ABSTRACT
Intellectual Nerve and Spiritual Muscle: Homage to Alfredo López Austin and Jacob Olupona" pays tribute to two intellectual leaders in the study of Indigenous religions. This chapter takes the form of a genealogical approach by showing how each writer, the African and the Mexican, navigated their own work by drawing, in different ways, on the work/perspectives of two earlier European intellectual giants in the field of historical studies-Mircea Eliade and Fernand Braudel. In comparing López Austin with Olupona a single question guides the pathway; Did African religons like the Yoruba have a 'central conception' that guided ritual practitioners through years of continuity and change? Lopez Austin claimed that Mesoamerican religions were linked through a 'núcleo duro' or hard nucleus that withstood and adapted to historical change. Is this the most apt way to frame the dialectics between continuity and change in Olupona's work? Olupona is the hero of this genealogy because of his unique spiritual muscle and intellectual nerve in the quest for new understandings of Yoruba ritual and cosmology.
