Nigeria

The Yoruba end of the world is a stage in a longer rhythm rather than a destination. The universe unfolds through successive aòn, each brought into being, inhabited, and dissolved, with the high god Olódùmarè and the orisha presiding over the turning, a scheme set beside Dogon Cosmogony and the Word and the wider African material. The pattern of the ages is not hidden from humans; it is held in the verses of Ifá, the divination corpus recited by babalawo, and consulted through the casting of palm nuts or the divining tray. A question about the future is thus answerable at the level of the cycle.

What distinguishes the Yoruba framing is that the dissolution is consultable. Among the odu there are verses that describe previous worlds and the conditions under which an age ends, so the recurrence has both a myth and a reference text. Wándé Abímbọ́lá's published transcriptions make the corpus available in its own language, and they show the cyclic material sitting alongside moral and medical instruction rather than apart from it.

The contrast to set against is the sealed, dated finale of the linear traditions. Where Revelation or the Quran name a sequence and withhold the date, Ifá describes the turns of the world as a knowable order and leaves the reading to the specialist. The corpus is treated in Yoruba World Cycles (Ifá), and beside Dogon Cosmogony and the Word the shared West African theme is the renewal of the world by speech and by a central figure's descent, but the Yoruba version adds a working technology for reading which age is current.