This clearance and explanation is very important especially for the Yoruba in diaspora and other tribes in Nigeria who keep thinking and saying that yoruba serves many gods. All orishas are all human beings, a heros and heroines and inventors.Thank you ma.
Why I just discovered her after her death? She a genius. In fact, she Orisha herself. I need to get all her books. Thank you so much uncle Tunde Kelani👍
Thank you so much Professor Oluwole! I've been trying, with a lot of difficulty to get what you've explained across to folk, you've done it brilliantly, I can now explain so much better! Eshe ma..
Im African American and im sorry if i come across as ignorant, but is she saying that there is one supreme God and that the orishas are not gods but spiritual beings that were bestowed upon having powers by this supreme god giving them abilities? And that humans can ask these orishas for help? Yet the supreme God is still the only true being? If so its not that different from Catholicism and therefore shouldn't be demonized by the west
She says there's one supreme God. And the orishas means Heroes and were people who had lived like us in the past but with supreme powers and also impacted on there people in different ways, just as you have it every where else in the world celebrating there Heroes yearly since centuries ago.
We are suffering today because we left what belong to us and embraces foreign Religion until Africans go back to their Original religion before things can become more better
And if the idea of these "oriṣas" being just heros, then why does Ifa divine that they be appeased when trouble looms? Cuz I've heard of some Ifa divination or traditions that prescribes that these oriṣas should be appeased to escape from certain dangers or succeed in certain adventures.
Mama, e se gan fun gbogbo awon alaye won yi, sugbon yio wu mi ki e fi awaon iwe yin si ori Ebay and Amazon ki gbogbo awa ti a wa ni eyin odi le ri raa. Agba yin a di ale oooooooooooooooooo, Afon a gbo ki o to wo, amin.
I don't think they are necessarily worshipped. In yorubaland we generally practice ancestor worship hence why people call out to the spirit of their dead mothers or fathers saying things like "eleda iya mi gbami". We beleive the dead are able to intervene in people's lives in some way and as a result we seek favors from the Orisa just like we would from a dead ancestor. It is my belief that Sango for example discovered gunpowder and its composition was a closely guarded secret but in his experimentation and research with the material he accidentally burned his palace and town down killing his children and people in the process leading him to commit suicide. In this case he becomes an Orisa because the general population know he had the knowledge of something powerful and because we believe dead ancestors interfere in our lives as a regular person if I was wronged by someone and in my culture I can call on any of the dead ancestors to hurt you. Who would you rather call, a dead grandparent or the great king who discovered a way to make things explode) This would be a great way for cults regarding these great individuals to spring up. We know for example that the cult of Sango sprang up after his death and was started by his friends. We are also told that they used the same magic to burn down the homes of Sango's enemies before his suicide which indicates that he might have revealed the knowledge of gunpowder to them as well. This is the same with many of the other orisa's having close people start cults about them after their deaths with the knowledge that the people proposed. Another reason why they might have come to be worshipped as they are today is that being great people who altered the course of Yoruba history, they would have been invoked often by those after them in the same way politicians today try to align themselves to the great politicians of the past and in a culture that doesn't record things by writing, one major disaster is enough to greatly alter the story of the Orisa as that great man who discovered how to smelt iron to the god of iron
A couple of problems I find with this submission of hers: 1. The meaning of "God/god" is so much wider than the almighty, encompassing feature she seeks to impose on the concept. For one, a god can range from any deified being to one considered almighty. The way people treat their favourite pastors or pop stars for example, is literally godification/deification in real time. So, I don't agree that to be a god, you have to be the most powerful almighty deity. 2. She intentionally draws parallel with Christianity because she knows that using any religion besides Judeo-Christianity will reveal that there is precedence for big and small gods coexisting in cultures. 3. Even in Christianity, the Jews in the Old Testament favoured some sort of Syncretism where they acknowledged God, but also indulged in the worship of other (littler) gods. 4. Does she imply that the existence of the human lives of Yorùbá gods remove them from true divinity? That's laughable. Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus, Mohammed, and a host of other divine or nigh-divine entities led human lives. This doesn't detract from their veritable deification. In fact, it enriches their myth.
