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.
Òrìṣà tradition in Yorùbáland today is simultaneously much smaller than it was, much more visible than it was fifty years ago, and much harder to count than any statistic suggests. The number of people who would tick "traditional religion" on a form is small. The number of people who attend a festival, keep a family observance, consult a diviner when things go wrong, name their children theophorically, or bury their dead with rites that are not in any church's liturgy is very much larger. Any account that reports only the first number has missed the subject.
This page covers the numbers and why they fail, the actual working relationship with Christianity and Islam, the Ọ̀ṣun-Òṣogbo grove and the Austrian artist who saved it, the position of the Ọọ̀ni, and the return-to-tradition movement, and it treats both the tension and the coexistence honestly.
There is no census figure. Nigeria has not published a national census breaking the population down by religion since 1963. A 1973 attempt was not published amid allegations of falsification, and successive governments have avoided the question because religion and ethnicity are politically explosive in Nigeria . This is the foundational fact and everything downstream of it is estimation.
The historical trend is documented. Andrew McKinnon's study, drawing on eleven nationally representative surveys, records that adherents of traditional religion fell from 50 per cent in 1931, to 34 per cent in 1952, to 18.2 per cent in the 1963 census, the first of independent Nigeria . That is a collapse over three decades, and it is real. The twentieth century saw the great majority of Yorùbá people become Christian or Muslim.
Current estimates are small and unstable. Pew Research Center, using Nigeria's Demographic and Health Survey data, gives 2020 figures of 56.1 per cent Muslim, 43.4 per cent Christian, and 0.6 per cent all other groups, with traditional religion falling inside that 0.6 per cent and not separately reported . Other estimates place "folk religion" around 1.4 per cent. McKinnon's own paper exists precisely because the relative proportions have often been the subject of conjecture, guesswork, and assertion, with researchers frequently relying on a single survey or on multiple sources reconciled by unstated methods .
Why the small numbers are misleading, in five ways.
The question is exclusive. A survey asking "what is your religion" with Christian, Muslim, and Traditional as options forces a choice that the practice does not require. A person who is a practising Anglican and who also has the family's Egúngún festival and consults Ifá when a child is ill will answer "Christian," accurately.
Social desirability is enormous. Òrìṣà practice carries real stigma in contemporary Nigeria. Answering "traditional religion" to a stranger with a clipboard has costs, and the direction of the bias is entirely one way.
Practice is not identity. The tradition never asked for a belief commitment in the sense the question assumes. 02-how-orisa-worship-is-organized sets out why belonging to an òrìṣà is a relationship rather than a creed, which means the survey instrument is measuring something the religion does not have.
The count excludes the diaspora entirely. Cuban, Brazilian, Trinidadian, and North American practitioners are outside any Nigerian survey. Brazilian Candomblé and Umbanda together, and Cuban Lucumí, involve numbers that are themselves contested but are certainly in the millions.
Adjacent practice does not register. Pew's own survey found that about seven in ten Nigerian adults believe that spells, curses, or other magic can influence people's lives . That is not a measure of òrìṣà devotion, and it is a measure of the persistence of a cosmology.
The honest summary: the number of committed, initiated òrìṣà practitioners in Yorùbáland is small, probably low single-digit percentages at most and possibly well under one per cent. The number of people whose actual religious practice includes elements of the tradition is very much larger and cannot be established from available data. Anyone giving you a confident figure in either direction is guessing.
J.D.Y. Peel's Christianity, Islam, and Orisa Religion: Three Traditions in Comparison and Interaction is the standard work and its framing is the correct one: these are not three sealed systems between which people move, but three traditions that have been in continuous mutual formation in the same society for well over a century . Peel's earlier Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba traces how the nineteenth-century missionary encounter constituted "Yoruba religion" as a describable object in the first place .
Some specifics.
Islam arrived first and adapted differently. Islam reached Yorùbáland well before Christianity and spread substantially in the nineteenth century, and Yorùbá Islam accommodated a good deal of existing practice. The clearest institutional example is Ojúde Ọba at Ìjẹ̀bú-Òde, a festival descended from the traditional Ọdẹdá observance, restructured around Eid al-Adha after Chief Balógun Kuku's conversion in 1896, which kept the horses, the age grades, the dress, the drums, and the homage to the ruler, and which now draws around a million people . 23-the-ritual-year covers it. This is not syncretism at the edges; it is a Muslim festival with a traditional-festival body.
Aládùrà Christianity is the significant Christian case. The Aládùrà churches, which emerged in Yorùbáland from the 1920s and 1930s and include the Cherubim and Seraphim, the Christ Apostolic Church, and the Church of the Lord (Aladura), are Christian in doctrine and unmistakably Yorùbá in structure and concern. Prophecy, dreams, visions, healing, spiritual diagnosis of misfortune, ritual bathing, and the identification of hostile spiritual agency all carry over. 03-history treats the Aládùrà emergence. The theological content is Christian; the questions being asked are the ones the òrìṣà cults were asked.
The practical pattern in ordinary families. A great many Yorùbá families are religiously mixed across siblings and generations and function without difficulty. Attending each other's occasions is normal. Funerals are the clearest case: a Christian burial for an elder is followed by observances whose structure is ìsìnkú àgbà, and Muslim funerals are followed by eighth- and fortieth-day observances of the same social weight. 24-ancestors-and-the-dead covers this.
Naming persists almost completely. Ògúnkẹ́mi, Ifáyẹmí, Ọ̀ṣundáre, Ṣàngóbùnmi, Babátúndé, Yétúndé are borne by Christians and Muslims who know exactly what the names mean. Some families now shorten or alter theophoric names under Pentecostal pressure, which is a visible recent change.
The genuine conflict is real and it is mostly Pentecostal. Nigerian Pentecostalism, which has grown enormously since the 1970s, is explicitly and actively opposed to òrìṣà tradition, treats it as demonic, and conducts deliverance ministry premised on ancestral curses and inherited covenants. This is not the older mission-church accommodation. It has produced: destruction of shrines and cult objects; family conflict where a converted member destroys inherited items; pressure on festival attendance; and campaigns against public funding for festivals. Reformist Muslim currents run a parallel opposition on parallel grounds.
Conflict over public space is the sharpest edge. Orò curfews colliding with Sunday church attendance, masquerade processions colliding with traffic and with people who do not accept the ritual frame, and state governments funding festivals with public money have all produced local disputes, court cases, and occasional violence. 22-oro-agemo-and-cult-societies covers Orò specifically.
And yet coexistence is the norm. Yorùbáland is among the most religiously mixed regions in Africa and has not seen the sustained Christian-Muslim conflict that has characterised parts of northern and middle-belt Nigeria. That is a real fact about Yorùbá society and it deserves stating alongside the conflict, not instead of it.
The survival of the most important surviving Yorùbá sacred grove is substantially the work of an Austrian artist.
Susanne Wenger (1915-2009) arrived in Nigeria in 1950 and settled at Òṣogbo. She was initiated into Ọ̀ṣun worship, took the name Àdùnní Olórìṣà, glossed as the sweet one of the òrìṣà or the one who brings joy to the divinities, and became a priestess . Accounts record that the head priestess of Ọ̀ṣun called on her for help, and Wenger, who had already been recognised for restoring shrines, came to Òṣogbo in 1958 .
What she did. The grove was being encroached on by farming, logging, hunting, and construction, and its shrines were decaying. Wenger, working with local artists and craftspeople, rebuilt and created shrines and monumental sculptures in cement and iron throughout the grove, and organised resistance to the encroachment. The resulting body of work is called the New Sacred Art movement, and it expresses the functions of the òrìṣà while also depicting the social life of both adherents and non-adherents . In the 1990s the establishment of the Ọ̀ṣun Grove Support Group and the Adunni Olorisha Trust consolidated the protection, and Wenger came to be regarded as a pioneer of a green aesthetic .
The result. The Ọ̀ṣun-Òṣogbo Sacred Grove was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2005 , as one of the last surviving examples of a sacred forest that was once a normal feature of every Yorùbá town.
The complications, which should be stated. A European woman is the central figure in the preservation of a Yorùbá sacred site, which raises the obvious questions and has generated real debate. Her sculptures are modern works in cement, not restorations of what was there, so the grove a visitor sees is substantially a twentieth-century artistic creation on a genuinely ancient sacred site. Some Yorùbá critics have argued that her aesthetic reshaped the grove according to a European modernist sensibility. Against this: she was initiated, she lived there for over fifty years, she worked with Yorùbá artists including Adébísí Akànjí and Ṣàngódáre Gbádégẹsin Àjàlá who developed their own substantial careers, she was invited rather than self-appointed, and without the intervention the grove would very probably not exist. Both things are true and this file does not resolve them.
07-arts treats the New Sacred Art as art; 23-the-ritual-year covers the festival.
The Ọọ̀ni of Ifẹ̀ occupies a position with no clean parallel: a traditional ruler with no constitutional political power in the Nigerian federal system, who is nonetheless the ranking spiritual figure of the Yorùbá and, in the Ifẹ̀ formulation, an òrìṣà himself. The Olójó festival, at which he wears the Àre crown held to be Ọdùduwà's, is where that identity is enacted rather than described. 23-the-ritual-year covers Olójó and 04-obatala the Ifẹ̀ succession disputes.
Three things to understand about the office now.
It has authority without power. Nigerian traditional rulers have no statutory governmental function. What they have is standing, convening power, mediating capacity, and the ability to make something legitimate by attending it. Governors and presidents visit them.
The current occupant has been unusually active. Ọba Adéyẹyè Ẹnitàn Ògúnwùsì, Ọjájá II, installed in 2015, has pursued a high-profile programme of cultural promotion, diaspora engagement, and international travel, and has hosted large numbers of diaspora practitioners and African-American visitors at Ifẹ̀. This has raised the international visibility of the tradition considerably.
The office is Christian-and-Muslim-adjacent in a way that is not contradictory to most Yorùbá people. Yorùbá kings are traditionally required to perform rites at their installation regardless of personal faith, and a number of contemporary Yorùbá obas are practising Christians or Muslims who nonetheless carry ritual obligations. Occasionally an incoming ruler refuses on religious grounds, producing a local crisis, and these cases make the news precisely because they are exceptions.
The Alaáfin of Ọ̀yọ́, the Awùjalẹ̀ of Ìjẹ̀bú, and the other senior rulers hold analogous positions, and the relative precedence among them is a long-running and sometimes sharp dispute. 09-social treats chieftaincy.
A distinct and growing phenomenon, and it is not simply the survival of the old practice.
What it is. Educated, often urban, often young Yorùbá people adopting òrìṣà practice deliberately, frequently after a Christian or Muslim upbringing, and frequently framing it as recovery of a stolen inheritance rather than as conversion. It overlaps with Yorùbá cultural nationalism and with pan-African identity politics, and it is heavily mediated: much of it is organised through social media, YouTube, and online communities, and a good deal of the teaching material circulating is diaspora-derived.
Where it differs from inherited practice. It is chosen rather than inherited, which inverts the recruitment pattern in 02-how-orisa-worship-is-organized. It is frequently text-oriented, treating the Odù Ifá as scripture in a way the oral tradition did not. It is often systematising, presenting a unified pantheon with fixed correspondences of the kind 01-what-an-orisa-is explains does not correspond to any actual locality. And it is transnational, with Nigerian, American, Cuban, and Brazilian practitioners in constant contact and in occasional dispute about authenticity.
Related developments. The reconstructed Kọ́jọ́dá calendar with a June new year and years numbered in the ten-thousands. The reframing of Ifá as a self-standing religion with Ọ̀rúnmìlà at its head, which 10-orunmila notes. Institutions like the World Ifá Festival. The renaming of the Ọ̀yọ́ Ṣàngó festival as the World Sango Festival by state government in 2013 . And the growing prominence of Ìyánífá, women initiated to Ifá, which is contested in Nigeria and much more established in the diaspora. 05-ifa treats that controversy.
How to assess it. As a genuine and interesting religious development that is producing real communities and real practice, and as something structurally different from the inherited tradition it claims. Both descriptions are accurate. A reader should be particularly careful about material produced within the movement, which frequently presents recent systematisations as ancient, and about the reverse error of dismissing contemporary practitioners as inauthentic, which applies a standard of purity that no living religion meets.
For a Yorùbá person raised Christian and told this heritage was darkness, three findings from this section are worth carrying.
The tradition is not gone, and a good deal of it is in your own family, unnamed. The funerals, the names, the oríkì, the festival your relatives attend, the consultation somebody made when things went badly.
The thing you were warned about is not the thing that exists. "Idol worship" describes nothing in the ethnographic record, and 01-what-an-orisa-is sets out why the word is a nineteenth-century polemic rather than a translation.
And understanding it does not require adopting it. This corpus describes; it does not recruit. A person can know accurately what their great-grandparents were doing, and why, and how it worked, and remain whatever they are.
Earliest recorded forms of Yorùbá religious life centered on lineage-based shrines and civic covenants organized around local òrìṣà and sacred kingship . With the expansion of the Ọ̀yọ́ Empire from the seventeenth century onward, regional cults transformed into state apparatuses, notably the elevation of Ṣàngó into an imperial divinity whose priesthood reinforced imperial authority across subject territories . The collapse of Ọ̀yọ́ in the 1830s and the prolonged nineteenth-century civil wars shattered this political architecture, displacing populations into new urban centers like Ìbàdàn and Abẹ́òkúta where diverse òrìṣà traditions reassembled and adapted under intense military pressure .
Concurrently, the transatlantic slave trade violently dispersed hundreds of thousands of Yorùbá captives across the Atlantic, founding durable traditions such as Cuban Lucumí and Brazilian Candomblé that preserved ritual liturgies through creative adaptation . In Yorùbáland, mid-nineteenth-century Christian missionary contact systematically reframed local practices as idolatry and devil worship, producing a written Yorùbá language and a defensive re-articulation of tradition [S5, S11]. Under British colonial indirect rule established around 1900, traditional rulers were retained as administrative intermediaries while colonial education and legal frameworks marginalized indigenous priesthoods and stigmatized sacred societies [S5, S11].
Following Nigerian independence in 1960, mass urbanization, widespread literacy, and educational advancement catalyzed a demographic collapse of self-reported traditional affiliation, which fell below twenty percent in the 1963 census . From the 1970s onward, the dramatic rise of Pentecostalism intensified theological hostility, yet cultural resilience persisted through civil festivals, domestic rites, and naming customs [S4, S12]. Today, òrìṣà tradition operates transnationally: a minority local priesthood and heritage festivals within Nigeria interact with millions of initiated practitioners in the Americas, supported by digital networks and cultural reclamation movements [S5, S10].
23-the-ritual-year for the fuller sourcing.23-the-ritual-year and 05-sango.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.
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.
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 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.
How Yorùbá people actually live with three religious traditions at once, the real tensions, what scholars document about coexistence, and the full range of positions people hold.