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Sources & further reading
Ifá is a living Yorùbá religious, philosophical and divinatory tradition. What follows is for education and exploration: the structure of the sign system, and what scholars have recorded about how it is used. A traditional Ifá consultation involves trained practitioners and a transmitted body of knowledge that software cannot reproduce, and nothing on these pages stands in for one.
Works cited
Academic
Wande Abimbola
Ifá: An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus (1976, Ibadan: Oxford University Press Nigeria)
The standard account of the corpus by a scholar who is also an initiated babaláwo; the sequence of the sixteen used on this site is his.
William Bascom
Ifa Divination: Communication Between Gods and Men in West Africa (1969, Bloomington: Indiana University Press)
Fieldwork at Ifẹ̀ and elsewhere from the 1930s; the fullest description in English of the apparatus and procedure, with a large collection of verses (which are his and his informants', and are not reproduced here).
Wande Abimbola
Ifá Divination Poetry (1977, New York: NOK Publishers)
Verses with translation and an introduction on their form.
Wande Abimbola
Ifá Will Mend Our Broken World: Thoughts on Yoruba Religion and Culture in Africa and the Diaspora (1997, Roxbury, MA: Aim Books)
Interviews; the tradition in Africa and the diaspora, including the place of women in Ifá.
Institutional
UNESCO
Ifa divination system — Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (2008)
https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/ifa-divination-system-00146
Proclaimed a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005; inscribed on the Representative List in 2008.
Historical record
A. B. Ellis
The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (1894, London: Chapman and Hall)
A colonial-era ethnography, dated in its attitudes and often wrong in detail; cited only as a record of what a nineteenth-century observer saw. Public domain.
Practitioner-written (labelled where used)
Practitioner compilations (unknown authorship)
Tratado enciclopédico de los 256 signos de Ifá and related Cuban Ifá texts (2010)
Circulating Lukumí (Cuban Ifá) working texts in the owner's reference archive. Used on this site for one thing only: the Cuban spellings of the Odù, labelled as such and unverified.
How citations are shown
A citation names the work and, where a chapter or page has been confirmed against the text, the place. Where it has not, the page says “page reference not yet checked” — the work is the source; the exact place is still to be verified. No fact on these pages rests on an unnamed website.
The House of Ifá is an educational section. Satin Cradle is not a babaláwo, an ìyánífá, a priest, an initiated practitioner or an oracle, and does not offer consultations. Nothing here is needed for any practice.