kodewrita: Unfortunately for christians who would rather flirt with all manner of human philosophy, christ gave a take it or leave it proposition:

John 14:6
Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.


Denying this (stylishly or otherwise) puts you in the camp of the anti-christ.

simple.Were you there?

Dulcet7: [size=13pt]Yoruba Traditional Religion[/size]

Summary: This religion is the "way of connection". The goal is to find and follow your own purpose, and you must not hinder others from pursuing theirs. It varies slightly from traditional West African practices to the contemporary Yoruba-derived adaptations of religions: Candomble in Brazil and Santeria in Cuba. However varying, their beliefs and practices are far more closely connected than Mormons, Protestants, Jehovah's Witnesses and Catholics can be related.

Together these Yoruba practitioners share the view that the human problem is disconnection and that the solution to this problem is to reconnect ourselves to our destinies, to one another, and to sacred power. This can be accomplished through the techniques of divination, sacrifice, and spirit/body possession, which in combination allow us to truly flourish as individuals and societies.

Problem:
Each of us has a destiny we have somehow forgotten. Before we are reborn (the Yoruba affirm reincarnation), one of our souls (we have two or more, depending on who is counting) appears before the High God Olodumare to receive new breath. Olodumare then allows us to choose our own destiny, which includes the day we will return to heaven, our personality, our occupation, and our own unique measure of good and bad luck. When we are born, we forget, however. So we wander through life veiled from our true purposes, sidetracked by pursuits in love and work, foisted on us by parents, friends, coworkers, and spouses.

Solution
The solution is to remember—to recover our destiny so we can do what we were created to do for ourselves, our families, and the world. One of our souls (our Ori - more on that later) knows the destiny but is not permitted to reveal it all at once. We must remember. We are not alone, though. We have a lot of help from many superhuman beings, known as orishas (orixas in Brazil, orichas in Cuba), able and willing to help us live in harmony with our destiny.

Techniques
There are many techniques of divination to obtain the wisdom of the Orishas, and specially trained priests and diviners [babalawos (if male) and iyalawos (if female), either means "custodian of secrets"] who through Ifa (a most venerable divination technique) help us recover destiny, protect it from harm via sacrifices and correspondingly fulfill it through physical action in the world.

Not to say they dispense any such secret wisdom out of thin air, but they know how to cast the 16 palm nuts or the 8-half-seed shells divining chain when consulting with a client. This random casting process produces 256 (16 x 16) possible signatures each called odu and they have memorized at least 1024 Ifa verses (4 for each signature) and they chant the poems associated with the odu when it is cast. Embedded in each poem is the required technique in each case. The Ifa diviner is a mediator, not an oracle.

Movies may have confused us a bit, though. Gender aside, permit me to use the male gender for the babalawo and the female for the client. Akin to what you may have seen in Nigerian movies, the client does not tell the babalawo why she has come - the problem presented is a mystery to the diviner. Contrary to what you may have seen in Nigerian movies, the babalawo simply recites at least four poems per odu and the client decides which of the recited poetry is appropriate for her conflict, then the babalawo tells the client stories about that verse she selected. This is in line with the PROBLEM and SOLUTION as described above. The babalawo is no superstar. He is only helping the client remember (with her own input of course) what she used to know before birth but has forgotten.

Important to these techniques is the structure of the human being and the animating powers. Ara [/b]is the physical body. Each human has at least two souls: one called [b]Emi (related to breath) and another called Ori (related to destiny). Ori [/b]literally means head but here it refers to the spiritual center that chooses destiny just before we are born and then forget. Then there is the sacred animating power [b]Ashe (ache in Cuba and axe in Brazil), which animates both the Ori and the Orishas. It is potent in this channeling that happens between us and the Orishas. Ashe also channels between our Emi and our Ori i.e. the human-inclined part that forgets and the divine-inclined part that remembers.

At the start of a divination, the babalawo touches the palm nuts to his client's ori/head (representing her ori) and says "You KNOW the Mystery" then touches the palm nuts to the divining tray (bearing the image of Eshu, the Orisha messenger and says to Orunmila a.k.a Ifa (orisha of wisdom) "You KNOW the Mystery" and finishes by adding "I, myself, I know NOTHING". Thus he sets up a connection between the god within the client (Ori), through the Orisha messenger Eshu to all the Orishas and then the Orishas will return replies through Orunmila/Ifa which will be carried out by the client feeding the Orishas with sacrifices. Ifa divination works not because the babalawo is superhuman but because the client has a god within herself. A Yoruba proverb says "The head [ori] is the greatest Orisa"

Of all sacred powers there are malevolent spirits called ajogun [/b]who can make life a living hell if you cross them, ancestor spirits called [b]egungun [/b]and finally the most powerful spirits called [b]orisha who come in 3 overlapping types from plainly divine to basically superhuman (some combine classes e.g. Shango, god of thunder and lightning, is also a former king of the Oyo Yoruba kingdom).

The Yorubas approach the divine largely through legends / stories. These legends are as important to them, as the Koran is to the Muslim and the life of Jesus is to the Christian. In Yoruba religion the variance between humanity and divinity, sacred and profane, supernatural and everyday is a very thin line. Human beings carry the awesome ashe power inside them and the Orishas have the most flimsy human emotions and most of them live in the earth (notable exceptions are Shango and Olodumare). Whereas Greek gods and goddesses go scotfree when they do wrong, Orishas pay for their misdeeds. With one foot in the natural realm and one foot in the supernatural, both sides of humans and deities speak. Both sides listen. Without orishas to empower them, humans will die. Without humans to consult them and feed them sacrifices, Orishas would get irrelevant and die, respectively. As the Yorubas say "If humanity were not, the gods would not be".

These Orishas thus seem to be "one of us" rather than "sacred or set apart" and have a whole range of vices and virtues. [i]Like the Hindu gods, they do not present themselves as either wholly good or wholly evil. [/i]They can be generous and petty, merciful and vengeful. They can harm as well as heal. And so they challenge us not to eradicate evil but to balance it with good, and not only “out there” in the world but also inside ourselves (where good and evil coexist). This complexity of course, troubles Christians, Muslims and other religions who recognize evil and sin as problems.

Christian believers often scurry to justify the biblical God’s actions (or inactions) when he supposedly does or permits "evil" things, which for an omnipotent being is almost the same. In Yoruba religion no such theological gymnastics are necessary because their deities fail morally and they learn from them like they learn from the life of their next door neighbour who, for example, got into trouble with the police.

Orishas can be classified into male and female, sky and earth, hot and cool, forest and town. But Yoruba practitioners, in keeping with their strong preference for action over belief, do not typically worry themselves about such things. Neither do they fret about the afterlife. What really matters is how to get the orishas to intervene on your behalf in mundane matters of love, luck, and work. In order to do that, you need to get to know them—what they eat, what they wear, and how they sing and dance.

meltech: If you know God has healed you through BY HIS STRIPES Port Harcourt Healing Rain program, send your testimonies to info@cwpminternational.org or send your prayer request to request@cwpminternational.org
for more information visit www.cwpminternational.org
God bless you!

obadiah777: IN THE NEAR FUTURE ? THAT IS THOSE OF YOU WHO SURVIVE ALL THE NUKES THAT WILL DESTROY LAGOS AND OTHER MAJOR CITIES IN NIGERIA, AND THE WAR BETWEEN CAUCASIANS TRYING TO TAKE OVER AFRICA AFTER THEIR COUNTRIES HAVE BEEN NUKED IN WW3 ( ZECHARIAH CHAPTER 12 AND 13 ) ( OF COURSE THIS POST IS NIGERIA SPECIFIC )

YES, ALL EURO NATIONS WILL BE NUKED AND THE SURVIVORS WILL TRY TO RUN INTO AFRICA TO TAKE OVER AFRICA AND THERE WILL BE A MAJOR WAR IN WHICH TWO THIRDS OF ALL NEGROS WILL BE KILLED BUT THE EUROPEANS WILL BE DEFEATED ( ZECHARIAH 12TH AND 13TH CHAPTER ). THE REST OF THE NEGROS WHO SURVIVE THIS WAR WILL BE RELOCATED TO ISRAEL.

PAGAN 9JA:


i said almost.
https://www.nairaland.com/1184344/paganism-worlds-largest-religious-population
If the tribes unite, then we can see some stastical progress in Paganism.

seyibrown: ^^^^ In this part of the Yoruba world, there are not many SANGOleyes left. They are now mostly OLUWAleye or ADEleye or BABAleye, having embraced Christ and left Sango behind.

Welcome on board, Sangoleye.

Oluwa = Lord / Christ
Ade = Crown /Royal
Baba = Father

sangoleye:

Pastor AIO: It is common for Cuban and other africans in the diaspora who have little direct knowledge of africa to make that mistake because their introduction to african traditions is through yoruba. But my brother, sangoleye, Yoruba is just one of very many tribes and peoples in africa and many other people feel offended when they are not acknowledged. There are over 200 peoples in Nigeria and yoruba is just one of them. This is a Nigerian website, not a yoruba website.
I understand that you are not aware of the delicate and incendiary nature of tribal politics, but saying that this is a yoruba website is highly insensitive.

There are some threads on traditions religions. Type Ifa into the search engine and some of them will come up. However you are right that this site is mostly full of christian and muslim issues.

sangoleye: i'm cuban and i love and praise all the yoruba deities