Babalú-Ayé and a Theology of Multiplicity
Babalú-Ayé’s world is rife with multiplicity. He is called
by many names. Some people say he has 77 different roads, or avatars. He is
honored by an enormous number of groups, and they make altar objects for him with
many different forms. Even the secret medicines that go into these objects vary
widely.
Babalú-Ayé is called by many names.
In the Cuba countryside, some people call him Ayanu, and there are songs from Matanzas
Province that reiterate this name as a generic praise name for him. The Ararat
usually call him Asojano. In a common shorthand, many people simply refer to
him as “the Old Man” or San Lázaro, the Catholic saint with which he is
strongly associated. As I have explained elsewhere, these names are all really
meant to protect us from speaking is true name, Shakuaná. To utter that name is
to call sickness and death into your immediate surroundings.
My godfather Ernesto Pichardo taught me that Babalú-Ayé is
like a surname for a group of deities, each of which has its own character,
history, and preferences. Soyaya
is the earth at the bottom of the sea and eats yellow snapper. The road called Agrónika
is said to have retreated to a cave to create the já, the cleansing broom that
figures in many of Babalú’s ceremonies. Young and energetic, Afimaye
is said to be the youngest road of Babalú. Bound by a family connection to the
earth, sickness, and healing, each road expresses a different face of the
deity.
Individual devotees may even end up receiving or inheriting
multiple manifestations of Babalú-Ayé over time. Raquel Fernández—Obá Kedún inherited six different
Babalús, including the Arará deity that had crowned her husband, Rafael
Linares—Emerego.
The fundamentos,
or consecrated altar objects, that people use to honor Babalú also vary
widely. The so-called Babalú-Ayé Lucumí takes coral stones and cowry
shells, like other Lucumí deities. Most communities cover the vessels that
contain these things, but some
do not. Some Arará lineages give a sealed vessel with nothing in it. While some
people find this objectionable, others argue that it makes perfect sense:
Babalú-Ayé is spiritual and therefore cannot be contained in a vessel. The
Arará Sabalú give Asojano in the same kind of vessel but with a large “secret”
within it. While no one really argues about the validity of the multiple names
of the deity, people can become quite polemical about the morphology of the
altar objects, claiming that one is real while the other is an “invention.”
This mass of cement contains a wide range of medicines. Some
priests have shared their “recipes” for these secrets with me, and some people
use these as a schema from which to improvise or consult the deity. My
godfather Pedro
Abreu says that he makes each one unique, even if they are for the same
road. Why? Because the medicine that will heal one person is not the same
medicine that will heal another, even if they have the same ailment.
So how
do we make sense of this extensive multipilicity? How do we describe a deity
whose identity, names, and very form vary so widely? How do we understand these
phenomena as anthropological, sociological, or psychological? When discussing
the use of plates to decorate the altars of water goddesses in the Diaspora,
the famed art historian and praise singer of Yoruba classicism Robert Farris
Thompson describes how some priestesses claimed the plates were only for
dressing the goddesses up, some shared a more calculating and meaningful use of
the plates to identify the goddesses, and still others articulated a direct
cosmological significance. Celebrating this diversity, he says, “A range of
elaborative and interpretive discretion confronts us.” We might extend this idea
to formulate a notion of “interpretative multiplicities”—the various if
simultaneous meanings and uses that people ascribe to the same symbols and
actions with the African-inspired religious worlds of oricha and fodun worship.
This notion embraces the fundamental multivocality of symbols and symbolic
action, while at the same it recognizes that pluralistic and indeterminate
nature of the social and psychological universe, just as William James argued.
Despite the sometimes-vehement protestations of individual practitioners, it is
possible to say that all of these interpretations, however varied, express some
truth for specific people.
Note: The Thompson quote comes from page 215 of Faces of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa
and The African Americas (New York: The Museum of African Art, 1993).
Comments
Post a Comment