Children of Blood and Bone: The Film Adaptation and Orisha

The poster spells it with an umlaut: Orïsha, the kingdom in Tomi Adeyemi's Children of Blood and Bone, whose film adaptation is set for January 2027. Take the two dots away and the word stops being a fantasy coinage. Òrìṣà (roughly aw-REE-shah) is a Yoruba word for a divinity — one of the powers that Yoruba people in southwestern Nigeria, Benin and Togo, and their descendants across the Atlantic, praise, petition and consult. Not once, long ago. This morning, in Ìbàdàn and in Havana.

Almost everything written about the film explains the kingdom. Very little explains the word. And the gap happens to contain a good story about how knowledge hardens: one of the most-repeated facts about òrìṣà — that there are exactly 401 of them — has a traceable history, and the further back you trace it, the thinner it gets.

What òrìṣà means, plainly

In Yoruba thought, the source of everything is Olódùmarè, the supreme being, who is not the one you meet in the daily traffic of shrines and offerings. That traffic belongs to the òrìṣà. Each has a domain and a character: Ṣàngó (SHAN-go), thunder and lightning, remembered in many accounts as a king of Ọ̀yọ́ before he became an òrìṣà; Ọ̀ṣun (OH-shun), the river that runs through Òṣogbo, associated with fresh water, wealth and children; Ògún (OH-goon), iron and the edge of the blade, whose domain has grown with the world to include mechanics, welders and lorry drivers.

Each has praise poetry, days, colours, foods, songs, and priests who trained for years. Versions differ from town to town and lineage to lineage — the Ọ̀ṣun of Òṣogbo is not described in identical terms elsewhere, and Yoruba practitioners generally do not find that a problem to be fixed.

One correction while we are here, because films inherit it. Èṣù, the messenger who carries words between people and the divinities and who sits at the crossroads, is not a devil. He became one in print when nineteenth-century Yoruba Bible translation needed a local word for Satan and used his name. That single editorial decision has outlived the men who made it by more than a century, and Yoruba scholars have been correcting it, patiently, for most of that time.

How many òrìṣà are there?

The usual answers are 401, 601, or 1,440 — and none of them is a count anyone has verified. The most repeated is 401, from the Yoruba phrase ọ̀kànlénírinwó irúnmọlẹ̀, "four hundred and one divinities." In use, that phrase behaves less like a census result and more like the English "a thousand and one": a large tidy number with one added to say and then some. Ask ten priests in ten towns and you will not get one number back.

The small history of a number

Follow 401 backwards and the chain is short.

Today it sits in wikis, explainer videos, and the paragraph of context that entertainment sites paste beneath a trailer. Those draw on English-language popular handbooks of world mythology published from the 1970s onward. Those, in turn, lean on the mid-century scholarly generation — E. Bọlaji Idowu's Olódùmarè: God in Yoruba Belief (1962), William Bascom's fieldwork on Ifá and on the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria published through the 1960s. Both of them were reporting what particular people in particular towns told them, and both treated the numbers as unstable rather than settled; Idowu's reading was that the figures were never arithmetic in the first place.

Behind that generation sit the colonial-era compilations: A. B. Ellis's The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (1894), and Samuel Johnson's The History of the Yorubas, written by a Yoruba clergyman in the 1890s and not published until 1921. These were working from a small number of informants in a narrow slice of Yorubaland, in a period when the question being asked — how many gods do you have? — came with a European's expectation of a number attached.

So a fact repeated ten thousand times online rests, four or five links down, on a handful of pages written by a handful of men who each spoke to a handful of people. That is not a scandal. It is how most compact facts about oral traditions are built. It is worth knowing when a piece of coverage tells you, flatly, that there are 401.

Why four hundred is the suspicious part

Yoruba counts in twenties. Ogún is 20, igba is 200, irinwó is 400 — twenty twenties, the square of the base, the largest neat round number the system reaches for. In a base-20 language, 400 does the work that "a million" does in English: it means more than you are going to count.

There is a second reason a fixed total misdescribes the system. The set is open. A river can become an òrìṣà. A lineage founder can. In many accounts Ṣàngó was a man before he was a divinity, and Ògún's domain expanded to cover machinery that did not exist when his praise poetry was first sung. Local òrìṣà stay local, known in one town and unheard of two hundred kilometres away. A tradition that keeps admitting new members and keeps some of them regional cannot have a fixed roll — which may be exactly what the phrase "four hundred and one" was built to say.

Names and terms

• Òrìṣà — a Yoruba divinity, with a domain, a character, praise poetry and priests.
• Olódùmarè — the supreme being; the source, distant from daily devotion.
• Irúnmọlẹ̀ — the primordial divinities; used interchangeably with òrìṣà in some accounts, reserved for the first ones in others.
• Oríkì — praise poetry naming a person, lineage or òrìṣà by their deeds; a main vehicle of what is known.
• Ifá — the divination system consulted through a memorised corpus of verses (odù); its practitioners are babaláwo.
• Èṣù — the messenger at the crossroads, who carries words in both directions.

Where the word travelled

What a film can carry

A novel is allowed to borrow a word and build its own kingdom behind it. Fiction has always done that, and the adaptation is not obliged to be a catechism. The thinner move is in the coverage around it — the paragraphs that hand readers "Orisha" as a piece of invented world-building, or hand them 401 as a hard figure, when what sits behind both is a system of thought about justice, death and obligation that has practitioners who will buy tickets to this screen version too.

Which leaves a question nobody can currently close. The phrase reached print already worn smooth, in the 1890s, from a few mouths, answering a stranger's question. Was 401 ever a count that got lost — or did it only become a number at the moment someone with a notebook asked how many, in a language where the answer had to be a figure?