What is Ifá?

Tradition described: Yorùbá / Ìṣẹ̀ṣe

What is Ifá?

Ifá is the divination system of the Yorùbá people of southwestern Nigeria and neighbouring Benin, and of their descendants in the Americas. The same word names the deity who presides over it, Ọ̀rúnmìlà, the vast body of verses that carries its knowledge, and the practice as a whole. A Yorùbá speaker may say that Ifá is consulted, that Ifá speaks, and that Ifá is what a diviner has learned — and mean three related things.

At its centre is a system of 256 signs, the Odù, each formed of eight marks in two columns of four, and each attached to a repertoire of verses, the ẹsẹ̀ Ifá, which a trained diviner memorises over many years. A consultation produces a sign; the diviner recites from that sign's verses; the client recognises, in the stories and precedents recited, the shape of the matter they came with. The sign is mechanical; the reading is not.

Ifá was proclaimed a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2005 and inscribed on the Representative List in 2008, which describes it as practised among Yorùbá communities and, through the Atlantic diaspora, in Cuba, Brazil and elsewhere. Those diaspora traditions — Lukumí in Cuba, Candomblé in Brazil — are related but distinct, with their own literatures and spellings; these pages name which is meant.

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