Osanyin

Praise to the owner of herbal medicine. Once upon a time, the master botanist and herbalist Òsanyìn hoarded his knowledge, plants, and concoctions. When Òrúnmìlà complained to Èshù that he needed Òsanyìn’s plants to divine, Èshù knocked over Òsanyìn’s house. For what it’s worth, he insists he didn’t realize Òsanyìn was inside at the time. Rocks fell, crushing Òsanyìn like a cartoon coyote. Now he’s half his former height, with one eye, one arm, one leg, one giant deaf ear and one tiny hypersensitive one, and a squeaky little voice. But at least now he understands how to share.

Òsanyìn’s symbol is the healer’s or diviner’s staff, topped with a metal bird figure. His herbalism underlies all West African and Afro-Atlantic sorcery — thus its common African-American name, “rootwork.” Strangers in a strange land, struggling to apply a different continent’s botany to American flora, African root doctors nevertheless were slave society’s medical, spiritual, and cultural keystones. In places like pre-Civil War New Orleans, while white pharmacists poisoned rich clients with mercury and opium, poor and malnourished black people enjoyed a higher standard of care from conjurers who had already figured out such techniques as inoculation.

Òsanyìn hates to Incarnate because his new body inevitably suffers some catastrophic accident; waiting for it to happen is just too nerve-wracking. Instead he possesses dolls or children’s toys, imbuing them with his weird fast-forward-sounding voice (and giving everyone nightmares). He exhorts his Scions to master a field of knowledge (not just medicine or botany, though those often come easier), then share it with the World. Divinity’s seed is in them; they can do better than big pharma.