Òrìṣà

The competing scholarly definitions of òrìṣà, why "god" and "idol" are bad translations, what the numbers 201 and 401 are doing, and how òrìṣà relate to Olódùmarè and to the dead.

There is no Yoruba church. Òrìṣà devotion is organised town by town and lineage by lineage, with local priesthoods, local shrines, and local festivals, and this page explains how those structures work.

The white orisa who moulds human bodies, the contested creation narrative in which Oduduwa takes his place, the palm wine story and what Ife devotees actually say about it, and the politics carried inside the itan.

The thunder orisa and fourth Alaafin of Oyo, the contested question of whether a king became a god or a god absorbed a king, the Oba ko so narrative, and Sango in Cuba and Brazil.

The orisa of wind, storm and the Niger river, wife of Sango, the buffalo narrative, her relation to the dead, and the difference between the Yoruba Oya and the Oya of Cuba and Brazil.

The orisa of iron, war, hunting and the road, the massacre at Ire and its variants, Soyinka's reading of Ogun as the Yoruba tragic principle, and the occupational cult that now includes drivers and mechanics.

Esu as orisa in his own right: the messenger who carries sacrifice, the keeper of the crossroads, the activator of ase, the one who tests. The Satan conflation is handled in 04-cosmology; this page is about what Esu actually is.

The figure Yoruba dynasties descend from, held simultaneously as a creation divinity, a migrating conqueror, and an ancestor, sometimes as female, and now as the name of a political identity.

Orunmila as orisa rather than as a divination system: who he is, why he alone witnessed the choosing of destinies, his relationship to Esu and to Olodumare, and his cult. The Ifa corpus itself is covered in 05-ifa.

The orisa of leaves and of the knowledge of what plants do, the one-limbed body, the iron staff of birds, and the relationship between Osanyin and the practising herbalist.

The orisa of smallpox and of the earth's diseases, the naming taboo, the priesthood's control of epidemic, and the 1907 British colonial ban on the cult which is one of the most consequential state interventions in Yoruba religion.

The river orisa of Osogbo, the seventeenth of the orisa sent to earth and the one whose exclusion made the work fail, the founding covenant of a town, and the largest surviving Yoruba festival.

The mother of the fish children, an Ogun river orisa in Yorubaland who became the sea in Brazil and Cuba, why that displacement happened, and what it shows about how the tradition actually works.

Seven orisa treated together: the farming orisa, the hunter who became a river, Sango's other wife and the ear narrative, the orisa of wealth, the sea, the hunter of Ketu, and the one whose diaspora identity diverged furthest from his Yoruba one.

Yoruba twins, the highest twinning rate in the world, the ere ibeji figure carved when a twin dies, and the reversal from infanticide to veneration.

What Egúngún actually is, why it is a lineage institution rather than an orisa cult, how the costume and the taboo on touching it work, and how the tradition has been misrepresented.

The Efe and Gelede masked spectacle of the western Yoruba, what it says about women's spiritual power, why it is one of the most conceptually sophisticated things in the tradition, and its UNESCO inscription.

The restricted societies that sit alongside orisa worship: Oro and its night curfew, the Ijebu Agemo, the Ogboni earth society and its judicial role, described soberly and with the limits of public knowledge stated.

The Yoruba four-day week and the orisa days, the annual festival cycle, and detailed treatment of Osun-Osogbo, Sango, Olojo, Itapa, Igogo, Agemo and Ojude Oba including their present condition under tourism.

Yoruba burial and funerary practice, the good death and the bad death, the ancestor as continuing presence, atunwa and rebirth, and how all of this actually works in Christian and Muslim Yoruba families today.

How many practitioners there actually are and why nobody knows, the real relationship with Christianity and Islam including genuine syncretism, Susanne Wenger and the Osogbo grove, the Ooni and traditional authority, and the return-to-tradition movement.