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The organisation

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Amòye, standalone
API

Three addresses, one project

Ìpilẹ̀ṣẹ̀
ipilese.com · You are here
The platform: the corpus, the explorers, the dictionary, names and learning.
Ìpilẹ̀ṣẹ̀, the organisation
ipilese.org
The organisation: methodology, governance, rights, sourcing, funding and corrections.
Amòye
ipilese.online
Amòye on its own: the same guide the platform embeds, over the same API.

The corpus text is free to individuals, permanently. No paywall on the heritage material, no account required to read.

Home Browse Search Explore

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Eight places to start, each a real document with a real photograph, chosen to span what this corpus holds.

Start somewhere real

History

The Ifẹ̀ Classical Age

Ilé-Ifẹ̀ between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, its sculpture and the industries that produced it.

Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Inv. No. III C 27527) · Public Domain

Òrìṣà

Ṣàngó

The thunder òrìṣà and fourth Aláàfin of Ọ̀yọ́, and the contested question of king becoming god.

The Cleveland Museum of Art · CC0

Diaspora

Cuba: Regla de Ocha, Lucumí, and What Is Called Santería

How Yorùbá-derived religion took root in Cuba, from the cabildos de nación to the modern casa-templo.

Wikimedia Commons · Public Domain

Textiles and Dress

Adìrẹ in Depth

A technical and social study of resist-dyed cloth, its makers, and the chemistry of indigo.

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

Osun Osogbo Festival of Yoruba Water Deity 08.jpg

Festivals

Ọ̀ṣun-Òṣogbo

An exhaustive account of the annual Ọ̀ṣun-Òṣogbo festival, its origin traditions and ritual stages.

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

Women

Market Women and Economic Power

How market authority was structured and how trade wealth did, and did not, convert into political power.

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

Oral Literature

Ìwì and Ẹ̀sà Egúngún: The Masquerade's Poetry

The chanted poetry of the Egúngún masquerade and the altered voice that marks it as ancestral speech.

The Cleveland Museum of Art · CC0

Food and Agriculture

Principal Dishes

The dishes eaten day to day: the swallows, soups, legume preparations and their regional identities.

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

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If you only have an hour

If you want a single hour

Start Here, one of the four fifteen-minute explainers, and the FAQ: an accurate foundation, honest about its own limits.

1 stages · 7 documents

Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

The curious newcomer

For someone with no prior connection to Yorùbá culture who wants a genuine understanding rather than a survey-course impression.

4 stages · 17 documents

The full catalogue

749 documents across 39 sections. Filter by section, reader level, confidence or tag.

Collections

CollectionsThe corpus's structured record sets: proverbs, tales, wisdom entries, children's games, and the unreviewed oríkì harvest.

Interactive tools and lookups

ExploreFive interactive ways into the corpus: the Odù structure, the map of towns and diaspora, the dated chronology, the local concept graph, and the visual gallery.
The 256 OdùEvery Odù is a signature of eight marks across two columns. Browse the full set of 256, open any one for what the corpus holds about it (its ẹsẹ Ifá verses, themes and narratives), toggle the marks yourself to feel how 256 follows from the structure, rotate the 256 as points of the binary space their signatures define, or see where the historical ranking orders disagree.
Towns, Kingdoms and DiasporaEvery town and diaspora place the corpus names, plotted where a coordinate is verified.
ChronologyThe corpus's dated chronology, from deep background to the present, each event graded by how well it is sourced.
Concept GraphThe corpus as a graph of documents and the links between them, centred on whichever one you open.

University of California Libraries (digitized on Internet Archive) · Public Domain Mark 1.0

The diaspora Yorùbá reconnecting

For someone Yorùbá by descent, raised elsewhere or raised without the tradition, who wants their own inheritance back on accurate terms.

4 stages · 16 documents

Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

GalleryIllustrations and archive images from across the corpus, filterable by source or subject.

Àmì: tone and diacritic toolsLook up the correct tone for a word, search by tone pattern, or restore diacritics to untoned text.

LearnExercises drawn from the corpus itself: tone, diacritics, proverbs, the glossary, Odù notation, towns and rulers, and the timeline. Progress is tracked in this browser only, in the tradition's own terms (depth and return), never a score or a rank.

AmòyeAsk Amòye anything about Yorùbá culture, history, language or thought. Every answer shows where it comes from: what's been read, what live search found, or Amòye's own analysis, always labelled.

What the corpus establishesEvery principle here was drawn from a document and carries the line it rests on, quoted word for word. Open one to see the reasoning and the source.

DictionaryLook up any Yorùbá word: part of speech, pronunciation, senses and examples from the bundled Wiktionary.

Corpus GlossaryThe corpus's own concepts explained in place: cosmology, Ifá, òrìṣà, social and historical terms.

Òwe: ProverbsYorùbá proverbs drawn from the corpus, each with the literal gloss and the idiomatic English the corpus itself gives it. Nothing here is paraphrased.

NamesYorùbá personal names, with their morphological breakdown, meaning, and the naming-system category each belongs to. Search is diacritic-insensitive.

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1 documents

Diaspora Deep·28 min

Gender, Priesthood, and the Matriarchy Debate in the Yorùbá Atlantic

A comprehensive scholarly analysis of gender construction, sacred authority, spirit mediumship, and the contested matriarchy thesis across West African Yorùbá communities and their Brazilian and Cuban diasporas.

advancedhighgendermatriarchy

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Filter by title or summary

Section

Level

Confidence

Tag

1 documents

Diaspora Deep·28 min

Gender, Priesthood, and the Matriarchy Debate in the Yorùbá Atlantic

advancedhighgendermatriarchy