Sacred Culture

In traditional Yorùbá thought, there is no such thing as "religion", as it is known by the Judeo-Christian traditions. For the Yorùbá, there is only sacred culture, the way of the originals, summed up in the proverb that says "Let's do things the way they used to do them so that things may turn out the way they used to turn out." 

Consequently, the Yorùbá regard the sacred as an aspect of culture that requires no controversy, competition, nor evangelical crusades. The sacred is simply regarded as a natural aspect of life itself. Stated differently, the organizing principles of Yorùbá indigenous knowledge systems are characterized by their spiritual, philosophical, cultural and ecological interdependence. According to philosopher Adébáyò Adésànyà, “this is not simply a coherence of fact and faith, not of reason and traditional beliefs, nor of reason and contingent facts, but a coherence of compatibility among all the disciplines. A medical theory e.g., which contradicted a theological conclusion was rejected as absurd and vice versa. This demand of mutual compatibility among all the disciplines… was the main weapon of Yorùbá thinking. God might be banished from Greek thought without any harm being done to the logical architecture of it, but this cannot be done in the case of the Yorùbá… Philosophy, theology, politics, social theory, land law, medicine, psychology, birth and burial all find themselves logically concatenated in a system so tight that to subtract one item from the whole is to paralyze the structure of the whole.”