Nanã
The oldest of the orishas: lady of the primordial mud, of still waters and the swamp. Owner of the matter from which humankind was molded and the destiny it returns to. Life and death in one hand. Greeting: "Saluba Nanã!".
Who she is
Nanã (Nànã, also Nanã Buruku or Nanã Buruquê) is the oldest and most venerable of the orishas — the elder, the grandmother of the pantheon, older even than the arrival of Ogun and of iron into the world. She is the lady of the primordial mud, of the clay at the bottom of swamps, of the still waters that run deep and do not flow. Her wisdom is that of long time, of the patience of the earth that receives all and decomposes all.
Of Jeje/Fon origin, her cult comes from the region of Dassá-Zumê and Savê, in ancient Dahomey (present-day Republic of Benin), and is among the oldest in all of West Africa — among the Fon, Mahi and Ewe peoples she is worshipped as a vodun, and in Ketu Candomblé as an orisha. It is said that Nanã was already present when the Earth was made fertile: she is “the oldest orisha in the world.” Her very name, in a Yoruba reading, evokes the idea of root — that which lies within the earth, sustaining all that springs from it.
The borrowed clay: the debt of life
Nanã’s most famous itan (myth) explains why human beings die.
When Oxalá (Obatalá) received from Olodumare the task of molding the beings who would populate the Earth, he tried to shape man out of air, fire, stone and wood — and in none of these did life take hold. It was then that he turned to Nanã. From the bottom of the swamp where she dwelt, the elder drew a portion of moist clay and handed it to Oxalá. With that mud the human body was at last molded, and Olorun breathed life into it.
But Nanã set a condition: that clay was on loan. When men died, their bodies would have to be returned to her. This is why human beings do not live forever — the clay they are made of must one day go back to the one who lent it. At death, the body returns to the earth: it returns to Nanã. She is, at once, the giver of the matter of life and its creditor, guardian of the gateway between the living and the dead. She gives the beginning and gathers the end.
In some houses, the one who asks for the clay is described generically as Olodumare; the core — clay borrowed and returned at death — is the same in all of them.
Life and death in one hand
What makes Nanã one of the most profound figures of the pantheon is that she does not separate birth from death. Where other traditions place two opposing gods — one of life, one of death — Nanã is both. The mud that generates the body is the same that reabsorbs it. The swamp that seems stagnant and dead is, in truth, the most fertile womb: it is from still water and decomposing matter that new life springs.
She carries the ibiri, a staff made of palm ribs, raffia, gourd, beads and cowries, with which she governs this passage between worlds and leads the eguns (the spirits of the dead). The ibiri is the image of ancestrality itself: the ancestor who supports and gives ground to the descendants, like a stooped body sheltering another. Nanã uses no metal — she predates the age of iron, and iron, the tool that cuts and wounds, is forbidden to her. Her force does not cut: it dissolves and transforms.
The conflict with Ogun and the iron taboo
Why does Nanã admit no iron in her cult? The answer lies in one of the most-told itans about her.
At an assembly of the orishas, Ogun, lord of all metals, was acclaimed as the most indispensable of all: it was thanks to his iron tools that one could hunt, plant and live. Nanã contested that supremacy. Ogun, irritated, challenged her: “I’d like to see how you’ll eat, without a knife to kill the animals.” The elder replied that she would never use anything made by Ogun — and that, even so, she would do all she needed. To prove it, she sacrificed the animals without metal: with a wooden knife, or, in another version, wringing the animals’ necks with her own hands.
Ever since, in Nanã’s cult, no metal: offerings and sacrifices are made with tools of wood or bamboo, or by covering the blade with cloth. Some houses tell the origin of the conflict differently — Ogun trying to seize Nanã’s muddy territories, provoking her — but the ritual outcome is always the same: the lady of the mud receives no iron. There are also those who read the taboo as a sign of her antiquity: Nanã is older than the Iron Age, and therefore does not know it.
The elder and her lineage
Nanã is the mother of Omolu/Obaluaê — the orisha of earth, disease and healing — and, in many traditions, also of Oxumarê (the rainbow, the cycle) and of Ewá (possibility, foresight). Her relationship with her children is described as ambivalent and contradictory: now she exalts, protects and saves them, now she hides, represses and casts them off.
The most painful case is that of Omolu. The itan tells that he was born with his body covered in sores and wounds. Nanã, unable to bear having borne such a son, abandoned him at the seashore for the tide to carry away — and on the beach the crabs wounded him still. It was Yemanjá who took him in, tended his sores with banana leaves, fed him and raised him as her own, until he became the lord of healing. From this lineage, then, are born the orishas who govern time, destiny and the border between health and death. Nanã is the root from which springs the understanding that all that lives is in passage.
The lists of children vary among the houses: besides Omolu, Oxumarê and Ewá — the most agreed upon —, some traditions also include Ossaim. The very fatherhood (with Oxalá) is told in different ways depending on the nation.
Like Saint Anne — the grandmother, mother of Mary — with whom she was syncretized in Brazil and celebrated on July 26, Nanã is the ancestor who carries the memory of everything. She is sought for wisdom, for serenity before death, and for the healing of afflictions that come from haste and imbalance. Her children of saint are said to inherit her temperament: patient, mature, wise and just, but given to attachment to the past and to a sincerity that spares no one.
Domains
- Mud and clay — the primordial matter of which life is made.
- Still waters — swamps, marshes, deep lakes; the fertility of what seems motionless.
- Ancestrality — the ancient memory, the patience of long time, the leading of the eguns.
- Life and death — the complete cycle, given and gathered by the same hand.
The game’s perspective
Nanã is, for the Wiki, the principle of the cycle clay→life→clay — the wisdom that death and birth are the same movement seen from two sides. This resonates deeply with the game’s Mesopotamian axis: the descent into the underworld of Ereshkigal, humankind molded from clay by the Sumerian gods (a direct echo of Nanã’s borrowed-clay myth), and Aurora’s alliance with the lady of death as a path of renewal, not of ending. The clay Nanã lends and reclaims is the same from which, in Sumer, the gods mold humankind — and to the Kur, the land of no return, this clay one day goes back. Where there is clay that becomes a person and a person that becomes clay, there is Nanã.