One Hunter, Two Homes: Ochosi in Yorubaland and in Brazil

Ochosi's standing looks different depending on which side of the Atlantic a reader is describing. Within the Yoruba homeland he is recorded, in the general scholarly surveys of the pantheon, as one orisha among many rather than as a figure singled out for extended separate treatment, a warrior deity of the hunt counted alongside Ogun and Elegua but without the depth of independently documented local cult history that a figure such as Ogun carries from Ire or Shango from Oyo. In Brazil, by contrast, the same orisha, carried across the Atlantic by enslaved Yoruba speakers and transmitted above all through the Ketu nation of Candomble, became Oxossi, one of the most prominent and widely venerated orixas in the entire tradition, king of the Ketu nation in some houses and closely associated in Umbanda with the caboclo spirits of Brazil's own indigenous and forest imagery. His feast day there, the twentieth of January, is kept alongside that of Saint Sebastian, one of his Catholic syncretic identifications, and stands among the most visible dates in the Candomble calendar. Sandra T. Barnes's comparative study of a related warrior orisha's Old World and New World transmission gives the general shape for reading this asymmetry: a diaspora branch of a Yoruba cult can develop a local elaboration, Oxossi's association with the Amazon forest above all, that its homeland tradition did not independently produce to the same degree, without this being evidence that homeland worship ceased. What can be said honestly is narrower: the documentary record for Ochosi's cult within Nigeria is thinner than the record for his transplanted Brazilian form, a gap in the record rather than evidence about the strength of the homeland tradition itself.