Ori

Ori, literally "head", is in Yoruba thought the personal destiny and the inner spiritual head that carries it. The tradition distinguishes the outer physical head from the inner head, ori inu, and it is the second that is the seat of destiny and, in many formulations, the most important of all the spiritual forces bearing on a life. It is commonly said that a person's ori is their own personal orisa, and that it should be attended to before any other.

How destiny is acquired is given in Ifa narrative. Before birth, in the presence of Olodumare, a person kneels and chooses their ori, and with it the shape of the life to come, its length, its work, its principal circumstances. The choice is made without full knowledge of what is being chosen and is then forgotten at birth, so that a person lives out a destiny they themselves selected and cannot recall selecting. Two consequences follow. Because the choice was one's own, the tradition holds a person answerable for their life in a way that a doctrine of imposed fate would not. And because it is forgotten, divination is required to learn what one has chosen, which is the structural reason Ifa divination occupies the place it does.

Destiny is not held to be rigidly fixed. Ifa practice is largely concerned with discovering the destiny one has, and with the sacrifices and the conduct needed to align with it and to clear obstacles from its path. Bad character can spoil a good destiny, and this is where ori connects directly to iwa pele, good character, which the tradition treats as the condition under which a destiny can actually be realised. Sacrifice, right conduct and the support of the orisa are all understood to bear on the outcome without abolishing what was chosen.

Ori is venerated directly, and the practices are among the most personal in Yoruba religion: ibori, the feeding or propitiating of one's own head, and the making of the ile ori, a beaded and cowrie-covered container that houses it. The concept carried into the diaspora and is central in Lucumi and Candomble, where initiation is understood substantially as work done on and with the head of the initiate.

The Yoruba account of ori, a soul choosing its own destiny before birth and then forgetting the choice, has a structural parallel remarkable enough to be regularly noted in comparative mythology: the Myth of Er that closes Plato's Republic, composed in an entirely separate tradition with no plausible historical contact.

In Plato's myth, souls awaiting rebirth are brought before a selection of possible lives, arranged by lot as to order but with the choice left free, and each soul selects the pattern of life it will lead before a guardian spirit (daimon) escorts it to birth; before entering the body each soul drinks from the River of Forgetfulness (Lethe) and forgets the choice entirely, so a person lives out a fate they themselves selected without memory of selecting it, precisely the structure Yoruba tradition attributes to ori. Plato uses the myth to argue a person is responsible for the quality of the life they chose, since the fault, as the myth's presiding figure states, lies with the chooser and not God, a conclusion close to the one the main entry draws from ori's forgotten choice.

The parallel is instructive because the two traditions develop it toward different ends: Plato's myth functions within an argument about justice in a single philosophical dialogue, a one-time literary construction, while ori is embedded in Yoruba religion's entire divinatory apparatus, requiring lifelong attention and Ifa consultation because the forgotten choice must be continually rediscovered rather than simply accepted as a premise and set aside. Scholars generally treat the resemblance as independent convergence rather than evidence of historical contact.