Babalú-Ayé

In parts of Yorubaland there is a god whose name you do not say out loud. Speak it carelessly and you invite what it carries. So people reached for other names instead. Obalúayé, king and lord of the earth. Babalú-Ayé, father and lord of the world. Courteous names, landlord names, the sort you use for someone you would rather not meet on the road. Underneath all of them sits Ṣọ̀pọ̀nná, and Ṣọ̀pọ̀nná is smallpox.

One account makes him the eldest son of Olodumare, handed the earth outright and given the power to reward or punish everything living on it. He fed humanity by giving it every grain the ground produces. When he was displeased he made those same grains come up again on the other side of the skin, hard little seeds under the surface, then blisters, then scars. It is one of the most economical ideas in West African religion: the gift and the punishment are the same substance, delivered in the opposite direction. Anthony Buckley, who studied the god at close range in the 1980s, found him not merely a bringer of pox but a ferocious and vindictive presence held responsible for a particular kind of madness too, which fits a fever that climbs high enough to take the mind with it.

He is danced in raffia. The costume covers the whole body in fibre, with a hood of the same straw and a fringe of it hanging over the face so that nothing shows, and the material moves with a dry hiss that anyone raised near palms recognises instantly. Nothing about it is glamorous. It is the deliberate look of a body you are not permitted to see, which is exactly right for a disease that disfigures. In one hand the figure swings the já, called the xaxará in Brazil, a bundle of palm-leaf ribs bound into a broom and hung with cowries, beads and small gourds said to hold remedies. It is a sceptre and a cleaning implement at once. You sweep with it, and what you are sweeping is illness.

At dawn a priest works it along the packed earth of a compound, short strokes, low to the ground, the cowries clicking against the ribs. Nothing dramatic happens. The point is that nothing happens, that the morning stays ordinary, that the thing which came through the next village keeps walking.

His priesthood mattered more than most. They kept the shrines, carved and tended the staffs that stood in them, and controlled what happened to the sick and the dead during an outbreak, including isolation and burial and, in some accounts, the property left behind. A wooden staff collected in Nigeria in the second half of the nineteenth century and now in the Wellcome holdings at the Science Museum shows the shape plainly: a plain cylindrical pillar on a round base, a carved human head on top, no more than a foot high. Someone stood that in a shrine and fed it. British colonial administrators grew convinced that the priests were not merely predicting outbreaks but starting them, spreading matter from the pustules of the infected, and in 1907 they banned the worship outright. Whether the suspicion was fair has never been settled to anyone’s satisfaction. The ban did not stop anything; it only pushed it out of sight.

By then he had already crossed the Atlantic several times over. In Cuba the Lucumí and the Arará carried him, and in Brazil he became Omolu and Obaluaê. His parentage splits along the way and never resolves. Some traditions give him Yemayá as mother and Shango as brother. Others name Nana Burukú, and some of those tell it cruelly: she leaves the infant on the beach to die, crabs tear at him until he is scarred over, and Yemayá finds him there and nurses him back. It explains the body before the myth of the exile ever begins.

The exile is the story the elders tell most. He spread smallpox among his own people and they drove him out for it. He walked. He kept walking through empty country long after his legs had given up, bent double, and at the worst of it he could not walk at all and dragged himself forward on the ground because stopping was not available to him. He reached the Arará. He healed them. They made him king.

Which is why, every 17 December, the road into the Cuban village of Rincón fills with people doing the same thing to themselves. The shrine there sits beside a former leprosarium and holds a miraculous image of Saint Lazarus, the beggar covered in sores and attended by dogs, and Lazarus and Babalú-Ayé have been the same figure in Cuban practice for a very long time. Pilgrims call the journey the caminata, the walk. Some push little carts loaded with candles and coins. Some wear sackcloth and go hunchbacked on crutches. Some lie down on the asphalt and haul themselves along it on their backs, propelling with their legs, and in the dark you often cannot see them at all, only hear them. The air smells of candle wax and cigar smoke, because smoke gets blown at the images the way it gets blown at an altar.

In houses across the island the same night runs differently. A basket is lined with sackcloth and ringed with plates of food, thirteen or seventeen or seventy-seven depending on whose lineage you were initiated in. People take a handful from each plate, rub it over the body to lift off whatever misfortune has attached itself, and throw the handful into the basket. A speckled rooster, a guinea hen, two eggs and the já do the rest of the cleaning. In one lineage the basket is built up from crumbled charcoal, then bread smeared with palm oil, then seven guinea peppers, each layer standing for something that happened to him. Another priest opens by drawing a chalk circle and filling it with divination signs. Then everyone walks round the basket and sings.

His power is simply the disease itself, given or withheld, which is a blunter kind of authority than most gods hold. The limits come from the same place. He cannot be looked at, cannot be named, cannot arrive quickly on ruined legs, and he depends absolutely on being fed, swept and sung to by people who would rather he stayed away. Smallpox was declared gone from western Nigeria in 1980 and gone from the world shortly after. The road to Rincón is busier than it has ever been.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Babalú-Ayé?

Babalú-Ayé is the Yoruba orisha of epidemic disease and healing, known in West Africa as Ṣọ̀pọ̀nná or Obalúayé and carried to Cuba and Brazil, where he is also called Asojano, Omolu and Obaluaê. He is credited with sending smallpox and with curing it. His name means roughly “father, lord of the world” and is a respectful substitute for a true name people avoid speaking.

Why is Babalú-Ayé’s real name not spoken?

Saying Ṣọ̀pọ̀nná aloud is thought to invoke the power the name carries, which is the disease itself. Devotees use praise-names such as Obalúayé and Babalú-Ayé instead. The avoidance is not politeness for its own sake; it treats the name as an active thing rather than a label.

What is the já or xaxará?

The já, called the xaxará in Brazilian practice, is Babalú-Ayé’s ritual broom, made from the ribs of palm leaves bound together and decorated with cowries, beads and small gourds said to contain remedies. It is used to sweep sickness and misfortune off bodies, homes and shrines. It works as both a cleaning tool and a sceptre of office.

Why was the worship of Sopona banned in 1907?

British colonial authorities in Nigeria came to believe that the god’s priests were deliberately spreading smallpox by taking matter from infected patients, and banned the worship in 1907 on that suspicion. Worship continued regardless. Smallpox was declared eradicated in western Nigeria in 1980.

Why do Cubans crawl to the shrine at El Rincón on 17 December?

They are repeating what Babalú-Ayé did in his exile, when his legs failed and he dragged himself along the road rather than stop. The Cuban shrine at Rincón is dedicated to Saint Lazarus, the sore-covered beggar with dogs, who has long been identified with Babalú-Ayé. Pilgrims come in sackcloth, on crutches, or flat on the pavement, and most are keeping a promise made in exchange for health.

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