Obatala is the senior orisha of the Yoruba tradition, the king of the white cloth, to whom the supreme being Olodumare gave the work of creation, the shaping of the solid earth and the moulding of the bodies of human beings from clay, before life was breathed into them. He is thus a creator and a craftsman of humanity, and he is associated with whiteness, purity, coolness, wisdom, patience, and the calm authority of an elder; his devotees wear white, and he is offered white things, and he is understood as the most senior and dignified of the orisha, a figure of moral purity and serene judgement. As the moulder of human bodies he is the patron of humanity in a very direct sense: each person's physical form is his handiwork.
The Yoruba oral corpus of Ifa divination, the odu, preserves much of what is known of Obatala's mythology and was transmitted for centuries by trained diviners before being extensively recorded in writing by scholars such as William Bascom and Wande Abimbola from the twentieth century onward; his principal shrine lies in a sacred grove at Ile-Ife, the city Yoruba tradition holds as the origin-place of the world and of humanity, fitting for the orisha credited with shaping the first human forms. Carried across the Atlantic through the transatlantic slave trade, Obatala's devotion continues today within Cuban Regla de Ocha (Santeria) and Brazilian Candomble, where he is honoured under his own name and is widely associated, through the syncretism those traditions developed under colonial-era Catholicism, with Our Lady of Mercy or, in some Candomble houses, with Jesus Christ, an identification his devotees understand within their own living practice rather than as a substitution of one faith for another.