The Many Ways of Being Human

1.10

Yoruba and Benin

In Ile-Ife at sunrise, a man throws sixteen palm nuts eight times and draws lines in powder, and the pattern, one of 256, calls up a verse he knows by heart. The Yoruba kept a whole library in living heads, and when that knowledge crossed the Atlantic with the enslaved, the river goddess Yemoja became the sea goddess Yemanjá.