Orisha

Olodumare is the source and is not the addressee. The supreme being of the Yoruba arrangement is acknowledged in proverb and in the structure of thought, and receives no temples, no priesthood and no sacrifice. What is served instead are the orisha, who stand between people and a creator that withdrew, and this remoteness is the hinge on which the whole system turns.

The delegation is explicit in the tradition's own account. Creation is handed down: Obatala is given the work of shaping the land and the human body, and the ordering of the world proceeds through appointed agents rather than by direct action from the top. Authority is distributed by assignment, not seized.

The roster is open at both ends. Orisha attach to towns, to rivers, to lineages, and the count given in the tradition, four hundred and one, is a number that means an enumerated set plus one more, which is to say it is not closed. It is open at the human end as well: Shango was an Alaafin of Oyo before he was an orisha, and the elevation of remembered ancestors is a continuing feature rather than a mythological event that finished.

Ile-Ife holds the position of origin, the place where the world is said to have been made and the point from which the tradition is reckoned.

This is a living religion with living custodians. Its priesthood is entered by an initiation that is closed, and the atlas records that the office exists without reproducing what is transmitted inside it.

The primary corpus of Yoruba religion is not a book. It is the Ifa literary corpus, an immense body of verse organised under two hundred and fifty six figures, held in the memory of initiated diviners and recited in the course of consultation. It contains narrative, precedent, prescription and history, and it is transmitted person to person under obligations of training and secrecy.

That has two consequences for anyone reading about the tradition. The first is that the corpus is genuinely vast and genuinely variable: what a diviner in one town holds under a given figure is not identical to what a diviner elsewhere holds under it, and there is no authority that harmonises them. The second is that the parts of it which have been printed were printed by particular people, for particular purposes, and their appearance in a book is not evidence that they were ever meant to be public.

Outside the corpus, the written record begins with missionaries, colonial administrators and, from the late nineteenth century, Yoruba scholars writing about their own tradition. That last group changed the field, and the modern academic study of Yoruba religion is substantially continuous with it.

The tradition also travelled. Orisha religion crossed the Atlantic under slavery and continues in Cuba, Brazil, Trinidad and the United States, in forms with their own histories and their own custodians. Material from those branches is not automatically evidence for West African practice, and the atlas keeps the branches distinct.