Olokun

The floor in front of the altar is washed before the sun is properly up. Then a priest crouches and begins sifting powdered white chalk through the fingertips, laying down a cross with circled ends and a scatter of small marks between the arms, working quickly because the design is not meant to last. Behind it stand the molded figures: wives, chiefs, children, an entire court in clay, surrounded by imported plates and enamel bowls and cooking pots, and hung about with strings of cowries that have small bells knotted at the ends. The room is a model of a palace at the bottom of the sea. By evening the drawing on the floor will have been danced into nothing, which is the point of it.

The Edo of southern Nigeria call this deity Oba n’Ame, King of the Water, and one of the praise names is blunter than that: the King of the Sea Is Greater Than the King of the Land. It is a genuinely startling thing to say in Benin City, where the oba of the land is the axis of the world, and the justification offered is economic. Olokun has a palace of cowries. The oba does not. Among the Yoruba, three hundred kilometres west, the same figure is more often a woman, the greatest of the water divinities, and the songs put the other rivers in their place. All waters must pay homage to Olokun. Olokun is the greatest of all waters.

The name is a plain statement of ownership. Olo, owner. Okun, sea. In the Ifá divination corpus, in the odu Òtúá Méjì, the deity is Olókun sẹ̀ní adé, the royal being, a-gbódò-jọba, the one who reigns supreme in the waters, and the same verse contains the line that does most of the theological work: no matter how settled the surface of the sea, movement goes on underneath it. The whole cult sits on that observation. What is visible is not what is happening. Wealth, illness, pregnancy, ruin and the intentions of enemies are all understood to be in motion somewhere below the line of sight, and the deity who owns that region is therefore the deity to ask.

Sources disagree about whether Olokun is male or female, and they disagree consistently rather than randomly, which is more interesting than a straight contradiction. On the coast and among the Edo, Olokun is a king with wives. Inland and across much of Yorubaland, Olokun is a queen and a mother, one of the deified women alongside Ọ̀ṣun, Ọbà and Ọya, and the ideal of beauty is attached to her: graceful dancing, sweet singing, elaborately dressed shrines, good cloth, women in expensive beads. In Cuba the two readings are formalised, and the deity is held to be male in one initiatory context and female in another. In Ile-Ife the story of how she reached the sea at all is a domestic quarrel. Olokun was the senior wife of Oduduwa, the second wife made her position unbearable, and she left, carrying what she could, and went on leaving until she became the water itself. Wretchedness turned into the largest fortune in the world, which is a Yoruba joke about wealth as much as it is a myth about the Atlantic.

The Edo tell the origin differently and give the deity a childhood. Olokun was the eldest son of Osanobua, the creator, in a family that included Sango, Ogun, Orunmila, Esu and Ogiuwu, the divinity of death. Before the world existed, Osanobua decided to test the boy and sent him to the river to fetch water in a basket woven out of reeds. Olokun saw the trick coming. Before leaving he covered the ground outside the house with chalk designs and asked his father to keep them safe if it rained, and his father, distracted, agreed. At the river he did not bother with the basket. He bathed, called up a rainstorm on the walk home, and arrived to find the drawings gone. Asked why he had brought no water, he asked instead what had happened to his patterns. Osanobua admitted that the designs could not be lifted off the land. Olokun replied that water could not be lifted in a basket. His father, impressed rather than annoyed, handed him the power to give health, wealth and children to the world, and the Edo now pray to have a child greater than themselves, because that is why Osanobua had Olokun.

Nobody has ever described the god’s face. What exists instead is an industry of representation: the clay court in the shrine, the ceremonial dress sewn with cowries and coins and small bells, the fans and the bell and the iron rod used to strike it, the drum and the maraca, and above all the chalk. Every ritual object can also be drawn in orhue, and the drawings run in both directions, understood as prayers going up and as the deity’s footprints coming down. The most versatile of these designs is the igha-ede, the division of the day, a quartered cross that stands for a crossroads and for the meeting of the earthly and the spirit realms. A person standing at the centre of one can speak into the other world. Food and gin and quartered kola go into its arms to be distributed among the spirits, medicine pots sit at its intersection while a priest prays over them, and no two priests draw it the same way, because each shrine’s version identifies its owner.

The best-known image of Olokun is not a portrait either, exactly. In 1910 Leo Frobenius excavated the grove called Igbo Olokun at Ile-Ife and took away a naturalistic brass head, bought for six pounds and a bottle of whisky on the understanding that he would keep a copy and return the original. The original has never been found. The head became the Ori-Olokun, put on postage stamps and university crests and the logo of the Nigerian Institute of Architects, and one of the odder chapters of Nigerian cultural restitution involved Wole Soyinka retrieving it from a house in Brazil in 1978, only for the recovered object to turn out to be a British Museum souvenir made of clay. The grove itself kept a better secret. Excavation there has recovered more than twelve thousand glass beads along with crucibles and production waste, evidence of large-scale glassmaking between roughly the eleventh and fifteenth centuries whose products travelled as far as Mali and Burkina Faso. The deity of hidden wealth had a bead factory buried in her own back garden.

The powers claimed for Olokun are consistent across both traditions and narrow in a useful way: prosperity, fertility, health, protection, authority over all other water spirits, and knowledge of things concealed, extended into dreams and mental health and healing by water. The limits are equally clear. Olokun is not the supreme being and never was, and worshippers wash the head with sea water and the legs with lagoon water while acknowledging that only Olodumare makes anything truly clean. Nothing is granted at will. Blessings pass through divination, and the tradition holds that the deity prospered no one until Ifá confirmed the case, which is why the relationship with Orunmila is remembered as a marriage. The priesthood carries a long list of taboos around menstruation, sex, corpses, newborns and food eaten in public, and violating them cuts the line. And the deity’s own defining quality is a limit on what any human being can know: no one reaches the bottom of the sea, no one reaches the bottom of the lagoon.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Olokun?

Olokun is the Yoruba and Edo deity of the sea, whose name means “owner of the ocean”. Olokun rules all bodies of water and every other water divinity, and is asked for wealth, children, health and prosperity. Worship is centred on Ile-Ife in Yorubaland and on Benin City and its surrounding villages among the Edo, and it continues in Cuba and Brazil.

Is Olokun male or female?

Both, depending on where you ask. Among the Edo of Benin, Olokun is male, a king with wives and chiefs whose praise name is Oba n’Ame, King of the Water; across much of Yorubaland Olokun is female, a deified woman and the greatest of the water goddesses. In Cuban practice the deity is treated as androgynous, understood as male in one initiatory context and female in another.

What does Olokun do for worshippers?

Olokun brings wealth, fertility, health and protection, and is credited with knowledge of hidden things, including dreams and matters of the mind. Shrines are stocked with cowries and imported dishes precisely because these signify the prosperity the deity can bestow. Nothing is granted automatically, though: the tradition holds that Olokun blesses no petitioner until Ifá divination confirms the request.

How is Olokun worshipped?

Worship happens at compound shrines built as models of Olokun’s underwater palace, complete with molded clay figures of the deity’s wives, chiefs and children. Priests of both sexes, called ohen among the Edo, sing, dance in cowrie-sewn ceremonial dress, ring bells, divine, and sift designs in powdered white chalk on the floor before the altar. Ceremonies are held in the morning or as the sun sets, and the chalk drawings are deliberately impermanent.

What is the Ori-Olokun?

The Ori-Olokun is a naturalistic brass head excavated by Leo Frobenius in 1910 from the Olokun grove at Ile-Ife, taken as an image of the sea goddess. Frobenius acquired it for six pounds and a bottle of whisky, agreeing to keep a copy and return the original, and the original has never been located since. The head became a national emblem in Nigeria, appearing on postage stamps, a university crest and the insignia of the Nigerian Institute of Architects.

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