Yorùbá Religion (Ifá)

Yoruba religion holds a single supreme being, Olodumare, also called Olorun, owner of the sky, who is the source of everything and the object of no cult. There are no temples to Olodumare and no priesthood serving him. The ordinary business of religion is conducted with the orisha, hundreds of divine powers who govern particular domains and act as the accessible face of the divine. Obatala shapes human bodies and stands for purity and restraint. Ogun holds iron, war and every trade that uses metal. Shango, a deified king of Oyo, holds thunder and rough justice. Oshun holds fresh water, wealth and love; Yemoja is associated with waters and motherhood; Eshu, or Elegba, stands at every crossroads and gateway and must be greeted first, since nothing reaches its destination without him.

Eshu is the figure worst served by translation. Missionaries rendered his name as Satan, and the identification has stuck in Nigerian Christian usage. In the tradition he is neither evil nor good: he is contingency itself, the one who carries offerings upward, tests people, and makes movement possible.

Underlying all of it is ashe, the power that makes things happen, present in words, blood, leaves, rivers, iron and people in varying concentrations. Ritual is largely the management of ashe: praise names spoken correctly, offerings made in the right order, taboos observed. Offering, ebo, is the standard instrument, ranging from kola nuts, palm oil and cooked food to the killing of a fowl or a goat that is then shared and eaten.

Ancestors, the egungun, are honoured alongside the orisha and appear masked at festivals, speaking for the lineage dead. Religion here is not a separate compartment of life. It is bound into family, town, kingship and craft, which is one reason practice outlived the formal abandonment of it.

Ifa is the divination system at the intellectual centre of Yoruba religion, and it is also a body of knowledge large enough to occupy a lifetime. It is associated with Orunmila, the orisha of wisdom, who is said to have witnessed the choosing of every person's destiny and therefore to know what each came into the world to do.

The mechanics are simple; the content is not. The diviner, a babalawo, manipulates sixteen sacred palm nuts or casts a divining chain, and records the result as one of 256 Odu, each a pair of columns of single and double marks. Each Odu indexes a large body of memorised verse, ese, telling of earlier clients who faced comparable situations, what they were told to offer, whether they complied and what followed. Several hundred ese per Odu is a commonly cited figure, and the corpus is not closed; it absorbs new material.

The diviner does not interpret freely. He recites until the client recognises their own case in one of the stories, and the prescription follows from the verse rather than from the diviner's opinion. This is why Ifa is often described as a jurisprudence as much as an oracle: precedent applied to a present situation.

Training is long, oral and demanding, and initiation into Ifa is distinct from initiation to an orisha. Women are initiated as iyanifa in some lineages, a practice widespread in parts of the diaspora and rejected in others where Ifa priesthood is held to be male. Practitioners genuinely disagree about this, and the disagreement is unresolved.

UNESCO proclaimed the Ifa divination system a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005, citing both its value and the difficulty of transmitting it as the generation of senior babalawo ages.

Every person is held to possess an ori, an inner head, which is at once the seat of individual identity and the destiny chosen before birth in the presence of Olodumare. Choosing well matters, and so does not knowing what one chose: divination exists to recover it, and offerings, good character and the help of the orisha exist to keep a person on its path. Ori is itself venerated and receives offerings from its owner, which makes each person in some measure the object of their own devotion. Iwa pele, gentle or good character, is the practical ethic, and the verses return constantly to the idea that a fine destiny can be ruined by bad character and a modest one improved by good.

It is a mistake, common in comparative treatments, to describe Yoruba religion mainly as the source of Santeria, Candomble and Vodou. It is a living West African religion with its own institutions. Orisha festivals structure the civic year in many Yoruba towns, and the Osun festival at Osogbo draws crowds from across Nigeria and from the Americas each August; the sacred grove there was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2005.

How many adherents there are cannot be answered cleanly, and any figure should be treated with suspicion. Most Yoruba people identify as Christian or Muslim, and Nigerian census practice has not recorded traditional religion in a usable way for decades. Identification and practice also diverge: consulting a babalawo, attending an orisha festival or observing lineage obligations is common among people who would name a church or a mosque if asked. Since the 1990s the revival known as Isese, roughly our native ways, has pressed for the tradition to be counted in its own right, and Isese Day on 20 August is now a public holiday in several southwestern Nigerian states.