Ifá and Other Knowledge Domains: Medicine, Ethics, History, and Reasoning from Cases

The Ifá corpus is not only a divination resource. It is where a great deal of Yorùbá knowledge was stored, because a society without writing needs somewhere to put things and the 256 addresses were the filing system available. Abimbola's summary is that Ifá is recognised by the Yorùbá "as a repository for Yoruba traditional body of knowledge embracing history, philosophy, medicine and folklore" 1

This file examines what that means concretely for four domains, and then examines the strongest structural claim made about the corpus, that it works like case law. That claim is largely defensible and is worth stating precisely enough to see where it breaks.

Medicine

The connection between Ifá and healing is not decorative. Abimbola: "In traditional Yoruba society, Ifa priests were the physicians, midwives and psychiatrists of their own communities" 1 A newly initiated priest was expected to specialise in one of these fields, spending at least five further years with a recognised expert 1.

Bascom's account of the babaláwo's practical work makes the same point from the client's side. The diviner channels sacrifices and worshippers into different cults, recommends offerings to the dead or means of dealing with witches and àbíkú, children who do not wish to live, and prepares protective and retaliatory medicines 2.

The material link runs through the verses. Every verse carries a prescribed offering, memorised with it 1, and many carry medicinal preparations. Abimbola notes that many Ifá medicinal preparations are made with iyèròsùn, the divining powder 1, which puts the pharmacological and the divinatory into the same physical procedure.

The scale of the pharmacological content is documented by Pierre Verger's Ewé, which runs to 744 pages and presents 2,216 recipes based on leaves, barks, seeds, fruits, flowers and roots, gathered over roughly forty years of fieldwork 3. Verger organised the material with attention to the incantations (ọfọ̀) accompanying each preparation and to the connections between preparations and Ifá divination signs 3. Verger was initiated as a babaláwo at Kétu in 1953, which is how he had access to the material 3.

Two things follow that are easy to miss.

The plant knowledge is indexed by Odù. A preparation is not stored as an isolated recipe but attached to a verse under an address. Retrieval of the remedy and retrieval of the diagnosis are the same operation.

The incantation is part of the preparation. The ọfọ̀ is not commentary on the recipe; it is a component of it, expressing the qualities of the ingredients in poetic terms 3. Separating the pharmacology from the verbal formula, as a modern reader instinctively does, is a distortion of how the knowledge is actually held.

The obvious question, whether the pharmacology works, is a matter for pharmacological research rather than for this file. Some Yorùbá medicinal plants have documented activity and some do not, and the corpus makes no distinction between the two categories. What can be said is that the corpus preserves a very large body of systematically organised plant knowledge, and that the organising principle is the divination system.

Ethics

The corpus carries ethical content, and it carries it in a specific form: not as commandments but as outcomes attached to cases.

The structural mechanism is the eight-part verse form set out in file 04. Parts 5, 6 and 7 record whether the client complied with the prescription, what followed, and how he reacted, and part 8, which is obligatory, draws the moral 14. Every complete verse therefore ends with an explicit ethical conclusion derived from a narrated consequence.

The dominant theme is compliance with prescribed offering, and Abimbola notes that many verses end by stressing its importance and warning of the consequences of neglect 1. But the moral content is broader than ritual compliance. The verses reward patience, generosity, good character and respect, and punish arrogance, greed, impatience and the neglect of obligations, and they do so by showing what happened.

The central ethical concept, ìwà pẹ̀lẹ́, gentle or good character, belongs to the cosmology section and is not developed here. Its relevance to Ifá as a discipline is that character is treated as a professional qualification: the initiation examination in the forest tests the candidate on his "competence in the Ifa system and outlook on life" 1

What makes this ethically interesting rather than merely didactic is the conditional structure. The verse does not say a good person prospers. It says a particular person in particular circumstances was told to do a particular thing, did or did not, and a particular outcome followed. Generalisation is left to the interpreter. This is closer to casuistry, reasoning from cases, than to rule-based ethics, and it is the same feature that supports the jurisprudence comparison below.

History

Verses encode events, migrations, dynastic claims and the founding of towns, and UNESCO's citation notes that the ẹsẹ reflect Yorùbá history, language, beliefs and contemporary issues 5.

The corpus is therefore a historical source, and the history section of this corpus treats the general problem of using oral literature as evidence. Four cautions specific to ẹsẹ Ifá are worth stating here.

The verses are not chronological. They are filed by divination address, not by date. There is no sequence to extract and no internal dating.

The characters are frequently not historical. Many verse protagonists are ọ̀rìṣà, animals, or personified abstractions. Bascom notes that the sixteen paired figures themselves appear in the verses as diviners and central characters, described by informants as having lived on earth like human beings in the period when the deities also did, though "they are not considered as, or worshiped as, deities" 6 Distinguishing a historical actor from a mythological one inside a verse is often not possible.

The corpus is open. UNESCO notes the number of verses continues to grow 5. New material enters, which means a verse's presence in the corpus does not date it.

The verses were composed to be useful, not accurate. A verse survives because diviners find it applicable, not because it records what happened.

Against these, the corpus has one significant evidentiary virtue: because it was transmitted with an obligatory fixed skeleton 1, the invariant parts of a verse, including names, are relatively protected against drift. Where a verse names a town, a title, or a person, that naming is more stable than the surrounding narration.

Abimbola's characterisation is the defensible one, that the corpus is the storehouse "inside which the Yoruba comprehension of their own historical experiences and understanding of their environment can always be found" 1 It records how the Yorùbá understood their history, which is a real and different thing from recording the history.

Ifá as reasoning from cases

This is the strongest structural claim made about the corpus, and it holds up better than most claims in this section.

The structural argument

The parallel between an ẹsẹ Ifá and a law report is close, and it is close at the level of form rather than by analogy.

A law report names the parties, states the facts, records the decision, and states the holding. An ẹsẹ Ifá names the diviners who decided, names the client, states the occasion, records the prescription, records compliance, records the outcome, and states the moral 4. Both are records of a particular decision in a particular situation preserved because future situations will resemble it.

The retrieval procedure is analogical in the same way legal reasoning is. The client hears verses and stops the diviner at the one that resembles his situation 1. The reasoning is: this case is like my case, therefore what governed that case governs mine. That is reasoning by precedent, and the matching is done by the party whose situation it is.

The corpus is treated as authoritative and citable. Bascom: the verses "embody myths recounting the activities of the deities and justifying details of ritual, and they are often cited to settle a disputed point of theology or ritual" 2 Citation to settle disputes is precisely what a body of precedent is for.

The babaláwo functions as an authority on doctrine generally, not only on his own practice. Bascom: he "is accepted as an authority on Yoruba religion. He is a professional whose business involves learning about all the deities, not merely the one he himself worships," and he is consulted by worshippers of many different deities as well as by Muslim and Christian converts 2.

There is a scholar positioned to make this argument with unusual authority. Kọ́lá Abímbọ́lá holds a doctorate in philosophy of science and a second doctorate in the law of evidence, has published on abductive reasoning in law, and was consecrated a babaláwo by the Ògeese conclave of diviners of the Aláàfin of Ọ̀yọ́ 7. His Yorùbá Culture: A Philosophical Account argues that the philosophical ideas implicit in Ọ̀rìṣà religion form the basis of Yorùbá culture 8. I was not able to consult the book directly and so do not attribute the case-law comparison to him in any specific form; I note only that the person best equipped to assess it works in exactly these two fields. Confidence: medium on the strength of the comparison, and I have not verified that he frames it as I have here.

Bascom's argument about checkability

The most substantial support for reading Ifá as a rule-governed discipline rather than an intuitive one comes from Bascom, and it deserves quoting at length because it is a careful comparative claim.

He begins by noting that "the rules of Ifa divination can be defined as precisely as those of the simpler methods using four or sixteen cowries" 2 Then the contrast:

"In many other types of divination, in Africa and elsewhere, the subjective element in interpretation leaves room for dispute, even among diviners." He lists cases: the fall of bones read by relative position, the angles of sticks in joint bones, the lines on fire-cracked shoulder blades, the entrails of a fowl, tea leaves, lines of the palm 2. Then the sharper case: "In crystal- or water-gazing, where no one can confirm or contradict what the diviner says he sees, and in shamanistic performances or states of possession, where a familiar spirit or deity speaks to or through his medium only, interpretations are not subject to check either by the client himself or by other diviners" 2

Against that: "In contrast, the babalawo follow a regular system of rules, deviation from which is criticized by their colleagues and condemned by their clients. At least the elementary rules are understood by their regular patrons and, even when they are not known, clients are provided with recognized techniques to prevent a babalawo from departing from the rules in order to employ his personal knowledge of their affairs to his own or any one else's advantage. A client need not even reveal to the diviner the nature of the problem which prompts him to seek his advice" 2

This is an argument about procedural verifiability rather than about truth, and it is the right argument. Bascom is not claiming Ifá predictions come true. He is claiming that Ifá, unlike scrying or possession, has publicly known rules, an outcome not controlled by the practitioner, an audience competent to detect deviation, and a structural device preventing the practitioner from exploiting private knowledge of the client. Those are the properties that make a practice a discipline.

His closing remark carries some edge: given all this, "some of the early descriptions of Ifa are amusing reflections of the naïveté, prejudices, and superstitions of the observers who recorded them" 2

Where the comparison breaks

Four disanalogies, and they are not trivial.

Case selection is randomised. Which precedents a litigant may cite is determined by relevance. Which verses a client hears is determined by a cast of palm nuts. No legal system selects governing authority by chance, and this is the deepest difference between the two.

There is no hierarchy of authority. Law has appellate structure, binding and persuasive authority, and mechanisms for overruling. Ifá has seniority among Odù, which is disputed between lineages 6, but no appellate court, no doctrine of overruling, and no way of retiring a verse.

There is no adversarial testing. A legal precedent is argued against by an opposing party before a decision-maker. An ẹsẹ Ifá is recited and interpreted without any structural opponent.

The corpus is not consolidated. No practitioner holds all of it, no written version is authoritative, and lineages differ 16. Law depends on a shared, consultable, and reasonably consolidated record.

The accurate formulation is that ẹsẹ Ifá are case-based reasoning without a court. The form of precedential reasoning is present, the institutional apparatus that makes precedent binding is not. That is a real and interesting intellectual structure, and overstating it into a claim that Ifá is a legal system would be the same kind of error as the Leibniz claim in file 07.

Ifá as unwritten scripture, and a caution

Bascom writes that the verses "in effect constitute their unwritten scriptures" 2, and he records a striking piece of evidence for how far that reading was taken by Yorùbá people themselves.

The most notable religious syncretism arising from European contact, he says, is a church founded in Lagos in 1934, the Ìjọ Ọ̀rúnmìlà Adúláwọ̀, "which was founded on the premise that the teachings of Ifa constitute the Yoruba Bible" 2

This is significant for the reader this corpus is written for. Yorùbá people responding to Christianity in the 1930s did not uniformly abandon Ifá or uniformly reject the new religion. Some reorganised Ifá into a church, with the corpus as its scripture, because the comparison to scripture seemed to them apt and useful.

The caution attached is the one from file 04: the scripture comparison fails on canon, on fixity, on authority, and on closure. The corpus has no fixed text, no closed canon, no adjudicating body, and it is growing 5. A reader who takes "the Yorùbá Bible" as anything more than a strategic analogy will misunderstand how the corpus works.

A summary of the epistemology

The features that make Ifá an epistemically interesting object, gathered from across this section:

The practitioner is denied the question 1. The outcome is randomised. The relevance judgment belongs to the client 1. The prescription is fixed to the verse rather than invented 1. The rules are publicly known and deviation is detectable by colleagues and clients 2. The corpus is distributed, so no individual controls it 1. The reasoning is analogical from recorded cases rather than deductive from doctrine 4.

None of this shows that the system produces true statements about the future, and nothing in the scholarship claims it does. What it shows is that the system was built with an unusual degree of attention to constraining the practitioner, and that the constraints are structural rather than moral. That is worth understanding on its own terms, and it is invisible to anyone who approaches Ifá as fortune telling or as superstition.