Obatala

Obatala is the senior orisha of the Yoruba tradition, the king of the white cloth, to whom the supreme being Olodumare gave the work of creation, the shaping of the solid earth and the moulding of the bodies of human beings from clay, before life was breathed into them. He is thus a creator and a craftsman of humanity, and he is associated with whiteness, purity, coolness, wisdom, patience, and the calm authority of an elder; his devotees wear white, and he is offered white things, and he is understood as the most senior and dignified of the orisha, a figure of moral purity and serene judgement. As the moulder of human bodies he is the patron of humanity in a very direct sense: each person's physical form is his handiwork.

The Yoruba oral corpus of Ifa divination, the odu, preserves much of what is known of Obatala's mythology and was transmitted for centuries by trained diviners before being extensively recorded in writing by scholars such as William Bascom and Wande Abimbola from the twentieth century onward; his principal shrine lies in a sacred grove at Ile-Ife, the city Yoruba tradition holds as the origin-place of the world and of humanity, fitting for the orisha credited with shaping the first human forms. Carried across the Atlantic through the transatlantic slave trade, Obatala's devotion continues today within Cuban Regla de Ocha (Santeria) and Brazilian Candomble, where he is honoured under his own name and is widely associated, through the syncretism those traditions developed under colonial-era Catholicism, with Our Lady of Mercy or, in some Candomble houses, with Jesus Christ, an identification his devotees understand within their own living practice rather than as a substitution of one faith for another.

One of the most important and tender teachings attached to Obatala is told in the Ifa verses of the Yoruba tradition. It is said that once, while about the work of moulding human bodies from clay, Obatala drank palm wine and became unsteady, and that as a result some of the bodies he shaped that day were formed differently from the rest, people born with what the world calls disabilities or unusual forms. Rather than casting these aside, the tradition holds that Obatala took them as especially his own: people born with such differences are regarded as sacred to Obatala, under his particular protection and care, and are to be treated with special respect. The story is often told with the further lesson that Obatala thereafter forswore palm wine, and his devotees traditionally abstain from it in his honour. This teaching gives the tradition a profound and humane doctrine of the dignity of every human body, whatever its form, as the sacred handiwork and special charge of the creator-orisha.

Obatala is worshipped across West Africa and, in the diaspora religions of Cuba and Brazil, under names such as Obatala and Oxala, where practitioners associate him with Catholic figures such as Our Lady of Mercy. These are living religions, and Obatala remains among their most revered spirits, the cool, wise, senior orisha, the moulder of human bodies, and the protector of the purity and dignity of every person he has shaped.