History & overview · every faith gets one
The orisha ride the world — ashe moves through everything.
The tradition of the Yoruba people of West Africa: one distant source (Olodumare) whose power moves the world as ashe, met through the orisha — vivid, personal forces of river, iron, thunder, and crossroads — and through Ifá, one of humanity's great divination systems. Mother of the largest religious diaspora after the Abrahamic ones.
The founding
No founder and no founding date: city-shrines, lineage priesthoods, and the Ifá corpus carried orally in 256 chapters, centuries deep before writing arrived.
No single founder — Yoruba Religion accreted rather than began.
What it holds
Reality. A world charged with ashe — the power-to-make-happen.
The divine. Olodumare is the source and has no shrine, no priesthood, no image and no festival — you do not approach the owner of the sky directly. What is addressed is the orisha, of whom the count is given as 201 or 401 or 1,001, all of which mean uncountable, and who have names, temperaments, foods, colours, drum rhythms, days of the week and things they will not tolerate. Above all of them, for you personally, is Ori — your own inner head, chosen before birth, which the tradition says can accomplish what no orisha can. Eshu is not the devil. The tradition has no devil..
Death and after. The ancestors remain active kin; reincarnation within the family line.
The line
descent is public here — where it came from, what left itBranches:
Santería / Lucumí — The orisha crossed the ocean wearing saints' faces.