Odinani

Odinani arranges its beings in tiers, and almost all religious work happens below the top one. Chukwu, the great chi, is the source of everything and the guarantor of the moral order, but receives no temple, no priesthood and no regular cult of his own. He is invoked in oaths, in personal names such as Chukwuemeka, meaning God has done much, and at the end of prayers that begin elsewhere. Below him stand the alusi, sometimes rendered arusi or agbara, deities each bound to a domain and usually to a place: Ala, the earth, who is the most important of them; Amadioha, thunder and lightning and the swift punisher of concealed wrongdoing; Anyanwu, the sun; Idemili, associated with water and with the python; Agwu, the force behind divination and, when it seizes a person unasked, behind madness. An alusi has a shrine, an attendant priest, a set of prohibitions and a temper. It can be neglected, offended, appeased and, in the recorded practice of more than one community, abandoned outright when it stopped delivering.

Between the living person and all of this stands the chi. Each person is understood to have one, a personal spirit portion that is theirs alone and that shares the credit and blame for how their life goes. A person of unusual good fortune is said to have a strong chi, and a person who works hard and gets nowhere is said to be arguing with one. Because the chi is personal, Odinani never resolves into a single doctrine of destiny; it holds two things at once, that a life is given a shape and that a person is answerable for what they make of it.

The dead form the last tier. The ndichie, the ancestors who died well and were buried with the proper rites, remain members of their lineage rather than departing it.

The practical religion of an Igbo village turns on land, law and time rather than on doctrine. Ala is the earth as a person: she owns the ground, receives the dead into it, and holds the code of conduct. Offences that break that code are nso ala, abominations against the earth, and the category is precise rather than vague. It has historically covered homicide within the community, theft of yams, incest, and a birth or death that violated the accepted order. What makes nso ala distinctive is that the pollution is public. It attaches to the land and the lineage, not only to the offender, so the remedy is a public sacrifice and cleansing performed by the earth priest rather than a private penance.

Authority to speak for a lineage is held physically. The ofo is a staff, cut from a particular tree, passed to the eldest surviving man of a line, and understood to carry the assent of the ancestors. Divination, healing and the reading of misfortune belong to the dibia, who are consulted about causes rather than symptoms, and whose work assumes that a serious illness or a run of losses has a reason somewhere in the relations between a person, their chi, their ancestors and an offended alusi.

Time is counted in a four-day week, eke, orie, afo and nkwo, each named for a market, so that the ritual calendar and the trading calendar are the same calendar. Christianity arrived with the missions of the 1840s and, unusually, spread very fast; most Igbo people today are Christian. Odinani did not so much end as move: masquerade societies, title-taking, funeral obligations to the ndichie and the sense that the earth can be offended continue, sometimes openly, sometimes inside a Christian frame that its practitioners see no need to reconcile.