Iroko in the Family of Babalú-Ayé

Years ago, I wrote about a Matanzas lineage in which Babalú-Ayé is taken on a ritual journey before he is given to a new devotee. First, he goes to the cemetery, where he is fed a guinea with white wine and cigar smoke. Then he is taken to the foot of a ceiba, where the feeding is repeated. Finally, he returns to the house, where he eats again with the ancestors.

Cemetery. Ceiba. House.

At the time, I was interested primarily in what this sequence revealed about Babalú’s relationship with the dead. But the ceiba keeps appearing.

Dasojí—the father of the Babalú-Ayés—is imagined reclining against the trunk of a ceiba, surrounded by his children.

Nanú, their mother, lives in its crown.

Naná Burukú receives two white guineas at its foot at dawn.

And Babalú himself goes there before entering the house of a new devotee.

These are not all versions of the same ceremony. They come from different houses, different stories, different ritual contexts. Still, the pattern is difficult to ignore.

The ceiba is one of the great sacred trees of Afro-Cuban religion. The orisha most closely associated with it is Iroko.

William Bascom’s Cuban interlocutors in 1948 described Iroko in several ways. Florencia Baró said Iroko lived in the ceiba. But some identified Iroko with the tree itself. However, “Ito” put it the point more plainly: a stone could be placed there, but it was not essential. “The tree is the important thing, and it is what eats.”

Florencia Baró told Bascom that every noon and midnight the orishas and the dead gathered beneath Iroko to have their disputes settled. Candito Pérez likewise described the ceiba as the place where the orishas deliberated, made laws and established the conditions governing them. In Baró’s account, Iroko remembered those agreements—and therefore knew each orisha’s powers, obligations, and secrets.

Iroko knew what each orisha ate.

Iroko knew what each one did.

Iroko knew their secrets.

One of Lydia Cabrera’s elderly informants put it even more evocatively: “Iroko is always an assembly of spirits.”

The tree is not simply the house of one orisha. It is a place of gathering. The dead gather there, that Africans and Creoles meet there, and that people in the countryside fed their ancestors at the ceiba for precisely this reason.

The Iroko worshiped in the ceiba, one of Cabrera’s unnamed interlocutors tells us, “belongs to the branch of Naná Burukú and Ayanu…” (Ayanu is a name for Babalú-Ayé commonly used in Matanzas.)

In other words, Iroko is not simply standing nearby while the family of Babalú-Ayé gathers at the ceiba.

Iroko belongs to the family.

That makes the old stories and ceremonies look different.

Dasojí reclining against the trunk.

Nanú living in the crown.

Naná Burukú receiving sacrifice at its foot.

Babalú eating there on his journey from the cemetery to the house of a new devotee.

And Iroko—the power of the tree itself—belonging to the branch of Naná Burukú and Ayanu.

Then there is Jueró.

Jueró is the rainbow serpent, another ancient power bound into this same family. I do not know a traditional account that specifically places him in the ceiba, but perhaps he does not need one.

But it is interesting to note that both Bascom and Cabrera describe Iroko dressed with a multicolored sash or apron, echoing the many colors of Jueró’s rainbow. Those colors also point toward the ancestors, who themselves “take nine colors,” binding Iroko, Jueró, and the dead into the same ritual palette.

The rainbow stretches between Earth and Heaven.

So does the tree.

One arcs across the sky.

The other rises out of the ground.

Both join worlds.

And pieces of the ceiba even enter the secrets of Babalú-Ayé himself. Depending on the lineage, elements of the tree appear in his já and among the materials hidden inside his fundamento.

Something from the great tree outside is carried inside.

Could we say a little piece of Iroko travels with Babalú?

Perhaps that is why the ceiba keeps appearing whenever we look closely at this family.

Its roots disappear into the Earth. Its trunk stands among the living. Its crown opens into Heaven. The dead gather there. The orishas gather there. And Babalú and his family gather there because Iroko already belongs with them.

The ceiba is not simply a sacred tree in the worship of Babalú-Ayé.

It is his family tree.

___

Sources:

William Bascom’s Cuba Field Notes,1948 are held at Bancroft Library, University of California-Berkeley. See pages 13, 16, 33, 52, 53, 56, 58, 65, 85,121, 242.

Lydia Cabrera (trans. David Font-Navarete) El Monte, 2023 ed., pp. 160–162, 197.

Image: Michael Chauvet https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ceiba_pentandra_Vi%C3%B1ales.jpg

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