Yoruba

Spiritual Communication

The Yoruba culture is a very spiritual culture, centering its arts on the connection between real world and spiritual world. The ashe is a powerful spiritual life force and the energy of creation, which plays a big role in the Yoruba culture. Multiple Gods all referred to as Orisha also guide them. The spiritual world is reached through the babalawo, the diviner, and the Ifa, the divination. Through all of these aspects of the spiritual and life forces, many Yoruba visuals, like the calabash bowl and the performance of the divination, greatly reflect the communication between real world and spiritual world.

The calabash from Oyo represents the Yoruba cosmos, the aye and orun. This bowl is used for drinking, serving food and also to carry goods to sell at the market.  Its two halves, the bowl and the lid, link to the two parts of the Yoruba universe, aye and orun. The aye means the real, living world. This part of the world includes the knowledgeable ones, the living, the people and the unknowing or children.  So on this part of the calabash, images of women, priests, animals and such might be depicted. The other half is the orun, or the otherworld where Olodumare is the creator. This includes the spirits, Orishas, ancestors and the divination and depicts such gods as Ogun or spirit Oro and Iwin, not to mention the many other Orishas and spirits. The visual impact directly communicates the relationship between the real world and spiritual world. While the two halves can be separate, they are really not a whole until the two parts, or two worlds, are together as one.

Calabash

The Babalawo, the diviner, also connects to the spiritual world through performing an Ifa divination. A tray is used to carry out the communication between the babalawo and the Orisha. This tray, for example, is decorated with Eshu, the god of crossroads who brought together the world of real and spirit while he is bordered with the living motifs such as mothers, farmers and soldiers.  The babalawo performs the communication with the spirit world by chanting stories of the Orisha. He also uses palm nuts and a sculpted Ifa divination tapper to complete the spiritual performance.

Ifa divination tray

These two examples only begin to show the importance of the relationship between the real and spiritual world.  The two cosmos of the Yoruba universe go together like ying and yang. Not only does the Yoruba culture live by the connection between the real world and spiritual world, but also it is visually present in its communication and every day life.