Orun and Aye

Yoruba cosmology is usually set out as a pair. Orun is the invisible half, Aye the visible, and the two are described in the Ifa corpus and in ordinary speech as halves of one thing rather than as two places. The image most often used is a closed calabash, its upper and lower shells fitted together with the world inside. Orun is not distant in the way a heaven above the sky is distant. It is the other side of a membrane crossed continually and in both directions. Olodumare, the supreme being, is in Orun and receives no cult of its own; the orisha, who do, are also there and are the beings actually addressed. The ancestors are there, and remain members of their lineages.

E. Bolaji Idowu's study of Olodumare in Yoruba belief set this arrangement out for a scholarly readership in the early 1960s and remains the reference point for it, including his argument that the Yoruba high being is genuinely supreme rather than a reading back of Christian monotheism, a claim that has been contested since. What follows from the pairing is that Yoruba religion has little use for the idea of leaving the world behind. A person's business is conducted in Aye, with the powers of Orun, on terms agreed before birth.