Foundations: Section Index

This section is the orientation a reader needs before the rest of the corpus will land properly. It establishes who the Yorùbá are, how this corpus decides what counts as known, why the picture of Yorùbá religion as devil worship exists and where it came from, what the tradition is and is not, how Yorùbá people actually live with Christianity and Islam, and what the core concepts are.

Read file 01 first. Readers examining historical claims that Yorùbá religion is demonic should read 03 second, which documents the development and history of those accounts before the substantive files that follow 1.

The files

01. Start Here. What this corpus is and what it refuses to do; who the Yorùbá are, with population figures and their limits, the homeland and its constituent peoples, and the diaspora; the six commitments governing every file; and reading routes for four kinds of reader.

02. How This Corpus Handles Evidence. The three registers that are never blended, what the tradition says of itself, what historians and archaeologists document, and what colonial and missionary sources claimed, with the failure mode each blending produces. What the confidence markers mean, why initiate-held knowledge is marked as a gap rather than filled in, and the three-layer translation rule and why it exists.

03. The Demonization. The longest and most carefully sourced file in the section. The missionary encounter and the theology it brought; the vocabulary that translation created, fetish, idol, juju, witchcraft, and the Èṣù to Satan equation with its documented origin and consequences; what colonial administration actually wanted, which is narrower than the anti-colonial version and wider than the apologetic one; twentieth-century Nigerian Christianity and the Pentecostal theology of spiritual warfare; Nollywood and the feedback loop between film and belief; the effects on how Yorùbá people see their inheritance; and, in contrast and with equal rigour, what the tradition actually holds.

04. What Yorùbá Tradition Is Not. Twelve misconceptions answered with evidence, correcting distortion in both directions: devil worship, òrìṣà as demons, animism and primitivism, absence of ethics, absence of a supreme being, uniformity, human sacrifice, stasis, illiteracy and unintellectuality, identity with Vodou, uniformity across the diaspora, and the Afrocentric overclaims about Egyptian origins, the invention of computing, and inflated antiquity.

05. Being Yorùbá and Christian or Muslim. The unusual copresence of three religious traditions and why it arose; the three different things people mean by traditional religion; what people actually do, including mixed households and festival participation; the genuine tensions, including funerals, chieftaincy, Ògbóni and the asymmetry of the demonic accusation; and the full range of positions Yorùbá people hold, described without advocacy.

06. A Conceptual Map. Twenty core concepts, each with a literal gloss where documented, a two-sentence definition and a pointer to its full treatment: orí, àyànmọ́, ìwà, ọmọlúàbí, àṣẹ, ọ̀run, ayé, Ọlọ́dùmarè, òrìṣà, Èṣù, Ifá, Odù, ẹsẹ, babaláwo, ẹbọ, oríkì, ìtàn, òwe, egúngún, ilé and ọba, with a closing sketch of how they fit together.

Reading paths

If you are new to all of this: 01, then 06, then the fifteen-minute explainers in the onboarding section.

If examining accounts of demonization: 01, then 03, then 04, then 05.

If you want to know how much to trust what you read here: 02, on its own, in fifteen minutes.

If you are going to write or argue about this material: 02 and 04 before you say anything in public. Between them they will stop most of the errors that circulate in both directions.

What this section does not cover

Everything substantive. History belongs to the history section, the conceptual system to cosmology, divination to Ifá, the deities to the òrìṣà section, and so on. This section establishes the frame and hands off. The onboarding section holds the plain-language explainers, the glossary, the pronunciation guide, the learning paths and the FAQ.