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In standard practice, the client silently holds a question in mind without stating it aloud. This protocol ensures that the diviner's prior personal knowledge of the client cannot influence the lookup process.
The client does not tell the babaláwo what they came about.
Every Ifá consultation formally acknowledges Èṣù at the opening because no offering is completed without his delivery. Contrary to nineteenth-century missionary identifications, Èṣù is not an evil figure or devil in Yorùbá cosmology.
Nothing offered reaches its destination unless Èṣù carries it, and the opening of a consultation acknowledges him.
The supreme being, Ọlọ́dùmarè, is considered remote from day-to-day affairs and possesses no temples, priesthood, or sacrifice. The òrìṣà serve as the immediate spiritual powers associated with specific domains, towns, and lineages.
When a Yorùbá person had a religious dealing with the world, in the ordinary case it was with an òrìṣà.
The framing of òrìṣà as demonic entities originated from specific nineteenth-century missionary translations and theological frameworks. In indigenous Yorùbá thought, deities possess complex and varied moral attributes rather than malicious demonic roles.
First, an òrìṣà is not a demon and the pantheon contains no evil gods; the demon framing came from a specific nineteenth-century translation and theology, documented in the foundations section.
Yorùbá devotees are typically born into a relationship with the particular deity served by their family. While divination can identify an additional or alternative òrìṣà during life milestones, lineage inheritance remains the standard basis.
An òrìṣà relationship most commonly comes through the lineage.
Historical linguistics groups Yorùbá in the Volta-Niger branch alongside ancestral relatives like Ìgálà and Itsẹkiri. Archaeological and linguistic evidence indicates that Yorùbá culture developed in its home region rather than migrating from the Middle East or Egypt.
Historical linguistics places Yorùbá within the Volta-Niger branch of Niger-Congo, and reconstructs Proto-Yorùbáoid, the common ancestor of Yorùbá, Ìgálà and Itsẹkiri, as spoken near the confluence of the Niger and Benue rivers [S2].
The Aláàfin of Ọ̀yọ́ governed under formal constitutional constraints enforced by councils such as the Ọ̀yọ́ Mesì and Ògbóni. If the Ọ̀yọ́ Mesì formally rejected the monarch, the king was constitutionally mandated to commit suicide.
The Aláàfin was not an absolute ruler.
While an initial destiny is chosen or received before birth, it establishes starting parameters rather than a fixed conclusion. A person's character, practical effort, divination, and sacrifice actively interact to realize or repair their allotted destiny.
The tradition's position is that destiny sets the terms and does not settle the outcome, which is a genuinely different position from both hard determinism and its opposite, and one that a great many philosophical traditions have arrived at by other routes.
Ethical behavior centres on the cultivation of ìwà, or character, which outranks ritual sacrifice and material wealth. Rather than an individual pursuit of private perfection, good character is constitutively relational and directed toward social harmony.
Moral worth is evaluated by the quality of a person's character as it shows in conduct toward others, toward the community and toward the environment [S3].
National survey figures reflect socially acceptable identity categories rather than practical day-to-day behaviour. A substantial number of individuals identifying formally as Christian or Muslim continue to utilize traditional diviners and healers.
Survey figures showing traditional religion at well under one percent of Nigerians measure self-identification on a question where Christian and Muslim are the socially available answers, not practice [S2].
Documented instances of human sacrifice were institutionally specific, occurring in connection with royal funerals and communal crises. The individuals selected for these rites were predominantly captives and enslaved persons produced during regional wars.
Domestic slavery within Yorubaland also expanded during the same period, and Ojo's work on human sacrifice is inseparable from that fact, since the people sacrificed were largely enslaved [S4].
The letters ẹ, ọ, and ṣ represent separate phonemic sounds distinct from e, o, and s. Removing or omitting subdots conflates entirely different words and destroys orthographic information.
Dropping a subdot merges words that are distinct.
The language relies on High, Mid, and Low level tones to define words alongside consonants and vowels. Pitch variation on an identical sequence of letters will produce entirely unrelated lexical terms.
Yorùbá has three phonemic tones: High, Mid and Low [S1][S2].