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Bascom's Survey and What It Recorded

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Bascom's Survey and What It Recorded

The best known scholarly account of Ifa in English is William Bascom's Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Africa, published by Indiana University Press in 1969. It is a long book, most of its bulk given over to Yoruba texts with facing English translation, and it was assembled from fieldwork with practising diviners rather than from any single written source, because no single written source existed to work from. Bascom also treated the ordering of the figures as a question worth a separate study, apart from the monograph.

Two things follow for a reference page. The first is that what reached print is a sample: particular diviners, in particular places, at particular dates, recorded by a researcher who chose what to ask for and what to include. It is not a canon, and a verse absent from Bascom is not a verse absent from Ifa. The second is that the printed verse is the most portable part of the tradition and the least complete part of it. Knowing which verse applies to the person sitting in front of you, and what follows from it, is taught rather than published.

Eji Ogbe appears throughout that literature by virtue of its position at the head of the order, and its prominence in the published record reflects the prominence the tradition itself gives it.

The atlas records the shape of the corpus and the state of its documentation. The verses, the readings and the prescriptions given in consultation are held and conferred by initiated practitioners, and are not set out here.

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