Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency

5. Establishing the Self

5. Establishing the Self Concede to each person his or her own particular character. Yoruba adage quoted in AbiQdun (1983: 15) 1 A woman giving birth to two, three children will not expect them to behave the same way. One man's food is another man's poison. One man's behavior may be contrary to another man's behavior. For instance, one may prefer to talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, as Abidifa prefers. One may not prefer so much talk, as OmQ~~~~ does not prefer. Everybody comes to the world for a mission, for a purpose. We can't just all come to the world for the same purpose. KQlawQle O~itQla2 Many types of ritual focus on the individual as their central concern. In the fourteen..day long series of rituals known as It~fa, "The Establishment of the Self," diviners set out to interpret the precise nature of the individual's inner head.3 The ritual is not geared to an entire community, nor is its focus on a collective. It~fa rituals are explicitly concerned with the identity of the individ.. ual and with his social relationships only by implication. In It~fa, what O~itQla and other diviners hope to accomplish beyond the initial identification of an initiate's personality is to provide him with an ever.. expanding corpus of texts that serves as models for self..examination and self.. interpretation. Since individuals ideally accumulate texts that comprise their personal corpus of models over their lifetimes, and at various points weigh those texts in relation to others that may turn up in subsequent divinations, they embark on a lifelong program of searching, reflexivity, and interpretation. This program serves, according to O~itQla, as their guidance in life. To establish the initiate's self, diviners conceptualize and perform It~fa as a journey with travel from one place to another, and a return; new experiences; joys and hardships along the route; and material for further contemplation and reflection.4 As in funerals, the first, third, seventh, and in this case fourteenth days of the It~fa I attended were marked by special ritual segments (aito). In brief, day one through to the night of day two were journeys to and from a sacred grove, when the initiates learned their personal sets of Ifa divination texts sup.. posed to guide their lives. On the third day back home, the diviners checked their progress through divination. This was also a day of feasting, dancing, and playing. The seventh day repeated the action of the third day of "checking." 64 Yoruba Ritual Finally, the fourteenth day marked the reaggregation of the transformed novice back into his ordinary, everyday routine. In the three It~fa I attended, the ritual segments of the third through the fourteenth day were flexible. They were variously abbreviated, condensed, elabo... rated, or eliminated in accordance with the financial conditions of the initiate's family and his psychological state. Diviners also inserted special sacrifices and even invented novel ritual acts based on their interpretations of each initiate's special texts. It~fa's segmented, discontinuous form permitted these various kinds of manipulations. During one It~fa in July 1986, for example, O~itQla instructed one twenty...year...old initiate and his wife to bum their bed pillows as a ritual act. The gathering for the burning of the foam pillows was a spectacle in itself {fig. 5.1).5 THE RITUAL CONSTRUCTION OF SELF6 One of the diviners' explicit intentions in performing It~fa rituals is to pre... pare the initiate's personal set of divination palm nuts, which will be used initially to divine his personal texts and subsequently throughout his life when... ever he consults a diviner. As the diviners "worked on" the initiate during It~fa rituals, they simultaneously worked on his palm nuts to "build them up," imbu... ing them with the power to overcome life's difficulties. This personal set of divination palm nuts represents the male initiate's rebirth, his personal destiny, and, by extension, Orunmila, the deity of divination. On the nights before the journeys began, the diviners focused the attention of the sojourners on the work at hand in a formal preparatory ritual {idiifa}. They accomplished this by invoking the sojourners' inner heads. The diviners displayed all of the sacrificial items and other materials brought by the initiate and his family at the diviners' request to be used during the following fourteen days. Each diviner held up...