Baba Who? Babalú!

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...

The COVID pandemic rages on. While the indicators suggest that we are all doing better at the basics of masking, hand washing, and physical  distancing , people are still falling ill. Many people have asked me about ceremonies and offerings to honor  Babalú-Ayé  and request protection and healing.    This simple ceremony is what I would call old-school. It is not flashy. It does not require a  lot of  people or animals. Rather, it is uses simple ingredients that please the  oricha , and it focuses on the most important ingredient of all—devotion.   Please note that this offering is primarily for those people who  Babalú-Ayé   Lucumí  and whose pots are not sealed.  Arará  vessels and those in some  Lucumí  lineages are sealed at the time of initiation. You can learn more about the different forms of  Babalú   here .    Go before your  Babalú-Ayé  and greet him. Say your  mo...

 Last fall, my goddaughter Phoenix Smith—Olá Otón Adélele asked me to participate in first activities of the Alliance for Ecotherapy & Social Justice . She asked me to explore how oricha religion provides us with a robust model for nature religion and healing as part of a video series called Ecotherapy for Everyone: Healing with Nature for Peace and Justice.   My presentation focused on three major aspects of oricha religion and how it links individuals to the natural world. First, the presentation explored the idea of the sacred forest as the source of divinity within the religion and how different ceremonies channel that divine energy back into human life. Then, it looked at many of the ways that specific religious ideas and practices link individuals to ecosystems or natural phenomena; this section of the talk also explores how the Arará deity Dandá-Jueró can be understood as a model for ecological connections that lead to wellbeing. Finally, the presentation intr...

“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 ...

Babalú-Ayé does not play a formal ritual role in the itutu, the funeral ceremony for those oricha priests that have passed away. However many elders contend that he delivers the body of the dead person to the cemetery on a cart, and so he is always strongly linked to death . Given the recent passing of friends, I have seen several itutus lately, and like most ceremonies in the religion, they invite reflection. The itutu brings transformation, as the deceased moves from the world of the living to the world of the dead. Essentials from the priest’s initiation are placed in an open gourd on the floor within the egun altar. We sing oro egun , the nine songs to praise and move the ancestors. For first time, we name the spirit of our departed colleague as part of the invocation, and we sing to them as an egun. We also feed the new spirit with a bird. For those of us who regularly honor the ancestors, their presence is constant, but we never lose track of the fact that we are living o...

In both Cuba and Benin, the road of Babalú-Ayé known as Suvinengué is strongly associated with the vulture.   His name can be translated as “vulture-child of Dasoyi .”   The elders in Cuba say that Suvinengué is a vulture with the head of human being, and in Benin they also say he is bald and gray, like the vulture.   Some Dahomean elders say Suvinengué flies from Earth up to Heaven carrying messages from human mouths to God´s ears. They say he indicates whether an offering has been accepted or not. When an offering is left outside and then disappears overnight, it is thought that Suvinengué has taken it to the deity it was intended for.   Still others say simply, “He eats the dead.” This link between Babalú and the ancestors is quite profound, and other roads of the deity revolve around this link. Afimaye is said to seek out Arará priests at the hour of their deaths, but in Benin, he is seen as the overseer of a collective workforce made up of the spirits...

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 r...

        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 exte...

I woke up this morning with my thoughts squarely on the pilgrim’s road. I love the image of moving out from a town and into the largely asocial and empty space. This middle place is outside of usual relationships. This middle place is neither here nor there. It is the betwixt-and-between space that many associate with rites of passage.  You know another town is over the horizon or over the next hill, but you spend most of your time between specific places. Similarly, the image of walking between more fixed social worlds intrigues me deeply. The pilgrim’s body literally moves out of one space and into the middle ground. It is the work of the body that propels the pilgrim forward, and it is the body that is marked by pilgrimage. The pilgrim sweats and drenches his clothes. With time, the sweat mixes with clothes worn day after day, and the pilgrim begins to reek. The pilgrim’s feet strike the Earth again and again. Her legs again, and her feet begin to swell.  Most pilgri...