Socio-Religious Analysis of the Drum of Ọbàtálá Festival

This work identifies Ọbàtálá festival as one of the several festivals among the various Yoruba religious groups in the southwestern Nigeria, particularly among the Yorubas. It has an iconic drum as a major instrument during the festival which is called Igbìn. Research methods used in this study are therefore descriptive, varying from interviews, observation, and also, personal experience. It discovers that it is the reason why festival serves to be a social context in which Yoruba religions are displayed. It reveals that Festival celebration is identified with symbolic actions that portray worship tenet of the adherents in a religious group are carried out through ritual, iconography and gesture that symbolically actualize their collective sociocultural experiences. It is therefore important to document that Igbìn drum exhibits the acts of spiritual manifestation in ritual passages. It activates the spirits of deities in festivals and thus motivates connection between them and the participants.

Keywords: Socio-Religious; Socio-Cultural; Mythology; Culture; Divinity,