Exu

[featherynscale]

Archived for my personal happiness, an article by Erik Davis on Eshu-Elegbara, who is my other favorite orisha and the main reason why I'm hesitant to have anybody cast for me - The concept is that everybody belongs to one of the powers, no matter their race or religion, and I'm not sure how I'd react to the idea that Exu might be on my head.

TRICKSTER AT THE CROSSROADS

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Legba: "wise/protector"/"road opener", and "trickster." It was the latter image
that Christian missonaries associated with their Satan. But they are not
similar or related.
West Africa's God of Messages, Sex, and Deceit
When we think of tricksters, we generally imagine folk characters and
culture heroes, not gods. Tricksters either tend to be associated with
animal spirits (such as Coyote), or are Promethean figures, archetypal
"humans" who interact with and upset the world of the gods. But one of
the world's greatest and most interesting trickster figures is not only
a god, but a god of high metaphysical content. He is Eshu-Elegbara, one
of the orisha, the West African deities that are worshiped in many
related forms across African and the African diaspora in the New World.
While he embodies many obvious trickster elements-- deceit, humor,
lawlessness, sexuality--Eshu-Elegbara is also the god of communication
and spiritual language. He is the gatekeeper between the realms of man
and gods, the tangled lines of force that make up the cosmic interface,
and his sign is the crossroads. In the figure of Eshu-Elegbara, the West
African tradition makes a profound argument about the relationship among
spiritual communication, divination, and the peculiar chaotic qualities
of the trickster. But before we investigate Eshu-Elegbara's character,
we must first place him in the general context of orisha worship.

Meet the Living Gods.
The orisha, the gods of the Fon and Yoruba peoples of West Africa, are
some of the most vital and intriguing beings ever to pass through the
minds of men and women. The orisha are profoundly "living" gods, if by
this we means archetypes, or constellations of images and forces, that
actively permeate the psychic lives of living humans. On the simplest
level they are alive because they are worshiped: orisha are prayed to,
invoked, and ritually "fed" by many millions of people in both Africa
and the Americas. Not only are the gods alive, but they are long-lived;
unlike contemporary Neo-Pagan deities, which have basically been
reconstructed from the inquisitional ashes of history, the orisha have
been passed through countless generations of worshipers with little
interruption.
More profoundly, the very nature of the orisha is to be alive in the
most fundamental sense we know -- though our own human lives. Though
they possess godlike powers, the orisha are not transcendent beings, but
are immanent in this life, bound up with ritual, practice, and human
community. They are accessible to people, combining elements of both
mythological characters and ancestral ghosts. Like both of these groups
of entities, the orisha are composed of immaterial but idiosyncratic
personalities that eat, drink, lie, and sleep with each other's mates.
Though West African tradition does posit a central creator god, he/she
is generally quite distant, and the orisha are, like us, left in a world
they did not create, a world of nature and culture, of sex, war, rivers,
thunder, magic, and divination. The orisha are regularly "fed" with
animal blood, food, and gifts, and during rituals the gods frequently
possess the bodies of the faithful. Their behavior draws from the full
range of human experience, including sexuality, mockery, and intoxication.

That the orisha remain outside the scope of many Western students of
esotericism and even polytheism is understandable, given the historical
domination of Africans by the Europeans of the New World. Black
Americans were forced to hide their deities or dress them up in Catholic
garb, while whites cut themselves off from all but the most superficial
appreciations of those African cultural values that managed to survive.
To even graze the heart of the orisha, white Westerners must overcome
two obstacles: the storehouse of Hollywood's cartoon representations we
carry in our subconscious, and the more pernicious underlying Western
prejudices against traditional African worship, which run the gamut from
the denigration of blood sacrifice to the absurd notion that polyrhythm
is somehow less sophisticated and more primitive than European musical
forms.

But why bother? As one esotericist I spoke to put it, "Why be interested
in these grotesque and parasitic deities?" One could answer that these
gods are fascinating, vibrant, and unique, and serve as a window onto
the spirit and culture of Africa and the black traditions that have had
a major influence on New World culture. More to the point, however, they
are not grotesque but rich in character; they are not parasites, but
entities deeply and reciprocally bound up with the daily lives of their
worshipers. When we look on West Africa, we must keep in mind that our
"instinctive" sense that these alien practices are primitive, savage,
and even demonic is the lingering afterimage of thoroughly European and
colonialist images of tribal Others dancing in the hot jungles of
sexuality, atavism, and perversion. Looking toward Africa, the first
thing the West encounters is its own dark mirror

The fact that people tend to simplify images of pre-colonialist Africa
-- for example, imagining simple villages where there were vast,
cosmopolitan city-states replete with bureaucrats, poets, and sewer
systems -- is only one indication of the lingering tendency to see
Africa as the repository of the primitive. Even when looking seriously
at West African spiritual traditions, white Westerners run into two
potential traps: the error of seeing such systems as purely traditional
and not historically dynamic; and the temptation to idealize tribal
peoples and project onto them some prelapsarian harmony with Nature, a
condescending and overly romantic error rampant, for example, in the New
Age embrace of Native American spirituality.

Because the West is such a text-oriented culture, there is an
understandable tendency to equate civilization with the technology of
writing, and the sort of reflective interior consciousness that that
particular machine apparently constructs in human beings. West Africa
did not possess writing as we now it, and the orisha disclose themselves
not in books but in shrine, ritual, and memory. For today's
text-oriented seeker, there are no great Yoruba books to commune with,
no Gita or Genesis. Though the Yoruba system of divination, Ifa,
compares to the I Ching in terms of complexity, strucutre, and poetic
sublimity, few know about it outside the tradition, partly for the
simple reason that the "writing" of Ifa is carried in the heads of the
diviners, the babalawo. (A complete edition of the Ifa has recently been
published by Harper SanFrancisco).

But the images of West African spirituality that come most immediately
to mind in Western culture are images of ritual possession. Though many
esotericists have a sympathy for invocation and strong ritual, the
performance of West African possession remains bracing, far different
from the bloodless, "spiritualized" rituals of monotheisms, or from the
almost literary rituals of modern, reconstructed Neo-Paganism.
Possession by the orisha is a visceral fact. To the intensely exciting
yet coolly controlled beating of drums, the possessed person (usually a
dancer; in Haitian parlance, the "horse" who is to be "ridden") shakes,
falls on the ground, rolls his or her eyes, perhaps froths at the mouth,
and speaks in different voices. The particular orisha is recognized by
his or her mannerisms, is costumed appropriately in ritual rooms, and
proceeds to prophesy, dance, ask for food or booze, and if it's Eshu,
may start pawing the ladies. I have attended Haitian voudun rituals, but
even from photographs and film it is clear from the eyes of the
possessed person that a qualitatively different order of consciousness
and personality has momentarily annexed the everyday persona, which
invariably recalls almost nothing of the experience.

In its rituals, the West African tradition has learned to plug people
directly into the realm of archetypes, archetypes which are strengthened
by interfacing with the "lower" traits of ordinary human personalities.
One clue to the nature of this interchange lies in the fact that
possession often seems to be triggered by the master drummer playing
particular patterns within the complex web of polyrhythmic drumming.
Haitians calls these jarring, rhythmically "dissonant" patterns cassés
(or "breaks," a phrase used in a similar musical sense in today's
hip-hop culture). Possession may result from the cognitive dissonance of
the cassé, the alien beat that enters from another plane and shakes up
up the rhythms of the everyday. In any case, possession is a
magnificently strange act, a radically immanent embracing of spiritual
being that is both magical (a worldly invocation of spirits) and
religious (as a selfless release to godhead). Possession by the orisha
concretizes spirit and ties it to the cycle of ancestors and blood and
the rhythms of sex and family.

So too is blood sacrifice, the "feeding" of the orisha, an acute
acknowledgement of the material dimension of spirit, of the fact that it
is humans, not gods, that keep gods alive, and that our being is bound
up with the excesses of mutual contract and exchange. Molly Ahye, an
important scholar of Trinidadian dance as well as an orisha worshiper,
speaks about how one "must have the blood, which is a life force, which
spirit lives on. You think that spirit doesn't need sustenance, but
spirit needs sustenance" (Ahye admitted, however, that she did not kill
animals herself).

Even if we cannot accept possession or animal sacrifice, we err in
seeing the orisha as being merely superstitious products of animism, or
as folk heroes elevated to the level of gods. The orisha are highly
evolved archetypal patterns, and they work out metaphysical problems in
the heart of life. They form a network, a living and evolving system of
forms and forces that from certain angles resonates deeply with the
perennial philosophy of the West.

And at the interstices of this network is the Yoruba deity Eshu-Elegbara
(or Eshu for short), perhaps the world's most sophisticated Trickster
figure (a very similar figure, Legba, exists among the Fon in
neighboring Benin). More than a well-hung culture hero (though he's that
too), Eshu is a divine mediator of fate and information, a linguist, a
crafty metaphysician. Eshu is a trickster not just because he fools
people and creates chaos, but more profoundly because he's always
escaping the codes of the he simultaneously reinforces. He gives the
world the divination system of Ifa, but does not rule over its poetic
prophecies, because he is always flowing through the cracks of fate.
Eshu fully embodies the sophisticated metaphysics of West Africa, a
metaphysics of change and communication, of the copulation between being
and world, of the complex power of the crossroads. Eshu expresses a
spiritual principle of connection, and the chaos and trickiness of
exchange. That he is a god, with stories and moods and lusts, only shows
that in the West African tradition, spiritual principles are most real
when they're brought into the fabric of daily life, of the recognizably
human patterns of money, family, sex, power, and language

The Hermetic Linguist

Of all European pagan deities, Hermes is the one most closely aligned
with Eshu. Like Hermes, Eshu is the divine messenger, and relays
information between the gods and between humans and the gods. A small,
very dark man, he walks with a large staff, and is often sucking on a
pipe, candies, or his fingers. He the "roadmaker;" he "sets the affairs
of the earth in order,...is so swift that he can be the messenger for
many,...[and] can circle the earth in an instant." Eshu's caprice,
quickness, and agility of body and mind are all characteristics he
shares with Hermes, perhaps reflecting the perennial spiritual
characteristics of communication.

Because Eshu is the messenger, in orisha rituals (today performed from
Nigeria to Rio to Montreal) one must "feed" or call him first, before
any other gods are invoked. For the Fon people, the primacy of Eshu
(whom they call Legba) comes about through his linguistic ability, his
proficiency at communicating. In the beginning, Mawu, the female aspect
of Mawu-Lisa, the androgynous high god of the Fon, gives her seven
children different realms to rule--earth, sea, animals--and gives them a
language separate from her own. But she allows Legba, her youngest and
most spoiled child, to remain with her and to act as a relayer of
information to her children.
So Legba knows all the languages known to his brothers, and he knows the
language Mawu speaks, too. Legba is Mawu's linguist. If one of the
brothers wishes to speak, he must give the message to Legba, for none
knows any longer how to address himself to Mawu-Lisa. That is why Legba
is everywhere.
As the hermetic linguist, then, Legba knows the cosmic language as well
as the earthly language. This is why humans must ritually acknowledge
him before any other god. In our monotheisms, God's information is
distant, except for the occasional prophet, and the rest of us are lost
in babble and books. But Legba is always traversing that region of
babble, and embodies the hope and the peril of a more open channel:
hope, because he allows us to speak with the gods and for them to speak
with us; and peril, because he tends to play tricks with the information
he has, to keep us perpetually aware that he oversees the network of
exchange. His nickname is Aflakete, which means "I have tricked you."
In many tales, Legba both causes and solves a power play among the
orisha, and he does so by conveying information. In one, Sagbata, the
lord of earth, and Hevioso, the lord of sky, are perpetually besting one
another, though Hevioso is generally agreed to be superior. Legba lies
and tells Mawu that there is no water in the sky, which allows Hevioso
to cut off the rain, causing a horrible draught. Then Legba goes to
Sagbata and tells him to build a huge fire on earth, which he does. Mawu
becomes afraid that the flames will burn even heaven, and she orders
Hevioso to make it rain, reducing his prominence and tentatively
reconciling the brothers. Among the tales of the Yoruba gods, Eshu
similarly propels the narratives of jealousy and power by occupying
certain privileged places where he gives ideas and information--not the
whole story, but just enough to make the story happen. At one point,
Shango the thunder god asks him, "Why don't you speak
straightforwardly?" "I never do," Eshu responds. "I like to make people
think."
Perhaps the most famous Yoruba story about Eshu concerns two inseparable
friends who swore undying fidelity to one another but neglect to
acknowledge Eshu. These two friends work on adjacent fields. One day
Eshu walks on the dividing line between their fields, wearing a cap that
is black on one side and red (or white) on the other. He saunters
between the fields, exchanging pleasantries with both men. Afterwards,
the two friends got to talking about the man with the cap, and fall to
violent quarreling about the color of the man's hat, calling each other
blind and crazy. The neighbors gather about, and then Eshu arrives and
stops the fight. The friends explain their disagreement, an Eshu shows
them the two-sided hat--all this to chastise the friends for not putting
him first in their doings. The lesson of the tale is obvious, but just
as interesting is where it places the god. Moving along the seam between
two different worldviews, he confuses communication, reveals the
ambiguity of knowledge, and plays with perspective.

So Eshu is a master of exchange, or crossed purposes, of crossed speech.
This is why his shrines are found both at crossroads and at the market,
for he is master of such networks of desire. For example, he uses his
magician's knowledge to make serpents that bite people on the way to the
market, and then sells them the cure.
The Fon have a wonderful way of imagining Legba's mastery of crossings.
Mawu tells the gods that whoever can come before her and simultaneously
play a gong, a bell, a drum, and a flute while dancing to their music
would be chief of the gods. All the macho gods attempt and fail, but
Legba succeeds, not just demonstrating his agility, but his ability to
maintain a balance of crossed or contrary forms and forces (and
incidentally providing a window into the unique genius of African music
and rhythm). Legba dances not only to the beat of a different drummer,
but to the beats of many different drummers at the same time.
As Robert Pelton writes in his excellent book, The Trickster in West
Africa (the source of many of these tales), the Fon are "dazzled by
[Legba's] metaphysically fancy footwork because they know that the
pathways of new order that he opens always skirt the edges of chaos."The
creator of plots, the player of many instruments, the trickster Legba
always risks unleashing a Pandora's box of powers. But it is only in
risking such chaos that novelty is continually reborn, and the community
is imagined to interact dynamically, rather than by some rigid
structure. The potential for dynamic chaos is the metaphysical heart of
the Trickster. There is a Yoruba prayer that goes:
Eshu, do not undo me,
Do not falsify the words of my mouth
Do not misguide the movements of my feet.
You who translate yesterday's words
Into novel utterances,
Do not undo me.

Eshu can transform the past into "novel utterances" because he knows
that the power of ambiguity and the multiplicity of perspectives can
change the fixed into the free. New connections always create a new
world, and Eshu/Legba puts creative chaos in the heart of tradition and
shows what advantages can be taken of it. As Pelton states, this god
"finds in all biological, social, and metaphysical walls doorways into a
larger universe."

of all the lines that Legba transgresses, the most visible ones are
sexual. He is young, small, and spry, and has a ravishing sexual
appetite. When Mawu punishes him for some transgression by commanding
that his penis remain always erect, he smiles and immediately begins
groping the nearest female. In another episode, after tricking many
suitors out of deflowering the daughter of a king, he has sex with the
woman himself. The happy king commands that Legba may sleep with any
woman he chooses, and names him "the intermediary between this world and
the next. And that is why Legba everywhere dances in the manner of a man
copulating." His priests, the legbanos , even mimic copulation with
wooden phalluses.

Since the Fon insist on the primacy of humanity in all its aspects, we
err in seeing in Legba's more human behavior the limits of his divinity.
For sexuality expresses the trickster's need to always go beyond
boundaries: new order is always created out of the partial collapse of a
previous structure. More profoundly, copulation is the most fully
experienced of connections, Legba's pet project everywhere. These two
functions are deeply related, and Legba puts sex in the heart of
spirituality, not as transcendent tantra, but as the more immanent
principle of connection. Of course, Legba's sexual appetite causes just
as much trouble as his propensity to tinker with data, as in the following:

We are singing for the sake of Eshu
He used his penis to make a bridge
Penis broke in two!
Travellers fell into the river.
Eshu makes us recognize the fundamental relation between sex and the
evolving, continually reconnecting cosmos. As Pelton writes, "He is the
living copula, and his phallus symbolizes the real distinction between
outside and inside, and the wild and the ordered."

Garbling the Book of Fate

The Legba of the Fon cannot be correlated exactly with the Eshu of the
Yoruba. For the Yoruba, Eshu can be a nastier, more malevolent being,
though he still delights in contradictions, and, to a lesser extent,
sex. Where there is confusion or arguments, he is there. The violence
and lawlessness of Eshu's desire is demonstrated in an a tale related by
Robert Farris Thompson about Eshu-Yangi, the father of all Eshu. (Like
most orisha, Eshu exists in a countless multiplicity of individual
aspects.) Eshu's mother offers him a bounty of fish and fowl, and Eshu
eats it all, and, not sated, eats his mother as well. But Eshu's father
-- in this tale Orunmila, the god of divination -- is ready for his
hungry son when he came for papa with slavering jaws agape. Orunmila
hacks Eshu into little bits, which fall all over the earth, becoming
individual shards of laterite stone. Orunmila catches the remaining
spirit of Eshu, and to placate his father, Eshu promises that all the
stones will become Eshu's representatives. All Orunmila has to do is
bless the stones, and they will do his mystic bidding. Eshu then coughs
up his mother.

this tale of cosmic give-and-take, reminiscent of the ancient Gnostic
notion of the "shards" or "sparks" separated from the deity, Eshu
demonstrates both his generosity and his caprice. For the Yoruba, Eshu
is the god who has access to ashé (literally meaning "so be it"), the
immanent (but morally neutral) power of creation which the supreme being
gives to the earth, and which can be possessed by some people.

Eshu receives ashé when all the gods journey to the supreme god to find
out who is the next most powerful. Each brings a huge sacrifice,
carrying it on his or her head. But Eshu consults the oracle before he
goes, and finds that all he needs to bring is a bright red feather set
upright on his forehead. When the supreme being sees this he grants Eshu
the power of ashé, because Eshu had shown his unwillingness to carry
burdens, as well as his sensitivity to the power of information. (To
this day, Eshu figurines often have a large phallic plume or nail on the
head.) As Thompson says, Eshu shows us that one must "cultivate the art
of recognizing significant communications...or else the lessons of the
crossroads--the point where doors open or close, where persons have to
make decisions that may forever effect their lives--will be lost."

Of course, these moments of crisis, of significant communication, are
oracular moments, and it is appropriate that Eshu has a subtle and
complex relationship with the Yoruba (and, subsequently, Fon) system of
divination, Ifa. The process of the divination itself is eerily similar
to that of the I Ching: The babalawo, or diviner, quickly passes sixteen
palm nuts between his hands, and depending on how many are left, he
draws either a broken or solid line in powder. He (and the babalawo is
always a he) draws two groups of four lines each to create one of 256
possible patterns. He then recites from memory the numerous verses
associated with that odu, and he and his client will settle on those
verses which seem relevant. (Like the hexagrams of the I Ching, the
verses are often ambiguous and enigmatic.)

Because Eshu is the ties between cosmic pattern and daily life, it is
obvious why he would be associated with divination. Like the kabbalistic
Tree of Life, Ifa is described as having "roads," "pathways," or
"courses," resonant linkages of images and meanings -- obviously Eshu's
bag. For the Fon, whose system of Fa divination is very similar to the
Yoruba's Ifa, Fa is destiny, the pattern of the day, the individual and
the cosmos. Each person has an individual Fa, just as each person has an
individual Legba. Because Legba is the only god who knows the "alphabet
of Mawu," he is "sent by Mawu to bring to each individual his Fa, for it
is necessary that a man should know the writing which Mawu has used to
create him."

Sometime before Ifa existed, a Yoruba myth goes, a declining human race
had stopped sacrificing to their gods, and the gods were hungry. So Eshu
decided to give humans something that would make them want to live. He
journeyed to a palm tree, and there the monkeys gave him sixteen palm
nuts and told him to go around the world so that he might hear "sixteen
saying in each of the sixteen places." He did so, and then gave the
knowledge to men through Ifa, the "sixteen places" being the sixteen
primary odu and the sixteen palm nuts. This myth again demonstrate the
reciprocal relationship between man and gods; it is said that without
Eshu, the gods would always go hungry, for he tricks men into disastrous
defiance so that they will then need to sacrifice to win back the gods'
favor. But it also emphasizes Eshu's character as a mediator and a
speedy messenger, who places himself between different perspectives and
collects messages.

Legba's relationship with Fa, and Eshu's with Ifa, shows an extremely
subtle and lively understanding of divination and destiny. Eshu gives
the world Ifa, and on the babalawo 's divining tray, twin Eshu statues
stare out at each other (again, like Hermes, Eshu is linked to twins).
But he is not Ifa's master. In one Fon tale, Fa, the god of divination
and fate, sneaks into Legba's home and sleeps with his wife. Legba asks
her why and she says that his penis wasn't big enough for her.
Challenged, Legba eats an enormous amount of food and swears to have sex
with her until she tires, all the while calling out "the path of destiny
is large, large like a large penis."Legba then made Fa stay in the
house, while Legba takes his wife and hits the road, vowing that he will
always be first, and will always be ready to fuck.

As Pelton writes, "Fa keeps a certain dominion over destiny, or inner
space, but Legba's elasticity gives him mastery over destiny's
paths...Legba can roam as he chooses, going in and out to bring men to
their destiny, but never ceasing to widen the path for them."By knowing
the whole system, Eshu can escape, slipping through the cracks of fate.
Eshu's Ifa odu is the seventeenth, the first one outside the system.

Why is Eshu/Legba linked to divination? Because, paradoxically, freedom
is tied to divination, if only for the simple fact that oracles must
always be interpreted, its messages decoded. As Eshu makes abundantly
clear, such decodings are always ambiguous and partial. The literary
critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., whose Signifying Monkey uses Eshu to
establish a model of African-American textual analysis, says that at the
crossroads "there is no direct access, or contact, with truth or
meaning, because Eshu governs understanding." And Eshu is a tricky
governor, whose pathways of information are always surrounded by the mud
of ambiguity.

New Wordly Wisdom

When the orisha were smuggled to the New World on slave ships, they
changed their character as the concrete situations of their followers
changed. Mixed together, cut off from traditional structures, surrounded
by Christianity and the whip, New World Africans now had different
spiritual needs. The world's most vibrant form of syncretism emerged,
where Catholic saints and the orisha blended into one another, and the
worldly wisdom of West Africa continued disguised in song, drum, and
celebration. Eshu himself went through many changes, and while different
geographical groups of African descendents took him in opposite
directions, all of his varied faces nonetheless further extend his
peculiar multivalent being.

In Brazil, Exu--as his name is written in Portuguese--become a darker
being. In condomble, Brazilian orisha

Eshu's emphasis on trickery and vengeance made him an ideal orisha for
slaves, who imagined him as the saint of revenge against the whites.
Under these conditions, his more malevolent aspects were emphasized, as
his various aspects were multiplied to cover a range of nasty magical
acts. In umbanda, the urban, highly eclectic revision of condomble that
relies heavily on nineteenth-century spiritualism, Exu quite simply
becomes the devil.

In Haiti, where the orisha are known as the loa and the practice is
known as voudun, Legba went through other drastic changes. He is still
lord of the crossroads, the grand chemin, whose channel between earth
and the gods is contained in the ritual house's peristyle, or
poteau-Legba. The crossroads is seen in Legba's vévé (a complex cosmic
diagram drawn with white flour that represents the loa). But in Haiti
Legba has become an old, withered peasant, bent and crippled on his
cane. In her superb Divine Horsemen, the American avant-garde filmmaker
Maya Deren tells how terrible and twisted the possessions performed by
Legba are. In Haiti Deren describes a Legba who comes full circle, like
the answer to the riddle of the sphinx, no longer the virile child of
the morning but the impotent old man of evening. He is still the
omniscient observer--as one Haitian told Deren, "We do no see him, he
sees us. All those who say the truth, he is there, he hears. All those
who speak evil, He is there, he listens."[19] But his omniscience has
become the knowledge of death.

As with Brazil, the Haitian Legba is known for his magic. One prayer
goes "Sondé miroir, O Legba," which means literally "fathom the mirror"
and figuratively "uncover the secrets."[20] As with most Haitian loa,
Legba has two main aspects: a Rada and a Petro, the Petro being darker
and more frightening. Legba's Petro aspect is called Carrefour, the
crossroads, and he is lord of black magic, linked to Ghédé and Baron
Samedi, the fearsome baddies of death and the grave. Legba's sacrifice
is a white cock whose neck is twisted; Carrefour gets a black cock who
is set on fire and allowed to run around in agony. While Legba's vévé
emphasizes the four distinct cardinal points of the metaphysical axis,
Carrefour's emphasizes all the wayward points in between. But
Carrefour's magic is for man to use, to ward of demons or run the risks
of invoking and using them. Wisely, the West African tradition puts the
onus on man, not some transcendent deity; as Deren points out, it is man
who makes magic, not the loa.

In Haiti and Cuba, Legba is not the devil, but is syncretized with other
saints, particularly St. Anthony, St. Lazarus (who is old and walks with
a cane), and, sometimes St. Peter, the gate-keeper. Again, these
correspondences are not fixed in stone, but seem to mutate as the
context of the world changes. This ability to adapt shows the deeply
pragmatic wisdom of orisha worship, for, as esotericists know, all great
magicians are revisionists, not classicists. But for all his different
aspects, forms, and Christian names, some followers of the orisha insist
on the central unity of the Trickster figure. Molly Ahye insists there
is no difference between Haiti's Legba and the Trinidadian/Brazilian Eshu:

Eshu is Legba, Eshu-Elegbara. Legba is a contraction. Eshu is the
connection, the spiritual connection between man and divinity....Eshu is
a mirror of us. He embodies all the forces, positive and negative. Eshu
is the one who guards the secrets. He has the power to manipulate man or
to free man, because there is so much of man in him. You are linked to
him by your humanness and he plays on that. And you are linked to him by
your divine spirit and he tests that...How do you know you're good and
righteous if you haven't passed through the fire? What is the force that
will test you through that fire? Even is that thing has to bear your
weight--infamous, evil, whatever--that is the thing that gives you the
opportunity to test yourself. That is what Eshu does.

A Little Legba in Us All
As is probably apparent, I feel that in Eshu/Legba we meet one of the
world's most impressive gods. His lawlessness and tricks not only keep
us on our toes, but point us towards the most creative components of
destiny, the free zones of fate. In him, the Trickster becomes a kind of
metaphysical principle. While never losing touch with the ground, he
wanders perpetually, in search of information or sex. For Pelton, Legba
embodies Jung's synchronicity, and for Henry Louis Gates, he is the
Logos. But Eshu is also the being of the network, of the immanent
language of connection.

The orisha are not frozen, static patterns of tradition, nor do they
exhibit the more reactionary tendencies found in overly transcendent,
patriarchal models of spirit. As a result, these "living" gods are able
to continually come to terms with the world as it is for people now. The
character of Papa La Bas in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo is no less real a
Legba than the ones in anthropology books, or the one Robert Johnson met
and sang about in Mississippi. In his book Count Zero , science fiction
writer William Gibson put the orisha in the heart of cyberspace, his
computer-generated astral data plane, and it worked far better than any
hoary Egyptian deity or Irish fairy would have. Gibson, who tossed in
those gods when he was bored with his book and happened to open a
National Geographic article on voodoo, told me in an interview that he
felt "real lucky, because it seemed to me that the original African
religious impulse really lends itself much more to a computer world than
anything in Western religion...It almost seems as though those religions
are dealing with artificial intelligence.". Gibson also pointed out how
similar vévés are to printed circuits.

While Gibson was talking about fiction, what he's saying demonstrates
the contemporary appeal of the orisha to folks who may not willing to
kill cock with their bare hands. And of all the orisha, Eshu hints at
the most profound, and relevant, connections: between networks and
truth, magic and perspective, messages and sex. Of all the orisha, he is
the one that speaks most to non-devotees, because he is about the very
process that we go through in order to hear him: the process of
communication.

(by: Erik Davis: originally appeared in Gnosis, Spring 1991)

Comments

[lysana.livejournal.com]

In umbanda, the urban, highly eclectic revision of condomble that
relies heavily on nineteenth-century spiritualism, Exu quite simply
becomes the devil.

Not in the Umbanda house I have visited, he isn't.

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

That's interesting - I think you're the only person I know that has any direct experience with Umbanda. I'm really just beginning to learn about any of the orisha faiths, and everything I do know is from the Cuban side of the house.

What is your experience of how Exu is treated, if you don't mind me asking?

[lysana.livejournal.com]

Keeping in mind that the Umbanda house I work with soft-pedals a thing or two, most notably, they have abandoned blood sacrifice and told the orisha that if they don't like it, they don't get to hang out... Exu is seen at the house much like the Eshu discussed in the essay. He opens all of the ways. His word cannot always be taken at face value, and must be looked at from different angles. He loves rum and cigars and sexy women. He is the first called and last to leave. He will play mind games and try to push buttons to see if you react. But he is no devil. Just the biggest trickster in the pack.