William Bascom's Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Africa (1969), still the standard ethnographic reference for the practice, describes the babalawo tapping the iroke against the edge of the opon Ifa, the wooden divination tray, while reciting invocatory verses calling on Orunmila, the orisha of wisdom and divination, and on the diviners who came before, before beginning the sixteen palm nut or divining chain procedure that generates an odu. The tapping and invocation together open the divination session and are treated as necessary to secure Orunmila's attention before the consultation proper begins.
The implement is commonly carved from ivory or a dense hardwood, often topped with a small kneeling human figure, a form that recurs across different Yoruba workshops and regions with local stylistic variation.
Regional and workshop variation in the iroke's carving is considerable: some examples from the Oyo region favor a single kneeling figure at the head, while others carry more elaborate multi-figure compositions, and museum and private collections holding Yoruba ritual art frequently include examples acquired during the colonial period whose original ritual provenance is often poorly documented, a gap that has itself become a subject of scholarly and repatriation interest distinct from the object's ongoing ritual use among practicing babalawo today.