Araba

Most divination is private. Somebody has a problem, goes to a babalawo, pays, and receives a reading and a prescription for their own life. The Araba is the office that exists because some questions are not private. As the senior babalawo of a town he casts on the town's behalf: at the ritual year's public castings, at the installation of a king, and when something has happened that concerns everybody.

The office is a chieftaincy inside the priesthood rather than an appointment from outside it. It is filled from among initiated babalawo by the priests themselves, and it carries duties beyond casting: the training and examination of younger diviners, adjudication when two diviners disagree, and the ordering of the priesthood's own affairs. Several towns have an Araba and the towns do not answer to one another.

At Ile-Ife the holder is styled Araba Agbaye, which is usually rendered as Araba of the world. The claim in the title is a real claim and it is not universally accepted, which is a separate matter from the seniority of the Ife office within Yorubaland itself. Within Ife it is not in doubt.

One thing the office is not is a priesthood of an orisha. An Araba is a babalawo, initiated to Ifa and working the corpus, and the cults of Sango, Osun, Obatala and the rest are headed by their own priests, who answer to their own lineages and not to him.

The present standing of the Ife office is a twentieth century development and worth telling as one. As Ifa and orisha communities in Cuba, Brazil, Trinidad and North America began, from the middle of the century, to look back toward Yorubaland for authority, they needed something to look at. The Araba Agbaye at Ile-Ife was the most legible candidate: a named senior office, in the city that claims to be where the tradition began, performing a public casting on a fixed date.

The annual casting at Oke Itase became the point of contact. Priests now travel to Ile-Ife for it from across the Americas, and the Odu announced there is circulated within hours to communities that will never set foot in the town. That is a considerable expansion of what a town chieftaincy was for.

It has also made the office contested in a way it was not before. A house in Havana that traces its own line back through Cuban initiators may hold that it answers to that line and to no one else, and the proposition that any single African office speaks for Ifa worldwide is rejected by a good many practitioners on exactly that ground. The atlas records the office, records the reach it now has, and records that the reach is argued about.