What is Ifá?

The witness

Orunmila, the witness to destiny

Who is Orunmila?

In the Yoruba tradition, every person chose their own destiny before being born. They knelt before Oloddumare and spoke it aloud, and only one stood by and heard it: Orunmila. That is why he is called Eleri Ipin, «witness to the choice».

The distinction matters. Orunmila does not invent your destiny and does not hand it to you. He remembers what you yourself said. So when life goes off course, or a road has to be chosen and you cannot see it, his oracle is consulted — not to be told something new, but to hear again what was already spoken.

The word

The 256 Odù, the written word of the oracle

What are the 256 Odù of Ifá?

The word of Ifá is arranged into 256 Odù. Sixteen of them are the major signs, called Meyi — from Eyiogbe to Ofun Meyi. The other 240 are the combined signs, the omoluos, born from crossing the sixteen with one another.

Each Odù is a chapter in full. It carries its own prayer, its patakís (the sacred stories), its iré and its osogbo, its advice, its taboos and its ebbós. Between them they cover the whole of a life: nothing that happens to a human being falls outside an Odù.

The number is not random. A sign is drawn in four places, and each place takes one mark or two. That gives 2⁴ = 16 figures, the Meyi. When the oracle falls, two figures are marked — one on the right, one on the left — and that gives 16 × 16 = 256. When both halves are the same, the sign is a Meyi, a «double». When they are different, it is an omoluo, and its name joins the two: Ogbe Yeku carries Ogbe on the right and Oyekun on the left.

The 16 Meyi, one by one

The Meyi are the major signs. They rule, they open the year, and they give their character to the other 240. This is what each one is about, in the words of its own page in this treatise.

The craft

The babalawo and the consultation

What is a babalawo?

The priest of Ifá is the babalawo, which means «father of secrets». He is consecrated to handle the oracle, and only he may open it.

The consultation is called the osode. In it the babalawo asks with the okuele, the divining chain, or, in the great ceremonies, with the sacred ikines on the board of Ifá. What falls is a sign, and that sign names the Odù. From there comes everything Ifá has to say to that person, on that day, about the thing they came to ask.

The consultation follows an order. First the sign comes out. Then the babalawo asks whether it comes in iré or in osogbo, and which road it comes by: who brings the good, or where the danger is coming from. At the end he asks what has to be done — the ebbó — and what closes it. The babalawo does not make any of this up. He reads the Odù that came out, and the Odù already says what it has to say. That is why the treatise matters so much: it is the text the priest has to know by heart.

Awó is the babalawo's own title — Awó ni Orunmila, «the secret of Orunmila» — and the oldest of them lead the greater ceremonies. In the house of santo there are also the oriaté and the iyalosha or babalosha, and each of them works with a different oracle. Ifá does not compete with them. It is where you go when the matter is serious, or when the word of Orunmila is the one that is needed.

The two roads

Iré and osogbo: the fortune and the shadow

What are iré and osogbo in Ifá?

No Odù arrives alone. It comes either in iré — the blessing: health, stability, victory, a settled house — or in osogbo — the warning: illness, loss, the death that hangs about waiting.

This is where people misread Ifá. There is no good sign and no bad sign. There are roads. The same Odù that ruins one person lifts another, and the oracle's work is to say which of the two you are standing in, where it is coming from, and what has to be done about it.

Iré and osogbo never come as a single word on their own. Each one carries a second name, and the second name says which way it comes. An iré that comes through your work is not the same as one that comes through the hand of the dead, and an osogbo of illness is not an osogbo of tragedy. This treatise records 605 iré and 983 osogbo across the 256 signs. These are the ones that come back most often.

The iré: where the good comes from

Iré Ariku

Long life and health. The greatest good of all: that death does not touch you yet. It comes back in more than a hundred roads of the treatise.

Iré Ashegun Otá

Beating your enemies. It is the most frequent iré in the whole corpus, 194 appearances: Ifá gives the victory over whoever is in the way.

Iré Ayé

The good that comes through the world: prosperity, the business that works, the abundance that comes from your own work.

Iré Owó

The good that comes through money, the hand that opens.

Iré Omó

The good that comes through children: the safe birth, the family line.

Iré Obiní

The good that comes through the woman, through the partner.

Iré Lese Egun

The good that comes by the hand of the dead: the ancestors holding you up.

The osogbo: where the shadow comes from

Osogbo Ikú

Death. The greatest osogbo: the one to push away before any other.

Osogbo Arun

Illness, the body breaking down. It is also written Aron.

Osogbo Ofo

Loss. What goes and does not come back: the job, the house, the person. It is the most frequent osogbo in the corpus, 222 appearances.

Osogbo Eyó

Tragedy, the quarrel, the blood. The trouble that breaks out between people.

Osogbo Ogú

Witchcraft: harm put on you on purpose, by another hand.

Osogbo Ashelú

Justice, the authorities, prison. The sign that warns of trouble with the law.

The second names change from house to house and from branch to branch; these are the ones this treatise uses. What does not change is the logic: the oracle never says only «good» or «bad» — it says which way it comes.

The remedy

The ebbó: the sacrifice that opens the way

What is an ebbó?

Ifá does not stop at telling you what is wrong. It prescribes. The ebbó is the work the Odù marks: to hold the iré in place, or to turn the osogbo aside before it lands.

It can be a cleaning, an offering, a prayer over the head, or a major piece of work that takes days. The scale varies; the logic does not. Across the patakís the same lesson comes back again and again — whoever makes the ebbó finds the road open, and whoever looks down on it gets caught by the story.

An ebbó is not a punishment and it is not a payment. It changes where the person stands in relation to what is coming. That is why the Odù always marks it — never what the priest prefers — and why each one has its own materials, its own place and its own destination. This treatise records 1,447 ebbós and 1,022 works across the 256 signs: 2,469 remedies in all, each one tied to the road that explains it.

What people actually come to ask about

Sorted by what they are meant to fix, the seven most frequent reasons behind those 2469 remedies draw a map of human life that anyone will recognize:

• 511Beating enemiesWhat people ask for most in the whole treatise.
• 451SpiritualThe dead, the guardian angel, what is not being looked after.
• 334HealthThe body and what is threatening it.
• 292MoneyThe work that does not come, the business that never gets going.
• 255Keeping death awayWhat you do when Ikú is close.
• 202LoveThe partner, the house, what got broken.
• 146LossWhat is no longer there and has to be won back.

The list says something about Ifá. It is not an oracle of curiosities. Almost everything it records is a concrete problem of a concrete person — enemies, money, health, family — with a practical answer for each one. The materials and the steps of every ebbó are on the page of its Odù, and the major works are only set up by a consecrated babalawo: none of this is done on your own from a web page.

The memory

The patakis: the memory of the oracle

What is a patakí?

Every Odù keeps its patakís: the stories of the orishas, the animals and the people who lived that sign first, before anyone else.

They are not decorative fables and they are not folklore. They work as case law. The patakí is the case that set the ruling, and the ruling is what the babalawo applies to the person in front of him. That is why this treatise carries all of them, in full, without merging two into one and without trimming the parts that are uncomfortable.

The logic is a courtroom, not a story with a moral at the end. When Irete Untelu comes out and the sign forbids guava, the ban is not somebody's opinion. It comes from the road where Oluó Popó blessed the wasp and left it said that, for as long as the world lasts, that Odù will not taste guava. The case set the ruling, and the ruling is applied to whoever draws that Odù centuries later. That is why a patakí is not summarized. It is quoted whole.

• 5,338Patakís in the treatiseEvery road of the 256 Odù, none merged into another.
• 3,897ProverbsThe rulings of the signs, each in one short line.
• 1,992Appearances of orishasWho speaks in each Odù, and why.

Of those 5,338, there are 768 open to anyone — at least one in every single one of the 256 signs — and the rest make up the body of the treatise. No Odù is left without a story you can read for free.

The boundary

The eewó: what is forbidden

What is an eewó?

A person's Odù also gives them their eewó: the taboos that protect them. A food they must not eat. An act they must not commit. A place they must not go.

These are not arbitrary rules. Every eewó comes out of a road of the sign — something happened there once, to someone, and the prohibition is what remained. Knowing the reason behind yours is the whole difference between learning a list by heart and actually understanding it.

An eewó is not a sin. It is closer to an allergy: something that harms this person, because of the sign they carry, while it does nothing at all to somebody else. This is why there is no universal list of Ifá taboos. Whoever carries Eyiogbe must not wear stripes; to a person with another sign that means nothing. This treatise holds 1,502 eewó across the 256 Odù, and 1,133 of them come with the reason: the exact road the ban came out of.

Real examples, with their reason

• Do not wear striped clothes. Stripes look like the bars of a jail; this Odù marks the risk of prison and loss of freedom. Eyiogbe
• Do not eat guava paste. Because of the blessing of Oluó Popó on the wasp: as long as the world is the world, Irete Untelu will not taste guava. Irete Untelu
• Do not mistreat children. Here Olofin took the children away to heaven because they were mistreated so much, and he shut off the water. Ika Roso
• Do not drink anything you did not see being served. They put poison in your drink, as they did to Orunmila in the house of Olofin. Irete Kanlú
• Do not curse your own luck. Your Angel does not like it. Ika Kana
• Do not waste money: save for tomorrow. Do not throw away money or bread, no matter how old it is — says Elegbá. Irete Yero

The first four show the kinds that exist: one about clothing, one about food, one about how you treat other people, and one about looking after yourself. An eewó can be anything a road has marked. And they all have the same shape: do not do this — because on such a road this happened. Take the reason away and the tradition turns into superstition. Keep it and it turns into memory.

Your own eewó are confirmed by a babalawo in the itá, reading the Odù that came out. No published list takes the place of that.

The origin

«Here is born»: what the world owes each Odù

What does «here is born» mean in an Odù of Ifá?

One phrase comes back all through the corpus of Ifá: «here is born». An Odù does not only give advice. It claims to be the place where something appeared in the world for the first time. A custom, a law, a trade, a natural fact, an invention. This treatise records 1,672 of those birth certificates.

For a newcomer it is the most surprising part of the oracle, because it shows what kind of text Ifá wants to be: not a manual for divination, but an account that sets out to explain the whole world. Everything that exists came into the world through one of the signs.

1. The scattering of languages. Eyiogbe rules the word; it is called «the Odù of the double language». Eyiogbe
2. Sacred writing and ink. From the road where Shangó created writing so that Olofin could do the consecrations. Oyekun Meyi
3. Marriage. After the war between the men and the women, Obatalá gathered those who had slept together and married them. Odi Bara
4. Sea trade. The boatman with no passengers and the hunter with no prey met at the riverbank: from then on the boatman ferries the hunter across, and the hunter got back all the ivory he had lost. Ika Oggunda
5. The airplane. The witch Omologú stuck wings on himself with wax to cross the sea through the air — and Olofin melted them off him. Ika Bara

Look at the last one. An African oracle passed on by word of mouth for centuries keeps, in one of its 256 chapters, the story of a man who stuck wings on himself to fly and had them taken away by the sky — and the tradition calls it the birth of human flight. You do not have to believe in Ifá to see what that means: humanity has been repeating the same warning for thousands of years.

The mix-up

Are Ifá and Santería the same thing?

No, although they go together. Santería — the popular name for the Regla de Osha — is the worship of the orishas: Elegbá, Obatalá, Yemayá, Shangó, Oshún, Oyá and the rest. Ifá is the oracle of Orunmila and the body of knowledge held in the 256 Odù. In Cuba the two branches have grown so close together that in practice you cannot pull them apart. They are still not the same thing.

The clearest difference is who leads the ceremony. In Osha it is the oriaté, the iyalosha and the babalosha — the mother and the father of santo — and they work with the diloggún, the oracle of the cowrie shells. In Ifá it is the babalawo, consecrated to Orunmila, working with the okuele and the ikines. A person can be made in santo without being a babalawo; a babalawo, in Cuban practice, has almost always gone through Osha first.

The other difference is reach. In the diloggún the santero reads up to the twelfth letter. From the thirteenth on, the consultation is sent to Ifá, because those letters are spoken by Orunmila. That is why he is called Eleri Ipin: he does not rule over the orishas, but he was the witness to the destiny of all of them, and his word ends the argument.

Ifá is not the same as Palo Monte either, or as spiritism, even though many Cuban houses practice all three. Palo comes from the Congo, not from Yoruba land; spiritism arrived from Europe in the 19th century. They share a space, not an origin. The story of how they came to share it is the story of Cuba.

Your sign

How do I know which Odù is mine?

How do I know which Odù of Ifá is mine?

Through a babalawo, and in one way only: in ceremony. There is no test, no birth date, no calculation that gives it to you. An Odù is not chosen and it is not worked out — it comes out.

There are two different moments. In a consultation — the osode — the babalawo draws the sign that rules that matter on that day. It is the word of Ifá about what the person came to ask, and it changes from one consultation to the next. In the itá, the ceremony of consecration, the Odù that stays with the person for life comes out. That one really is «their» sign, and with it come their eewó, their warnings and their road.

In between there is the hand of Orula (Awofakán for a man, Ikofá for a woman): the ceremony where most people receive their first personal Odù and their taboos. Orula is the familiar name of Orunmila, and this is the way into Ifá for anyone who is not going to be consecrated as a babalawo.

In the meantime this treatise is open. The 256 signs, with their essence, their proverbs, their patakís and their taboos, can be read without having received anything. Reading is not the same as being consecrated, and no text replaces the ceremony — but knowing the corpus before you sit down in front of a babalawo changes everything you understand when he speaks.

Do not trust any site, app or person promising to «calculate» your Odù from your name or your date of birth. In the tradition there is no such thing.

· The book goes on

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