The Yoruba placate a pantheon headed by an impersonal deity, Olorun, and include lesser deities, some of them formerly mortal, who perform a variety of cosmic and practical tasks.

One of them, Oduduwa, is regarded as the creator of the earth and the ancestor of the Yoruba kings.

According to a creation myth, Oduduwa founds the city of Ife and dispatches his sons to establish other cities, where they reign as priest-kings and preside over cult rituals.

Formal traditions of this sort have been interpreted as poetic illustrations of the historical process by which Ife's ruling dynasty extends its authority over Yorubaland.

The stories are attempts to legitimize the Yoruba monarchies—after they had supplanted clan loyalties—by claiming divine origin.

Ife is the center of as many as four hundred religious cults whose traditions are manipulated to political advantage by the oni (king) in the days of the kingdom's greatness.