Yoruba Mythology

Yoruba religion is a living oral tradition with no book of creation. The Ifa corpus consists of 256 odu, memorized verse by verse by babalawo priests; the creation material lies scattered through those verses and was never assembled into one connected account, and different towns and priesthoods carry different versions. Every written text available today dates from the late nineteenth century or after. Samuel Johnson, an Anglican pastor at Oyo, finished his History of the Yorubas in 1897 and sent it to London, where the publisher lost the manuscript; his brother Obadiah rebuilt it from the notes after his death and it appeared only in 1921. Johnson writes from Oyo's standpoint and makes Oduduwa a human prince who migrated from the east, not a god. The details most often retold — the snail shell of earth, the chameleon testing the ground, 'the earth spreads wide' — are set out most fully in Idowu (1962), the version popular retellings usually follow; Idowu was a Christian theologian whose purpose was to argue that Yoruba religion is essentially monotheistic, and later scholars have pointed out that his Olodumare is shaped to resemble the Christian God. Anyone using his material inherits that filter.

Who actually made the land is unsettled, and how a version comes out depends on who is telling it. Kingship at Ife descends through Oduduwa, and the royal tradition has him go down the chain and pour the earth. Obatala's priesthood holds that Obatala was the one commissioned and that palm wine cost him the work — in some tellings he is not drunk at all, merely late. Other versions have Olodumare send Oduduwa from the start, with no Obatala in the story. Oduduwa's gender is not fixed either: some records make Oduduwa female, consort of Obatala and a deity of the earth. The equipment varies too — a chain of gold or of iron, a pigeon with a five-toed hen or a hen alone. The sequence below follows the composite Ife version that is most widely told, and keeps both claimants in the text. Palm wine therefore turns up twice below — once costing Obatala the making of the land, once spoiling a batch of human bodies — which is what comes of setting different tellings side by side, not two drinking bouts inside a single story.

There is no separation of sky and earth in this cosmogony: the sky and the waters are two realms from the outset and nothing has to be split or propped apart. There is no theogony either — the orishas are already in the sky when the story opens, and nobody says where they came from, so the 'first beings' stage is left empty. Nor is there a world-destroying flood or an end of days. The 'ordeal' stage here is filled by the dispute between Obatala and Oduduwa, which at Ife corresponds to a long standoff between two priesthoods; readers comparing it with the floods and doomsdays of other traditions should keep that difference in view. Deriving Ile-Ife from 'ile n fe', 'the earth spreads wide', is a traditional etymology, not a linguistic reconstruction. Ifa and orisha worship are practiced today in Nigeria and Benin and in Cuban Santeria and Brazilian Candomble, each with its own tellings; much of what babalawo know is transmitted only through initiation and has never been published, and only published material is used here.