This is Friday, Oxalá’s day. The sun makes the cobblestones shine like silver, and everyone is wearing white.
Axé.
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This is Friday, Oxalá’s day. The sun makes the cobblestones shine like silver, and everyone is wearing white.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Vocabulary (let’s hope we have this right), learned at a conference in Gainesville, FL, 20 years ago.
OLODUM means creation, and white clothing indicates composure. AXE is vital power, the power, to accomplish things, e.g. AGENCY. The AYE is a market place, and the ORUM is home; these two interact with each other.
In the Yoruba cosmos, AYE are the living and ORUM are the spirits. ILE AYE means HOUSE OF THE WORLD. XIRE is serious play, what we do for the gods. ERE is a possession trance, clairvoyance. ALA is creativity and inventiveness. Artists are also expected to open up their thinking, to have insight, to enlighten us.
Yoruba spirituality is about multiple and competing identities. Culture and society are not epiphenomena but are THE phenomena; the Yoruba live among and between many cultures. They speak of their culture as a river that never rests — a culture is an entity in transformation; rivers are deep and have crosscurrents. The Atlantic is another part of this “river that never rests.”
[This was the paper of Henry Drewal, “History, Agency, and Identity: Yoruba Transcultural Identity.”]