Let’s start with Eshu-Elegbara, the orisha of the crossroads. Called Eleggua in Cuba, Papa Legba in Haiti, Exú in Brazil, and related to the signifyin(g) monkey tales in the United States, this trickster is the keeper of the gate between cosmic and human consciousness. He is the process of human sense-perception and cognition, as well as the logic that undergirds and makes understanding possible. Eshu interprets one’s destiny from Ifá to the babalawo during divination. In one legend, this trickster’s sexual appetite cursed him with a perpetually erect penis, a symbol of his eager intercourse between worlds and the penetration of realms that marks the crossroads as an erotic zone.

Despite this imagery, Eshu contains feminine paths. Ogundipe states that Eshu “is at once both male and female. Although his masculinity is depicted as visually and graphically overwhelming, his equally expressive femininity renders his enormous sexuality ambiguous, contrary, and genderless.” Eshu’s indeterminacy sits at the heart of Yoruba hermeneutics, an approach to truth that leaves meaning open-ended and unresolved. Eshu’s presence at the gates of consciousness is essentially queer. Birth order names further reveal how Yoruba logic exceeds simple binaries. While twins (Ibeji) are considered sacred, the Idowu (child born after twins) and the Alaba/Idogbe (second male or female child born after twins) continue the dynamic unfolding of ashe. And while orishas like Olokun and Inle are explicitly androgynous, homosexuality and gender-bending marble through the expressions of many prominent orishas, including Yemayá, the orisha of maternity and the sea, and Changó, the orisha of male virility. Cabrera noted in her fieldwork that the deeds of the orishas indicated homoerotic intimacy was “not such a terrible mark of shame.”

Cosmological Queerness Across the Yoruba Diaspora, James Padilioni jr.

Cosmological Queerness Across the Yoruba Diaspora: by James Padilioni Jr

https://www.aaihs.org/author/apontesghost/

This is thoughtful and erudite and does a lot to explain the disagreements about gender identity thanks to, to quote the author:

“This brief sketch of Yoruba cosmology points to its potential to expand the scope of intimacy within Black communities. Black cosmologies that embrace indeterminacy and multiplicity subvert the Manichean colonial imposition of linear and binary logic so necessary to the arithmetic of racial capitalism and its oppositional calculations of white/black, gay/straight, man/woman, mind/body, debit/credit, and profit/loss.”  

yeup, mythic ville.

We must create a new mythology, or rediscover in old ones new principles for living that hasten liberation.

It is in this spirit that I hold up the Yoruba cosmology, briefly detailing its sexual and gender complexities and their ethical considerations. As a well-documented cultural system with wide dispersion and influence across the Diaspora—including Brazil, Cuba, the Caribbean, and the United States—Yoruba cosmology presents alternative schemas for imagining and enacting Black life in the African Americas. The Yoruba worldview is one of ontological wholeness, this fullness culminating in the supreme being Olodumare. Genderless, or possessing all possible gender expressions simultaneously, Olodumare’s plenitude is permeated by ashe, the divine energy and power that brings things into existence, the potential from which emerges the infinity of forms that populate Olodumare’s realms. Ashe sustains these forms in substantial unity through their infinite permutations and iterations. Because Olodumare exceeds the scope of human comprehension, aspects of Olodumare’s ashe condense within orishas.

Though sometimes likened to gods, orishas are properly understood as avatars, or personifications of ashe that relate to natural forces. It is important to understand that orishas are not the “reservoir” of ashe, nor its source or generator. Undifferentiated ashe is always already present throughout the cosmos and seeks expression within forms of matter and natural phenomena that then double as personifications within an orisha. As social beings, the orishas form a special way to relate the workings of ashe to the human condition.

— Cosmological Queerness Across the Yoruba Diaspora, By James Padilioni Jr.