Baba Who? Babalú!

“Babalú-Ayé wants everyone to place his altar directly in front of the main door of the house,” a friend texts from Perico , Cuba. “He wants everybody to place seven gourds in front of him, each with a different kind of grain, a red onion, and cigar. And most importantly, he wants everyone to light two candles and pray to Him to scare away the pandemic.” This admonition is followed by another prescription for a cleaning at the foot of the Old Man. In this moment, the coronavirus pandemic has killed thousands of people, paralyzed whole countries, and quarantined millions. So oricha communities around the world are naming ways to acknowledge his impact and pray that he go easy on us. As one traditional praise song says: Ason kuele, Ason kuele, Ason kuele, Ason ño Sickness, be gentle with us Babalú is sometimes said to “rule” infectious disease, but in fact, he is infectious disease and its antidote. So at this moment, we are becoming intimately acquainted ...

Perhaps no other plant is more closely associated with Babalú-Ayé than cundeamor . Not only do many people cover his vessel with this herb, some houses wrap cundeamor around the horns of the goats they offer to Babalú. In fact, as part of the awán , everyone present must place a strand of this climbing vine around their neck. At the end of the ceremony, these necklaces are cast off and into the basket. Cundeamor grows aggressively at the end of the rainy season, fruits near Babalú’s feast day on December 17th, and then dries up and disappears completely. The fruits have a distinctive brilliant yellow-orange color and bright red seeds. Cundeamor  acts just like the deity: emerging at the beginning of the dry season, he grows toward his feast only to disappear again. Not only does its growing habit mimic Babalú, both the leaves and fruits of the cundeamor have a long and well-documented history as a medicinal herb. In Cuba, both Momordica charantia and Momordica ba...

My teacher, Ernesto Pichardo--Obá Irawó, likes rhetorical questions, so one day he asked me, "What odu does Babalú-Ayé appear in?" I mentioned that people say that Babalú is born in the sign Odí-Eyeunle, along with vomit and smallpox. He said, "Yes, that is true, but there is sickness in every sign, and so Babalú is in every sign. In this he is like Elegguá, who appears everywhere." It is true. The sign Oché Meyi speaks of problems with the blood and diseases like leukemia. The sign Iroso-Ofún speaks of impotence. In the treatises that compile the wisdom about the signs, each one speaks to particular diseases or vectors of infection. I have heard that some Yoruba babalawos always mark an offering for Eshu, and then one for Babalú-Ayé, who has immense power. "Always" is probably a figure of speech, but it does point to a pattern: Babalú-Ayé is offered something in every odu. Babalú-Ayé is strongly associated with the Earth itself, and West Africans and ...