What is an ẹsẹ̀ Ifá?

Tradition described: Yorùbá / Ìṣẹ̀ṣe

What is an ẹsẹ̀ Ifá?

An ẹsẹ̀ Ifá is a verse: a poem, sometimes short and sometimes very long, belonging to one Odù. Each Odù has many; a well-trained babaláwo knows several for every one of the 256 and a great many for the sixteen principal Odù. The corpus as a whole is oral, transmitted from teacher to student, and no complete written version exists or could.

Abimbola describes a typical verse as having a recognisable structure: it names the diviner or diviners who performed a past divination (their names are often poetic epithets), names the client and the matter they came about, records the advice given and whether it was followed, tells what happened, and closes with the client's response — praise, or regret. A consultation, then, is told as a precedent: this is what Ifá said to someone in your position before.

The verses are the property of the tradition and of the people who carry them. Scholars have published collections with translations, and they remain those scholars' and their informants' copyright; the tradition itself holds some verses closed. None are reproduced on these pages. Where an Odù's page says that verse material has not been added, that is the whole of the archive's honesty: it will hold verses only when they are public domain, licensed, or given by a practitioner with permission, and it will say where each came from.

Editorially reviewed against the sources named

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