Orisha Ashe

Question: What do you think of the idea of the Loa and the Orisha being separate pantheons? I have not researched enough to be considered an expert, but I think they are thematically different and both have gods not shared by the other. Maybe the Loa are the gods who have not "abandoned" the African slaves and came with them to the Americas. Thoughts?

I think it's possible, but it has the same problems that making, say, separate Greek and Roman pantheons has: one or both of these pantheons will be badly misrepresented by trying to split them off, because they just have too much in common and will lose integral members of their rosters and parts of their cultures if they're separated.

There are indeed different gods between the two sets. The Americas have such creatures as Baron Samedi, Marinette and Damballa, figures who have developed in the last few centuries as a result of synthesis with other religions, peoples and cultures that the displaced African slaves encountered. The original Orisha religions in west Africa have such gods as Oba, Oshumare and the Ibeji twins, who were imported to the New world only cursorily. But the problem is that the most important and major gods between the two are not only the same, but actually haven't changed all that much in their crossing of the ocean, and you can't cut the heart out of either group.

You want a New World Loa-only pantheon to go with the Old World Orisha-only pantheon? Do you still want it if it doesn't have Kalfu, Oshun or Ogun? Those figures are far too important as Orisha to not be members of the west African pantheon, but they're also far too important as Loa to be left out of the New World roster of gods. They're indispensible and nearly identical; neither pantheon can function without them, but it would also be downright inaccurate to try to pretend that these are two completely different sets of gods who don't share about 80-90% of their makeup in common. If you assign them to one pantheon, the other is both crippled and now very much not a good example of what its religion actually believes in and worships.

Of course, the sticky wicket is that they also are different gods; the Exu of Candomble, for example, is no longer perfectly identical to the Eshu of Yorubaland, and the two religions, while they share tons of common ground, are also no longer identical, having evolved over time as all religions do. But, just like Zeus and Jupiter, they're so close that from a game perspective there's nothing to gain from trying to split them off, and they'd just be figures with almost the exact same associations and stories.

This is all general pantheon-splitting stuff, but you're right: theme is important, and I'm here to tell you that there is not a whole lot of thematic difference between the Orisha religion of Africa and its many child religions in the Americas. For one thing, the concept that the Orisha "abandoned" the African slaves is preposterous; it's easy to think of only the Louisiana bayou spirits when talking about the Loa, but the gods the Africans brought with them from their homeland are spread all over the Americas, and in most cases those African gods are still right there with their people. Brazil alone has millions of worshipers who still consider the likes of Shango and Oshun among the most important of their gods; Haiti, also with worshipers in the millions, credits such thoroughly African gods as Ogun with the strength and drive that won them their independence; the rest of South America, not to mention Cuba, still calls upon almost all the Orisha of west Africa, some of them with slightly corrupted names or syncretisms with saints but all of them very firmly alive and active. Orunmila is still called upon for prophecy and wisdom under the name Orule; Erinle's powers over the earth and the human body are still begged for through his shortened name Inle; as Oxala, ancient Obatala is still celebrated and feted as vigorously as he ever was. Many of the Orisha have even taken on new and additional roles based on their New World worship, such as Ogun, who as the god of iron has become the patron of modern weaponry and technology, or Olokun, god of the sea, who has become the patron of all those souls of slaves who died during the Middle Passage and were accepted into his watery bosom.

New Orleans vodun is definitely a strong force in the New World, but it's far from the only African diaspora religion around, and our tendency to let it be the be-all and end-all of our image of the Loa is crippling when we're trying to look at the big picture. Candomble in Brazil, Santeria in Cuba and Puerto Rico, Vodun in Haiti and Shango Baptism in Trinidad and Tobago are all thriving, strong traditions that maintain almost all of the African Orisha wholesale; and that's not even counting Africa itself, and we should count Africa because there are still millions of Orisha worshipers in Nigeria and Benin in the modern day, despite the attempts of Christianity and Islam to weed them out. There are some differences, of course, between the practices of today and their ancient roots, but only as much as any religion has when it grows over a few centuries of new situations and ideas. You might as well try to split Hinduism into two different pantheons by claiming that the Vedic Vishnu must be a different dude from the modern one - he's certainly changed over time, but saying he's a different god would be just plain wrong.

As for thematic differences, I gotta tell you, there are not very many of them. The Loa are all about balance of opposing forces in the universe? Great, so are the Orisha! The Loa are all about the many gods acting together to perform the work of one great creator god (Bondye)? Great, so are the Orisha (they call him Olodumare)! The Loa often change form or have alternate and opposing personas? Great, so do the Orisha! The Loa love to possess and ride their followers in crazy drum-ceremonies? Great, so do the Orisha, practically every day! The Loa are called upon in magical rituals to provide aid or wisdom from beyond? Welcome to the Orisha practice of magical divination! Worshipers of the Loa build elaborate shrines to their gods with delectable offerings of food and trinkets for their favors? What a coincidence, so do the worshipers of the Orisha!

In fact, the only major difference I can think of is the prevalence of death-related spirits elevated to godhood in the Americas, as the Yoruba religion really doesn't do that much (it has the Egungun, spirits of the dead ancestors who can sometimes influence the world, but no proper Underworld or death god), probably a result of the tumultuous time of slavery and its high and brutal mortality rate as well as influence from other religions' ideas of the afterlife. But more gods having Death does not a different pantheon make, and much stronger are the shared themes of the different faiths, such as the concept of the heroic journey of life, in which each man or woman must soldier on through adversity to achieve their personal destiny with help from their patron gods, one of the major themes of both the Yoruba religion and the long and painful passage of its people across the ocean.

Look, I'm not trying to say that the diaspora religions are identical to the traditional religions of west Africa; that's obvoiusly not true. They've been changed by time, distance, trauma and influence from a whole bucket of other cultures and religions that rub elbows with them, and they have built their own traditions and ways of worshiping. They are vibrant and distinct religions, and anyone who says they aren't is being deeply religiously insensitive. But what I am trying to say is that they still very much share a heart, not to mention almost all their major deities. Trying to split them up would give you two very broken pantheons - missing major gods, desperately trying to lock themselves into too-narrow powers to avoid overlap, and constantly confusing everyone with their obvious and un-talked-about similarities.

In fact, that's basically what they look like right now in the original Scion book, and that's why we're fixing them. The Loa are the Orisha - their later forms, their faraway forms, but themselves nonetheless, members of a pantheon that has always been fluid in form and closely linked to its people. Splitting them not only wouldn't make very much sense, it would diminish them both when we could instead be celebrating their incredible versatility and ability to remain major world powers even after the complete European domination of their ancestral lands.

The Orisha are some awesomely badass deities. Give them their props for making it across the sea with their beleaugured people to also be the Loa!