The Ifa Literary Corpus

Calling the Ifa corpus a scripture is a decision worth stating. It has no autograph, no canon list, no closing date and no institution empowered to say what belongs in it. What it has is a structure every practitioner agrees on and a body of verse no practitioner holds in full. The structure is 256 figures, called Odu: sixteen principal ones, the Odu Meji, and the two hundred and forty produced by pairing them. A divination produces one of these figures, and the figure is the address at which the answer is kept.

Under each Odu sits an open set of ese, verses in a Yoruba register full of archaic and proverbial forms. An ese does not state a rule. It narrates. Someone in the past faced this situation, went to a named diviner, was told to sacrifice a named thing, did or did not do it, and this is what became of them. The diviner's task is to select, from what he holds, the case that fits the client in front of him. That is why the corpus cannot be closed: a tradition of precedent has no reason to stop accumulating precedents, and a priest who has trained for twenty years and one who has trained for five will not recite the same Odu the same way.

So there is no copy. There are priests, each carrying a portion, and the portion is acquired by memorisation over years alongside a teacher. That is what this atlas means by an oral corpus, and it is why this entry describes a shape rather than presenting a text.

Printed collections of Ifa verse do exist. Wande Abimbola, himself an initiate and a scholar, published selections in the 1970s that remain the standard academic point of entry, and William Bascom's fieldwork between the 1930s and the 1960s recorded a substantial body of material for both Ifa and the sixteen cowrie system. Practitioner publications in Nigeria, Cuba, Brazil and the United States have added a great deal more. None of these is the corpus and none of them claims to be. Each is a selection made by a particular person from what particular priests were willing to give.

This atlas does not reproduce, quote or closely paraphrase any ese, and that is a rule rather than an oversight. Ifa is a living religion. Its verses are transmitted through initiation and through a teaching relationship, and their circulation is part of what the priesthood is. Facts about the corpus, its structure, its language, how it is learned and what an ese does, are ordinary subjects of description and are described here. The verses themselves are not the atlas's to hand on.

The same rule covers the initiatory material around them. Itefa, the initiation that makes a babalawo, and the internal grades and obligations of that priesthood, are named here as closed and are not reconstructed. Where a reader wants the verses, the route is the one the tradition itself provides, which is a teacher, and the published scholarship is the honest second best.

Sources Ifa: An Exposition of Ifa Literary CorpusWande Abimbola with Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West AfricaWilliam Bascom