This entry records that Yoruba religion possesses an extensive body of prayer, invocation and sacred verse, most centrally organized around the Ifa divination system and its enormous oral corpus, the Odu Ifa, without reproducing that material here. Ifa verses, memorized and interpreted by babalawo, specially trained diviner-priests who undergo years of formal apprenticeship to master the corpus and its associated divination techniques, function simultaneously as sacred narrative, ethical instruction and prayer, addressed to and invoking Orunmila, the orisha associated with wisdom and divination, alongside the wider pantheon of orishas central to Yoruba religious cosmology.
UNESCO recognized the Ifa divination system as part of humanity's intangible cultural heritage specifically because of the scale and sophistication of this oral corpus and the specialized, rigorous training required to properly transmit and use it, a recognition that underscores both the corpus's cultural significance and the seriousness with which the Yoruba tradition itself treats questions of who is qualified to transmit and interpret it. Given this structure of specialized, initiation-based transmission, this entry limits itself to describing the existence and general character of Ifa and wider Yoruba prayer practice rather than presenting specific verses that properly belong to trained babalawo and their communities.