Yoruba & Diaspora · English · 1894
The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa
A. B. Ellis
A colonial officer's survey, and the earliest systematic list in English of who the orisha are and what each is for. Ellis gives Olorun as the sky-god — the deified firmament rather than a person — and sets out the birth-catalogue in which Shango comes out as the god of lightning, Ogun as the god of iron and war, and Oya as the goddess of the river Niger. His comparative framing is his decade's and his informants go unnamed, so the corpus takes the roster and leaves the theory.
Read The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa in full at the linked edition →What this text attests · 7
| Name here | Rank given | # | Powers described |
|---|---|---|---|
 Elegba = Eshu | — | — | Named as the phallic god from whom Ifa acquires divination, in a myth Ellis reports against the general belief that Ifa had the faculty from the beginning. The corpus carries the disagreement rather than either side of it. |
Ifa = Orunmila | — | — | Called Ifa throughout rather than Orunmila, which is how the English sources of this period generally have him: the divination system named where the orisha would be. |
| — | — | Described in a passage on the division of labour among the orisha — Olorun cannot form a child in the womb, that being the function of Obatala. The scan of this page is badly degraded and the corpus takes only what is legible in it. | |
| — | — | God of iron and war, third in the same catalogue. | |
Olorun = Olodumare | — | — | The sky-god of the Yorubas — the deified firmament, or personal sky, set in a series with Nyankupon of the Tshis, Nyonmo of the Gas and Mawu of the Ewes. Ellis's comparison is the point of interest and also its limit: he is arranging four peoples' high gods into one type, which is a nineteenth-century move rather than a Yoruba one. |
| — | — | Goddess of the river Niger, sixth in the same catalogue, among a run of river goddesses each named for her own water. | |
| — | — | God of lightning, second in the catalogue of powers born from Yemaja's body — a list that also produces Ogun, Olokun, Olosa, Oya, Oshun and Orisha Oko in a single birth. A pantheon delivered as a genealogy in one sentence. |
