An Important Paper from Iyanifa IyaLea

Recently a female priest sent me a packet of information on Nana Buuken and Iyaami, or Our Mothers. She thought that it was very informative, even cutting edge. What I found was a very confusing montage of what can only be described as malevolent folktales, incongruous symbolism, rules for interpreting curses and Pataki gone awry, which is to say Pataki that can support any strange dictum one chooses. The Feminine earth forces do not need to be muddled in this way and are really quite simple to understand if one just goes outside and looks for a speck of nature, like an ant setting a grain of dirt on the embankment to his front door or an earthworm stretching across damp pavement in search of a mate, and with these sightings understand how you too engage in the creative work of life. The old saying that the answer lies at your feet applies here, even for the city dweller.

American Indians have an elegantly reduced description of the earth as Our Mother and the sky as Our Father and this in its brevity is a much better way to approach the subject than the popular writings passed around by Orisa Priests. So let us look at Our Mothers in a more natural way and see why this negative portrayal of the divine feminine still captures the imagination, even the minds of those who seek freedom from the dominant worldview. And if we must use tales to understand what we believe are complex spiritual dimensions, at least we can do so with logic and intellect. By looking deeper into archaic symbolism immersed in ancient folktales, one might be able to glean an element of truth, but one must first understand the energy itself in a very intimate way in order to have the ability to recapture the seeds of reality so deeply obscured by prejudice.

Like the offerings of fruits and vegetables that we give to the Orisa, which decompose and return to the earth in cyclical fashion providing the compost or nourishment for new life, growth, and fulfillment . . . and like the animals we sacrifice to the Gods so that we too may experience a profound shift in energy which will give us a new opportunity to live in a more balanced way . . . . the Feminine Earth energies reside here in our domain, giving life and nourishment, rebirth and sustenance. Even so, the vigor of decay is balanced by the creative forces of life, where beauty and birth are illuminated by suffering and death. Some would like to deny this aspect of death, and would even call it the enemy, so that anything that looks old or worn is immediately discredited.

We are surrounded by a sea of creative feminine energy, so surrounded we fail to even see it or appreciate it in a meaningful way. Instead, Our Mothers are draped in fables of sinister witches and unpredictable forces. Stories seeped in mysterious symbolism, prohibitions, and acts of destruction promote the ignorance of superstition. This negative view of feminine spirit is mirrored in the way women are viewed by society, and in the way that the supernatural "witch" is seen also as a living person. We see that women, especially old women, are the bearers of aversion and contempt. If not, than why the relentless pursuit of an ageless, lean body, and wrinkle free face. Why the billions of dollars spent each year on makeup and plastic surgery?

This "witch" concept is not just projected on the older women in our communities, but it is also projected on the feminine spiritual forces in nature and indeed on the Earth itself as powerful corporations continue to plunder our natural resources worldwide and in return give back to the earth pollution and mass extinction of species. Biodiversity, as a feminine component of our earth, maintains the equilibrium of life-giving forces that keep the flow of birth and decay in natural order. When Mother Nature is disrupted by human degradation, our survival is threatened. This is not through a mysterious, revengeful god, spewing plagues and natural disaster, but through the neglectful and disrespectful workings of human activity that our earth becomes more hospitable for the spread of viruses and calamities like global climate change. We must therefore examine our worldview and see how we got to be this way.

First of all, this term "witch" cannot possibly be used as a label for feminine earth forces nor the women in our community who seem to garner attention by virtue of their wisdom and demand for social justice. And this word "witch" must be looked at from every angle that it is presented to us, even in the popular telling of children’s folktales. As a professional storyteller, I must recycle the witch in the stories I select, and to be frank, some writers have already done the work of resuscitating stories presenting the crone as a woman of positive influence. Even so there is still a need for a bit of tweaking on my part, having the inspiration of Ifa on my head and initiation of Nana Buuken in my heart, I have plummeted the depths of the immortal spirit, and surprisingly found that in that place of realization, there really is no discrepancy between male and female and so no useful way to dismiss one at the expense of the other. The wise elders in my stories come from the same place and are neither male nor female, neither good nor bad, but a force that must be understood so that life may continue and we may be truthful to all life both physical and spiritual. In this way the stories I tell flow naturally from a bubbling spring of ancient knowledge that will seep back into the earth for purification and again feed the well that we drink from. I do this for myself as much as for the audience, for even a priest of Ifa and Nana Buuken needs reminders of what is real.

Recently I have been telling a Russian folktale to school children called "Vassalisa the Wise". It is one of many stories that incorporate a magical being called BabaYaga. In this particular story, a young woman named Vassalisa is forced by her step mother and step sisters to go deep into the woods to beg for fire from the menacing Baba Yaga. Though Baba Yaga is described as the western version of a witch, being very old and having a nose that touches her hairy chin, and a diet consisting mainly of human flesh, she personifies the archetypal qualities of Nana Buuken. For those unfamiliar with Nana Buuken, this is a Yoruba feminine energy closely associated with the concept of Iyaami or Our Mothers. In ancient history the Russian people must have understood Baba Yaga as a benevolent, yet frightening source of feminine power, similar to Nana Buuken who is the mother of singled celled beings, bacteria, viruses, or the divine intelligence of life responsible not only for creative evolution, but for suffering and decay. But like so many other aspects of the feminine it was turned into a source of "evil" thereby permitting one half of humanity - the male half – to appropriate a dominant position over the female half. If scrutinized with honesty and integrity, this social structure would have been smashed to pieces as the virus spread with maddening speed throughout the world’s populations challenging the authority of human survival. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to see micro organisms for what they really are, a divine life form that rules the world . . . and we as simple carriers in need of purification? Those entrusted with spiritual authority spun it differently and god became angry and jealous and a fervent warrior against the feminine. What a shame that divine intelligence can be reduced to human emotion, but telling in that it reflects the very emotions of those who created this power struggle.

None-the-less, remnants of a "Small Pox Goddess" or Nana Buuken can be seen in the famous Russian witch, Baba Yaga. Like Nana Buuken, she guards the hearths of the inner glow of all living things. This part about fire and fever has never been denied by the storytellers and has survived the retelling and rewriting of history as Baba Yaga is said to be the keeper of fire, evidenced by a fence surrounding her house which consists of bones and skulls. The skulls are filled with burning embers radiating an eerie glow from the eye sockets, nose cavities, ear holes, and grinning teeth. Without this fire, all life would perish and we see this in the physical demand for warmth, for light, and for cooking, as well as the flow of blood through the ancestral line. At the same time, this energy holds the seeds for death and we see this in the cellular makeup of all living things. All creatures including mammals and insects, reptiles and birds contract the virus. If they did not, our ecosystems would collapse under an explosion of insect populations. Plants, as well, cannot escape the gruesome-tragic effects of the virus. Yet in their affliction, they show us the interconnectedness of all life. Plant galls, those weird bulging structures found on leaves and stems, are made by both bacteria and insects. The bacteria create this encasement as a kind of housing complete with the plant’s nutrients serving as a food source. The life of the plant itself is seldom jeopardized by the presence of the gall but in winter time, the gall’s inhabitants will become food for birds and other small animals. One must remember that there are beneficial bacteria in all things including our bodies so that natural healing occurs without our knowledge.

Like the burning skulls that surround her abode, Baba Yaga’s house is emblematic of the ancient rites once associated with living in a paradoxical world where death is imbued with life. Her house is described as having huge chicken legs which help it to jump and dance and whirl in circles. This image evokes our archaic memory of animal sacrifice, held in a circle by male and female priests who knew the appropriate offerings and prayers that might placate the ravishing goddess whose fiery transformation held the possibility of death. The flow of sacrificial blood was and is a literal transmutation of the fire offered in exchange for new life. The hen and the rooster, in particular, are very old objects of animal sacrifice and birds in general are symbolic of feminine earth forces. The vestiges of this play out in the distorted version of the female witch flying through the air in the dark of night, highlighted by a full moon.

Baba Yaga uses two vehicles to fly. One is a mortar and pestle. How strange that an implement used for grinding herbs into medicines has flip-flopped into a means of transportation for a sinister being. Or is it just clever propaganda designed to spread fear of the female healer. Her other vehicle or, perhaps it is a staff, appears to be the rather banal house broom. This borrowing from the feminine seems an obvious reference to the common woman but it strikes also at the heart of what we consider the maternal aspirations of family and home when one considers the plant fibers used for making thatch roofs and houses. Similarly so, protective housing is made from broom fibers by Orisa priests who conceal Nana Buuken’s vessel and ceremonial objects from the uninitiated.

And what of this ability to fly like a bird? Birds are metaphors for the divine on all continents probably because of their attachment to the earth and their comfort in the sky or what is perceived to be the heaven realm. Their balance of being in both worlds reflect the mirroring of heaven and earth, light and dark, male and female, life and death. Heaven, light, and sunrise are all associated with the male antipode and earth, sunset, shadow and death are all a part of the female antipode. But those who understand energy know that these images are like stories in the way they help the uninitiated place their unknowing into a filing system.

Earth energies have always been thought of as female because we can see the act of creation in the birth of all species, and the sprouting of plant life, and we can also experience decay through old age, illness, death, and the return to the soil. Masculine energies have always been associated with the invisible, the outer limits of the sky, the atmosphere, the universe, and the brightly shinning stars that in the depths of night (or the feminine) become beacons of distant worlds, yet distant only in our imaginations. The Yoruba named this male energy Orunmila. And fascinatingly, Orunmila gets the knowledge of the invisible or future events through the feminine gift of Odu.

Traditionally, Odu amount to stories that personify some type of gain or loss or moral teaching and by this means they proscribe the energy pattern, solutions and celebration that further the client’s ability to prosper and live in good health. In this vein, there is a story that prohibits the female human from gazing on Odu, that is Odu in the form of a sacred vessel acquired by the most senior, male, priest in an Ifa community. From this little tidbit, the dominant culture, as expressed through the major world religions and colonial powers, has guessed that the male spirit in the Yoruba pantheon has precedence over the female. After all, the western mind seeks what it believes to be true and finds it even where it does not exist. But if one looks at this scenario from Ifa’s point of view, one can see that this is really about men and women working together as equals, as two halves that complete the requisite of living in balance in a perfectly balanced world. The wise Yoruba men and women understood that we must always work together to create children and homes, food and sacrifice, art and song and above all our spiritual teachers, our priests and herbalists and doctors who will tap into that ancient well of spirit where everything is connected. What other religions could so easily do – separate the male from the female – Ifa could not.

One can see how those with their penchant for assumed authority could play upon the fears and tragedy of a population, using the "witch" and the female as the mysterious, even magical causes of our fall from grace. It must be noted here that they included a male "devil" just to make sure certain males most unlike themselves could also be oppressed with impunity. However, even the devil concept evokes images of the feminine, as Satan’s environment is filled with fire and burning flesh, and was said to be deeper than the sea, bringing it closer to the core of the earth than the heavenly abode of god. None-the-less, the long-term affects of this worldview would drag all of humanity into strife. By denying the feminine honor and respect, those who construed this device could hardly see that they were also denying all aspects of the sacred, even their own. The wholeness of spirit within each individual therefore had to be found somewhere in the heaven realm where the masculine god held dominion. This neat compartmentalization bargained us right out of our inborn responsibility for living in harmony with our Ori, other men, other women, and the earth itself.

We in the western world continue this pathetic searching for divinity either in the book or in the sky or in a powerful leader. Willingly we take our cue in this game show crying out, "Good or Evil? Person, Place, or Thing?" And those who have risen above this debate go on to ask "Male, Female, Gay, Straight, Bisexual, Metro sexual, Asexual?" In truth, Orisa energy is all of these and none of these at the same time, and perhaps the Creator god is too. All living things, in particular, the human is endowed with a particle of sacred knowledge or the divine Creator within, yet what happened to our ability to access this component? What drawer did we stuff this immense ability? How easily we were convinced that this power was not really ours at all. By the use of stories and their reshaping through the force of ignorance we have let others harness our will, taking over the questions we ask as well as the consciousness we answer to. Our reliance on stories shaped by rulers intent on keeping the world a perpetual slave ship, has us rowing straight for the sharp jagged rocks of destruction. We see it coming but we continue to play the game.

In contrast, the traditional Yoruba can take emotion and human identity and create art, stories, songs, and figures of speech that reflect the sacred, but unlike the westerner their inner knowledge and ancestral wisdom cannot bear to unravel the fabric of their psyche and detach them from the sacred multi-dimensionality of reality. So, they have no inner conflict, searching for the "tell-all" odu or the infallible priest. Their own game of deception lies in their ability to accept all, including the glamorous life of the west whose membership requires a belief in an imported god, and they latch onto it despite their deeper understanding of its falsity. Once again the answer to your questions about god-identity lie closer to you than imagined, not just at your feet, but within your ancestral wisdom, and Ori.

This very point of inner knowing and ancestral wisdom is what saves Vassalisa from being consumed by the negative forces of living out of balance with her environment, and with her own sweet, almost too innocent nature. Vassalisa is guilty of ignorance in the form of complacency. By inaction, she is drawn into a world of service to that which she does not believe in. To those with an earth-based consciousness, where homeostasis is deliberately and consciously observed on a regular basis, this type of unconscious behavior is viewed as being just as egregious as willful acts of neglect. Vassalisa’s excuse for this lies in the tragic loss of her mother, an untimely death caused by a mysterious illness. With her last breath of life, Vassalisa’s mother gave her daughter the greatest gift a parent can give – a blessing of wisdom. She told Vassalisa that she would continue to care for her as an ancestor and for life to go well, Vassalisa must pay homage to both her dead blood relatives as well as her Ori. But life becomes difficult for the young girl and as she grows she becomes the object of derision and slavery and this buries her memory of her mother’s blessing. As is the case for most, Vassalisa experienced the throes of a desperate life before coming to terms with her path to freedom. In this quagmire Vassalisa remembers her mother’s blessings and is thrown into a journey of initiation consisting of the search for the powerful feminine deity, the force responsible for the death of her mother and whose key to survival will finally bring Vassalisa into the realm of full realization.

Of course, the popular folktale does not tell it in this way exactly, with the exception of death holding a divine blessing for the living. Instead, the story emphasizes the troubles on the outside symbolized by the cruel stepmother and stepsisters, an absent father, and the dangerous witch whose magic holds freedom from these travails. It is reminiscent of the Cinderella story, though Vassalisa must use courage and perseverance to rescue herself rather than rely on a rich powerful prince. And there is no fairy godmother at her assistance. Instead, the ancestral blessing takes the form of a doll that Vassalisa must always carry with her, hidden in her pocket, and she must regularly consult the doll while placing food before it, very much like an offering one presents to the ancestors along with prayers.

Vassalisa must also perform some tasks for Baba Yaga in order to secure the knowledge of the inner glow that will bring her into alignment with her destiny. The tasks consist of common household chores and cooking, the same work she did for her family, but they also include supernatural feats that require supernatural intervention by the doll.

There is one other aspect of this story that deserves reflection and that is the prominent symbolism presented in the colors black, white, and red. These colors are worn by the doll, by Vassalisa, and by three different horsemen Vassalisa encounters while deep in the woods searching for Baba Yaga’s house. She asks the old woman what each of the horse men really are and the answer is that white is day break, red is the sun as it travels brightly across the sky, and black is Baba Yaga’s night. In fact all three belong to Baba Yaga and symbolize life, death, and blood. Blood by which the ancestors return and blood whose life force alters the flow of currents in this dimension, thwarting death when necessary. The theatre of the sky offers a glimpse into the energies at play on the earth, and we as the ever present audience seek to understand the deeper meaning of all aspects of our world and our place in it.

Unfortunately, the storytellers in service to the dominator paradigm have taken the wise woman and deftly turned her into a cannibalistic fiend and this by all accounts, is a great and harmful act against humanity. This is not to say that negativity is non-existent. The most virile form of negative energy does exist, but not in the way that it is commonly portrayed. It is real, but it is manageable. And it is true that negative energy is inadvertently birthed by the same feminine earth forces that give rise to beauty and sustainability of all life. What must be repeated and repeated is that decay and death are manageable and natural when they flow from the divine order they were constructed to serve. Secondly, it must be understood that the divine order has complete authority over the negative energy and sends it back into the primal uterus to be recycled so that it may fly out again with a new agenda. By whatever belief system we come to understand this vital point, we will at least be able to achieve some form of balance in our lives, but it can never be accomplished as long as women of power are called witches and the scourging of feminine energy is propagated through greed, stories, and religious beliefs. And as long as Orisa worshippers buy into the falsity of these stories and images they will remain as children, frightened of monsters under their bed and unable to tap into the wisdom of feminine energy within their Ori and within the sacred environment of our world.