Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch

Question: We know the Orisha love Prophecy and Mystery (it's even in their PSP), but how do they feel about the Magic purview and the gods or Scions that use it?

To put it mildly, they are not big fans. The Orisha tend to shoot witches on sight and ask questions later, if they bother asking any questions at all instead of being relieved and having some celebratory palm wine.

Actually, their love of Prophecy and Mystery is tied into the same ideas here that probably make them extremely twitchy and unhappy around Magic. Yoruba religious philosophy holds that each person is born with a destiny to be achieved, chosen by them before their birth, but that they do not know its exact details. Each person is responsible for figuring out what to do in order to achieve their destiny in a sort of lifelong ongoing quest, and unlike in European cultures' conceptions of future and fate, the Yoruba are fully aware that this is not a foregone conclusion. It is entirely possibly to fail at one's destiny by not figuring out what you're supposed to do or even just not trying hard enough, and a failure to achieve your destiny means that you lived a literally wasted life, with no significance, importance or goodness to contribute to your people.

Since most normal people don't have a hotline to what Fate wants them to be doing, this is why divination, the practice of seeking oracular enlightenment, is so centrally important to the Orisha and their people. Seeking readings from prophets and oracles allows people to get small glimpses into what they're supposed to be doing and what it might be their destiny to achieve, giving them a significantly better chance of succeeding than if they just flailed around in the dark trying to guess what the best path might be. Orunmila, god of prophecy and enlightenment, has dedicated his entire existence to providing this all-important information to anyone who might need it, in tandem with Eshu, who despite being a seriously crazypants trickster who does a lot of things that make no sense just because he thinks its funn still takes that particular duty seriously most of the time. Even the other gods often stop to ask for divinations during their divine myths, looking for guidance as to what they need to be doing, such as when Obatala seeks a reading from Orunmila before he embarks on the journey that eventually lands him in Shango's dungeons or when Shango discovers his father's true identity through a divination and is able to set out to find him.

So, in the Yoruba religion, you have a bunch of people, including gods, who are striving to reach their all-important destinies, and who love to use Mystery and Prophecy to help guide them toward what they need to do in pursuit of that goal. When you introduce Magic, suddenly everything becomes problematic in a very, very big way.

Magic is the opposite of Prophecy and Mystery; instead of divining the will of Fate, it imposes itself upon Fate to twist it for its own ends, meaning that it directly confuses or perverts the intent of one or more peoples' destinies. Yoruba myth is replete with stories of witches, how terrible and dangerous they are, and how they have to be destroyed immediately for everyone's good; even in the modern day, believers in the Orisha visit priests when they experience a string of bad luck to ensure that they are not being afflicted by some witch's evil curse. If a being has the power to literally change your destiny, or at the very least confuse it so badly that you don't know which way is up, you're almost guaranteed not to be able to achieve it the way you were meant to.

So using Magic is basically the most anti-Orisha thing you can do, and they are not at all okay with it. Which is not to say that they don't have a few people among their ranks with that power; Oshun, in particular, is associated with the manipulation of destiny because she is the goddess of hairdressing, and destiny is according to Yoruba thought located in the ori or "head", meaning that to change your head is literally to change your fate, and similarly Eshu, who occasionally intentionally twists Orunmila's messages about fate for his own reasons (usually petty revenge), is known to be a weaver and worker. But as a generality, even though those gods are tentatively accepted because they never (or, in Eshu's case, seldom) use it for evil, it's an entire purview whose purpose is expressly to fuck the entire universe up. It ruins everything. It's the worst.

So, the Orisha are likely to look askance at anyone who demonstrates Magic under the best of circumstances, and to react with outright hostility and fear under the worst. Meddling in another person's destiny is perhaps the most serious sin you could commit to upset them, so while they aren't as likely to care if you just fuck around with your own fortune - after all, it's your problem if you screw up and can't figure out your destiny anymore - they will have very little tolerance for in any way manipulating someone else's. Even if you're behaving yourself, you're not likely to gain their trust; to them, you're walking around all the time wearing a giant ticking bomb strapped to yourself, and your constant assurance that it's okay, you're not going to use it isn't going to set very many of them at ease.

In our games, the Orisha have put up with a few Magic users in their vicinity out of necessity (particularly at the Kingsmoot, where they can't exactly start taking potshots at everyone else's viziers), but they aren't happy about it. Obatala in particular has been very vocal about wanting any "evil wizards" that might be nearby to be hunted down and destroyed, including Folkwardr, and only the fact that most of the major Magic gods are elsewhere trying to work on the Fate problem together has prevented probable violence from breaking out. Luckily, none of our Orisha Scions have ever been into Magic all that much except for poor Theo, and since he got eaten by Titans after only a fairly short career as a Scion, they're inclined to view him as having gotten his just deserts.

To be clear, it's not that you can't be a Scion of the Orisha and have Magic; you totally can, and several of them even pass it down as favored. But you'll be under constant surveillance and mistrusted by many, possibly all of the family members you deal with, so choose your powers - and how you use them! - wisely.