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Feeding the gods in Yoruba religion

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In Yoruba religion and in other West African traditions, feeding the gods is one of the main ways people relate to the divine. Offerings of food and drink are shared with deities (orisa) and ancestors, and people then eat with them. The religion scholar Afe Adogame argues that in African traditions food is "more than just sustenance": it expresses identity, binds people together, and is rooted in creation myths that are acted out through the farming year of planting and harvest.[1]

Sacrifice as a meal

In Yoruba practice, divination and sacrifice (ebo) go together. A diviner, the babalawo, consults the Ifa oracle and prescribes the right offering. Adogame lists several kinds of ebo, including offerings of thanksgiving and communion, votive offerings, offerings to calm an angry power, preventive offerings, substitute offerings and foundation offerings. Yoruba people think of ebo as eating with, or feeding, the deities.[2]

Gods and their foods

Each orisa has its own tastes and rules. Obatala stands for ritual and moral purity, shown by whiteness: his temples are whitewashed, his devotees dress in white, and on certain days they eat "white" food, cook with shea butter, avoid red meat and offer white rather than red kola nuts.[2]

Ogun, the god of iron and war, cleared the path for the other orisa with his metal axe, so every iron farming tool belongs to him. As Adogame puts it, "Ritual food is offered first to Ogun, and only after feeding the deity, though symbolically, can devotees eat with the deity." At Ogun's yearly festival, vehicles are decorated with fresh palm fronds (mariwo) for protection, and devotees may swear to tell the truth by kissing iron.[3]

Goddesses of water have their own offerings. Yemoja, mother of all fishes, has a shrine pot whose water is given to newborns and to women hoping for children. Osun, goddess of the river at Oshogbo, gives the "water of life" that the other orisa receive; at her festival, people in need fetch river water to take home.[3]

Eating with the ancestors

Ancestors are fed too. Only people who lived well, died a "good death" and were properly buried become ancestors, and their families feed them, eat with them and pour libations at special shrines. Neglecting them is believed to bring misfortune.[4]

Among the Oza

Adogame also describes the Oza, whose seven principal divinities include Ehẹ Eshide, a dual-gendered deity of farming, rain and good harvests. Before any meal, family or communal, food and drink are offered to the deities and ancestors who guard the family and its land.[5][6] The New Yam Festival cannot begin until the first new yams have been presented to Ehẹ Eshide and the family ancestors; only then may people eat the new crop.[7]

Food, place and new beginnings

Every new venture, from a job or a house to a journey, an exam or a marriage, calls for a "foundational ritual". The most common offering is a libation of water, alcohol or food poured before a meal or festival. Such offerings are made at family altars, ancestral shrines, groves, hills, rivers, crossroads, graveyards and market squares, so the ritual map of a community overlaps with its everyday geography.[8]

Other hungry gods

Feeding the divine has close parallels elsewhere. In Hindu Tantric stories the goddess Kali appears as a hungry girl who eats a demon's whole kingdom, and in the rite of kumari puja a young girl is fed by hand as the living goddess.[9] See Kali and food; for communities that feed one another as worship, see Langar.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Adogame, Afe (2026). "Eating: Feasting with the Deities: African Foodscapes and Ritual Imagination". In Greenberg, Yudit Kornberg; Zeller, Benjamin E. (eds.). The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Food. Bloomsbury. pp. 208–217.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Adogame, Afe (2026). "Eating: Feasting with the Deities: African Foodscapes and Ritual Imagination". In Greenberg, Yudit Kornberg; Zeller, Benjamin E. (eds.). The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Food. Bloomsbury. p. 212.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Adogame, Afe (2026). "Eating: Feasting with the Deities: African Foodscapes and Ritual Imagination". In Greenberg, Yudit Kornberg; Zeller, Benjamin E. (eds.). The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Food. Bloomsbury. pp. 212–213.
  4. ↑ Adogame, Afe (2026). "Eating: Feasting with the Deities: African Foodscapes and Ritual Imagination". In Greenberg, Yudit Kornberg; Zeller, Benjamin E. (eds.). The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Food. Bloomsbury. p. 214.
  5. ↑ Adogame, Afe (2026). "Eating: Feasting with the Deities: African Foodscapes and Ritual Imagination". In Greenberg, Yudit Kornberg; Zeller, Benjamin E. (eds.). The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Food. Bloomsbury. pp. 214–215.
  6. ↑ Adogame, Afe (2026). "Eating: Feasting with the Deities: African Foodscapes and Ritual Imagination". In Greenberg, Yudit Kornberg; Zeller, Benjamin E. (eds.). The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Food. Bloomsbury. p. 215.
  7. ↑ Adogame, Afe (2026). "Eating: Feasting with the Deities: African Foodscapes and Ritual Imagination". In Greenberg, Yudit Kornberg; Zeller, Benjamin E. (eds.). The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Food. Bloomsbury. pp. 216–217.
  8. ↑ Adogame, Afe (2026). "Eating: Feasting with the Deities: African Foodscapes and Ritual Imagination". In Greenberg, Yudit Kornberg; Zeller, Benjamin E. (eds.). The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Food. Bloomsbury. p. 216.
  9. ↑ Johansen, Sundari. "Storytelling: The Hungry Goddess: Food, Consumption, and Liberation in Tantric Kali Narratives". In Zeller, Benjamin E.; Kornberg Greenberg, Yudit (eds.). The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Food. Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 246–260.
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