Iyalorisha

An iyalorisha is a woman initiated into the priesthood of a particular orisha and empowered to initiate others into it. Everything structural said of the babalorisha applies: she is initiated to one orisha rather than to Ifa, the house she heads is a lineage, those she initiates are her children in the religion, and seniority within the house is reckoned by initiation rather than by age.

The office is not a female version of a male one. It is the same office held by a woman, and in the tradition's own terms the pair are counterparts. That distinguishes orisha priesthood from the Ifa priesthood, where the standing of women initiates, the iyanifa, is genuinely argued over between houses. No comparable argument attaches to the iyalorisha: women have held orisha priesthoods for as long as there is a record of them, and in several cults they hold them predominantly.

Certain cults are women's cults outright. The Osun priesthood at Osogbo is led by women, and the Iyalode and Yeye Osun titles that appear in the festival there are women's offices in a women's hierarchy. So is the Gelede complex, which is performed by men but is held to honour the spiritual power of women and of the ancestral mothers.

The most conspicuous fact about the office in the diaspora is that the great Candomble houses of Bahia have been led, for most of their documented history, by women. Casa Branca, Gantois and Ile Axe Opo Afonja were all headed by ialorixas, and the succession of maes de santo in those houses is the backbone of any account of Brazilian Candomble. In Cuba the balance went the other way, with male officiants taking a larger share of the ritual work and the oriate emerging as a male specialism.

Anthropologists have argued about the reason at length and the argument is historical rather than doctrinal. Nothing in Yoruba religion says the office is a woman's. What differed were the conditions on either side of the Atlantic: how enslaved and freed people were able to organise, what urban trades women controlled in nineteenth century Bahia and Havana, which African arrivals dominated each port and when, and how each colonial state treated African religion. J. Lorand Matory has gone further and argued that the Bahian female lineage was consolidated in part by nineteenth century traffic between Lagos and Bahia, which makes the Brazilian pattern a product of exchange rather than of isolation.

What is not in dispute is the standing of the women who held it. The senior ialorixas of Bahia were public figures, and the defence of Candomble against a century of police suppression was substantially their work.