How to Live
the ethic — what it asks of a life
Your own prohibitions.
Divination gives you eewo — things you personally must not eat, wear, touch or do. They are individual, so two people in one household may have contradictory ones, and nobody else is in a position to check. Breaking one is not an offence against a rule; it is held to damage the arrangement your destiny was built on.
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Cultivate iwa pele — gentle character.
Good character is the whole point of the system: destiny is chosen before birth, but iwa pele is how you live up to the one you picked.
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Omoluabi.
The complete person: respectful, hardworking, truthful, generous, patient, humble and useful. It is what Yoruba child-raising is aimed at, and the concept is invoked constantly in ordinary speech — someone behaving badly is told they are not an omoluabi, which stings more than an accusation of wrongdoing.
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Greet properly.
Men prostrate flat, women kneel, and elders are never addressed by name alone. It looks to outsiders like formality and functions as something else: the greeting establishes relative position before any conversation happens, and in the diaspora it survives inside religious houses long after it has gone from the street.
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Swearing on iron.
Ogun is iron, and to swear you touch or lick a piece of it. Nigerian courts and police have used it because people who will perjure themselves on a Bible or a Quran will not risk it on Ogun — which practitioners point out is a comment on which religion the swearer actually believes.
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The knowledge cuts both ways.
The same herbs, words and workings that heal can be turned to harm, and practitioners do not pretend otherwise. What the tradition asserts instead is that work done to injure returns to the sender, and often to their children — which is a claim about consequences rather than a prohibition backed by an authority.
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Feed whoever arrives.
A stranger at the compound is fed before being asked what they want. The odu are full of stories where the ragged visitor is an orisha in disguise and the household that was generous is the one that survives the following year, which is an unusually direct piece of moral engineering.
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