Ase survived the Atlantic slave trade as one of the most resilient concepts of Yoruba religion, carried into the Americas and reconstituted, under different names and often blended with Catholic saint veneration, in traditions including Santeria (Lucumi) in Cuba, Candomble in Brazil, and Vodou in Haiti, where the underlying concept of a directable, ritually respected vital power persists even where the specific vocabulary shifts. Early European travelers' accounts and missionary writing, beginning with sources such as Samuel Ajayi Crowther's nineteenth century Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language, gave English readers some of their first fixed transliterations of Yoruba religious vocabulary, though the deeper theological content of ase took much longer to be documented with real care, a gap Idowu's mid-twentieth-century scholarship did much to close.
In contemporary popular usage, especially in the African diaspora and in some strands of American spirituality, "ashe" has become a widely used affirming exclamation, roughly comparable to "amen" or "so be it," a genuine continuation of the word's ritual-speech function even where it circulates well outside any formal Ifa or orisha practice. As a concept internal to a living religious tradition concerned with divine and ritual power rather than a claim of measurable physical force, ase has not been and is not treated here as subject to laboratory test.
Sources Olodumare: God in Yoruba BeliefE. Bolaji Idowu with Vocabulary of the Yoruba LanguageSamuel Ajayi Crowther