In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

New Beginnings When you are going to start your life, you go through a journey. Even when you are coming to the life, you go through a journey. Just as a funeral is a rite of separation for the community, but is also conceived as a new spiritual beginning for the individual, the first rituals performed for a newborn infant are incorporations into the material world. Like funerals, these rituals focus on the metaphysical journey between two realms. Whereas funerals are costly public displays in the form of sacred send...off parties, the entry of an infant into the world is a much more subdued, private affair marked by a brief, relatively simple ritual performed by a diviner for the parents to discover the quality of the child's coming. The parents passively and patiently await the diviner's interpretation. The action is more thoughtful and contemplative than physical, quiet rather than loud. As O~itQla described this metaphysical process: You know, the grandfather's body has been molded by Ori~anla IDeity of Creation} long before, and has been destroyed. Then his spirit wanders. Ori~anla will make another body. The spirit of the father-whose body has been destroyed together with his head-goes to a new body, and then goes to take another head. (taped discussion #82.78) It is the assumption that, like the deceased's spirit, which lingers for awhile in the world disembodied, the spirit of the newborn babe is still betwixt and be... tween the otherworld and earth. Its spirit has just left its place in heaven (0 yi fara mQ Qrun). It is still in the process of coming (0 ~~ n bQ la ori r~). The infant's first ritual constitutes the third phase of Van Gennep's tripartite initiation pro... cess. There is no separation apart from birth itself. The baby arrives in a liminal state, as suggested to O~itQla by the amount of time it spends sleeping and dozing. The ritual concern of the diviner and the parents is incorporation. In explaining birth, O~itQla made an analogy to my trip to Nigeria: As you are here now, your parents are there. When you first arrived in June before we settled down, before you became more Abidifa...ly {that is, more like himself, the speaker}, you usually remembered your parents, your 52 Yoruba Ritual people there, your mends. Your mind had not fully settled with us here. { ... ] Now you have gradually {gotten] used to us here. You remember them, but partially. You have entered into our own world. You have entered into our own mind. You have entered into our own thinking. You see that is the work of the ori inu linner head], because it is coming. It is still with the other ancestors over there. You know the child is coming on a journey. He has just stepped {into] the world. And he is still a new man, a new face who n kQsc: lis stepping]. He hasn't settled. (taped discussion #86.102) Yoruba salute the parents of a newborn baby, "greetings for the stranger" (c: ku alejo). The very concept of the "journey" presupposes the experience of being a stranger in a strange land. There is an extremely high infant mortality rate, particularly during the first three months after birth. Because of the baby's precarious betwixt and between status, O~itQla performs rituals known as "Stepping into the World" (IkQs~ w'aye) and "Knowing the Head" (Imori). According to him, the former should be performed between the third and seventh day after birth; the latter in the third month. During the rituals, diviners propose diverse and extremely personal courses of action for the parents to take in dealing with the child. STEPPING INTO THE WORLD According to O~itQla, the act of stepping the foot is an important segment (aito) of the ritual performed during the week after birth-literally the first formal step the child takes. The Ifa divination process itself is like every other.! Through interpreting texts, the diviner obtains a sense of the baby's impact on its family. He constructs for the parents what the immediate future holds in store. The texts provide clues to the baby's nature, including its name. If, for example, the baby has come to the world through the intercession of a deity, it will be named in that deity's honor: E~ubiyii, "E~u gave birth to this one," or Ogunbiyii, "Ogun gave...

Share