Children of Blood and Bone: The Orisha Behind the Film Adaptation

In the behind-the-scenes footage there is a moment where a costume designer lifts a beaded panel and talks about weight — how it hangs, how it will move at a gallop. The word orisha goes past in the same breath as shooting schedule and second unit, a piece of world-building vocabulary sitting in the sentence the way "the Force" or "Westeros" would sit.

The film adaptation of Tomi Adeyemi's Children of Blood and Bone is due in cinemas in January 2027, with Gina Prince-Bythewood directing, and the production details have been arriving in the usual order: cast, footage, a date. All of that is real news. But the word carrying the most weight in the trilogy's name — Orïsha — was not coined for a novel. It belongs to Yoruba people in southwestern Nigeria, Benin and Togo, and to millions of people in Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad and the United States who use it about something they did last Sunday.

Are the orisha invented for the book?

No. The orisha (oh-REE-shah) are figures in a Yoruba religious tradition that is practised now, by living people, in cities with airports. Ifá divination, the system in which many of these figures are consulted, is on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage; the priests who read it, the babaláwo (bah-bah-LAH-woh), train for years. Across the Atlantic the same names travelled in the holds of slave ships and surfaced in Cuban Lucumí, in Brazilian Candomblé, in Trinidadian Orisha worship — changed by the crossing, but not ended by it.

What Adeyemi built on top of that is genuinely hers. The kingdom of Orïsha is a fictional country. The maji clans, the colour-coded magic, the rules about who can burn and who can call water — those are a novelist's invention, and she has said so. The borrowed part is the vocabulary and the deep structure underneath it: a world with a distant creator, a crowd of intermediary powers with jobs and temperaments, and a life force that runs through the whole arrangement.

That distinction matters more on screen than on the page. Prose can leave a thing half-lit. A production has to decide what everything looks like, and there is no neutral decision — a costume, a shrine, a drum pattern either points at a real tradition or points at a hundred earlier films that got it wrong.

A short history of how the word travelled

Here is the part the press cycle never covers: the outside world's picture of the orisha was assembled by a small number of hands, and you can name most of them.

Yoruba first became a written language in the 1830s and 1840s, largely in Sierra Leone, largely in the hands of missionary lexicographers working with freed captives. The foundational text is A Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language, published in 1843 under the name of Samuel Ajayi Crowther — himself Yoruba, Egba by origin, captured as a boy, freed at sea, later the first African Anglican bishop. A dictionary is not a neutral object. It is a set of decisions about which English word goes next to which Yoruba one.

By the 1890s, colonial officers were compiling those decisions into survey books. A.B. Ellis published The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa in 1894, working largely from other people's notes and traders' accounts rather than from years in any one town. Those compilations fed the encyclopedias, and the encyclopedias fed everything after.

The correction came, and it came from Yoruba scholars — Bolaji Idowu's Olódùmarè: God in Yoruba Belief in 1962, Wande Abimbola's decades of work on the Ifá corpus. But by then the earlier books were the ones already on the shelves, already quoted, already summarised by people who summarised the summaries. Nobody in this chain was lying. Each hand simply had to compress, and compression always drops the same things first: regional variation, the name of the teller, the phrase "in one account".

The thin source: how Èṣù became "the devil"

Start with a story, because the tradition starts with stories.

The cap on the boundary. Two friends farm neighbouring plots and boast that nothing will ever come between them. Èṣù walks the path along the boundary wearing a cap — black on one side, white on the other. Afterwards the friends argue about what they saw. One is certain the cap was black; the other is certain it was white. Each knows he was looking straight at it. The argument turns bitter, and the friendship breaks. In some tellings the cap is red and white, and in some the friends come to blows before the truth arrives. The consequence is the same. Neither man lied. Neither man saw the whole thing.

That is not a story about evil. It is an argument about partial vision, made in the form of a man in a two-coloured cap.

Èṣù (EH-shoo) is the messenger and the keeper of thresholds — crossroads, doorways, the mouth of the market. In many lineages his name is spoken before the others, because nothing gets carried if the carrier is not addressed first. He is unpredictable, he is owed his portion, and he tests reciprocity constantly. What he is not, in any Yoruba account, is a principle of pure malice set against a principle of pure good. That structure is not how the system is built.

So where did the devil come from? In the 1840s, translators putting the Bible into Yoruba needed a word for Satan. The choice that stuck — traced by scholars to Crowther's vocabulary and the Yoruba scriptures that followed it — was Èṣù. One lexical decision, made by one committee, under a deadline and a theology.

Measure the source against the belief. The source is a line in a dictionary. The belief is now in hymns, in tracts, in Nollywood posters, in the mouth of a child in Lagos who has never heard the cap story and is certain she knows what Èṣù means. It runs straight through households: a Yoruba Christian may use the word one way in church on Sunday and hear their grandmother use it another way at the door on Monday. A very thin source is holding up a very heavy building.

This is worth knowing before the film arrives, because a trickster figure on screen will be read through that inheritance by default. The audience brings the mistranslation with them.

The number that keeps changing

You will see the orisha counted. The figure given is 401, or 201, or 601, depending on the book. The Yoruba constructions behind these counts — the irúnmọlẹ̀, the primordial powers — typically use a large round number plus one, and the "plus one" is usually understood as an open place rather than a final tally. Yoruba counting has long used four hundred the way English uses "a thousand and one": more than you are going to count.

Reference works picked a number and printed it, and the idiom hardened into a census. Where a tradition offers you an open door, the safest translation is not a total.

Names and terms

• Òrìṣà / orisha (oh-REE-shah) — an intermediary power with a domain, a temperament, and its own body of stories.
• Olódùmarè (oh-LOH-doo-mah-reh) — the creator, distant from daily affairs; the orisha are who you deal with.
• Àṣẹ (AH-sheh) — the force that makes things happen; also the word that closes a prayer, roughly "so be it".
• Ifá (ee-FAH) — the divination system and the vast oral corpus attached to it.
• Babaláwo — an Ifá priest; literally "father of secrets".
• Ìtàn (EE-tahn) — the stories, the ones that carry the teaching.
• Ṣàngó (SHAHN-go) — thunder, associated with the old kingdom of Ọ̀yọ́; in many accounts a king before he was anything else.
• Ọya (OH-yah) — wind, storm and change; the Niger River carries her name.
• Ọ̀ṣun (OH-shoon) — the river of that name, and what a river does: fresh water, fertility, sweetness, wealth.
• Ògún (OH-goon) — iron, tools, war, and by extension surgeons and drivers; oaths sworn on iron still carry weight in parts of Nigeria.

One figure, four names

Versions differ within each of these, too. A house in Havana and a house in Matanzas will not tell you the same thing.

What a film can carry, and what it cannot

A Yoruba proverb runs: Ọwọ́ ọmọdé kò tó pẹpẹ, ti àgbàlagbà kò wọ akèrègbè — the child's hand cannot reach the high shelf, and the elder's hand will not fit inside the gourd. Each needs the other. A major adaptation can put these names in front of an audience no scholar will ever reach. It cannot hold what a lineage holds, and it was never going to.

So do the small thing that closes the gap slightly. This week, take one name off the list above — Ọ̀ṣun is the easiest place to start — and find the geography it belongs to before a trailer teaches you otherwise. Ten minutes gets you the river, then Osun State, then the town of Osogbo, then the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2005, and the festival held there every August by people who are not waiting for a film. Arrive at the cinema knowing that at least one of those names has a riverbank.