Ori: the Spiritual Head and the Choice of Destiny

Introduction

When UNESCO published Wande Abimbola’s Sixteen Great Poems of Ifa in 1975 — poems from the Ifa corpus rendered into English by a babalawo who was also a university professor — two of the sixteen poems chosen spoke of the same thing: Ori, the head. Not the anatomical head, but the personal divinity every human being chooses before birth and carries through life. In Yoruba philosophy, Abimbola writes, success or failure, long life or early death, wealth or poverty are aspects of human experience predestined by one’s choice of Ori (Abimbola, introduction, pp. 32–34). This article reads the two poems — and closes with a Cuban pataki about what happens when heads get lost.

The divinity each person has all to themselves

Abimbola sums up the concept like this: after Orisanla, the divinity responsible for creation, moulds the body of the person about to be born, it is Ajala — “the potter who makes heads in Orun”, a supernatural power not even counted among the divinities — who supplies the ori, taken from his storehouse of heads of every kind: big and small, kiln-fired and unfired (pp. 32–33). Once chosen, the head becomes the symbol of success or failure in life. Whoever chooses a good head chooses with it the potentiality to s쳮d — not victory itself, because they still have to work to realise it. Whoever chooses a bad head is condemned to failure, unless they work exceedingly hard and offer much sacrifice, which Abimbola describes as the element of reparation for the defects each person carries from origin (pp. 32–33).

And where does Ifa come in? Only Orunmila witnessed, in Orun, the choice of each head. To consult Ifa, says Abimbola, is merely to try to find out what one’s own Ori has kept in store: divination is the communication of the wishes of one’s Ori to Ifa, who reveals them through the appropriate Odu (p. 33).

Orunmila’s question: who follows the devotee to the end?

The fifth great poem of the collection (Ori As Each Individual’s Personal Orisa, pp. 158–177) holds this doctrine inside a myth. Orunmila gathered the Orisas and asked a single question: which of you is capable of following your own devotee on a distant journey, out over the seas, without turning back? Sango, the bravest of them all, answered first: I will follow. But Orunmila asked — and what if, walking and walking, you pass through Koso, your own home, and your favourite food is there, and a rooster crowing? Sango answered at once: first I eat, then I continue the journey. One by one, the other Orisas gave the same kind of answer: each would stop at their own house. When Orunmila himself confessed that he too has a limit to how far he can follow his devotee without turning back, the Orisas, disturbed, begged him to explain the meaning of the story — and he answered: it is Ori, Ori alone, who follows his own devotee on the most distant journey over the seas, without ever turning back (p. 158).

The poem closes with a salute: Ori, who never forgets his own devotee and brings him blessings faster than the other gods — no god blesses a man without the consent of his Ori (p. 159). And Abimbola explains why this does not make deserters of the Orisas: the Orisas exist for the public at large, with many people clamouring every day for their protection, while Ori has a single devotee to care for. That is why each person’s Ori is their personal Orisa — the intermediary between them and the other divinities, just as the divinities are intermediaries between human beings and Olodumare (pp. 158–159).

The house of Ajala: the choice that cannot be undone

The sixth poem (Ajala And The Choice of Ori, pp. 178–207) tells the choice as a journey. Three friends set out for the abode of Olodumare to choose ori: Oriseeku, son of Ogun; Orileemere, son of Ija; and Afuwape, son of Orunmila. All were warned: do not stop anywhere on the way — go straight to the house of Ajala, the potter who makes heads in Orun. The first two took the warning seriously: they passed their own fathers’ doors without entering. Afuwape disobeyed — he wanted to see his father, and Orunmila, consulting Ifa for his son, ordered a sacrifice of three bags of salt and money, part of which the boy was to carry on the journey (pp. 178–179).

Oriseeku and Orileemere reached Ajala’s house first — but he was not home. They asked for the storehouse of heads and chose by themselves. They chose useless heads: on earth, they worked all their lives and reaped nothing. Afuwape, delayed by the visit to his father, met on the road a gate-keeper cooking his own soup and seasoning it with ashes — and offered him the salt he carried. The gate-keeper, delighted, told him the secret: Ajala is an incorrigible debtor who hides in the ceiling of his house to escape his creditors. Let Afuwape pay off the debts, and Ajala would come down. So it happened: with the creditors paid, Ajala emerged from hiding and chose, himself, a good head for Afuwape. On earth, Afuwape prospered (p. 179).

Abimbola draws three lessons from the myth (pp. 179–180): sacrifice leads the way — it was the salt and money offered in his father’s house that opened the right path; salt civilises — in his reading, the gate-keeper cooking with ashes is a symbol of the world before that ritual, civilising good; and the choice of Ori is final and irrevocable — whoever chose badly cannot undo it, but can make up for it with hard work joined to much sacrifice.

When the heads got lost: a Cuban pataki

The Tratado Enciclopédico de Ifá, in the entry for the odu Odi She, holds a pataki that reads like a commentary on all of this. An awo of that land, using the power of Ozain (the Cuban spelling of Osanyin), began collecting people’s brains and storing them at the foot of an atori tree — together, without telling them apart. When Olofin learned of it and sent Obatala to investigate, the awo, rushing to return everything before the Orisa arrived, mixed up the heads: he put the women’s on the men, the children’s on the old. Obatala had to attend to each person’s head — the rite the Lucumi tradition calls obori eleda — for them to return to normal; and Odi She lost the rulership of that land, for having dislocated the people’s brains (Tratado, Odi She entry, pataki of Oluo Bomo Shekete).

The pataki describes a real rite — the rogation of the head, the office of a consecrated priest, which in Brazilian Candomblé has its parallel in the bori. Here we describe it, we do not teach it: what is done, with what and when belongs to the table of those with the authority for it. (TO CONFIRM in the primary source: the description of the bori in a Brazilian source — Beniste.)

What this teaches

The concept of Ori sustains one of the most sophisticated architectures of destiny any tradition has ever formulated. The choice of the head explains the inexplicable — sudden death, suffering, sudden luck — and, at the same time, excuses no one from acting: the good head is potential, not prize; the bad head is obstacle, not sentence. Abimbola himself points out the risk of fatalism — if everything was chosen before birth, why struggle? — and answers with the system itself: Ori is only the symbol of potentiality, and everyone still has to work to realise it (pp. 179–180). Between the poem in which only Ori accompanies the devotee to the end and the pataki in which Obatala returns each head to its owner, the same affirmation remains: before any Orisa, each person answers to the divinity they carry with them.

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What you have read here is rooted in the 256 Odus of Ifá — the corpus we study verse by verse. Read them as contemplation: real divination belongs at the table of a consecrated babalawo.

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