Orisha

So displacement means that we were cut off from the roots and the sources of our power.

In some instances, there were certain spiritual practices that survived, right? Hoodoo in Louisiana, Obeah throughout the Caribbean, Santeria and Lucumi in Cuba, um, Voodoo in Haiti, Kumina, Zion Revival in Jamaica, um, what's referred to as Orisha and Shango Baptist practice in Trinidad, um, Candomble in Brazil.

A lot of those all have sort of Yoruba, Yoruba sort of diasporic foundations.

The Sanctified Church in the US, right? So the forms that have survived in the diaspora are displaced Africanized forms, right? Much of formal academia and everyday culture has disconnected our diaspora realities from the continental African realities, and often demonized these diaspora forms as country, savage, deviant, devilish, right? And they're not that thing.

The traditional religion of the Yoruba people, uh, mostly what is now Nigeria, also Benin and Togo, uh, so that whole area of West Africa, there is a religious practice called Yoruba.

And at the center of it is essentially a supreme creator and then there are what are called Orishas, which are divine spirits to focus on different areas of our human life.

And there's a whole divination system around this belief system and system of religion, and some of it involves, uh, r- like reading bones, divination, read by trained priests.

So the Yoruba tradition doesn't treat spiritual work as one simple thing.

It is, uh, more of a pop culture image of where that comes from.

Most of the religion of Yoruba is devotional prayer offerings, restoring balance in our body, in our lives, in the world.

Practitioners that I know personally, I know several practitioners of this religion, and they have a really devoted relationship to typically one or two specific Orishas for many, many years, specific, um, of these, like, divine beings.

Uh, or even they could be devoted to that Orisha for their entire life, and they're gonna do devotions and prayers and offerings and all of that as part of their relationship.

Olorun had two sons.

The elder's name was Orisha.

The name of the younger son was Adudoa.

They were living together in the sky.

Olorun called Orisha to him.

He gave him a handful of earth and a hen with five claws.

Olorun said to him, "Go down and make land upon okun, the ocean." Orisha went.

On the way, he found some palm wine.

Um, I am so glad that they had a lot of, uh, scenes in New Orleans, because that's the one place I have been to where I've been able to at least visit the Museum of Voodoo in New Orleans, which is amazing.

And learn a lot of the history I did learn I learned there, right? And all the stuff about disguising African deities as saints in order to keep it under the nose of the slave owners, like all of that stuff is, there's literally a chart in the, in the museum that sort of tells you which saints map to which, you know, Orisha to which, uh, uh, deities.

So, yeah, so it's a bit, so anyone, if you're going to New Orleans, make sure you stop there.

It's like right by, uh, Louis Armstrong park.

Yeah.

You know, it's about Orishas.

Yeah.

It's about Yoruba-

We followed a single guardian out of Eden's gate today and found an entire throne room waiting on the other side of that gate.

Cherubim with four faces in a single body, seraphim shielding their own eyes from the glory too bright to look at directly, ophanim covered in eyes of their own, seven named archangels standing ready before that same glory, and beyond scripture entirely, an entire world full of Hermes and Valkyries and Xian and Orishas, each culture reaching for its own name for the same populated space between heaven and earth.

There's one more pattern worth naming before we close, and it runs through nearly every encounter we've covered today.

Almost every single time one of these throne room or messenger beings appears directly to a human being, their first words are some version of fear not or be not afraid.