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.
The tradition is candid that the knowledge required to heal is the knowledge required to harm, and that working to injure — variously afose, ogun ika, and other categories — exists and is done. Practitioners do not deny this, and a certain amount of Yoruba public life is conducted with an eye on it. What the tradition asserts is a mechanism rather than a prohibition backed by an authority: harmful work is held to return on the sender, frequently on their children, and the odu supply cases. The absence of a punishing deity means the argument for restraint is consequentialist and lineage-based, which in a society organised around descent is not weak. It also means the boundary between protective work and aggressive work is contested case by case rather than settled by rule. This is one of the aspects that Christian and Muslim critics in Nigeria attack most directly, and practitioners generally respond by pointing at the same practices in their critics' own communities.
The same ground, other faiths
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