The Orisha of the Yoruba Tradition: Fourteen Figures in Narrative Order

Olodumare gives the tradition its frame: he acts once, at the founding of the world, and then withdraws from narrative while the orisha carry the stories. The atlas records him as beyond gender and still venerated, and its main source is Idowu, Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief.

Obatala is the orisha Olodumare sent to shape the new earth and give people their bodies. A told variation blames palm wine for the differences in human bodies, and lineages disagree on whether Obatala or Oduduwa completed the creation, a question the tradition leaves open.

Olokun belongs to the ocean and to a presence kept hidden from ordinary sight. The recorded tale has him boasting of his weaving and challenging Olodumare, who answers through Orunmila, and accounts differ on whether Olokun is female, male or both.

Orunmila was present when each unborn person chose a destiny before Olodumare, which is why the Ifa tradition calls on him to recall what people forget. The atlas notes that he is consulted at life passages through the Ifa divination system, and that the odu were entrusted to his children.

Eshu is Olodumare's messenger and Orunmila's companion in the Ifa narrative cycle, carrying words and offerings between heaven and earth. Idowu is cited for reading him as a morally neutral mediator who tests gods and humans, not as an embodiment of evil.

Ogun is the orisha who forged the first iron tools and cut the path through primeval forest for the others. The atlas marks him as a composite figure, since a later local story makes him a king of Ire whose reign ended in catastrophe, and he is still venerated in several religions.

Osanyin lives apart in the forest with one leg, one arm and one eye, holding a knowledge of leaves that only he has complete. The atlas records his iron staff topped with small birds and the Yoruba belief that a plant's medicinal power is his gift.

Shango carries two connected stories, a king's reign that ended in his death and the claim that he ascended as the orisha of thunder. The atlas marks his historicity as debated, and records meteorites and stone axe heads kept as his thunderstones.

Oya stands at the boundary between the living and the dead, as mother of the ancestral masquerade tradition and as a shapeshifter. She is one of the principal female deities of the Yoruba pantheon, and the atlas records her authority as fierce and independent.

Oshun is told in two pictures the tradition does not reconcile: the wronged party excluded from an undertaking that fails without her, and the clever one whose advice to a rival costs the rival dearly. Both are carried forward, and Ifa verses are the main textual source for her.

Yemoja has more than one account of her kinship, wife of Obatala in some tellings and of Aganju in others, and mother of many orisha. The atlas records blue and white as her colors and notes that diaspora lineages differ on how her ocean identity relates to the earlier river figure.

Aganju is a name for raw power, the wilderness, the fire under the earth and the river a traveller cannot cross without help. Tellings call him father or brother of Shango, and Oyo tradition also counts him among its deified kings, so his cult is tied most closely to that kingdom.