Study Guide: How to Read the Ifá Literature

The serious literature on Ifá is smaller than the volume of writing about Ifá suggests, and most of what matters was written by three or four people. This guide names the books, says what each is for, tells you which are legitimately readable online, and gives a reading order. It also gives criteria for judging the very large quantity of unreliable material you will meet first if you start with a search engine.

The two indispensable authors

Wándé Abímbọ́lá

Abimbola is the central figure in Ifá scholarship: a Yorùbá scholar, a trained babaláwo, formerly Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ifẹ̀, and the person who did most to establish the corpus as literature deserving academic treatment. He writes from inside the tradition and inside the academy at once, which is the source of both his authority and the one caution worth holding about him.

Ifá: An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus (Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1976). The foundational analytical work. Part one covers cultural background and the divining process; part two analyses the form of Ifá texts and the stylistic features of the poetic language. This is the book to read if you want the literary and structural analysis. Reprinted; also issued by Athelia Henrietta Press (1997), ISBN 1890157007.

Sixteen Great Poems of Ifá (UNESCO, 1975). Sixteen long poems in Yorùbá with facing English translation, plus a substantial introduction covering the cult, the instruments, the divination process, sacrifice, training, and the literary and philosophical system, and an appendix giving the Ifá priests' own traditional interpretation for each poem. This is the single most useful book for a reader starting out, because the introduction is the best short account of how the whole system works and the poems let you see what ẹsẹ Ifá actually are. Available in full at the Internet Archive 1.

Ifá Divination Poetry (New York: NOK Publishers, 1977), ISBN 9780883570470. Sixty-four poems in Yorùbá with annotated English translation, preceded by structural, stylistic and thematic analysis. This is where the eight-part structure of ẹsẹ Ifá is set out in full. Harder to obtain than the other two.

Ifá Will Mend Our Broken World (Roxbury, MA: Aim Books, 1997). Shorter, more accessible, more openly advocative. Useful, and read it knowing that its register is different from the 1976 and 1977 books.

The caution. Abimbola is a practitioner as well as a scholar and does not pretend otherwise. On disputed matters, most visibly the ranking of the sixteen Odù, where he presents his list as having "universal validity and acceptability" while Bascom's survey of 86 lists found it in half of them, his account can present as settled what is contested. Read him with Bascom beside him.

William Bascom

An American anthropologist whose fieldwork ran from the 1930s to the 1960s. He is not a practitioner and writes as an outsider, with the corresponding strengths and blind spots.

Ifa Divination: Communication Between Gods and Men in West Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 575 pp. The standard scholarly monograph and the most rigorous treatment of the system's structure that exists. Part one covers the apparatus, the figures, sacrifices and medicines, predictions and professional ethics, the diviners, and the belief system; part two prints verses in Yorùbá and English organised by figure. Available in full at the Internet Archive 2.

Read this book for: the mathematics of the figures done properly, the survey of 86 lists that establishes how much lineage variation exists, the comparative chapter placing Ifá among African and world divination systems, and the correction of inflated Odù counts. Chapter IV, "The Figures of Ifa," is the single most valuable chapter in the entire literature for the reader interested in the binary structure.

Sixteen Cowries: Yoruba Divination from Africa to the New World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980; paperback 1993), ISBN 0253208475. The standard work on Ẹẹ́rìndínlógún and the necessary companion for understanding the divination family. Available at the Internet Archive 3.

The caution. Bascom writes in the ethnographic register of his period, and on gender he states flatly that "only men can practice Ifa," a position that Ogunnaike's later work shows to be more complicated than Bascom knew 4. His fieldwork was also weighted toward Ifẹ̀, which is why he follows the Ifẹ̀ ranking rather than the more widely attested one. He is scrupulous about saying so.

The other essential books

Kọ́lá Abímbọ́lá, Yorùbá Culture: A Philosophical Account (Birmingham: Iroko Academic Publishers, 2006), ISBN 1905388004. Philosophical treatment of Yorùbá thought with Ifá at its centre, by a philosopher of science and of legal evidence who is also a consecrated babaláwo. The book to read for the epistemology and the reasoning structures rather than the ethnography.

Jacob K. Olupona and Rowland O. Abiodun, eds., Ifá Divination, Knowledge, Power, and Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), xvi + 371 pp., ISBN 9780253018908 (paperback), 9780253018823 (hardback). The major modern edited volume and the best single guide to the current state of the field. Four sections: Ifá orature and its interpretation and translation; Ifá as knowledge, with theoretical questions; Ifá in the Afro-Atlantic; and sacred art in Ifá. Contributors include Rowland Abiodun, Barry Hallen, Andrew Apter, Henry John Drewal, Kamari Clarke, Stefania Capone, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Wyatt MacGaffey, Philip Peek and M. Ajísẹbọ McElwaine Abimbola, whose chapter on women in the Ifá priesthood is directly relevant to file 06 5.

Bernard Maupoil, La Géomancie à l'ancienne Côte des Esclaves, Mémoires de l'Institut d'Ethnologie XLII (Paris: Institut d'Ethnologie, 1943), xxvii + 686 pp.; reissued 1981. The standard study of Fa among the Fọ̀n, from fieldwork in Lower Dahomey between 1933 and 1936. Never translated into English, which is a genuine gap: it is the fullest study of any West African geomantic system in any language and anglophone scholarship engages with it mostly at second hand.

Pierre Fatumbi Verger, Ewé: The Use of Plants in Yoruba Society (Rio de Janeiro / São Paulo: Odebrecht, 1995), 744 pp., ISBN 8571645141. 2,216 plant preparations with their incantations and their connections to Ifá signs, from forty years of fieldwork by a scholar initiated as a babaláwo at Kétu in 1953. The indispensable work on the pharmacological dimension. At the Internet Archive 6.

Ron Eglash, African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999). Read it for the mathematics of African design systems, which is genuinely valuable, and read it carefully on divination. His recursion analysis concerns Bamana sand divination rather than Ifá, and his transmission argument about binary and Leibniz is speculative and, in its popular restatements, wrong. File 07 sets out why.

Omotade Adegbindin, Ifá in Yorùbá Thought System (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2014). A philosophical study engaging critically with Wande Abimbola's readings. Useful as a corrective and as evidence that the field argues internally.

Journal articles worth going to directly

Ayodeji Ogunnaike, "Mamalawo? The Controversy Over Women Practicing Ifa Divination," Journal for the Study of the Religions of Africa and its Diaspora 4.1 (December 2018), pp. 15-34. Open access 4. The best treatment of the gender question, unusually even-handed, and the single article this section relied on most heavily.

Ayodeji Ogunnaike, "The Dynamic Spread of Geomancy in Africa." The most careful recent work on the Ifá and Islamic geomancy relationship, arguing against simple one-directional transmission 7.

What is legitimately available online

Verified accessible at the Internet Archive, which lends scanned copies under controlled digital lending:

• Abimbola, Sixteen Great Poems of Ifá, full text 1
• Bascom, Ifa Divination, full text 2
• Bascom, Sixteen Cowries 3
• Verger, Ewé 6

Open access on the web:

• Ogunnaike's "Mamalawo?" article, from the journal's own site 4
• UNESCO's element page for Ifá, which is short and worth reading in full 8

A note on the PDF sites. Copies of Bascom and Abimbola circulate on document-sharing sites. Their optical character recognition is poor, particularly on Yorùbá diacritics, which are frequently dropped or corrupted. Any Yorùbá text taken from these copies needs checking against a printed edition, and this corpus flags where it has restored diacritics from degraded scans.

A reading order

Start here. Abimbola, Sixteen Great Poems of Ifá, introduction only, pages 1 to 32. Roughly an hour. It covers the training, the instruments, the divination process, sacrifice, the 256 Odù and the structure of the verses, from a scholar-practitioner, and it is the most efficient orientation available.

Then. Bascom, Ifa Divination, Chapter IV, "The Figures of Ifa." This is where the binary structure is done rigorously, including the tables of figures, the two competing seniority orders, and the correction of the inflated Odù counts. If your interest is the information-system question, this chapter is the destination and much of file 02 and file 03 is derived from it.

Then. The poems in Sixteen Great Poems, reading the Yorùbá and the English together even without Yorùbá, and then the appendix, which gives the priests' own interpretations. This is where you stop treating the corpus as an abstraction.

Then, depending on interest.

For the system's place among other divination systems: Bascom, Ifa Divination, the introduction, pages 3 to 12, which contains the three-principle analysis and the comparative survey. Then Sixteen Cowries.

For gender and the contemporary community: Ogunnaike's "Mamalawo?" in full.

For philosophy and epistemology: Kọ́lá Abímbọ́lá, Yorùbá Culture, then Adegbindin.

For the current field: the Olupona and Abiodun volume, chapter by chapter as the topics interest you.

For the mathematics: Eglash, African Fractals, read with file 07 open.

For pharmacology: Verger, Ewé, as a reference rather than a read-through.

Read last, if at all. Popular books promising the meanings of all 256 Odù, and websites offering the same. By this point you will be able to see what is wrong with them.

How to judge a source you meet

Six practical tests, drawn from the errors this section has documented.

Does it give a number other than 256? Claims of 4,096 or 65,536 Odù come from an error Bascom corrected in 1969 2. A source repeating them has not read the standard literature.

Does it present one ranking of the sixteen Odù as the correct one? Bascom found 21 alternative rankings across 86 lists 2. A source unaware that lineages differ is reporting one lineage as universal.

Does it say Leibniz got binary from Ifá? False, and file 07 gives the dates. This single test eliminates a large fraction of the popular material.

Does it attribute fractals or recursion to Ifá citing Eglash? Misattributed: Eglash's recursion analysis is of Bamana sand divination 9.

Does it give confident meanings for all 256 Odù? No published scholarship provides this. Such lists come from practitioner and commercial sites, mix Nigerian with Cuban with invented material, and are untraceable.

Does it distinguish what the tradition says from what scholars document from what missionaries claimed? A source that blends the three cannot be relied on for any of them.

What is not in the literature

Worth knowing before you go looking.

The full corpus. Published collections hold a few hundred verses against an estimated hundred thousand or more. No complete edition exists or is likely to.

Initiate-restricted material. Higher initiation procedure and material concerning the òrìṣà Odù are not published, and scholars who touch on them say they are describing partially 4.

A definitive Odù list. Not because scholars have failed to compile one but because lineages genuinely differ 2.

Maupoil in English. Still.

Systematic study of digital and online Ifá. Beginning, and thin.

A note on reading as a Yorùbá person

For a reader who is Yorùbá and was taught this was darkness, one practical observation.

The scholarship is largely by Yorùbá scholars. Wande Abimbola, Kọ́lá Abímbọ́lá, Jacob Olupona, Rowland Abiodun, Ayodeji Ogunnaike, Omotade Adegbindin, Oyeronke Olajubu. Reading this literature is not reading outsiders' accounts of your heritage. It is reading your own people's scholarship, most of it produced in Nigerian and American universities over the last fifty years, much of it in dialogue with the practitioners who hold the material.

The exception, and it is a substantial one, is that the earliest descriptions are missionary and colonial. Bascom's assessment of those, that they reflect the naïveté, prejudices and superstitions of the observers who recorded them, is the professional judgment of an anthropologist who read all of them 2. That literature is where the demonisation comes from, and it is now a historical artifact rather than a source.