The Sickened Speech of Babalú-Ayé

In 1992, when I first visited Cuba, an elder told me a simple story about the ritual broom of Babalú-Ayé that is usually called the já. He explained that when Babalú was wandering the Earth, at some point he was so sick that he could no longer speak. In the laconic Cuban style, he said, “So that’s why Babalú-Ayé has 16 cowries sewn to his já and why he does not speak through the shells.”  Throughout the stories of Babalú, speech is contested and fraught with difficulty. Common to all aspects of Lucumí religion, different accounts provide explanations and justifications for who has the authority to speak for Babalú-Ayé and in what contexts. These accounts are of intense relevance because speech is usually homologous with knowledge in the religion, and knowledge is perhaps the most potent currency that moves between people.

The classic tale from the sign Ojuani-Odí explains how Babalú-Ayé united with Orula. No one could stop Death except Orula, and so Babalú-Ayé made a long-term alliance with him. From that point forward, Babalú-Ayé is said to have only spoken through Orula and the Ifá divination he governs. 

There is a story in the sign Irete-Oyeku that also links the shells on the já to the troubled nature of Babalú’s speech. The story offers the classic tale of his exile: Babalú did not play by the rules, and so the Lucumí expelled him.  But this story explicitly states that when the Lucumí exiled Babalú, they also forbade him to speak through the shells, which were thereafter sewn to his já as a reminder of this taboo. It seems they sought to silence him and thereby limit the impact of the ruptures he causes and suffering they imply.

For contrast, it is interesting to note that there is another story that explains the origin of the já as a healing tool. Babalú-Ayé-Agrónika-Omobitasa entered a cave to consecrate a já that he then used to heal the Arará. 

The sign Ogunda Meyi contains the most complex and seemingly opposite accounts of Babalú’s access to speech. First, it is worth noting that Ogunda Meyi is where leprosy was born and spread around the world, so from the outset it is inseparably linked to Babalú, who was historically associated with the scourge of leprosy. This divination sign also includes a powerfully simple story where Asojano, exhausted from his travels, sits down on a stone in the land of the Arará, and is immediately given the gift of being able to divine: He is connected to the Earth and he speaks the truth. No shells, no third-party, no nasal voice. He speaks, and what he says is true. 

At the same time, Ogunda Meyi contains a story that explains the birth of the okpele, the divining chain made with eight seeds that babalawos use, and in that story Babalú-Ayé is a major player. While wandering the Earth, Babalú comes to a place where he recognizes the language being spoken by the local diviner. It turns out the local diviner is a long-lost godchild of Babalú’s. The diviner tries to heal Babalú’s leprosy but in the process contracts the disease himself. As he lies dying, he hands Babalú an okpele, explaining that it is a secret Messenger for Ifá.  The godson also explains that a tree will grow from his grave, and from the nuts of that tree, Babalú can make more okpeles.

Pedro Abreu-Asonyanye, the leading Arará priest of Asojano in Havana, categorically maintains that Babalú does not speak when he possesses people because in his opinion, he only speaks through Ifá divination. As Abreu points out, when Asojano comes down into people’s bodies and tries to speak, he speaks in a strange and nasal voice that is hard to understand, a voice the Cubans call fañosa. Abreu does take this as an explanation for why Asojano must speak through Ifá, but it actually opens the conversation to the intelligibility of the sickened speech of Babalú-Ayé, the theme of my next post.

(Thanks as always to Eguín Koladé for clarifying conversation. The já pictured above belonged to Rafael Linares--Emerego.)

Termite Hill in the South Rift Valley

Large and noticeable on the low, flat floor of the Rift Valley in Kenya, it is easy to appreciate why people see termite hills as both an eruption of the underworld into this world and as an access point to that unseen land. The termites move comfortably between the worlds, and we can only hope to emulate their chthonic wisdom.

Judith Gleason--Oyá Lola Has Joined the Ancestors

A couple weeks back I had to go to New York City for work, and I called Judith Gleason to see if she wanted to have dinner. No answer, so I left a message. The next day, her son left me a message explaining that she had joined the ancestors on August 5th after having a stroke.

I have "known" Judith since 1987, though I doubt anyone really knew her. In all honesty it is terribly difficult for me to separate her from Oyá, the oricha of her devotion, the oricha of lightning and winds, whose unpredictable movements shake up the status quo and reveal new opportunities. So here I am cleaning up after this storm.

When I was twenty-one, I found Judith´s book, Oyá: In Praise of the Goddess. I read it again and again, as I tried to follow the shifting currents of its prose and as I worked to digest the world it depicted. I still have the original copy whose binding has been broken by wear and double taped for reinforcement. The book is a masterpiece of original, synthetic scholarship that breaks between lived experience, anthropology, depth psychology, textual analysis, and diasporic description. These shifting perspectives imitate the motile quality of Oyá's subjectivity and reveal Judith’s unwillingness to privilege any one perspective. Such was her deep commitment to her vision of wholeness.

Having been pulled (or blown?) into the world of oricha, I needed to find a way to connect to the community, so I sought Judith out. I found her name and address in Contemporary Authors and wrote her a short letter explaining my situation. A week later I received a short letter in her own hand, explaining that she only knew two diviners but recommending one--Santiago Pedroso. A month later I visited Santiago for my first cowry shell reading, and five years later Santiago's sister Norma initiated me to the orichas.

As the years went by, Judith and I would talk from time to time, always circling our common interests--oricha, the feminine, depth psychology, writing, family, and finding a path through the world. Over the years, I heard about "the children" at Stanford, in Mexico, dealing with mental illness. There were conversations where I called with a specific question, and Judith and I would talk till we wandered through to some kind of answer. But there were other "conversations" where Judith would launch into whatever she was working on or thinking about, propelled by the inner force that defined her in some way. In either case, I usually would get a letter a week or two later with more thoughts, hints, intuitions, and images.

In one such conversation, we discussed Nana Burukú and Nanú, dark goddesses associated with the powerful mysteries of the Earth. I had told Judith that my guiding ancestor spirit had served Nana Burukú as a priestess in life. A week later, a letter arrived addressed in her distinctive handwriting, and it contained a small necklace for Nana Burukú that Judith had gotten in Dassa, Benin, where the goddess has her principal temple. That necklace still sits on my ancestor shrine, gracing the neck of the doll that represents my guide spirit.

At some point, Judith wanted to go to Cuba to meet a senior Oyá priestess I had mentioned to her several times. I set her up with a driver, a place to stay, and more contacts than she could possibly meet in a week. To my delight, she fell in love with Cuba. The simplicity and directness of most people delighted her, and she appreciated the priestess Ester de Oyá, who in her late seventies was still dancing for the orichas at drumming ceremonies. Judith also took a shining to my friend Paco, with whom she stayed. I think she ended up going twice, but the years make it hard to remember. What I do remember is the lilt in her voice when she spoke of Cuba. I was thrilled to be able to return the favor of opening the roads for her to find some new vitality.

The last time we spoke was in April. She called because a mutual friend had reached out to ask her about her involvement in the oricha community in New York in the late 1960s, and Judith somehow decided she wanted to cover some of this territory this with me. I had spoken to her relatively recently, and so I had some sense of her struggles to survive on a fixed income and the devastating loss she had suffered from the death of daughter. She told me of her efforts to find some footing in this new place. She recounted how a friend had insisted that she needed help and had directed her to a psychologist--her "shrink" as she kept saying. The talk-therapy helped, she said, but she confessed that she never told her shrink about her involvement with the orichas. "I am not sure what he would make of it, but I have never said anything about it." We talked too about the power of the psyche to defend itself from terrible trauma and loss. She mentioned a poem by Wallace Stevens that had helped her a bit as she struggled to make sense of the trajectory of her own life.

My wife tells me that when I got off the phone, I said I thought Judith was dying.

A week later the last handwritten letter arrived, continuing the conversation with more bits of detail about her family and her Yoruba experiences," this time telling how she had just recounted her first meeting with Pierre Verger to her eldest daughter. "So shreds of my Yoruba experience fly by. The years collapse and sometimes I cannot imagine how it all happened." Taped into the middle of the letter was the Stevens poem.

The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pine,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among the clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion

The exact rock where his inexactnesses
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.

--Wallace Stevens

It seems the blustering energy of a stormy intellect finally came home, directed to the specific, solitary solidity of the mountain. The opposites touched for a moment or a month, and now Judith Gleason--Oyá Lola is gone.

Ibaye, ibaye tonu.
Homage of the world, homage of the world to the one in heaven.

Pilgrimage: The Soul in Search of Itself

Just this week I got a flyer in the mail from the New York Center for Jungian Studies, advertising their 2013 Jung in Ireland program. One program was titled "Pilgrimage: The Soul in Search of Itself," and the copy gets to the heart of much of what I have tried to evoke in my writings on Babalú-Ayé and pilgrimage.

"Pilgrimage, an archetype representing the search for spiritual centeredness and wholeness, compels us to separate ourselves from ordinary life and place, and to embark on a meaningful encounter with what C.G. Jung calls the “Self.” Throughout the ages, people from all walks of life and every religious tradition have embarked on pilgrimages, explorations that mirror a spiritual journey inward to reflect on our life’s meaning and purpose.

Just as no two people are the same, no two pilgrimages are the same. Some necessitate a concrete and literal destination, while others consist of an inner, self-directed goal. But all pilgrimages have in common a restless human longing for depth, transcendence, and, ultimately, an authentic sense of being at home with ourselves in an ever-changing world. These are found in the soul’s search for itself. And, as such, we are all pilgrims.

"...We...come to understand how the often perilous journey and difficult inner work of the pilgrim is not so much of discovery but of rediscovery, not attainment but a reinstatement of the original human condition and even, as some would have it, a way back to a world of meaning and spirit."

(The image is a pilgrim on the way to Rincón, Cuba, as part of the annual festival of San Lázaro.)

Images from the Feast of San Lázaro

This video provides a touching rendition of the pilgrimage through black-and-white photography.

The Imitation of Babalú-Ayé: The Sacred Stranger

       

For whatever reason, I find myself intrigued today by a certain set of parallels in the material I have been laying out here: there are many aspects of Babalú-Ayé that live outside the house and cannot be brought in.  The Zulueta house in Perico has the secret that lives in an outbuilding in the patio, planted mysteriously by their founding ancestress, Octavia—Jundesi. Irete-Oyekún calls for the consecration of Ajuangan, a powerful and destructive force who also lives in the patio. Oyekún-Ojuani describes the kiti, the secret place for Asojano to eat and call his disruptive children.

Each of these seems to move against the major ritual pattern in Lucumí initiations for warrior deities, where the oricha is first fed in the forest and then, once placated, brought into the house.  These powers seem to point to aspects of divinity that cannot be civilized enough to bring into everyday life. These powers are always external and remind us of the power of the bush or the forest--el monte in Cuban Spanish. In fact, there is a story from Dahomey that identifies an earth mound as the source of the gods, so we know that these powers are prodigious and procreative.

If we take the image of something that always stands outside into society as somehow essential to both Babalú-Ayé and those who follow him, we come to something deeply untamable and alien within ourselves. In some cases, we fear to face the these things within ourselves, and in others we cannot bear the idea of showing these parts of ourselves to anyone else. As human beings that recognize the unintegrated within ourselves, we become less predictable - even to ourselves. Who really knows how she will react when the doctor announces cancer? Who can predict with total certainty how he will react to the slow decline of age or the loss of something precious like a parent, or a child, or a hand? Sometimes we shield ourselves from the world, taking refuge in the caves of isolation. Sometimes we rise to the throne of our own authority. Like Babalú, we touch our own hidden nature, and like Babalú, we become irascible and unique.

 

Saint Roque as Babalú-Ayé

All along the Way to Campostela there are allusions to San Lazaro. In many towns, including Cacabelos where we are right now, there was a special hostel dedicated to San Lazaro located at the edge of town so pilgrims with the plague or leprosy would not have to mix with others. Imagined as a lame man on crutches with two dogs traveling with him, San Lazaro is a classic icon of suffering, isolation, devotion, and dynamism.

Another similar figure is San Roque. Son of French nobles, Roque became a mendicant. On pilgrimage to Rome, he came down with the plague. With open wounds he walked to Campostela, attended by a faithful dog that licked his sores clean and brought him food to eat. He is always represented as a pilgrim with sores on his legs and a dog at his side. He caught people's imagination in the Middle Ages, and there are churches for him all along the Way.

Yesterday I was already thinking a post about San Roque, who in Cuba is often linked to Babalú-Ayé, the deity of infectious disease and healing. Today we walked into Cacabelos, passed the Plaza de San Lazaro, and visited the little chapel where this image of San Roque sits on the main altar.

When we went to the Plaza of San Lazaro for dinner, we saw an elderly homeless man picking through the dumpsters. As we left after dinner, he was still at it, so I offered him our leftovers--dinner for him and a small offering for us to show our gratitude for our well-being.