Iyami Aje — literally my mothers — is the collective, primordial power possessed by women, and rendering it as witchcraft imports connotations that distort it. It is not conceived as a crime or a pact but as an inherent capacity, held particularly by older women, which can build or destroy and is not to be provoked. The mothers are not named individually, are addressed with extreme circumspection, and are associated with birds. The Gelede masquerade tradition of the Ketu Yoruba, inscribed by UNESCO in 2001, exists specifically to honour and pacify them: elaborate carved headdresses, satirical performance, and a spectacle explicitly designed to please the mothers. The wider point about Yoruba gender is that the tradition holds female power to be real, dangerous and requiring propitiation — which is a very different proposition from either equality or subordination, and sits awkwardly beside the exclusion of women from egungun and from Ifa in conservative lineages.