The concept of marriage, husband and wife in Yorubaland goes beyond traditional husband and wife, as an older woman can simply refer to and younger one as my husband. OLODUMARE, ORUNMILA AND ODU AS WIFE OF ORUNMILA It should be noted that not all Babalawo can be regarded as Olodu, because every Olodu must have attained some level of mystical understanding of the workings of nature and Olodumare. According to Wande Abimbola (2006), Babalawo that possessed Odu, and usually look into it once in a year are called Olodu. Hence, the owner of mystery/mystical knowledge that knows us i.e strangers in this world than we know ourselves.
It’s the reality of this observation that makes Yoruba ancestors to coined Olodumare from Olo/Oni- owner, Odu-mystery, ma/mo-know, Aare- stranger. Orisa and human being alike than we know ourselves. Odu is the mystical attributes of God, because he is the only being that knows all things that is known and unknown to the Irumole. But, this essay will focus on the relationship between Olodumare and Odu. Odu is a term that is seen in the Yoruba name for God, and Oduduwa, who happen to be the progenitor of Yoruba race. This is because, whenever cold water is drank, it gets the stomach cold.
Through ikin merindinlogun i.e sixteen nutshells by marking it on ifa divination tray since writing is the process of putting idea, views, opinion etc into signs and symbols e.t.c which they also termed Odu with the understanding that it stand for what Odu really means.It should be noted that Yoruba’s name things based on the function it perform e.g fridge, Yoruba named it Ero amunu tutu. As awesome as these two scholars views are on Odu may be, they did not explain why the name of Orunmila’s wife is be used to describe the Yoruba marking/writing system.Prior to colonization, Yoruba’s encode and decode information they receive from Orunmila This view was corroborated by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, when he said on my facebook wall that ‘the Odu are also organisational categories in Ifa, the system of knowledge, spiritual development, and divination enabled by Orunmila and Odu his wife. This range from the marking system of ‘Ifa’ to being a wife of Orunmila.Īccording to wande Abimbola in his book, ‘the sixteen major Odu’ (2006), he postulated that Odu is the combination of four signs that babalawo mark at each side on Ifa divination tray. In the ancient Yorubaland, till this very moment, ‘Odu’ is variously used to mean different thing or entity. Is it the same bag that contain foetus that Yoruba’s associate with the name of God i.e Olodumare and their progenitor?This essay tends to unravel the reason behind various usages of the term ‘Odu’, and its mystical interpretation, for the purposes of putting it straight that ‘Odu’ means mystery, and womb will not be enough to encapsulate it. Hence, one will be tempted to ask how ‘Odu’ becomes a bag that contains foetus. To an ordinary Yoruba person, womb to literarily means apo ile omo i.e bag that contains foetus. The popular impression among the faithful of ‘Ifa’ and ‘Orisa’ tradition and scholars alike is that Odu means womb, among other meanings postulated at different time without putting the other usage of the term into consideration.
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