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.
The obligation to feed an arriving stranger before enquiring into their business is embedded in Yoruba domestic practice and reinforced by the divination corpus, which is full of narratives in which a shabby, unpromising or importunate visitor turns out to be an orisha, an ancestor, or the agent of the client's fortune, and in which the household that was generous prospers while the one that was calculating does not. Esu in particular appears in these stories as a tester who arrives disguised. The moral engineering is efficient: rather than commanding hospitality on principle, the corpus makes the case that you cannot tell who you are dealing with, which produces the behaviour without requiring altruism. The obligation extends to the compound as a unit rather than to the individual householder, and it is one of the practices that survives strongly in Yoruba Christian and Muslim households that would not identify it as religious at all.
The same ground, other faiths
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