Esoteric Calendar
West African & Yoruba Calendar 2026
Orisha feast days, ancestor processions, and harvest festivals from West Africa.
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Cyclical Rhythms
These cycles repeat throughout the year. Their dates shift with the moon and stars.
Browse by Tradition
Orishas, ancestors, and the farming year
The Yoruba sacred year and its neighbours across West Africa are kept by the season and the deity. Time is marked by the feast days of the orishas, the powers that govern the natural and human world, and by the return of the ancestors, whose festivals fall when the farming year lets the community gather.
The most striking are the masquerades. At the Egungun Festival the ancestral dead return in towering, whirling costumes, danced through the streets by initiates who become, for the festival, the forefathers themselves. The Gelede honours the mothers, the elder women whose hidden power the community courts with masked dance. Others mark the harvest, like the Ga Homowo that ‘hoots at hunger’ once the rains have made the crop safe.
What this calendar holds
These are living festivals, still kept across Nigeria, Benin, Ghana, and Togo, and carried by the slave trade into the Americas, where the same orishas are honoured in Santería and Candomblé. The calendar gathers the feast days at their West African source, where the orisha and the ancestor are met in the open, in mask and drum.