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The Ram, the White, and the Many Names

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The Ram, the White, and the Many Names

Amadioha carries a set of attachments that recur across the Igbo country even where his name changes. White is his colour, and it appears in the chalk used at his shrines and on the bodies of those who serve him. The ram is his animal and his sacrifice. His day is afo, one of the four market days that make up the Igbo week. These are stable enough to identify him under different names, which matters, because the names are not stable at all.

He is Amadioha across much of the Igbo heartland and Amadiora in some communities. In the Ngwa and Ohafia areas he is Kamalu or Kamanu. Elsewhere he is simply Igwe, the sky. Whether these are one deity under several names, or several sky and thunder deities that outside observers have collected under one heading, is a genuine question, and the answer is probably that both are true in different places. Odinani had no central authority, no canon and no synod. Several hundred village groups each maintained their own alusi with their own attendants and prohibitions, and the resemblance between a thunder deity in one and a thunder deity a hundred miles away is a family resemblance rather than an identity.

This is worth stating plainly because reference works have a tendency to present Igbo religion as a tidy pantheon, with Chukwu at the top and a fixed roster beneath him, in the manner of a Greek or Norse arrangement. The tidiness is imported. What existed was a widely shared vocabulary and a widely shared set of associations, applied locally, with real variation in which deities mattered, what they were called, and what they forbade.

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