Babalorisha

The clearest way to place a babalorisha is against a babalawo, because the two are constantly confused outside the tradition. A babalawo is initiated to Ifa. His subject is the corpus of 256 Odu, his instrument is the tray or the chain, and his work is divination. A babalorisha is initiated to one orisha, Sango or Osun or Obatala or another, and his work is the cult of that orisha: its shrine, its offerings, its festivals, and the initiation of others into it.

The title means father of the orisha, and the parentage is the load bearing part. Someone initiated by a babalorisha is his child in the religion, and remains so; the house is a lineage and it is spoken of in kinship terms throughout. Seniority runs by initiation date rather than by age, so a person of sixty initiated last year is junior to a person of thirty initiated at twelve.

What the initiation consists of is closed, and is not described here or anywhere else in this atlas. What can be said is that it is not ordination in the sense a reader from a Christian or Islamic background will expect: there is no seminary, no examining body and no institution that can revoke it. Authority comes from the lineage and from the recognition of other priests, which is exactly why disputes in the tradition are so often disputes about who initiated whom.

The office crossed the Atlantic with the people who held it and kept its structure while changing its vocabulary. In Brazilian Candomble the babalorisha is the babalorixa, more commonly called the pai de santo, father of saint, in the Portuguese that the tradition's public language became. In Cuban Regla de Ocha he is the santero, and where he stands as initiator to a particular person he is that person's padrino, godfather. The Cuban houses also distinguish the oriate, the specialist who directs the ceremonies, which is a role Yorubaland does not separate out in the same way.

The lineage logic survived all of it. A Havana or Salvador house can still be traced by naming who initiated whom back through the generations, and legitimacy disputes in the diaspora are almost always disputes about that chain: whether a claimed initiation happened, whether the initiator held what he claimed to hold, whether a line has been broken.

Since the middle of the twentieth century there has also been traffic in the other direction, with American and Brazilian priests seeking initiation or reinitiation in Nigeria in order to attach themselves to an African line. That has produced real friction, because a Nigerian house and a Cuban house do not necessarily accept each other's reckoning, and the question of who is authorised to say so has no single answer.