Children of Blood and Bone Movie News: Who the Òrìṣà Really Are

A trailer went out this week for Children of Blood and Bone, and somewhere in the first minute a word crosses the screen that already has a street named after it in Ọ̀ṣogbo, a drum pattern in Havana, and a feast day on the beaches of Salvador: Orïsha. On screen, it is a kingdom — a fictional land where people with magic are hunted by people without it. Off screen, with the diaeresis dropped and the tone marks restored, òrìṣà is what tens of millions of Yoruba people in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo call the divinities who stand between a distant creator and the world.

So this is movie news that arrives carrying something older than the movie. Paramount's adaptation of Tomi Adeyemi's 2018 novel is a fantasy film, and it is entitled to be one. But the vocabulary it borrows belongs to people who are alive, who are in shrines and drum circles and initiation houses this month, and who will still be there when the film leaves theatres. This piece is about the gap between those two things — what the trailer shows, what the tradition is, and how to hold both without confusing them.

What most people do with a borrowed name

Watch the reaction to any trailer like this one and you will see the same two reflexes, arriving within minutes of each other.

The first reflex is to file the whole vocabulary under invented world-building. Orïsha, maji, kosidán, diviners — these read as the same species of word as Dothraki or Valyrian, coined for a map at the front of a hardcover. That reflex is not stupid. Fantasy trains us to treat proper nouns as decor, and the film gives no reason on screen to think otherwise. But it means a viewer can leave the cinema having heard the word Ṣàngó and never learn that there are people in Ọ̀yọ́ State who trace a lineage to him, or that a Cuban drummer would know exactly which rhythm belongs to him.

The second reflex is the opposite and, in its way, more costly: to take the film as a documentary with better lighting. If the story sorts its magic-users into ten clans by element — fire, water, iron, life and death — then that, surely, is how the religion works. It is not. That clan system is a novelist's engine, built to make a plot move, and Adeyemi has never claimed otherwise. Yet a reader who arrives at the tradition through the book often arrives holding a tidy chart that the tradition itself would not recognise.

The author-distancing story has pushed coverage further in that direction. Adeyemi posted publicly that she would not promote the adaptation of her work and would not see the film; the posts were later deleted. What that produced was a news cycle about a dispute rather than a news cycle about a source. Entertainment reporting is built to do this — announcement, plot summary, cast list, conflict, next story — and none of those slots is shaped to hold a sentence explaining that Yemọja is worshipped in three languages on two continents. So the tradition ends up as the one thing nobody covers, in a story that is entirely named after it.

The honest version of the first reflex is worth keeping: a fantasy film owes its audience a good story, not a syllabus. The problem is not that the film borrows. It is that borrowing, followed by silence, leaves millions of viewers with a name and no owner for it.

Is the Orïsha in Children of Blood and Bone a real religion?

No — and yes, in a way worth being precise about. The Orïsha of the novel is a fictional kingdom with a fictional history, a fictional monarchy, and a magic system the author designed. There is no country by that name. But the word is taken from òrìṣà, the divinities of Yoruba religion, which is a living faith practised today by millions of people in West Africa and across the Americas. The film is fiction built on a real vocabulary, in the way a novel about a fictional cathedral is still using the real word saint.

The distinction matters most in one direction. Nothing in the film should be read as a description of what practitioners believe or do. But the names on screen are not free-floating — each of them belongs to a specific people, a specific region, and in many cases a specific shrine you could visit.

What the evidence suggests

Who the Yoruba are, and where this comes from

The Yoruba are one of West Africa's largest peoples, concentrated in southwestern Nigeria and extending into Benin and Togo, numbering in the tens of millions. Their historic cities — Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Ọ̀yọ́, Ìbàdàn, Abẹ́òkúta, Ọ̀ṣogbo — are not villages that happen to have survived; they are urban centres with courts, guilds, and archives of oral history hundreds of years deep. Ilé-Ifẹ̀ holds a particular place: in Yoruba accounts it is where creation began, where the first dry land was made, and where the bronze and terracotta heads that startled European art historians in the twentieth century were cast.

Yoruba people today are Muslim, Christian, practitioners of òrìṣà tradition, and frequently more than one of those at once, in combinations that outsiders find contradictory and insiders do not. That is the ordinary religious landscape, not a compromise.

What an òrìṣà actually is

At the top of the Yoruba cosmos is Olódùmarè, the supreme being — the source of everything and, importantly, not the one you address about your particular problem. Olódùmarè is not petitioned directly and has no shrines or priesthood in the way the òrìṣà do. The òrìṣà are the ones you know by name.

An òrìṣà is not a symbol of an element. Each has a biography, a temperament, a set of praise poems called oríkì that a devotee can recite, foods and colours associated with them, a drum rhythm, a region where their worship is strongest, and a body of stories in which they behave well and badly. Ṣàngó, associated with thunder and justice, is also remembered in one tradition as a king of Ọ̀yọ́ — a ruler whose story ends in a way that is still argued over. Ọ̀ṣun is the river that runs through Ọ̀ṣogbo and the òrìṣà of that river, of fresh water, wealth, and children. Ògún is iron, and therefore the blacksmith, the hunter, the surgeon, and now the truck driver; his domain expanded with the technology, which is a good clue that this is a living system rather than a fossil.

Running through all of it is àṣẹ — the power that makes things happen, the force that gives a word or an act the ability to take effect. It is closer to "authority that works" than to "magic energy," and it is why the correct saying of a name carries weight.

How many òrìṣà are there? Yoruba tradition gives figures like 201 or 401 — ọ̀kànlénírinwó, four hundred and one — and the number functions less as a census than as a way of saying more than you will finish counting. Versions differ by town and by lineage. A deity central in one city may be barely known two hundred kilometres away, and both are correct.

Ifá is the divination system attached to all this, presided over by Ọ̀rúnmìlà, the òrìṣà of wisdom and destiny. A babaláwo — literally "father of secrets" — is trained for years to read a set of 256 configurations, each attached to a large body of memorised verse. UNESCO placed Ifá divination on its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2005. The same year, the Òṣun-Òṣogbo Sacred Grove, a forest of shrines and sculpture on the river's edge, was inscribed as a World Heritage Site. Its annual festival draws tens of thousands of people, including many who fly in from Brazil, Cuba, and the United States because the practice they inherited at home points back to this river.

This site describes what practitioners do and what it means to them; it does not print ceremony. Initiation, offering, and the handling of shrines belong to lineages and to the people trained in them, and that is not a technicality — it is the tradition's own rule about who may do what.

The same deity, four coastlines

When Yoruba people were taken across the Atlantic in the slave trade, the òrìṣà went with them, and survived in forms shaped by where they landed and by what the surrounding church would tolerate. What follows is not a chart of copies. Each of these is a full tradition with its own priesthood, its own liturgical language, and its own centuries of development.

One caution that costs nothing to observe: Haitian Vodou and West African Vodun are related to this world but are not the same religion. Vodun is Fon and Ewe, centred in Benin and Togo, with its own lwa and its own histories. Collapsing all of it into one word is the mistake the film industry has made for eighty years.

Why Èṣù is not the devil

Of all the names likely to reach a new audience through this film, Èṣù is the one most reliably distorted before it arrives.

Èṣù is the messenger between the human world and the divine, the keeper of the crossroads, the one who opens or closes the road, and the one addressed first so that everything else can proceed. He is unpredictable, he tests people, and Yoruba stories about him are frequently funny. He is not evil, and he is not the adversary of a good god, because the cosmology he belongs to is not organised into that war.

The confusion has a traceable source. Nineteenth-century Christian missionary translation into Yoruba — the landmark work associated with Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, himself Yoruba and himself formerly enslaved — rendered Satan as Èṣù. The choice put the name of a working òrìṣà into the mouth of every Yoruba Christian reading about the devil, and it stuck for generations. Yoruba scholars and practitioners have objected to it for decades, and some newer translations avoid it. It is worth naming plainly: a translation decision, not a belief anyone held about Èṣù, is why a trickster who opens roads is still introduced to English speakers as a demon.

What the novel actually borrowed

Adeyemi is Nigerian-American, and she has described encountering images of the òrìṣà in Brazil — in a country where the tradition survived the crossing — as part of what set the book going. What she then built is a fantasy: a kingdom called Orïsha, a magic-holding population called maji, a non-magic population called kosidán, and a monarchy that has tried to end magic by force. The word kosidán looks like Yoruba — kò sí carries the sense of there is none — and the deity names are lifted from the real pantheon and attached to clans and powers of the author's design.

That is a novelist's prerogative, and it is roughly what European fantasy has done with Norse and Greek material for two centuries without anyone demanding a bibliography. The asymmetry is only this: a reader who meets Thor in a comic has ten other places to meet him properly. A reader who meets Ọya in a trailer often has none.

As for the author's public break with the adaptation — she said she would not promote it and would not see it, and the posts were subsequently deleted. She has not laid out full reasons in public, and it would be dishonest to supply them for her. What can be said is narrow and true: the person closest to the source material has stepped away from the film that carries it.

What I actually do when a film borrows a tradition

I have watched a lot of these, and I have settled into five habits. They are not rules for anyone else, and none of them requires believing anything.

I read the spelling before the plot. Orïsha with a diaeresis is a stylised trade name; òrìṣà with a grave accent and an under-dot is Yoruba orthography, where the marks carry tone and change meaning. When a production restyles a name, that is usually a signal it intends invention. It is a fair signal, and I take it as one rather than as an insult.

I find the people before I look up the pantheon. The fastest way to stop treating a religion as a magic system is to learn where its cities are. Once I knew that Ọ̀ṣogbo is a real place with a real river and a festival I could look at photographs of, the deity names stopped being a list and became something more like a map of neighbourhoods.

I treat the diaspora as continuation, not copy. For a long time I half-assumed that Cuban and Brazilian practice were degraded versions of a pure African original. That framing is wrong and it insults about four centuries of work. Candomblé and Lucumí are not what survived; they are what people built, under conditions designed to prevent them building anything.

I check who is speaking. A studio synopsis, a novelist's interview, a scholar's monograph, and a practising babaláwo are four different sources with four different authorities, and the one thing they are never interchangeable on is what the practice means to the people inside it. When I want to know what an òrìṣà is, I go to scholarship and to practitioners. When I want to know what a film is doing, I ask the film.

I let the fiction be fiction. I am not interested in an accuracy scorecard for a fantasy novel, and I do not think Children of Blood and Bone owes its readers a course in Yoruba religion. What I do think is that the ninety seconds of a trailer are a doorway a lot of people will walk through, and that the room on the other side should not be empty.

Names and terms

• Òrìṣà (oh-REE-shah) — the divinities of Yoruba religion; each with a name, a story, a region, and living devotees.
• Olódùmarè (oh-LOH-doo-mah-reh) — the supreme being, source of all, not approached directly.
• Àṣẹ (AH-sheh) — the power that makes a word or act take effect; often written ashe or axé.
• Ifá — the Yoruba divination system, associated with Ọ̀rúnmìlà; on UNESCO's intangible heritage list since 2005.
• Babaláwo (bah-bah-LAH-woh) — "father of secrets"; a trained Ifá diviner.
• Oríkì (oh-REE-kee) — praise poetry naming a person, lineage, or òrìṣà.
• Èṣù (EH-shoo) — messenger and keeper of the crossroads; not the devil, despite a missionary-era translation.
• Ṣàngó (SHAN-goh) — thunder and justice; in one tradition, a king of Ọ̀yọ́.
• Ọ̀ṣun (OH-shoon) — the river at Ọ̀ṣogbo and the òrìṣà of fresh water, wealth, and children.
• Yemọja (yeh-MOH-jah) — associated with waters and motherhood; Yemayá in Cuba, Iemanjá in Brazil.
• Candomblé / Lucumí / Orisha (Trinidad) — established òrìṣà traditions of Brazil, Cuba, and Trinidad, each with its own priesthood.
• Vodun / Vodou — Fon and Ewe tradition of Benin and Togo, and its Haitian development; related to, but not the same as, òrìṣà worship.

There is a Yoruba proverb that fits this whole business better than anything I could write: Ilé ni à ń wò kí á tó sọmọ lórúkọ — we look at the household before we name the child. A name comes out of somewhere. It has people attached.

So, tonight's rule of thumb: when a film hands you a name, spend five minutes finding out which people it belongs to before you decide what it means.