Ochosi

Yoruba narrative tradition explains Ochosi's identity as an enforcer of justice through a single story that costs him more than it costs anyone he ever judges. In the myth, Ochosi, already known for a skill at hunting that never failed, discovered that someone was repeatedly taking birds he had caught and set aside, and in his anger at the theft he called on his own weapon, asking that it strike true against whoever the thief turned out to be, without first learning who that person was. The arrow found its mark exactly as asked. When Ochosi went to see what he had struck, he found his own mother, Yemu, lying where the arrow had reached her, having gone to the birds not to steal them for herself but, in the version of the story most often told, out of simple compassion, releasing creatures she found already caught. Ochosi's justice, summoned in anger and aimed at an unknown thief, had killed the one person the story gives no reason to think deserved it. Storytellers do not use the myth to excuse Ochosi or to condemn him outright; instead it is told as the origin of his character as it is understood ever after, a hunter and a judge whose aim is genuinely unerring and whose verdicts are for that very reason not something to invoke lightly, since a request answered exactly as asked can still land on someone the asker never intended. The myth is also why Ochosi is counted among the warrior orisha received together with Ogun, the smith whose tools make the hunt possible, and Elegua, the orisha who opens or closes the road to whatever is sought, a working trio in which Ochosi supplies the aim rather than the means or the opportunity.

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.