Odun Ifa

Most Yoruba festivals belong to an orisha. Odun Ifa belongs to Ifa itself, which is not an orisha but a system: the practice of divination, the priesthood that carries it, and the corpus of verse that priesthood holds in memory. The difference shows in what actually happens on the day. The gathering at Oke Itase in Ile-Ife is not principally a procession or a masquerade but a consultation, performed in public by the Araba of Ife with the assembled babalawo watching the tray. The question put is not a personal one. It is asked on behalf of everybody, and the figure that falls is announced afterwards as the reading for the year ahead, together with the sacrifices it calls for.

The priests present then recite from the Odu that has come. That recitation is the heart of the day and it is the part this atlas will not carry. The verses belong to a living priesthood and are transmitted through initiation, and reproducing them here would take something that is given rather than published. What can be said is what the recitation is for. An ese sets out a case that has happened before, what was done about it and how it turned out, and the diviner's work is to find the case that matches the one in front of him. A public casting is that same operation performed on a whole community at once.

The scale of attendance is the newest thing about it. Priests initiated in Havana, Bahia, Port of Spain and Miami now travel to Ile-Ife for the first Saturday in June, and the year's figure reaches communities within hours that will never see the tray it was cast on.

Ile-Ife holds the festival because Ile-Ife claims Orunmila. In Ife tradition the figure called Agbonniregun, identified with Orunmila, lived and taught in the city, and the shrine at Oke Itase is where that claim is kept. The Ooni of Ife attends, makes his offering and sits while the casting is done, which places the palace inside the festival without putting it at the centre. On Olojo the arrangement is the other way round.

The June date is worth stating carefully, because a claim rides on it that is easy to overstate. Current practice sets the casting on the first Saturday in June and treats the announcement as the opening of a new Ifa year. A good deal of contemporary Yoruba revivalist writing goes further and presents that day as the Yoruba new year in a reckoning called Kojoda, carrying a year number in the ten thousands. The festival and the June casting are well attested. The year count is a twentieth century reconstruction, is not attested in the older record, and this atlas keeps the two apart rather than folding one into the other.

What is old is the shape of the thing: a divination performed for a whole community at a turning point, by the senior diviner, with the result published as guidance and as a list of sacrifices. That pattern is documented across Yoruba towns, and the annual casting at Oke Itase is an instance of it, whatever is counted from it.