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What Esu is in the Yoruba sources, why the divination system cannot function without him, and the documented history of the missionary translation that turned him into Satan.

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 evening storytelling tradition, the call-and-response frame that opens it, riddles as a separate discipline, and the Ìjàpá cycle read as a body of ethical and comic literature.

Twenty-nine Yorùbá proverbs built around Àjàpá the tortoise, the tradition's central trickster animal, presented with the original, a literal gloss, a named translation, and the situation each is spoken in.

Guide to the thirty-six files in the alọ́ section, covering Yorùbá folktales, trickster cycles, cautionary narratives, etiological myths, and source criticism.

A tortoise tale in which Ìjàpá rescues a drowning hunter's son on condition of enslaving him, hides him inside a drum that appears to sing by itself, and loses him when he drinks himself unconscious at a dance.

A tortoise tale in which Ìjàpá wins half a palace by provoking a mute king's daughter into speech through a false accusation of theft, recorded by Ellis in 1894.

A tortoise tale in which Ìjàpá wins a wager by goading Erin the elephant into carrying him into town, then escapes execution by persuading the elephant that mud is more lethal than stone.