Oh yea, I forgot you was up there. I have other Ifa friends in NY and they do the same thing. This post on the paths of Ogun however, is that not a Cuban interpretation? Or maybe your oloye mixes Cuban stuff with the Yoruba stuff? I know many AA's do this. I'm not a purist, so I'm not coming from there. Just curious. My anthropologist manifestation (lol) always comes up with these scholarly pursuits, for instance i have tried to learn how ideas left Africa, come across the Atlantic, are modified and the modifications go back and influence the original, challenging theory that assumes a one way transfer (as I've mentioned for instance with Ogun's ileke), so that sometimes we think it (the idea) is Yoruba, but it is actually Cuban or Brazilian, etc. So what then of the "purist?"
Also, we can't help but mix in some new world stuff, for instance, it is very difficult to get African ewe, so we use the Cuban ones, and of course, we can consult Ifa regarding local plants.
I have also done some comparisons of ese odu from Yoruba sources against the same ese odu in Lucumi. It seems to me that the Cuban and Brazilian ones are more dramatic, like Latinos in general. They remind me sometimes of telenovelas. They tend to elevate the conflict in odu, especially between male orisa and female orisa.
I would like to here your thoughts on these points.
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The post on the the paths of Ogun might be from a cuban perspective. I got it from a secondary source.
I'd be the first to admit my oloye and his oluwo did learn aspects of Ifa via lukumi. And they've gone on record as saying si.
Obviously there's a large contingent of lukumi practitioners living in the NYC area, and it would be quite difficult for any AA initiate or aborisa not to come in contact with them, or be influnced by rtheir methods
That being said, here's my tale on Ifa and its relationship to lukumi and candomble
Let's say I'm an awo living in Ile Ife and I'm at home making an Ifa stew.
After finishing the stew I leave home with it and set out for Ibadan
When I reach Ibadan I set up a temple and initiate some folk there and train them on how to cook the Ifa stew
After a period of time they begin to add their local seasonings to the pot (no pun intended)
Then one day some of these priest branch out to other towns and nearby nations and repeat the process.
Years go by and some of their descendants leave home and travel overseas and repeat the process again, except this time they cook the stew using different utensils and substitute the original meats and vegetables with their 1st nation equivalents.
Over the next few hundred years a steady stream of Africans come to the new land, including a large contingent of central Africans.
The central african group brings their own ingredients to the stew.
Over the course of many years. A few of their children's children make their way back home and introduce and re-introduce old and new variations of the same stew.
So now we come to the present day. The stew is still here, only some of the chefs have been arguing about which seasoning taste the best.
My question is which one is more important, the food or the seasoning?
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