Although I follow the indigenorisha listserv with great interest on a regular basis I rarely send in anything and I probably

wouldnt even be sending this in if I had not been prompted by Baba Aiku for my comments on a recent thread relating to pinaldo. I thought this issue important enough to devote quite a bit of time to thinking about; it brought up a lot of issues for me and I hope that what I am writing here will be useful to other people who also read this listserv. I should say, first of all that I do not have ocha, although I do have warriors, and that I have not undergone pinaldo myself. Indeed I am in the enviable position of being able to claim absolutely no authority at all. What I write here comes from my keeping up to date on the research on West African Yoruba religion and Lucumi religion as it comes out, as well as from my own researches and years of observation and meditation of the meanings of certain things. Hence my comments on pinaldo: I. Taking the life of any creature is no small thing.

According to the renowned Cuban oriate and bata drummer Nicolas Angarica Olodumare never authorized human beings to take the life of any creature. Indeed, if we are to believe a number of Yoruba myths concerning the times shortly after the creation of the world and the first human beings, there would have been little need to do so. At that time the heavens and the earth were very close together. There was direct communication between human beings and Olodumare, as well as between human beings and the orisha. You could just reach out your hand at arms length and touch the other world. People traveled back and forth easily. Most of humans food came from the heavens and it was not necessary to take the life of any plant or creature on earth in order to eat. According to one version of the story, this situation changed when people became greedy and took too much food from heaven. Olodumare became annoyed at what greed had done to the people and withdrew to a distance that was far enough away so that humans could not reach there anymore or communicate with Olodumare unaided. After that the orisha became more important as mediators between human beings and Olodumare and the orisha became the chief means of dealing with the many problems human beings went on to create for themselves. What this story says then is that Olodumare had a plan for the way the world we inhabit was supposed to work, but because of some character faults of the first humans, the plan had to be altered and that alteration created a distance between Olodumare and the human race that was then filled in and bridged by the orisha. In other words, the way things are now is not the way things were supposed to have been. Herein lies the contradiction: Olodumare never authorized human beings to take the life of any creature that Olodumare had created, yet human beings have to do this all the time in order to survive. When we die and bow once again at the feet of Olodumare in the life that follows this one, we will give an account of our lives in relation to the contract that we made before coming into the world by being born. This contract constituted our fate, our preordained path through this life, and we will be responsible for our part in it, perhaps even down to every meal. But there is a circumstance in which we can be sure that there is immunity from wrong doing and the unauthorized taking of life and that is the act of immolating an animal in the context of a sacrificial rite. There is another story that goes back to the same mythical period. This story, found in Angaricas Manual del Oriate, describes the origin of the practice of sacrificing pigeons. [Grillelu]

Here we see that the taking of the life of an animal as seemingly inconsequential as a pigeon sends a shudder through the heavens. Perhaps this is the same shudder that greed sent there; we dont know. However we do know that this time, in response to the flaws in human character visible even in that early period, Olodumare and Olofi devised a means for purifying everything and setting things right and that even for them there was no alternative other than sacrifice. II. Sacrifice and the Consecrated Knife

A circumstance in which we can be sure that there is immunity from wrong doing and the unauthorized taking of life and that is the act of immolating an animal in the context of a sacrificial rite. Pinaldo does not grant the rite to sacrifice four-legged animals; it only grants the right to immolate or slaughter them and to perform a certain number of butchery tasks such a removing their significant aches, if needed, after the animal has been killed. By no means should the act of immolation be confused or equated with the whole of sacrifice. The presiding priest or priestess actually has the most essential sacrificial tasks: the libation and salutatory prayer, the presentation of the offerings and the person on whose behalf the sacrifice is being done, the consecration of the sacrificial victim, the application of blood to the altar, the words used to give direction to the life-force energy released by the immolation, and finally a divination to see if the whole process was acceptable to the deity and where the remains must go. All these tasks definitely require a priest to do them; they are not the kinds of tasks that people do in other contexts of their lives outside of the religious one. In Nigeria the priest might just designate someone else to do the immolation rather than do it themselves. There are so many other tasks involved that cannot be done by anyone else not in the priesthood but immolation was not considered to be one of them. The person so designated did not have to be in the priesthood although they could be a devotee of the orisha being sacrificed to or an apprentice to the presiding priest, oftentimes a family member. In the Cuban situation the rule seems to have been, according to Anagarica, that If the immolation is done by a priest/ess using a knife consecrated to Ogun, its wielder could pass the responsibility for the slaughter on to the orisha. They declared that Ogun killed it and were blameless. The consecrated knife not only represented Ogun; it WAS Ogun. Passing the responsibility on to Ogun protected the knife-wielder from any blame or consequences following from taking the life of one of Olodumares creations in the course of helping a fellow human being who was in a situation where once again there was no alternative other than sacrifice. In this situation humans now do what Olofi and Oludumare did. But certain absolution for immolating and killing one of Olodumares creatures only comes from verbally attributing the slaughter to Ogun and from using a knife consecrated to this orisha. III. African Religious Reformers in Cuba

Most of what people now take for granted as ancient and traditional practice in Santeria\Lucumi oral history research reveals as being much more recent, dating from the late 1880s into the early period of the twentieth century, solidified and becoming widespread really only in the 1950s. Several of the characteristics of present day Lucumi were are revisions of earlier Cuban practices, while others were innovations from a small group of priestesses and priests who acted as reformers. Some of their

reforms found wide acceptance, some found acceptance with only a small group of santero/as, others were rejected and continue to be debated and only come down through the lines of the reforming priests initiates. Pinaldo is one of these late nineteenth century/ early twentieth century ritual innovations and reforms. This reform movement was headed by Yorubas who immigrated to Cuba after the abolition of slavery. By then there was already a great diversity of ritual practices in places such as Matanzas province, Havana, Oriente and Regla all of which had significant ocha communities. The accounts I am familiar with (from John Mason, David Brown, Mercedes Sandoval and Miguel Ramos) all place either Efunche or Maria Towa as the originators of the Pinaldo ritual. These two women were the heads of a small group of Nigerian-born immigrants that came to Cuba after slavery was abolished and established themselves in the Lucumi community in Havana where they became influential religious reformers. The best known of these are Efunche (an Oshoosi priestess) and Obadimelli (an Aganju priest.) It is unclear whether Maria Towa was member of this group or not. Although she is reported in some accounts as being the Queen of the Lucumis, she might very have been against the reforms as opposed to promoting them. While most of the info I know about has Efunche as the main protagonist, there are accounts that have Maria Towa in this same role. It is entirely possible that she and Efunche worked together. The third member of this initially small group of reformers was also a Lucumi and Oshoosi priestess like Efunche and had emigrated from West Africa to Cuba. The information I have on Maria Towa describes her as a high ranking Lucumi priestess but does tell which deity she was devoted to. There is also some haziness about whether she lived in Regla or Havana. (Of course it is entirely possible that she lived in both places at different times, although Havana seems to have been where the heaviest action went down.) There are two stories relating to pinaldo that place it within the context of the religious reforms going on at the turn of the twentieth century. The first story concerns the origin of pinaldo as a ritual within the reformed Lucumi system; the second is concerned with how pinaldo was first used. These two stories explain why people say certain things about pinaldo today. At the same time as they show that while situations have changed, what people now say (using the same words) does not mean the same thing as it did then. IV. Getting Oguns Consecrated Knife

The first story goes like this: Either Efunche and another immigrant Oshoosi priestess (or Efunche and Maria Towa) saw that the religion as it was practiced in Cuba in the late 19th or early 20th century as being impure, too unlike what they knew from Nigeria. They saw that there was a lot of variety among the different houses and they wanted to establish a standard way of doing things that would take into account the realities of the Cuban scene in the post-slavery era. So in a sense they were working both backwards and forwards at the same time. When they used what they knew from their experiences and initiations from Nigeria they were working back towards their African homeland. When they looked around them to see what they could use from the results of the Cuban experience they worked in the present to winnow out and to choose. But when they created or combined elements they were projecting new forms into the future. Essentially they were trying to reform Lucumi religion in the Havana of their time with the idea

that what they did would become standard practice for all the Lucumi priesthood. To a great extent they appear to have succeeded in Havana and their version spread to some other cities and into the countryside but not all of their innovations were accepted by Lucumi religious people everywhere and there is still controversy about some of them. Although Maria Towa had much prestige and much authority in Havana as Queen of the Lucumis, she did not control everything. At this time the custom was that only certain Ogun priests, the achogun or acho ogun, were allowed to immolate animals in the context of Lucumi sacrificial rites. There were also certain other ritual acts that only they could perform. This meant that neither santeros nor babalawos were considered capable of carrying out the rituals entirely on their own because they were forced to depend on the achoguns to do the immolation. This diluted a priests authority and probably added to the cost of performing the ritual as well since the achogun had to be compensated. The three men who were characterized as achogun had developed a monopoly on immolation in the context of sacrifice in Lucumi and had managed to establish the idea that something beyond their initiation as Ogun priests gave them special knowledge and special ritual rights such that sacrifices were correct or better if someone with their religious qualifications did the immolation as opposed to someone else doing them. This allowed them to monopolize this particular service and also reserved to them the ability to pass their special knowledge on to others and create new achogun with the same ritual rights. This special right and knowledge would have been considered to elevate the achogun above other Ogun priests and, ideally, should have been marked by an initiation peculiar to achoguns and not shared with other Ogun priests. First of all, it is pretty clear that an immolation monopolizing group associated with Ogun like the achogun, did not exist in Yoruba religion in Africa. Orisha worship there was organized on the basis of separate cult houses, each with its own hierarchy and staff to carry out rituals for its own orisha. Priests/esses within their own temple would do the immolation in sacrificial rites or designate some member of their group to do it. There was no need to go to an Ogun priest for this service, in fact, the actual slaughter of the animal didnt have to be done by a priest at all. Sacrifices done in preparation for a major communal orisha or egungun festival would be done by the group that venerated the particular orisha being celebrated. So the position of the achogun was not one Efuche and/or Maria Towa recognized from their African experiences because this role and status did not exist in Africa. What they did was compel the achogun to initiate them into their society by threatening to cut them out of all the ceremonies done in Havana which meant that they would not be able to work. The achogun conceded to her threat and performed the ritual, consecrating her as an achogun herself. After this she was able to initiate other people as achoguns thus transferring to them the ritual knowledge and rights that had been given to her in her own initiation. This effectively ended the monopoly the earlier achogun had enjoyed at the same time as the reformers gained the ability to incorporate the rights and knowledge possessed by the achogun into their own religious reforms. What they did was establish a ritual that granted a priest the right to immolate four legged animals in sacrificial contexts. People, including priests/esses who had not undergone pinlado were to be forbidden from performing this act and, in their reconstructed priestly hierarchy, they shored up the special rite of receiving Oguns metal knife in pinaldo by making sure that the initiation of Ogun priests granted the new Ogun priest a wooden knife rather than a metal one. The wooden knife represented Oguns knife but was impractical for immolating a 4 legged animal; the metal

knife presented in the ritual of pinaldo IS Oguns knife and works quite well for slaughtering a four legged sacrificial victim. The reformed system also made it so that the pinaldo ritual was no longer restricted to certain Ogun priests but was open to priests or priestesses devoted to any of the orisha. This made sense in the new system because the reformed system conferred multiple orisha upon at initiation. So the reformers took over the special prerogatives of the achogun, and incorporated them into their reformed religious practice, thereby making the situation more like the traditional African one where monopoly of immolation by specialized Ogun priests didnt exist. At the same time, they reserved the prerogative of immolation to their own priesthood of olorishas. Later babalawos developed a counterpart to pinaldo called alternately pinaldo de Babalawo, wanaldo or kwanaldo, an initiation that confers on the babalawo the ritual right to immolate sacrificial victims in the context of the community of Ifa priests. Some babalawos, howvere, say that only babalawos truly have the right to immolate four- legged animals in all contexts, not just in sacrifices for themselves and their own clients. They probably incorporated pinaldo into their ritual system by getting it from the pinaldo done for santero\as. V. Confirmation

Some Lucumi priests say that the ritual of pinaldo confirms the asiento (aka kariocha.) In some houses the rite of pinaldo mirrors the asiento so closely that it is almost like making ocha all over again. It lasts seven days, has an ita of its own, and if the elder priest or priestess doing this ceremony is not the same as the one who did their asiento, they replace the other godparent permanently. The other godparent becomes an outsider to the new relationship or the pinaldo recipient severs the relationship entirely. If we look back into the history we can find something that suggests why such a confirmation was ever instituted (devised.) In order understand this we have go back to the period in which it was probably devised and see what was going on at the time. During this period, roughly the 1880s through the 1950s the reformers had to deal with: First there were all the iles seriously devoted to the earlier Afro-Catholic synthesis, houses that sincerely regarded the saints as being the orisha. (This the reformers had to accept as a fact of life in Cuba.) There was also competition from spiritist mediums and later from immigrant babalawos. (Apparently there were not any around until after abolition, many houses worked without them and many houses continue to do so up to this day.) Also the religion was not only practiced in the cities. In the rural areas there were such a great variety of orisha practices and they were often so different from what had evolved in the city that the reformers could not consider them legitimate when rural orisha worshippers surfaced in Havana. (It seems that the country folk from Matanzas was especially suspect.) Clearly anyone attempting to standardize what orisha worshippers were doing their hands full. We have already mentioned Obadimelli as one of this group of African-born immigrant reformers. His name means crowned twice. Obadimelli emigrated from West Africa sometime in the late 1880s. He was born in Nigeria and initiated there but was initiated as an Aganju priest in Matanzas after he had arrived in Cuba. Later he moved to Havana and encountered the Ochoosi priestess Na Rosalia better known as Efunche. Efunche had been born in Nigeria like Obadimeli, and she had been initiated there. She, along another Ochoosi priestess [Maria Towa?], were in the process of reforming Lucumi ritual. Their complaint was that the religion was not being practiced in what they knew to be its

purest form. What they were doing in Havana differed from what other iles were doing in Havana and it differed from what priests in Matanzas were doing too. Efunche refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of Obadimellis initiation in Matanzas and required him to undergo initiation again, this time according to the reformed ritual process she was promoting. Hence Obadmelli was crowned twice, once in Matanzas and once again in Havana. Obadimelli then joined Efuche and the other Havana Ochoosi priestess to spread their ritual reforms and innovations. He also instituted some reforms of his own in the initiation of Aganju priests that remain controversial to this day. The point here, however, is that Efunche, not satisfied that Obadimelli had been initiated in the Matanzas style, - and of course having no witnesses of that initiation, - required Obadimelli to undergo a second ocha in order to legitimate his religious credentials. In effect, however, Obadimellli had been initiated three times, first in Africa, then in Matanzas and then again in Havana. Each one of his Cuban initiations was required because no one in the Matanzas had been there to witness his initiation in Africa, and no one in Havana had been at his initiation in Matanzas. (Even if they had been there, they would not have considered it valid or done properly.) In those days in Cuba, Cubans required newly arriving Lucumi, no matter what their status claim was, to be reinitiated in the manner that had been redesigned to suit the conditions found in Cuba. Religious status, religious knowledge and religious credentials brought from Africa did not necessarily stand on their own. Newly arriving people had to be introduced and integrated into the social networks and ritual hierarchy of the other practitioners who had authority and were already there. This kind of confirmation might be viewed almost as a kind of accreditation. The initiation Obadimellli received was pinaldo and he was the first person to receive it in the new system. Pinaldo was first used to confirm the claim of a previous initiation into the priesthood and Obadimellis second initiation generated a new model that was later picked up and spread as part of the reforms. In the version of pinaldo that has the initiator turn over to the novice a set of knives consecrated to Ogun after they have immolated four-legged animals together, the idea is that the younger priest or priestess going through the ritual is doing so in the company of the elder one and the elders orishas. The immolation, therefore, is being performed through elders orishas so the elders spiritual authority is considered to validate the younger priests orishas. So one reason the ritual was used was to allow locally prominent ritual authorities (in this case the African reformers) to confer credibility upon previously unknown or unrecognized people who had been initiated in Africa or in unaccredited local houses. This allowed people to save face when confronted in the reformed context with the criticism that their earlier initiation was invalid. Whatever their previous initiation had been, pinaldo certified and confirmed that they were indeed priest/esses within the new system. In the reform movement situation it would make sense that the priestess conducting the pinaldo would replace the previous godparent. Look at the reform situation: Efunche succeeds in solidifying her reforms by requiring people who were initiated elsewhere or differently to undergo initiation again in her system in order to be considered valid in the reform movement she was building. Some of the recruits to the reform movement would have been devotees, others would have been priests who had been initiated into other houses before joining her. So I think that the confirmation piece comes from that, dealing with priests that claimed to have been initiated in unknown circumstances or were known to have been initiated by groups whose practices the reformers did not consider acceptable. If these strangers have been properly initiated, they should know what to do and everything should come out in their ita, and

they have been through this before anyway. In addition they would have gained something that other ocha houses did not give, the formerly scarce right to immolate four-legged animals in sacrificial rites. VI. Conclusion

So pinaldo has two facets: first, making the priest independent, originally independent of the achogun; and, second, confirming within the reformed system the initiation of people whose status was unknown or suspect. Today It is as if certain emotional overtones from the situation in which the ritual originated still hang around it like an aura, but the meanings have become blurry, and the explanations less and less convincing while the controversies continue. Priests who have undergone the asiento may not see why they need to undergo a costly ritual so much like it only to have a right to do what people in other houses who havent gone through the ritual can do anyway. Some houses never adopted pinaldo as an aspect of the reformed practices; in these houses they just designate someone, priest or not, to do the immolation. In other houses, pinaldo is a requirement and only priests, and\or only priests who have had pinaldo, can do the immolation. In this way pinaldo bears the marks of the forces that created it. It seems to me that those who now criticize or denigrate this ritual, or carp over the necessity for it or the expense it entails do have an alternative if they wish to engage in the kind of reform effort that the elder African reformers did. That alternative would be to abolish pinaldo altogether and give Oguns consecrated knives as part of the asiento. This would eliminate the need for the later rite and also save a lot of money, while reserving the act of immolation for the priesthood and maintaining the absolution that is gained by being able to pass the consequences for taking a life on to Ogun.