Yoruba religious thought places a single remote supreme being, Olodumare, at the summit of the cosmos, generally understood as too vast and unknowable to be approached directly, and it is the orishas who mediate between that remote power and the concerns of daily human life, each holding responsibility for a specific domain: Shango for thunder, lightning and royal justice, Oshun for rivers, love and fertility, Ogun for iron, war and technology, Yemoja for the sea and motherhood, Eshu for crossroads, communication and the unpredictable, whose goodwill must be secured before any other orisha can be properly reached. Each orisha has particular colors, sacred days, favored offerings, praise songs and a body of oral literature attached to their worship, and devotees are typically initiated into the specific service of one or more orishas considered to have chosen them, often identified through divination at birth or at a crisis point in life.
The system is emphatically not a fixed, closed pantheon in the way a literary mythology might present one; new orishas have entered Yoruba religious practice historically through the deification of notable ancestors and culture heroes, and the register of which orishas are served varies somewhat between different Yoruba city-states and lineages, giving the tradition a flexibility that has helped it travel and adapt far beyond its West African homeland.