Responding to "Yoruba Mythology"

The anthology Yoruba Mythology: Tales of the Òrìṣà from West Africa and the Diaspora (forthcoming, October 2026) assembles hundreds of myths, legends, and folktales from West Africa, Brazil, and Cuba into the first collection of its kind in scope and geographic range. Drawing on more than fifteen years of fieldwork, study with Ifá and òrìṣà priests and priestesses, and engagement with diaspora communities, the volume brings together myths of the òrìṣà myths, general folktales, and Ijapa trickster tales in a single, accessible English-language anthology. Its introduction advances a series of arguments about the nature of Yoruba mythology as a living, primarily oral tradition that resists the fixity of the printed page: its nonlinear philosophy of time, its refusal of the sacred/secular and good/evil binaries familiar to Western readers, its omnivorous capacity to absorb material from Islam, Christianity, and other traditions, and its remarkable expansion across the Atlantic and, increasingly, across the globe.