Waaqeffanna is unusual among the traditional religions of the region in how firmly it holds to one god. Waaqa is the sky and is the whole of the divine, not the head of a pantheon; there is no second god, no image, and no myth of a divine family. Prayer is direct, made standing with the palms up, often at first light, and Waaqa is addressed as the one who sees. Because there is no image and no temple, the religion has left comparatively little for archaeology to find, and most of what is known about its older forms comes from the language and from the institutions that carried it.
The concept that keeps the one god from being remote is ayyaana. An ayyaana is the divine quality by which Waaqa is present in something particular, and Oromo speech attaches ayyaana to rivers, to mountains, to a place, to a gadaa generation and to a person. Lambert Bartels, working among the western Oromo, described it as the way the one god is refracted rather than divided. To describe the ayyaana as spirits, and then to describe Waaqeffanna as polytheistic, is to mistake the grammar of the religion for a pantheon.
Safuu is the other half. It is the moral order understood as distance, the principle that things which are different ought to be kept in their proper relation to one another and not collapsed together. A person keeps safuu with their parents, with the land, with the dead, and with Waaqa. Wrongdoing in this system is less a matter of breaking a rule than of failing to hold a distinction that should have been held, and the language of pollution and of setting things right again follows from that. It gives the tradition an ethics that does not depend on a list of commandments and does not need a judgement after death to make sense of itself.