The Initiation of a Priestess: Performance and Imagery in Olokun Ritual

Abstract

The setting-an impluvium, a courtyard, or a large room-is airy and cool. The suffused light of the late-afternoon tropical sky illuminates the performance space. The participants, mostly women dressed in white cotton garments decorated with cowrie shells and brass cutouts, sing, dance, clap, and play calabash rattles. Bells are rung to invoke the deity whom they have come to worship. Prayers are chanted over and over. A white fowl is killed. Some of its blood is poured on the shrine; the rest is used to anoint the foreheads of the worshipers. Elaborately drawn chalk iconography is obliterated by dancing feet (as it is meant to be) and vaporous messages fly back and forth in the magnetized space between the other world and earth. As the singing and dancing intensify, one of the worshipers falls into a trance. Her eyes become glazed, her movements feverish and erratic as the spirits of the otherworld take possession, imparting visions, predictions, and vibrations from erinmwin, the world of spirits, to agbon, the world of living things. As dusk falls, the scene becomes eerily luminous: ground chalk which throughout the performance has been liberally sprinkled over the entire area, blown into the air to ward off evil, and rubbed on the faces and bodies of dancers and onlookers for good luck and fortune, hangs in the air like millions of brilliant dust particles. Chalkcool and pure and white-is a symbol of Olokun, the god of fertility and wealth who lives in a palace beneath the sea.1 The Kingdom of Benin is justly renowned for the more than 4,000 artifacts which came to the attention of an astonished European world in I897 after a British expeditionary force conquered the city, exiled the king, and looted the palace. The booty consisted of massive carved-ivory tusks, brass and ivory masks, and a large number of brass plaques, portrait heads, stools, and scepters. These are now housed in museums and private collections throughout the world. The aesthetic merit and sheer quantity of these objects has diverted attention from other, less known but no less interesting, art traditions. Craftspeople and the worshipers of local cults employ rich imagery in fabricating objects such as shrines, costumes, and