Ori Veneration

The teaching that lies under the practice is that a person selects their ori, the inner head that carries their destiny, before birth, and then arrives without any memory of the choice. Life is therefore partly a matter of getting back into alignment with an agreement one has already made. Ori veneration is the ordinary corrective for a misalignment: it is done before something is undertaken, at a change of circumstance, or when matters have gone wrong for long enough to suggest the problem is not circumstantial.

The act is called bori or ibori, which means simply to feed the head. Prayers are addressed to a person's own ori, praise names are recited to it, and prescribed materials are applied to the crown. It can be done by the person alone, and it can be done for them by a priest, and a diviner may prescribe it as the answer to a reading.

The unusual thing about it is the direction it faces. Almost every other act in the tradition is addressed outward, to an orisha, to the ancestors, to Olodumare. This one is addressed to a component of the worshipper. Yoruba writers have made a good deal of the resulting proposition, that a person's own ori is closer to them and more consequential for their life than any orisha, and that no orisha can do for a person what their own ori will not sanction.

Some devotees keep a physical emblem of the inner head, the ibori: a small conical form, made up under the direction of a diviner, which is not a portrait of the head but a seat for it. The ibori is housed in a container called the ile ori, the house of the head, built of leather and cloth and covered over in cowrie shells and beads.

Those cowries were money. An ile ori accumulated them over the owner's life, so the container grew as the person prospered and the shrine was simultaneously a devotional object and a visible statement of standing. That double function is why so many ile ori are in museum collections in Europe and North America: once the cowrie ceased to be currency, the objects became collectable in a way that a working shrine ordinarily is not, and the finest of them left Yorubaland during the colonial period.

The practice crossed the Atlantic and changed on the way. In Cuban Regla de Ocha and in Brazilian Candomble a bori is performed, but it has been drawn into the sequence of initiation in a way it is not in Yorubaland, where it stands on its own as an act available to anyone at any time. Diaspora and Nigerian practitioners both call it bori and do not always mean the same thing by it, which is worth knowing before treating an account of one as an account of the other.