“I started my life out in the city of New Orleans which is itself a spiritual center where several different African cultures came together with native American and indigenous European culture as well. So, I grew up being enchanted by the spirit of the Mississippi river, listening to the whisperings of stories about bayou creatures and long gone ancestors… I grew up in an atmosphere of spirituality with spiritual and psychic experiences which I refer to as “growing up tipsy”...
There were a lot of things that the women in my mother’s community did. I saw them make rain, I saw them talk to nature, I listened in when they interpreted each other’s dreams and saw that they were very very different from the white women on television. Whenever I asked them “why do you do this?” They’d say “because that is what the old folks say”. And I would continue to ask people who were older, and they all said “because that is what the old folks say”, and after awhile I got it , that the old folks did not just mean Mama Ludie who was older than my mother. “The old folks” were some mystical beings, some ancestors, some surviving wisdom that was floating in the atmosphere of my community. So I grew up “tipsy” and always knew that somehow I would land in the position of a root woman, two headed woman, priestess, or something like that…
The first person who read me, bless his heart, was a priest here in San Francisco by the name of Carlito. I went to his house, and as he did the divination, he kept asking and asking and then finally he said “let me ask what I think”. He threw the shells again, and he said “yes you are a child of Oshun” and then he said “not only that you are a favored child of Oshun!” And I thought to myself “he is bullshitting me” because at the time I was miserable. I was broke, I was sick, I was lonely, I was going through all of this stuff and I said [noise made from flapping lips] Then he said “the finest jewelry is tempered in the hottest fire and then plunged into the coldest water before it is polished. Its polishing time for you...”
I remember being at the bembe and turning around and looking over the room; and there were people who were as black as night, as brown as caramel, and as pale as vanilla, all dressed in white, with just a little scarf, the color of their Orishas. The drums were playing and everybody was praying and dancing and there was an energy in the room that was irresistible! I remember looking over my shoulder at that room and I said “there are a number of ways that a person can spend a lifetime. Let this way be mine.” And that was the moment that I gave up my resistance...
So back then (and now I am talking about the early seventies), for an African American there were only three choices: to be some kind of a Christian, or in Mohammed’s mosque or something like that. Some people were embracing Eastern traditions, going to Ashrams and chanting and stuff like that, but when it came to our natural, our eco spiritual systems you either had supplication, sort of asking to be accepted into the afro Cuban houses, or your other alternative was Oyotunji Village in the Carolinas…
There is a phenomenon that I call “Beneath Mary’s Skirts”. Because the Black Codes of the slave period forbade us from practicing our own tradition, in many places you will see altars with the images of catholic saints at the top and when you lift the skirt up of the altar the African artifacts are underneath. In New Orleans the police used to raid our temples and kick them over and that kind of stuff, but I always felt like it’s time to let go of that kind of trapping...
I got a letter from the Berkley Women’s Center saying we want to offer you space at the womens center to hold this tea of yours. So I arrived with a box of herbal teas and some honey and lemon, and when I walked in there were 36 women in the room. And when I came back there was 60 women in the room, and they kept multiplying and multiplying. Of those women, there were 21 women who really wanted to learn. Every last of those women today are either Orisha priestess, new thought ministers, sun dancers. Every last one of them have become service priests in some tradition or another… I realized that the needs of the women had outgrown my knowledge and ability to really serve them so I started looking for priests and priestesses who might be open to treating us with some respect…
I realized that there were people who needed their house spiritually cleaned… The reason I wrote Jambalaya was to give African American women another perspective on what we had inherited and to provide bottom-line access to power the stuff I’d grown up around seeing women do all the time. It was important to me that we understand that our tradition is not “spookism”, that we are powerful beings who can do a lot of stuff for ourselves, and to pull people's coats to the games that were being played on them in botanicas by charlatan readers… I‘ll tell you one of the things that’s interesting is when I’m in America I’m aware of how African I am, when I’m in Africa I’m aware of how American I am. Here we do things at leisure, we do things big and beautifully, we are lavish. In Africa you are in the belly of The Mother. It is very very clear that this what you’re doing is connected to survival…
A child in the Motherland is going to get a secret name at birth, is going to be named in a ceremony nine days after, is going to have an age- grade group, is going to go through all their rights of passage, is going to be around elders who know all of this stuff and is constantly teaching it to them, so they have a lifetime of spiritual teachings etc. Here we are making up for having had that taken from us, and so the Ocha becomes a big ritual. Okay the lifestyle is different. To bring it right down home, when someone makes Ocha here there is one year and seven days of incubation in white clothes called the Iyawo year.
Anybody reading this needs to know that I believe in the year and seven days and will not deviate from it under any circumstances because that time is needed to rearrange your energies. Somebody who grew up in the village in Africa being around the tradition all their lives, studying all the time will go through an initiation and they have three months in white. Its only three months because they’ve had eight, nine, ten years of training before them. The person here needs that year and seven days. And so sometimes we get a conflict because somebody from here will go there and come back and do the three months and then in month number four they’re feeling funny and they don’t know why , and they can’t reconnect with their elder and they are floating around. They need to learn principles and the rituals in the tradition…
The powers of Oshun are being uncovered more and more every day… It is Oshun who took the message of humans to Olodumare, that She is Ibukole, the high flying vulture, She is the Mother of Eshu Odara. We have Oshe Otura, we know that when Oshun turned her back on the world everything dried up! So we’re a re-empowerment of The Female Divine!
Wande Abimbola, who is serious scholar, has put forward some evidence that Oshun taught Orunmilla the art of divining. In the popular folklore there is a tale that says Obatala taught Oshun. Oshun was played down as if She was this little girl. This is also a common theme in world mythology—the little one who ends up saving us all.
From my readings, the relationship between Orunmilla and Oshun is one of great lovers. They represent the connection between destiny and love. Years ago, while thumbing through one of my many books, I came upon an odu that talks about Orunmilla being in despair because the world was making Him weary! He was wandering through the forest in despair and Oshun came upon him. The Odu said that She, (She always puts honey on her breasts, sprinkles river water and ties five yellow silk scarves around Her waist) its said that She danced in front of Him and “ they laid down to forget the world together.” I hear some tantra in there, I hear some suppressed sexual secret between Destiny and Love, between the interplay of cosmic energies. Now that the Divine Feminine is coming out from under the foot of enforced colonial masculinity. We are going to move towards a balance. We will see the interplay of the Divine Feminine with the Sacred Masculine.”
~ Iyanifa Ayele Kumari is an author, a healer, a priestess, and a diviner. She is also the author of the book: Iyanifa Woman of Wisdom: Insights from the Priestesses of the Ifa Orisha Tradition, Their Stories and Plight for the Divine Feminine
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