned for both of us. And the happy thing about it (one of the happy things) was that the somebody started to come to me before I began to ask. Sometimes, people say things will happen if we don’t pray; perhaps they will, it is not for me to say they will not, but the happening will not be in answer to prayer, and that has a joyfulness of its own, that nobody knows except the One who answers and the one who prays. That is a joy too great to be told. Sometimes, I know that I have been as happy over an answered prayer as I can be. And I can be very happy,” Aunt Affy said, with happy tears shining in her eyes. “This somebody was not anybody new, or strange, or very far off; when I thought about it there was no surprise in it; it was somebody who had been coming to meet me a long while—in preparation. Then, we were ready to be co-workers in a very simple way, making no stir, but I trust our work together will not prove hay or stubble in the last day. It was somebody I chose myself; we do a great deal of our own choosing. But it was God’s work and God’s workers, like Judah and Simeon. There was prayer first, and Judah using his knowledge and judgment. No wonder God could keep his promise; they helped him keep his promise, as you and I do. Do you remember what Andrew did after Jesus called him and asked him to spend that day with him? ‘He first findeth his own brother.’” “My only brother is found,” said Marion. “Now some one else may be ‘first.’”
- 72. “And I haven’tany,” said listening Judith. “But I have my cousin Don; I wonder about him.” “We each have our own; whoever we find is our own. This is our own world,” Aunt Affy replied in her happy voice. Marion’s question was answered. Aunt Affy always understood what was surging underneath her restless, foamy current of talk. Since she had known Aunt Affy she had grown quieter; she had come to Bensalem “in a fume,” she told Aunt Affy, and the air, or “something,” was making things look different. Aunt Affy smiled her wise, sweet smile; she knew the time came to girls when things had to “look different.”
- 73. XVII. THE STORYOF A KEY. “What time I am afraid, I will Trust in Thee.” Aunt Rody had a way of bringing her work and sitting somewhere near when Marion came; the girl’s vivacity, and gossip of village folks, gossip in its heavenliest sense, attracted the hard-visaged, hard-handed, sharp-tongued old woman. An afternoon with Marion Kenney was to the old woman, who never read stories, what a volume of short stories is to other people; stories, humorous, pathetic, and always with a touch of the best in life. And, somehow, the best found an answering chord in something in Aunt Rody. But for that something nobody could have lived in the house with Aunt Rody. The door across the hall was open; all was quiet within the small bedroom. For the world Aunt Rody would not acknowledge any weakness by bringing her chair into Affy’s room, or even into the entry. She was not fond of company; and all Bensalem knew it. Cephas asked her years ago if she wanted to be buried in a corner of the graveyard all by herself and the brambles.
- 74. “Heaven is asociable place, Rody, and you might as well get used to it.” Aunt Affy’s story was done, there was no sound in the other bedroom; Judith picked among her colored strips. “I had a letter from my cousin Don last night, Miss Marion,” said Judith, “and he said he was glad I loved the parsonage.” “Did he?” asked Marion, twisting one of Judith’s curls about her finger. “O, Judith, I know you want me to tell you a story,” she said hastily, as Aunt Affy slipped on her glasses again and took the coat sleeve into her hand. To Marion that coat sleeve was a part of Aunt Affy’s “new Bible.” “Oh, yes,” replied Judith, with pure delight. “Judith would have enjoyed the age of tradition,” said Aunt Affy; “just think,” in her voice of young enthusiasm, “instead of reading it, what it would be to hear from Andrew’s own lips the story of that day.” “We are living there now,” said Marion; “I am. The title of my life just now is ‘The Parsonage story of Village Life.’ But the story I want to tell Judith to-day is an episode in my own life. Seven years ago. I haven’t even told Roger yet, and I tell him everything. I think I never told any one before. I used to be at the head of things in those days; father was often away, and the children were all younger, except Roger, and mother wasn’t strong. We lived in an old house in a broad city street, away back, with a box-bordered yard in front, and lilacs, and old-fashioned things behind; we were all born there, even Roger, the eldest, and our only moving times was in the spring and fall cleaning. Once a friend of mine moved, and I was enough in the moving times to be there at an impromptu dinner; we stood around a pine table in the kitchen, or sat on anything we could
- 75. find, a firkin,or peach basket turned upside down, and they let me eat a piece of pie in my fingers. All I wanted was to do something just like it myself. And when mother said I might stay all my birthday week and help Aunt Bessie move, I thought my ship had come in, laden with moving times. “Aunt Bessie lived in the city in a beautiful home, but something had happened that summer; Uncle Frank was in Europe and could not come home, and Aunt Bessie and the children had to go into the country for a year. “The ‘country’ was only seven miles away; first the train, then the horse cars, and, then, a two-mile drive. “The wagons from the country came for the things Monday morning; there were two big loads (everything else had been sold), and in the country home we expected to find new and plain furniture that had already been sent from the stores. “Monday the children and I had a hilarious time at dinner; moving times had begun, and I did eat a piece of pie in my fingers. I was too full of the fun of things to notice that Aunt Bessie ate no dinner, and Elsie and I were teasing Rob in noisy play after dinner, and did not see that she was very white and scarcely spoke at all. “‘Marion,’ she said at last, ‘I cannot conquer it; I’ve tried for half the day and all night; I cannot hold up my head another minute; one of my terrible headaches has come upon me. Jane will have to stay here with me and baby and Rob—do you think you could—but no, you couldn’t—it’s too lonely for you—and I may not get there to- night.’ “‘Go to Sunny Plains alone—and have an adventure! Oh, Aunt Bessie! It’s too good to be true.’ “Unmindful of her headache I clapped my hands, and danced Rob up and down. It was all my own moving time.
- 76. “‘But, Marion, whatwould your mother think?’ she protested, weakly; ‘of course there are near neighbors—and you might take something to eat—and, if I do not get there, you must go across the way and stay all night. The old man who had the two white horses— you remember him, said he was our nearest neighbor, and he hoped we would be neighborly. He said he had a daughter about your age —you might ask her—if I do let you go—to stay with you all night.’ “‘But, after all,’ looking at our trim, colored maid of all work, ‘perhaps Jane may better go and you stay with me. And—’ “‘Oh, no, ma’am, oh, no, indeed, ma’am,’ tremulously interrupted Jane (she was only two years older than I). ‘I couldn’t think of it; I should die of fright. I never lived in a wilderness, and I expect to give warning the first week, for I never can bear the country.’ “‘Now, Aunt Bessie, you see I have to go,’ I persuaded. ‘Jane can’t help being afraid—and I didn’t know how to be afraid—really, I don’t know what to be afraid of. Let Elsie go with me, and we’ll do everything ourselves—have the house all in order for you to-morrow morning, and have the most glorious time we ever had in our lives. My Cousin Jennie isn’t fifteen, and she stayed a week over alone in the country while Uncle and Auntie were away. Oh, do let us go, Aunt Bessie.’ “‘Somebody must, I suppose,’ half consented Aunt Bessie, who was growing whiter every moment; ‘Elsie, are you brave enough to go with Marion?’ “‘Yes, mamma,’ said nine-year-old Elsie, in her grave little way, ‘but I don’t know what the brave is for.’ “‘I’m glad you don’t,’ smiled her mother. ‘Well, Jane—I hope I am not doing wrong—fix two boxes of lunch—and, you know you take the train to Paterson and then the horse-cars to Hanover—I will give you five dollars, Marion, you will have to take a carriage at Hanover—but you know all about it—you went with me to look at the house—and
- 77. you know whereto have the furniture put as I told you that day— and you can get things at the store—half a mile off—Jane, you will have to keep Rob and baby—Marion, I don’t know what your mother will say—it’s well there was a load of things left so that I may have a bed to-night—’ “During this prologue my feet were dancing, and my fingers rubbing each other impatiently, I was so afraid she would end with a sufficient reason for not allowing us to go. I could not believe that we were really off until we sat in the train, each with a huge, stuffed lunch-box, and I with five dollars in my pocketbook and my head confused with ten thousand parting directions, among which was, many times repeated: ‘Be sure to ask that girl to stay all night with you.’ “At the terminus at Hanover we got out and stood and looked around. Elsie was a little thing, but she was wise, and I liked to ask her advice. “‘Aunt Bessie found a horse and a carriage at the blacksmith’s shop that day, didn’t she?’ “This was hardly asking advice, but Elsie brightened, and answered deliberately: ‘We walked on a canal-boat, then, to the other side, for the bridge was being built.’ “‘Then we are in the right place, for there’s the new bridge,’ I exclaimed, relieved, for I missed the canal boat we had that day made a bridge of. “‘And we went down that way to the blacksmith’s shop,’ she said pointing in a familiar direction. Yes, I remembered that. The immensity of my undertaking was beginning to press upon me; I was glad I had brought Elsie. “With a business-like air we crossed the bridge, and walked along a grass-bordered path to the blacksmith’s shop; there seemed to be
- 78. two shops inthe long building; before one open door a horse was being shod, before the other a group of men stood with hands in their pockets watching a fire that had died down into a red-hot circle —the circle looked like red-hot iron. As we waited for the horse to be harnessed and brought, Elsie and I stood across the street watching the red-hot iron ring—as large as a wagon wheel. “Elsie looked as though she were forgetting everything in that red wonder, and I began to feel a trifle strange and lonely, for my little cousin was so self-absorbed that she was not much company. “‘Hallo, there!’ called the blacksmith as a boy drove a two-seated wagon out from behind somewhere. “With my best business air I asked the price before we stepped up into the wagon and replied, ‘Very well,’ to his modest one dollar. “The drive was beautiful; Elsie looked and looked but scarcely spoke. But she did exclaim when we crossed the railroad, at the tiniest railroad station, we, or anybody else, ever saw. “It was a brown shed, without a window even—the door stood wide open, there was no one within, no stove, no seats, no ticket office. “‘Well, we are in the wilderness,’ I said aloud. “And then, the ‘store.’ I wish I could tell you about that store. It was about as large as—a hen-coop, everything, everything in it. I got out and went in, for Aunt Bessie had asked me to inquire for letters which she had directed to be sent to Sunny Plains. The post-office was a rude desk and a few cubby-holes up on the wall above it; I saw a letter laid on a meal sack—this place behind the store seemed to be both post-office and granary. “‘I’ll be down by and by—you are the new people, I suppose; I saw your things go by,’ remarked a pleasant young man behind the counter; ‘I’ll come for orders. I hope you will trade with us.’
- 79. “‘Thank you, Isuppose so. And I wish you would bring some kerosene,’ I said, remembering that I must burn a lamp all night. “Along the half mile on the way to the new house were scattered several farmhouses, then came the church, and churchyard, and, on a rise beyond the churchyard, a pretty house. “‘That’s it,’ Elsie said, ‘I know the house.’ “The key was in the possession of the white-haired old man with the two horses, and his house was opposite the church. “Elsie was too shy to go to the door and knock and ask for Mrs. Pettingill’s key, but I was very glad to go; I began to feel that I would like to see the girl who would stay all night with us. She answered my knock, a tall girl, with an encouraging face. She brought the key, saying the wagons were all unloaded; two had come Saturday with things; her father had said my mother and all the family were coming before night. “‘Aunt Bessie was too ill,’ I replied, glad to have the neighborly subject opened so easily, ‘and she said I might ask you to come over and stay all night with Elsie and me.’ “‘Oh, I couldn’t,’ she answered, hastily; ‘I’m going away—I’m all dressed now. I’m sorry, too,’ she added, sympathetically, at something in my face, ‘but I can’t disappoint my grandmother; she sent for me because she is sick.’ ‘Then, of course, you will have to go. (Then I began to know what ‘brave’ meant.) Thank you for the key.’ “Up the steep, weed-tangled drive we went to the side door; the boy-driver unlocked the door for us, giving a view of the moving times within. I paid him his dollar, and he drove away, leaving us in the wilderness.
- 80. “Elsie stood andlooked around as usual. “It was a wilderness, a wilderness everywhere; the two-story house, painted brown, with red trimmings, was set in the middle of a large field; it had been untenanted for two years; the hedgerows had grown luxuriant, the grass was knee-deep; the house faced the west (the driver told me that), and the west this August afternoon was an immense field of cabbages bordered by tall trees; above it was the sky, beyond that might be anything, or everything; at the east stretched a mown field, dotted with trees, an apple-tree that looked a hundred years old near the fence, then a thick woods, over the top of which ran a line of green, low hills; among the greenness a red slanting roof was visible; at the south stretched other fields, among the trees a white house, with outhouses, a well-sweep; at the north, beyond two fields, in which cows were pasturing, in a grove, a thick, green grove, was the churchyard, with rows and rows of white stones, now and then a white or a granite monument; the brown church-tower arose above the tree-tops. And this was my wilderness for a night, with the sky, the protecting, loving sky over all, and bending down to enfold us all into its sunshine. “‘It’s pretty,’ said Elsie. “‘Yes, it is pretty. Now we must go in and go to work.’ “The opened door led into the small dining-room; small and so crowded; as my big brother said, there was a place for everything, and everything was in it. “The front parlor, back parlor, hall, all crowded; up stairs there was nothing but emptiness and roominess. “The kitchen, such a pretty kitchen, was crowded with everything, too—and a pine table, a firkin, and an up-turned, or down-turned peach basket.
- 81. “I was ina whirl, an ecstasy, an enthusiasm; but as somebody remarks, nothing is done without enthusiasm; now what should I do with mine, that, and nothing else? “Suddenly, to Elsie’s great perplexity, I gave a shout and rushed out the dining-room door, and down through the tangles into the road. “I had espied two men, working men, in shirt sleeves, with coats thrown over their arms. Farmers, or farmer’s sons, probably, great, true-hearted sons of the soil, knightly fellows who were ready to— “‘Are you—do you know anybody—’ I began, breathless, and with flying hair. “They stopped and gazed at me. “‘We have just moved in. I would like things moved, and bedsteads put up, and boxes opened.’ “‘We can do it,’ said one promptly. “He had lost one eye; the other eye looked honest. “‘Yes, we’re out of the work,’ said his companion. “He had a stiff neck; he did not look quite so honest. “‘Can you come now?’ I faltered. “‘Yes, right off. Come, Jim,’ was the cheerful response. ‘All we want is to be told what to do.’ I could always tell people what to do; at home I was called the ‘manager.’ “For two hours I kept those men busy; Elsie, with grave eyes and sealed lips, followed us about. I tried to forget the stiff neck, and the eye that did not look honest, and had forgotten both, when there was a heavy rap on the open dining-room door.
- 82. “There stood theyoung man from the store. “I had forgotten that I did not like those two busy men, who never spoke unless spoken to, still I was glad enough to cry when I saw this familiar and friendly face. “I had known him so long ago I could tell him anything. “‘H’m. Somebody to help you,’ he said, stepping in, pad and pencil in hand, for an order. “The men were in the back parlor; one was unpacking a box of books, the other was sweeping. “Yes,” I replied confidently, “I needed help and I called them in. I don’t believe—” my voice sinking to a whisper, “that they are tramps, do you?” “Oh, no. They are hatters. They have been about here two or three years; the factory is closed. The worst thing about them is drink. They will drink up all you give them. Still, it was hardly a right thing for you to do.” “Elsie’s arm was linked in mine, her big eyes fixed on the young man’s face. “‘A thing is always right—after it is done,’ I said desperately. “‘Whew! you are a wise one,’ he said quizzically. ‘I’ve brought kerosene—have you lamps for to-night? Oh, yes, I see you have. Sugar, bread coffee, tea, what will you have?’ “I gave the order; he wrote it, then lingered. “‘They are about done for to-night, I suppose.’ “‘Yes, I shall send them away.’
- 83. “He drove away,and I was left with my hatters. “‘You have worked two hours,’ I said; ‘what do I owe you?’ “The man with one eye looked at the man with a stiff neck. “‘Fifty cents, eh, Jim?’ “‘That’s about it,’ said Jim. “I did not bring my pocket-book down stairs, there were two bills in it; I handed each a twenty-five-cent piece with the most reassuring and disarming air (one air was for myself, the other for them), and thanked them, hoping they would soon have work at their trade. “They said ‘thank you’ and ‘good-night,’ and Elsie and I were left alone. “‘Aren’t you hungry?’ asked Elsie, ‘It is late and dark.’ “‘So it is: we will have supper in the kitchen—and I will fill a lamp to burn all night.’ “That supper was not quite as much fun as I thought it would be; Elsie munched a sandwich and wished she were home; out the window the fire-flies were glistening in the tall grass; the gravestones loomed up very white and tall and stiff. “‘We’ll go to bed early,’ I said cheerily, ‘and be up early in the morning to put everything in order. Aunt Bessie will be sure to be here early.’ “Elsie followed me up stairs still munching a sandwich. She, too, had learned what it was to be ‘brave.’ “The hatters had put up a bedstead and laid a mattress on it; the bed clothing lay in a pile on the bare floor.
- 84. “I made thebed while Elsie finished her sandwich. “‘May I brush out your hair and braid it?’ asked Elsie. “‘Yes, in a minute. Let’s go down stairs and look at all the doors and windows again.’ “The fastening on every door and window was tried anew. We were locked in. The world was locked out. I did not look out again at the fire-flies. “I sat down before the bureau while Elsie stood behind me and brushed and braided my long hair; doing my hair would comfort her if anything could. “But what would comfort me? “My Daily Light I had put in my satchel; I liked to have it open on my bureau; it was bound in soft leather, two volumes in one: I found the date, August XV., in the Evening Hour. “‘Read aloud,’ said Elsie. “My glance caught the large type at the head of the page. My heart beat fast, the tears started, but I cleared my throat and read unconcernedly: ‘I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her.’ “‘Read it again,’ said Elsie, brushing softly. I read it again. Elsie undressed and crept into bed. “‘You didn’t say your prayers,’ I remonstrated. “‘I like to say them in bed,’ she replied. “So did I that night.
- 85. “I placed thelamp, burning brightly, on the floor in the hall opposite my door, leaving the door wide open, then I lay down, and said my prayers in bed. “Elsie was soon asleep; my prayer ended with the earnest petition, several times repeated: ‘Please let me go to sleep quick and stay asleep all night.’ “Then I watched the light, and thought about home, and fell asleep. “A voice awakened me: Elsie was sitting up in bed:— “‘I’ll do your hair, Marion,’ she said thickly, talking in her sleep. “I pressed her down, and covered her; she did not waken. But I was awake, wide awake, alone in a great wilderness. There was no sound, no sound anywhere, but a stillness like the stillness of death. “Then sh—sh—sh—a hush, a soft pressing against something—a padded shoulder against a door, a soft fist at a window; then the stillness like the stillness of death. I was awake; I did not sleep. “The soft, soft sound came again and again; the softest sound I had ever heard, and then the stillest silence. “Should I get up, bring the lamp in, and lock the door? “But suppose there were no key in the door—it was swung back, I could not see the inside key-hole; if I should get up and find no key, and could not lock the door, I should confess to myself that I was afraid—how could I lie there, with the door shut and not locked, and be afraid? I was afraid to be afraid. I would rather lie there, and look with staring eyes at the lamp and the wide stairs, and listen, and listen, with my very breath, and know that I was not afraid.” “Oh, dear!” cried Judith, with a choking in her throat.
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