Odu Ifa

The Odu Ifa is the sacred text of the spiritual and ethical tradition of Ifa and one of the great sacred texts of the world. The Ifa tradition has its origins in ancient Yorubaland, but it holds a unique position among African religions as the only African religion which has continuously survived and developed on an international level. The religion appears in numerous countries under various names and forms—Lekumí (Santeria) in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States; Voudun in Haiti; Shango in Cuba; Candomblé in Brazil; and Ifa in Nigeria and the United States. But regardless of its various names and forms, it is the same tradition, rooted in the ancient teachings found in the same text, the Odu Ifa. Also, Ifa shares a unique status with Maat, the spiritual and ethical tradition of ancient Egypt, in their being the only two ancient African religions that have organized bodies of texts in which the tradition is rooted and developed.

The meaning of the word odu is open to various interpretations, whereas the word Ifa clearly refers to both the teachings in the text as well as the divine sage who taught them. In the Kawaida tradition, odu is translated as “baskets of sacred wisdom.” Thus, the Odu Ifa contains the “baskets of sacred wisdom of Ifa.” This reading is based on the Ifa creation narrative in which Olodumare, God, gives divine and human beings baskets of sacred wisdom to make the world good. Thus, each odu, or chapter, is a container of sacred wisdom that humans are to use to make their lives and the world good.

The Odu Ifa is composed of 256 chapters (odu) and innumerable verses (ese). Like other great sacred texts, it contains a wide range of literary forms and subjects, including poetry, proverbs, songs, chants, and sacred narratives, as well as prescriptions for divination and moral instructions for life. The seminal works on the Odu Ifa in translation, with commentary and analysis, are by Wande Abimbola, who is Awise Agbaye or International Spokesperson for the Ifa tradition. These works include Sixteen Great Poems of Ifa (1975), Ifa: An Exposition of the Ifa Literary Corpus (1976), Ifá Divination Poetry (1977), and Ifa Will Mend Our Broken World (1997).

In addition, there are also important works of translation of the Odu Ifa by others, including William Bascom's Ifa Divination(1969) and Sixteen Cowries(1980), Afolabi A. Epega and Philip Niemark's The Sacred Ifa Oracle (1995), and Solagbade Popoola's Practical Ifa (1997). Although the Ifa tradition is usually focused on divination and ritual sacrifice, within the Odu Ifa there is a rich corpus of ethical teachings that I have collected and translated in the text Odu Ifa: The Ethical Teachings (1999) and from which I will extract and discuss core concepts of the Ifa tradition here.

Although Ifa has other names, Orunmila is the most often used to represent him as the teacher of the Ifa texts. Orunmila is an orisha, a divine being or divinity, who is an assistant to Olodumare, who created heaven and earth. According to the sacred narrative of creation, Orunmila was present at creation and mastered knowledge of the world. He thus is regarded in Ifa tradition as the wisest of counselors and the custodian of divine or sacred wisdom. And it is the Odu that is the central source of this sacred wisdom of Ifa or Orunmila.

...