Babalawo

A reader who wants to know what a babalawo does can be told, accurately and at length: he divines with Ifa, identifies the odu that has fallen, recites from the corpus attached to it, prescribes what is to be done, and holds in memory a body of material that takes years to learn. That is the public face of the office and there is no reason to be vague about it.

This is not because the material is unavailable. A good deal of it has been printed, by ethnographers working in the twentieth century, and more recently by people selling books and services to a market that wants access without obligation. Availability is the whole of the problem and none of the justification. That something is in print is not evidence that anyone entitled to release it did so.

The same reasoning covers the houngan and mambo entries, where the kanzo is closed, and it is the reasoning this atlas already applies to restricted mantras and to Native American ceremony.

There is also a practical point. Initiatory knowledge in these traditions is transmitted inside a relationship, to a particular person, by a particular elder, under obligations that continue afterwards. A description lifted out of that context is not a shortened version of the thing. It is a different thing, and it tends to be wrong in ways that only an initiate would notice.

On the sources for this entry

The scholarly literature on Ifa is real and is used here. Some of it, including the mid-century ethnographic corpus, published divination verses that practitioners had not agreed to release. Where such work is cited in this atlas it is cited for what it establishes about the structure and history of the office, and its own record on this question is noted rather than passed over.

UNESCO proclaimed the Ifa divination system a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005, later inscribed on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, formal international recognition of the depth and coherence of the corpus a babalawo spends years memorising, alongside comparable recognition given to a small number of other oral traditions worldwide.

The office and the divination system behind it travelled across the Atlantic with enslaved Yoruba people from the sixteenth century onward, and distinct but related priesthoods descend from that same source in Cuba, where the tradition is generally called Santeria or Regla de Ocha, and in Brazil, within Candomble, each having developed its own vocabulary, ritual detail and relationship to the babalawo role over centuries of separate development under different colonial conditions. Contemporary practice now spans West Africa, the Americas and a growing diaspora of initiates elsewhere, including intentional communities such as Oyotunji Village in South Carolina, founded in the 1970s specifically to practise a reconstructed Yoruba religious life in the United States, so that a role rooted in West African tradition is now transmitted and practised on multiple continents under governments and legal systems entirely unconnected to its origin.