The Atlanta chapter of the Òrìṣà Spiritual Assembly meets on the second Sunday of every month at a community centre in East Point, twenty minutes south of downtown. When the chapter was founded in 2021 by a small group of practitioners who had been meeting informally in each other’s living rooms since 2018, the regular Sunday turnout was eleven people. By the end of 2024 it was twenty-eight; by April 2026 it had grown to forty-seven, with another twenty-some who attend less regularly and a mailing list of just over three hundred.
The chapter’s lead organiser — for purposes of this profile we will call her Ìyá Ìyàbọ̀, which is the name she uses in chapter business and which is the name by which most members know her — is a woman in her late fifties who arrived in Atlanta from Lagos in 1987, who works in healthcare administration during the week, and who has been an initiated priestess of Yemọja since 2002. She agreed to this profile on the condition that the chapter, not she personally, would be the focus, which is in itself a piece of information about how she organises.
## What the Chapter Actually Does
The monthly Sunday meeting has, over five years, settled into a recognisable rhythm. The afternoon begins at one o’clock with what the chapter calls *Ìpàdé Ìṣáájú* — the gathering before the gathering — which is a relaxed forty-five-minute period when members arrive, greet each other, drop off contributions to the food, and catch up on the news of the previous month. New visitors are introduced; members who are travelling that month make their announcements; the small administrative business of the chapter is dispatched.
At one forty-five the formal session begins with a teaching. The teaching is given by a different chapter member each month, on a topic chosen at the previous meeting. Topics over the last year have included: the verses of *Odù Ìká Méjì* (taught by a senior member who had been studying with a visiting Babaláwo for the previous quarter); the role of *àjẹ́* in Yorùbá cosmology (taught by a member who teaches comparative religion at a local university); a practical session on how to clean and care for consecrated beadwork (taught by Ìyá Ìyàbọ̀ herself, who has been making her own beadwork for over thirty years); and an introduction to the structure of the Ifá divination process (taught, with appropriate boundaries, by an Ifá initiate who travels in monthly from Birmingham).
The teaching runs about forty-five minutes; questions and discussion follow for another thirty.
At three o’clock the chapter breaks into *Orí Circles* — small groups of six to eight, in which members do focused personal work in a structured format adapted from the traditional Yorùbá practice of *ìjáde orí* (the bringing-out of the head). Each circle has a designated facilitator, usually a more senior member; the structure of the circle has been developed by the Assembly’s national office and is the same across chapters. The circles run for sixty minutes.
At four o’clock the chapter reconvenes for the meal, which is the heart of the gathering. Food is contributed potluck-style; the chapter has a rotating menu of expected dishes (jollof rice, bean cake, plantains, fish stew, callaloo greens) so that no single member is overwhelmed by the contribution. The meal runs until five-thirty or six. Most members stay for it; many stay later, talking in the parking lot until well past dark.
## Why the Format Works
I asked Ìyá Ìyàbọ̀ why the format had settled the way it had. Her answer was characteristic: she said that the format had not been designed; it had been *discovered* over five years of trying things, keeping what worked, and quietly retiring what did not.
Several things have been retired. The chapter tried, in 2022, to add a bi-monthly book club; the book club did not survive contact with members’ actual schedules. It tried, briefly, to organise a public outreach event in 2023; the event was successful in the narrow sense (about a hundred people attended) but exhausted the chapter’s volunteer capacity for months afterward, and the experiment has not been repeated. It tried, in early 2024, to record the monthly teachings for an online archive; the recordings raised concerns about the privacy of senior members and the appropriateness of distributing some of the more advanced teachings beyond the membership, and the project was suspended pending further reflection.
What has been kept is the structure that puts community first and information second — the long arrival period, the shared meal, the small-group work that allows for relationships of depth that the larger gathering cannot. The teaching is important, but the teaching is the second most important thing that happens at the chapter. The most important thing is that practitioners who would otherwise be isolated have a place where they regularly see each other, eat with each other, and do serious work together.
## What the Chapter Is Building
The chapter’s medium-term goals are three. First, to identify and train a successor leadership cohort, so that the chapter does not depend on any single organiser. This work has been underway since 2024 and has produced a working leadership team of six members who now share the operational responsibility.
Second, to establish a permanent shrine space — currently the chapter does not have a dedicated facility, and the more advanced ritual work that the membership has begun to require has had to happen in members’ homes or at the Assembly’s national gatherings. Ìyá Ìyàbọ̀ believes the chapter is two to three years away from being able to acquire and consecrate appropriate space; the financial groundwork is being laid through the dues structure that the chapter adopted in 2024.
Third, to extend the chapter’s hospitality to the growing number of African and African-American practitioners moving into the broader Atlanta metropolitan area, particularly in the Decatur, College Park, and Stone Mountain corridors. The mailing list has grown faster than the Sunday meetings; the chapter is exploring whether a second monthly gathering — north or east of the current location — might serve the wider community without diluting the strength of the existing meeting.
The work continues. The drums travel well to Atlanta. The community is being built.
If you are in metro Atlanta and would like to attend a Sunday meeting, the Assembly’s national office can put you in touch.