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J. D. ~ Peel ff A Comparative Analysis of Ogun in Precolonial voruoclcnd' bout Ogun, there seems to be a high degree of consensus on two general points: (I) that Ogun is a Pan-Yoruba deity of fairly uniform character and significance, and (2) that his cult has adapted remarkably to the conditions of the modern world and across the Atlantic. In this essay I wish, through a comparative examination of mostly contemporary evidence of the cult of Ogun as it was in the second half of the nineteenth century, to qualify the first of these points; and this should clear the way to a fuller appreciation of the second point. The first edition of Africa's Ogun lacked a specifically historical account of the Ogun cult in precolonial Yorubaland, other than a number of historical references that were incorporated into Sandra Barnes's and Paula Ben-Amos's synthesizing essay, "Ogun, the Empire Builder," which covers a broad span of both time and space. It is inevitably tempting to regard the cult of Ogun in precolonial Yorubaland as providing a baseline for assessing the cult's divergent development under different conditions across the Atlantic, and I think this has possibilities, provided it is done with great circumspection. The origins of much of Ogun's cult in the New World go back to before the mid-nineteenth century, and to treat Ogun in Yorubaland as it was between 1845 and 1912 as unproblematically equivalent to what it had been a century or more earlier, implies that it could have undergone no development in West Africa. Any historical analysis must be strongly oriented to the recognition of temporal change, and thus will tend to be drawn into opposing that predilection in Yoruba cultural studies to emphasize continuity, often by the postulation of "time-binding" cultural essences. "Traditional" religion is widely regarded as the vehicle par excellence of ethnic and communal identity, and perhaps no- 264 J. D. Y Peel where more so than the cult of Ogun, insofar as Ogun is celebrated by Wole Soyinka, the leading Yoruba man of letters of our day, as an icon both of a personal vision and of Yoruba (perhaps also African) values.' This makes a historical study of Ogun more consequential and also more difficult than that of topics that are less culturally charged. Evidence from the eMS Journals The great bulk of the evidence will be drawn from the journals and reports of missionary agents-in the great majority, Yoruba ones-of the Church Missionary Society, active since 1845. Without question this is the richest contemporary source for almost any aspect of Yoruba life, especially when read with the published works of such Yoruba CMS clergy as Samuel Johnson, James Johnson, and E. M. Lijadu. These men were hardly disinterested observers of what they considered to be "idolatry," and only rarely can their observations be called "ethnographic," in the sense of attempting to portray "heathen" religious practices in some detail as being significant in their own right. There is, for example, little detailed description of the rituals of orisa worship, or record of myths or prayers. What we have is hundreds of mostly brief references to the orisa and their devotees, as they came to the attention of CMS agents as they went about their pastoral and evangelistic business. They fall into several main categories: observations of orisa worship by individuals encountered in streets or houses; references to public festivals, sacrifices, or oracular consultations ; conversations and arguments with devotees or priests about their orisa or about orisa worship in general; itemizations of which "idols" have been given up by new converts; and, very occasionally, general characterizations of particular orisa or of the cults of a particular community. In contrast to much of the large existing literature on orisa, which is strong on general characterizations of the orisa, drawn from oral sources such as myths, ese /fa, and other kinds of religious poetry, and on analyses of their rituals, particularly the great annual festivals, the CMS data focus our attention on the more prosaic, dayto -day character of orisa worship. Where modern studies of "traditional religion " commonly present it as detached from the main preoccupations of daily life, the CMS journal writers, even if their accounts do not often penetrate very deeply, cannot but forcefully convey the omnipresence of the orisa in the lives of ordinary Yoruba in the last century. Their evidence, taken as a whole, tells us a great deal about both the...

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