An iyanifa is a woman initiated as a priest of Ifa, the Yoruba tradition of divination, able to divine with the sacred palm nuts and to hold the knowledge of the Odu.
The office and its title
The iyanifa is the female counterpart of the babalawo, and in lineages that recognise the office she performs the same divinatory and priestly work. The title, mother of Ifa, or mother of the secret, mirrors the babalawo's father of the secret. Her instrument is the corpus of Odu, the verses and signs read from the fall of the sacred nuts, and her authority rests on initiation into that knowledge within a recognised line.
A genuine and unsettled dispute
Whether women may be fully initiated into Ifa is one of the real unresolved questions of Yoruba religion. Some lineages, in Nigeria and widely in the Americas, initiate iyanifa and hold the practice to be old. Others maintain that the Ifa priesthood is male and that women serve the tradition through other offices, among them the apetebi, the wife or supporter of Ifa. The disagreement is doctrinal and unsettled, argued on both sides from the tradition's own sources, and it is set out here as a live dispute rather than resolved in either direction.