Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove

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Along the southern stretch of the river the forest still closes overhead. The Òṣun rises in the Èkìtì highlands and runs down through the heart of Yorubaland toward the lagoons of the coast, and for one bend of its course, where it skirts the town of Òṣogbo in what is now Osun State of southwestern Nigeria, the trees on its banks were never felled. Iroko and silk-cotton, a high canopy of primary forest, stand where the farmland and the rooftops have come up to the edge and stopped. The ground inside that edge is not idle. It is held, and has been held since the town was founded beside it, to be the dwelling of a goddess — Òṣun, the orisha of the river, of the sweet waters that the word for “spring” and the word for the deity name together. The grove carries her name, and so does the water, and so does the state. What survives there is the last large stand of what once was ordinary: the sacred wood that every Yoruba town kept at its founding, a piece of forest left to the powers and never broken to the hoe.

The Osun river in the closed canopy of the sacred grove — one of the last expanses of primary high forest in southern Nigeria. Oloyedejuwonlo, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The covenant at the river

The founding is told as a bargain struck at the water. In the time of a famine, hunters from the village of Ìpòlé-Òmù — the names given are Olútìmẹ́hìn the hunter and Láróyè, who would be the first of the town’s kings — came down through the bush in search of a river that would not fail, and reached the deep, steady flow of the Òṣun. They began to clear the bank for a settlement, and as a great tree was felled into the stream a voice came up out of the water: Láróyè, Olútìmẹ́hìn — you have broken all my dye-pots. The river was a person, and the clearing of her bank had spilled the vats in which she set her indigo. What followed was not flight but negotiation. The orisha did not drive the newcomers off; she moved them a little upland, to ground she named for them, and there she made her terms. Build her a shrine and keep her worship, and she would multiply the people, give them children, and hold the town safe. The town would render her, each year, an offering carried down to the river by a daughter of the royal line. On those terms Òṣogbo was founded, and Láróyè took the title Atáója that the town’s kings have carried since.

Within the frame of the tradition this is not a charming origin but a binding contract, and the obligation runs both ways. Òṣun keeps Òṣogbo, and Òṣogbo keeps Òṣun — the worship, the offering, the unfelled wood. The grove is the standing surety of the covenant. Every other Yoruba town once had such a wood: a tract of forest set aside at the founding for the orisha of the place, left uncleared while the surrounding country was given over to farm and compound. The Yoruba landscape was, in its older form, a landscape of these enclosures, each town with its girdle of sacred groves. What makes Òṣogbo’s singular is only that it lasted. As the population pressed outward and the axe and the hoe took the forest beyond, the groves of other towns shrank to a few trees around a shrine, or vanished altogether. Here the wood held its full extent — some seventy-five hectares of closed-canopy forest, with a further belt of woodland buffering it — because the goddess who held the town’s first covenant was held, in turn, by the unbroken trees.

A goddess of the sweet waters

Òṣun is among the most widely venerated of the orisha, the powers through whom Olódùmarè, the remote source named in the Yoruba reckoning as owner of the sky, orders the lived world. Where her sister-waters divide the domains — Yemoja the great river and later the sea, Ọya the Niger and the storm-wind — Òṣun holds the sweet waters: the spring, the fresh river, the rain that fills the pot. From the sweet waters comes everything that flows and quickens. She is the orisha of fertility, of the womb and the child, of love and the things that draw together, of brass and the cool yellow of her metal, of wealth and the divining that finds it. Her devotees wear her yellow and her white; brass and beads are hers; the river that runs by Òṣogbo is her body. In one telling she is counted a wife of Ṣàngó, the thunder-power who was a king of Ọ̀yọ́ before his deification — a marriage that ties the river-goddess of one town to the storm-king of the old imperial capital, and ties Òṣogbo’s grove into the wider net of the orisha.

She is also, in the internal account, a power who acts. The praise-poetry tells of the orisha gathered to set the world in order and leaving Òṣun out of their council, holding her a mere woman of the river — and of the work failing, the rain withheld and the world barren, until they came back to her and asked her share. Within the frame the lesson is plain: nothing made comes to fruit without the sweet waters, and the power that fills the womb and the seed is not a lesser power. The reckoning is the same one that runs through the Yoruba ordering of things, where the female and the cool and the watery are not soft and secondary but the ground on which the hot and the male and the dry depend, and the orisha who is slighted as merely a woman of the river turns out to hold the world’s increase in her hand.

At the river by Òṣogbo this is not allegory. The water itself is consulted; the childless come to it; what the river gives is read as the goddess answering. The river that runs through the grove is the readiest oracle in Yorubaland, and the woman who bathes in it and conceives has had her petition heard. Her name is woven into the names the town’s children carry, the Òṣun-prefixed names borne by those whom the goddess is held to have given, so that the covenant is legible in a register of the population itself — a generation of sons and daughters reckoned as her gift returned.

The shrines and the new monumental art

By the middle of the twentieth century the covenant was fraying. The shrines along the river were neglected, the old custodial sanctions weakening, the priesthood thinning; land-speculators eyed the wood and poachers and woodcutters came into it. Into that decline came an outsider who took the orisha for her own. Susanne Wenger, born in Graz in Austria in 1915 and trained as an artist in Vienna, reached Nigeria around 1950 and within a year fell gravely ill with tuberculosis. Her recovery turned her toward the Yoruba world: she was taken in by Ajagemo, a priest of Ọbàtálá at Ede, initiated into the orisha worship, and given in time the chieftaincy name Àdùnní Olóòrìṣà — Àdùnní who has the orisha. She settled at Òṣogbo in 1961 and made the grove her work and her home for the rest of her long life.

What she founded there, in the early 1960s, was a movement of restoration that became a movement of new art. Working with a circle of local Yoruba sculptors and laborers — Adébísí Akanjí, Burǎímọ̀ Gbádàmọ́ṣì, Kàsálì Akangbe Ògún, Rabíù Abèsù among them, the school that came to be called the New Sacred Art — Wenger did not merely patch the failing shrines. She and the carvers raised, in mud rendered over with cement and iron armature, a new body of monumental sculpture threaded through the whole forest: towering figures, walled and roofed sanctuaries, gateways, screens of fantastic openwork, the orisha and the spirits of the place given enormous plastic form. The Busányìn shrine on the bank was built as a great bird with its wings spread over the water; the goddess Ìyá Mòòpó, power of the women’s crafts, rose in a figure ten meters tall; an effigy of Òṣun herself stands among the trees with her arms outspread. The work is not pastiche of the old carving and not European modernism imported whole, but a third thing — an archaic-modern sacred art that grew in place, made by Yoruba hands for the Yoruba powers, and that has now stood in the grove for two generations as part of its devotional fabric rather than as decoration set upon it.

A monumental figure of the orisha Osun raised within the grove by the New Sacred Art movement. Tunde Akangbe, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The grove as it now stands is dense with this layered holiness. Within the forest are some forty shrines, two royal palaces, sacred precincts and a string of worship points strung along the riverbank, each tied to a particular orisha or a particular act of the founding. Èṣù the crossroads-messenger has his place — the power who must be greeted before the others, whom a nineteenth-century mission usage wrongly equated with the Christian devil, and who is in fact the keeper of the threshold through whom every offering passes. The shrine of Sọ̀pọ̀nná, orisha of the smallpox and the hot earth, stands among the trees. The river itself, with its pools and its bends, is the central sanctuary, the body of the goddess running through the middle of her wood.

A sculpted gateway into the grove, part of the New Sacred Art fabric that now threads the forest. Tunde Akangbe, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The festival and the calabash

Once a year the covenant is renewed in the open. Across about two weeks of the dry-season month — late July into August — Òṣogbo keeps the Òṣun festival, the largest gathering of the orisha worship still held in the Yoruba homeland, and the whole town turns toward the river. The rites move through the days: the lighting of the sixteen-point lamp of the kings, the cleansing of the town, the rebinding of the bond between the Atáója and the goddess who keeps his town. The festival comes to its center in the procession to the water. At its head walks the Arugbá — “she who carries the calabash” — a young woman of the royal line, chosen and set apart, who bears on her head a sealed calabash holding the offerings the town renders to Òṣun. She carries it covered and untouched from the palace down through the streets, the crowd parting before her, to the grove and the riverbank, where the offering is given to the water and the priests read what the goddess returns. The Atáója, the priestesses in their yellow and white, the devotees in their tens of thousands move behind her. What is renewed at the river is the first agreement: the goddess will keep the town for another year, and the town has kept its word.

The festival is the covenant made visible, and it is the reason the grove is not a museum but a working shrine. The carrying of the calabash is the annual proof that Òṣun is still given her offering and the wood is still hers. Within the frame, the prosperity of Òṣogbo through the year is the goddess’s side of the bargain kept; the procession is the town’s. The two halves meet at the water in the dry month, as they have since Láróyè and Olútìmẹ́hìn first heard the voice come up out of the river. The Arugbá’s burden is the load-bearing image of the whole: a covered vessel borne untouched through the crowd, its contents the town’s renewed pledge, set down at last at the edge of the water that is the goddess herself — the offering passing from the dry land of the living into the sweet flow that gives them their increase.

The grove in the present age

In the documentary record the grove’s standing is recent and exact. The Nigerian state declared it a national monument in 1965, and in 2005 it was inscribed on the list of the world’s heritage, under the reference 1118, on three of the cultural criteria — for its sacred art and its testimony to the orisha tradition, and as the last surviving example of the kind of grove that was once the common pattern of Yoruba settlement. The inscription rests on a double value the listing keeps clear. The grove is, first, a cultural landscape: the densest concentration of sacred sculpture and shrine architecture in Yorubaland, and the fullest standing record of a religious geography — town and grove, settlement and sanctuary — that elsewhere has been lost. It is, second, an ecological survival: one of the last large tracts of primary high forest left in southern Nigeria, a biological remnant preserved not by a park’s fence but by the unbroken belief that the wood is the body of a goddess. The two are one thing. The forest stands because it is sacred, and it is sacred because it stands.

The orisha did not stay in Yorubaland. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the collapse of the Oyo Empire and the wars that followed fed the Atlantic slave trade, and hundreds of thousands of Yoruba were carried across the ocean from the Bight of Benin. The powers went with them, and Òṣun was reconstituted on the far shore — as Ochún in the Lucumí, or Regla de Ocha, of Cuba, and as Oxum in the Candomblé of Bahia, where through long generations of prohibition the orisha were veiled behind the figures of the Catholic saints and survived the disguise. There Òṣun became a goddess of the river-mouth and the gold and the honey, worshiped far from the wood that bears her name. In the present age the traffic has reversed: practitioners of the orisha religion from across the Americas come back to Òṣogbo for the festival, to the one river that is unmistakably the goddess’s own, and stand on the bank where the covenant was first struck. The river that once carried the enslaved toward the coast now draws the descendants of the orisha back to its source.

The Osun river itself — the body of the goddess and the central oracle of the grove. Omoeko Media, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Susanne Wenger died at Òṣogbo in January 2009, in her ninety-fourth year, and was buried by the rites of the orisha in the grove she had spent half a century rebuilding. The forest she helped to save is not held in trust against some future return of belief; the belief never left. Each dry season the calabash still goes down to the water on a young woman’s head, the high trees still close over the river that other towns no longer have, and the first agreement made at that bank — protection for worship, increase for the unfelled wood — is offered again to a goddess who, in the reckoning of the town she keeps, has never once failed to answer.

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