A vestment worn by one who is celebrating, calling, Orisa Eshu Elegba.
The Orishas and everything about Yoruba culture is fascinating. You cannot come to the end of it, ever acquire knowledge of it all. For one thing, it isn't a quaint folkloric religion and way of life, but a continually evolving, reacting, active culture and religion.
For instance, this vestment, composed partly of so many cowrie shells, is worn over one shoulder, and though you can't see them here, there are metal bands that keep it in place, much in the same way such bands kept a lyre of a certain sort stable enough to be played with two hands. It is more than likely that the wearer is playing a bata drum, as the three Bata are the drums of the orishas. All those shells have some movement, which means they touch each other, and make some sound.
Imagine now that the wearer of this vestment is dancing -- and / or even playing drums. All these various polyrhythms surround the wearer, and ripple out in an ever growing pool of rhythm. The cowries are clicking, adding their own bit to the soundscape -- as if those tiny sounds are the prepositions of rhythm, helping in their own way to tie together the much larger, prominent rhythms, informing direction, time and place.
There are so many parts worn on a Yoruba celebrant's body that will do this, and they all speak together too, just as the rhythms of a Havana rumbero's feet speak to the rhythms of the drummers, as the bells on the drums speak back to the feet and the drums.
Another reflection of the deep mesh of the Yoruba world, where all is connected.
“Elegba or Elegbara is both a cognomen and aspects of the orisha Eshu. Elegba is the trickster and the keeper of ase. He opens and closes the doors to opportunity. He is the policeman of the spirit world. He has the ability to turn order into chaos. He is the spirit that allows transformation. It is Elegba who offers you choices. It is Elegba who is the divine messenger, carrying prayers, petitions and sacrifices to other orisha and spirits. He is always appeased first because he is capable of disrupting or misguiding prayers, offerings, sacrifices and rituals."
“Eshu is the most complex orisha in the Yoruba pantheon. Known to have twenty-one different aspects, Eshu is known as the Trickster. He is the keeper of Force (Ase). He is the divine messenger, carrying prayers, petitions, food and sacrifices to the orisha. He is the Policeman of the orisha, who deals out punishment, when it is due.”
In Cuba, in Santería, he is called Eleggua, and in Haiti, in Vodoun, he is called Papa Legba.
5 comments:
Very interesting post.
In dance schools primitive African dance, isn't classified by tribe or even nation.
Could you send me an email with details about Vaquero in Barcelona?
Honey -- You MUST get over your conviction that African anything when it comes to dance, music, art is 'primitive.' These are the most sophisticated forms there are, with only the traditional forms out of India as rivals in variety, depth and sophistication.
After all, since Africa is the birthplace of the homo sap, the African peoples have been practicing these arts the longest.
Additionally, not only is it incorrect, it's also demeaning to characterize these arts this way.
Particularly when you look at a typical white person in a multi-rhythmic or any rhythmic context -- they can't even clap on the beat, when tiny poc have no trouble doing so.
Particularly in the context of my friends who are African and of African descent.
Too early yet to send out the Barcelona info.
Love, C.
We purchased the catalog for the exhibit. When we took off the shrink wrap and were able to look inside we were unexpectedly surprised. The quality of the photo reproduction is very poor, not museum catalog standard at all.
The earrings Vaquero got for me in the museum's very nice shop are much better quality!
However, the catalog's text contains much useful information, some of which is new to me, and there's an excellent Yoruba language glossary included. Much of both are contributions by friends and colleagues.
The exhibit itself, though small is choice(the museum is small). As with all deep fascinations and vocations, you can never come to the end of them, what they mean, what there is to learn. Every contact with Yoruba art, culture, religion and history, no matter how much of it I know, I learn another bit I didn't know before, which again reminds me how little I do know, and how filled with wonder this world view is. And how contemporary!
These African arts and African diaspora arts are some of the most sophisticated practices and thought you will find anywhere on the globe. When it comes to music, only traditional forms from Indian cultures can compete with what the Yoruba have achieved.
This came to mind when in the museum's "Mediterranean World" galleries, with objects from 1500 B.C. to about 500 A.D. (this latter included objects from the Egyptian Copt communities): Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome. As interesting and beautiful and enduring as these other objects were, they felt mostly dead, compared with the vitality bursting from the Yoruba objects. And they seemed primitive, with all they didn't know, with their narrowness of world vision. The cosmetic and perfumery objects were the exception. They would instantly revivify from the contact of use.
Yoruba arts, culture and religion is still alive, still evolving, reacting, acting, producing, unlike the Greeks, the Romans, the Norse, the Pharaonic Egyptians, the Hittites, the Persians.
The viewer can trace threads among all these culture, however, that would also include the Yoruba -- particularly the bird, as mediator between heaven and earth. The bird is different in locale -- the Yoruba's are hornbills, while the ancient Egyptians's were ibis.
Love, C.
Has anyone read Michael Gruber's Tropic Of Night? If nothing else, it sets one straight about the so-called "primitiveness" of African cultures.
I've read Gruber's books. They're entertaining, but they are wholly fiction. They are not good guides to other cultures.
What his books in his Jimmy -- I forget his last name -- group do provide is a reflection of this universal push, it seems into a new espirtissima, which leaves out everything of the systemic intellectual achievement and the architectures of the musics and dances and the rest that have been worked out so carefully over millennia (well, millennia in terms of Africa, at least -- human got to the New World rather later).
Love, C.
Love, C.
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