Access to the orishas' will runs chiefly through Ifa, the Yoruba divination system administered by trained babalawo priests who cast palm nuts or a divining chain to generate one of two hundred and fifty-six possible Odu, each associated with a body of memorized verses, ese, offering guidance, precedent and prescribed ritual response to whatever question or crisis has brought a client to consult it; Orunmila, one of the orishas himself, is understood as the deity of wisdom and divination who oversees the entire Ifa system.
The transatlantic slave trade carried orisha worship out of West Africa and into the Americas, where enslaved Yoruba speakers, forced to disguise their religious practice, syncretized specific orishas with specific Catholic saints of superficially similar iconography or feast day, Shango with Saint Barbara, Yemoja with the Virgin of Regla among others, giving rise to related but institutionally distinct traditions including Santeria in Cuba, Candomble in Brazil, and related orisha-worshipping communities across the Caribbean and the United States. These diaspora traditions maintain direct ritual and genealogical lines back to specific West African lineages of practice even as they developed their own distinct liturgical languages, initiatory structures and syncretic imagery, so that orisha worship today is a living, actively practiced religion on both sides of the Atlantic rather than a historical subject studied only in its country of origin.