Composing New Ese Ifa: A Great Literary Corpus and it's Boundless Opportunities
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Composing New Ese Ifa
A Great Literary Corpus and it's Boundless Opportunities
Picture of opon ifa, divination platform and cosmological symbol of the Ifa system of knowledge and divination with a quaternary inscription adapted from traditional Ifa iconography, here suggesting the four spatial directions and their possible correlation with the first four odu ifa, also correlated with other aspects of the human being and the cosmos.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Comparative
Cognitive Processes and Systems
''Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
Abstract
An argument for the need to study the literary qualities of ese ifa, the literature of the Ifa system of knowledge and divination, in dialogue with other aspects of the system, and to enlarge the corpus through creating new ese ifa, as well as to adapt ese ifa techniques and orientations to new creations even if such efforts are not understood as expanding the sacred corpus.
Contents
What is Ese Ifa?
Reasons for the Near National and Global Invisibility of Ese Ifa
What is Odu Ifa?
How Ese Ifa are Used in Ifa Divination
The Literary Qualities of Ese Ifa
Ese Ifa as both Entertainment and Information
Structures of Ese Ifa
Questions on the Implications of Composing New Ese Ifa
Closed and Open Ended Scriptural Traditions
Judaism and Christianity
Hinduism and Buddhism
The Collaborative Composition of Ese Ifa
Between Open and Closed Approaches to Ese Ifa
Creative Possibilities of Composing New Ese Ifa
Implications for the Ifa Tradition of Composing New Ese Ifa
Moyo Okediji’s Ifa Tuntun, New Ifa
Breaking Open
What is Ese Ifa?
Ese ifa is one of the world’s great bodies of literature, in its volume, range of subjects and scope of literary techniques; its relationship to visually powerful and symbolically rich visual arts, its unique affiliation with the sacred, its conjunction with herbalogy; its performative power actualized through chanting, music and gesture and its centralization within a nexus of spatial patterns, graphic symbols and mathematical permutations, a totality projecting spiritual and philosophical orientations.
This literature, however, is practically invisible to most people in its native Nigeria and is largely unknown within the global study of literature. Its near invisibility outside academic circles and the ranks of devotees of the spirituality to which it belongs are the outcome of its largely oral character and how it is perceived as the literary corpus of the Ifa system of knowledge and divination, best known in its cultivation in Yoruba culture centred in Nigeria, a culture also evident in neighboring countries even as Ifa is also developed in Benin, of Nigeria's Edo region, while the Yoruba variant of Ifa has also spread to the Americas.
Ifa demonstrates close similarities of structure, purpose, and, at times, even naming, with divinatory systems in other parts of Nigeria and West Africa, such as the Igbo Afa, the Benin/Edo Oguega, the Dahomean Fa and further afield, shares less precise but still striking similarities with the Chinese I Ching.
I argue in this essay for the need to both study ese ifa and create new
examples of the literary genre.
Reasons for the Near National and Global Invisibility of Ese Ifa
The primary transmission method of ese ifa is through oral recitation and
memorization, even though it is now significantly represented in book
collections, often in translation. My understanding, however, is that beyond
Wande Abimbola’s groundbreaking and perhaps yet unequalled books, An Exposition
of Ifa Literary Corpus and Ifa Divination Poetry, there is little
literary study of ese ifa. It is included in some anthologies of African oral literature
but literary studies of the scope required for teaching ese ifa as literature
are not texts I have encountered beyond Abimbola’s works.
A primary problem leading to this inadequacy might be tension between its literary character and its sacred identity, a tension proving problematic for both those who identify with the literature as the expression of a spiritual culture and those who are repelled by that culture, since Ifa is integral to the now marginalized classical traditional Yoruba spirituality, part of classical African spiritualities which have been eclipsed by Western modernity, Christianity and Islam.
A number of those who identify with the spirituality to which Ifa belongs have challenges with appreciating the fact that the texts they revere derive their communicative force from techniques of linguistic manipulation and imaginative creation that define literature generally, secular and sacred. Within those whose influence by Western modernity, Christianity and Islam shape how they see Ifa, Ifa literature may be perceived as anachronistic, irrelevant in contemporary times or spiritually negative.
Ese ifa, however, demonstrate the narrative power, force of characterization, timelessness and potency of narrative settings that have made ancient Greek myth famous, the crystalline, jewel like beauty of Zen Buddhist stories and koans, gnomic puzzles suggesting philosophical directions, and Sufi, Islamic mystical stories, the balance of the phantasmagoric and the everyday actualized by the Judaic Hasidic tales of Nahman of Bratslav, the structural tightness, gnomic wisdom and verbal jazziness of some ese ifa signaling towards the union of philosophical paradox and eloquent compression uniquely achieved by the Argentinian writer Jorge Lous Borges.
What is Odu Ifa?
Odu Ifa are the organizational structures in terms of which ese ifa are organized. Odu Ifa are like book chapters while ese Ifa are the contents of the book.
There are 256 odu ifa. Each odu has a name and each has an unknown number of ese ifa, Ifa literary texts, attached to it.
How Ese Ifa are Used in Ifa Divination
Ese ifa constitute the primary information system of Ifa. The ese Ifa contain a broad range of scenarios understood as corresponding to various possibilities people may encounter.
The diviner interprets the patterns made by the divination instruments when divining, in terms of particular odu ifa. An effort is made to interpret the oracle's response to the client's query in terms of texts corresponding to the odu ifa pattern the divination instruments assume when cast by the diviner.
The Literary Qualities of Ese Ifa
Ese Ifa as both Entertainment and Information
Ese Ifa might be unique in world literature. It employs the standard characteristics of literature as globally known, qualities that give vividness to a subject through the manner it is depicted, or which verbally create something that does not exist.
Ese Ifa, however, might be unique in depicting the deities of Ifa spirituality
as instruments of obviously imaginative play even though those same deities are
revered in the same spiritual culture.
Even Zen Buddhism, which does the same thing with the image of the Buddha, does not approach the level of creative reworking of sacred forms achieved by ese ifa.
Ese Ifa, like the Biblical Old Testament, reflect a spectrum of positive and negative human possibilities, but even more than the Bible, are less given to the urge to describe its portrayals in religious terms, creating a literature in which the sheer joy of creativity is central, as opposed to the unceasing gravitas of the King James Bible, for example.
Ese Ifa demonstrate the practice of laughing at one's deities, of using them as instruments of fun, as tools for pursuing one's own narrow or expansive agendas, shaping varieties of cosmogonies, varied accounts of how the world was created, rather than the standard mono-centric approach of some other scriptures, suggesting the ese ifa composers have no aspiration to be understood as depicting reality as different from imagination, all this conducted within various levels of structural simplicity and variety, at times dramatizing striking word play best appreciated in the original language but evocative to a limited degree in translation.
The amazing force of this kind of imaginative creativity is that it coexists with the practice of a venerational attitude towards the same deities being so employed as instruments of fun in the oracular literature.
Ifa might be globally unique, therefore, in creating and sustaining a literature that both employs its deities as instruments of seemingly irreverent imaginative play while revering these deities in worship and ritual.
This seeming paradox suggests a sophisticated understanding of relationships between various aspects of reality, between imagination and truth, a sophistication increasingly buried under efforts to interpret Ifa and its literature in terms similar to the often unsustainable literal interpretations of the Bible as undiluted fact evidencing divine insight, when in fact the Bible is a book driven by tensions between various human agendas, particularly between the ethnic and the universalistic.
The artistic strength of Ifa literature enters another level of power when it is performed by well trained babalawo, adepts in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa, the Yoruba linguistic sonorities and musical rhythms when accompanied by instruments creating a spellbinding force dramatizing the understanding of oral literature as uniquely actualized through performance.
Structures of Ese Ifa
Ever since Abimbola's books, the basic structure of a good number of the ese ifa composed in Yorubaland, as different from those possibly from Benin represented by Cromwell Ibie's multi-volume Ifism, has become clear.
Abimbola shows Yoruba ese Ifa as operating in terms of three major parts.
They often or necessarily begin with an opening, presenting an imaginative picture of a diviner, who addresses an issue by consulting Ifa.
The second part of the piece depicts the issue central to the story.
The third part concludes the narrative.
This structural identity makes ese ifa a literary genre, a literary form with a defined orientation and even a specific structure, like the English literary genre, the sonnet, the less precise but still specific character of the Japanese haiku and the Yoruba poetic genres oriki, poetry of life mapping and Ijala, poetry of hunters, celebrating nature and the hunter's life
Questions on the Implications of Composing New Ese Ifa
Since the structure of Yoruba ese ifa is is clearly spelt out, why can't anyone use that format in creating their own ese Ifa, I argue?
Even the Benin ese ifa demonstrate orientations that may be adapted to new ends by new composers.
The traditionalists see me as trying to adulterate the Ifa scriptures through my suggestions, amplified by my going ahead to compose my own ese Ifa, at times expanding already existing examples or composing new ones from scratch.
"Why should anyone presume to modify such a venerable, sacred and structurally rich complex as the odu ifa/ ese Ifa matrix by presuming to compose new ese ifa?", the traditionalists argue.
"Why should a person presume to speak for the Ifa oracle by composing new literature, new ese ifa, in its name?", they contend.
Some even hold that the ese ifa, as is claimed for such sacred texts as the Bible and the Hindu Bhagavad Gita and the Shiva Sutras, understood as divinely composed texts or as inspired by divine intelligence, are all composed by Orunmila, the divine wisdom who was even consulted by Olodumare, the ultimate creator, at the time of creation, a divine wisdom who eventually chose to live on Earth for a time in human form, that account goes.
'"Why should a mere human", it is held, "presume to arrogate to himself the exclusive privilege of Orunmila by claiming to compose new ese ifa?"
Even
if one were to adapt the literary style of such a Biblical composition as the "Song of Songs'', for example, would that make the composition a continuation of
the Biblical text, is an argument invoked against the claim of being able to compose
new ese ifa.
Wande Abimbola has himself argued that the scope of Ifa is so vast, there is no point in creating new forms of Ifa, such as Moyo Okediji’s Ifa Tuntun, New Ifa, which is the immediate inspirations for this essay.
Ifa Tuntun was heralded by Okediji’s adaptation of ese ifa structure in composing new poetry on the social media site Facebook, dovetailing with my own earlier efforts in composing new ese ifa and developing new approaches to Ifa spirituality and philosophy.
Since there are no new forms of the Bible, the Koran and the Hindu Rig Veda, texts that are not up to 1% of the size of ese ifa, between the unwritten and the written texts of the corpus, why should Ifa suffer such a fate, Abimbola declared, at an online meeting held between Nigerian leadership of the Yoruba spirituality community with Okediji on the 8th of February 2025.
Closed and Open Ended Scriptural Traditions
My response to these challenges is that the processes of textual canonization, of deciding which texts should be seen as sacred and which should be elevated to the level of scripture, differs between spiritualities, and the Ifa case is particularly elastic.
Judaism and Christianity
Christianity and other Abrahamic religions exemplify closed text scriptures, in which the scriptures of the religion are represented by a single book, particularly so with Christianity, a book that no one can add to or remove from.
The processes through which the contents of the Bible were agreed upon out of a larger textual collection, are well documented, indicating that the canonization of what is now known as the Bible was the choice made at a point in time by a group of people, whatever one might think about the divine or other sources of the texts so chosen. No other scriptures may be created in Christianity.
The Jewish example, however, might be different, since other texts have emerged, which, though not enjoying the same foundational status as the Torah, if I'm getting the designation correct, are regarded by some adherents as scripture which open up the possibilities of the founding text in a way that elevate the new effort to a scriptural level, as evident with how such a work as the Zohar is perceived by its adherents.
Hinduism and Buddhism
Hinduism and Buddhism contain perhaps the most striking examples of creation of new scriptures.
Hindu scriptural history is a process of development across centuries, beginning from such earliest texts as the Rig Veda, and continuing to such later developments as the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Upanishads, with further scriptures emerging across the centuries, these scriptures constituting the founding texts of new schools, such the Shiva Sutras, described as composed by the God Shiva and revealed to Vasugupta, becoming the root text of the Trika school, even though other older scriptures existed centred on Shiva, while Trika went on to also develop other texts understood as canonical, such as Abhinavagupta 's Tantraloka, Light on the Tantras.
Buddhism demonstrates similar and perhaps even more stark examples of scriptural proliferation, represented by two major orientations, the Hinayana and the Mahayana, with the Hinayana representing more conservative approaches more in keeping with the basic teaching of the Buddha, who founded Buddhism, and the Mahayana, comprising various levels of modification of this inspirational core, from the austere beauty of Zen to the combination of elaborate cosmology and contemplative sophistication of Tibetan Buddhism, going by my understanding of this richly complex field.
All these examples of Buddhism, even though ultimately deriving from texts composed in the Buddha's native India, eventually developed their own scriptures.
The Collaborative Composition of Ese Ifa
How does Ifa fit into this picture?
I understand the possibilities of Ifa scriptural development as even more elastic than that of Judaism, Hinduism or Buddhism but that these possibilities have not been actualized in Ifa because the process of ese ifa composition seems to have been closed at a point in history, and the process of describing the existing texts as beyond expansion began.
Ese Ifa, even from Yorubaland, are clearly not the work of any single person, given the vast scope of Yoruba history the references of various ese Ifa suggest, as I understand, there even being an ese ifa describing how Jesus was born in Yorubaland and was first known by the Yoruba name "Jewesun", along with references to Islam, which is predated in Yorubaland by the traditional spiritualities to which Ifa belongs.
Given the breadth of expressive styles within even Yoruba ese ifa, the various ideological orientations towards the same subjects that they demonstrate, varieties amplified by the further differences evident in what I'm calling Benin ese Ifa, it's clear the corpus was composed over a long period of time by various people, for various reasons, a process Akinwumi Ogundiran maps, according to his own use of the relevant data, in The Yoruba: A New History, describing his understanding of the processes through which ese ifa were composed in response to various social situations over centuries of Yoruba history, and as reflecting various, and at times, competing ideologies
Between Open and Closed Approaches to Ese Ifa
Why was the process of textual expansion of ese ifa closed?
I don't know but closing the process helps to escalate belief in the divine authority of ese ifa as timeless constructs from a divine intelligence capable of illuminating all challenges.
If the scriptures are open to expansion, even into the contemporary period, the subjective processes and social contexts driving such ongoing creativity open for analysis, the oracular sanctity of the literature could be diluted or lost, one view might hold.
Recognizing all these possibilities in the Ifa community’s self-understanding, why do I insist on championing the idea of treating ese Ifa as a literary genre, which may be used in both secular and sacred ways, and encourage the further composition of ese ifa?
I’m doing so because I understand that as central to the actualization of the creative possibilities of ese ifa and even of Ifa in general.
Why so?
The current approach de-emphasizes the appreciation of the artistic creativity of ese ifa, in favour of a one sided emphasis on oracular value. This impacts negatively on the scope of appreciation and study of this literary form, evidenced in the fact that its unique qualities are unknown in the global literary repertoire. As a form that may be approached from both a secular and a sacred perspective it needs to be better appreciated, its essence of creative play implying it may be approached as an imaginative orientation to the sacred cosmos to which Ifa is related, without needing belief in the deities of this cosmos or assent to any aspect of its cosmology to enjoy the stories or even learn from them.
Creative Possibilities of Composing New Ese Ifa
For those who wish to take ese ifa beyond that basic point, they may also serve as contemplative platforms, forms that may be used as means of reflection and contemplation, as a means of relating to ideas that ese ifa address.
Composing new ese ifa expands the creative possibilities of this genre, demonstrating its creative range, possibly extending into philosophical speculation on the nature of time in relation to eternity, as I have done in one such new creation of mine, or employing them in addressing contemporary issues, as Moyo Okediji has done with his own adaptation of ese ifa structure.
Its also possible to adapt old ese ifa by expanding the story or poem without changing its plot or ultimate outcome, as I have done in some of my own efforts, or to modify the story in terms of various levels of divergence from the original.
Could ese ifa also be created to promote particular ideological orientations? Certainly, like various existing ese ifa project particular ideological biases.
Implications for the Ifa Tradition of Composing New Ese Ifa
What would be the implications of such proliferation for Ifa as a spirituality and a divination system?
It implies the emergence of traditional and non-traditional ese ifa, leading to choices for Ifa devotees and diviners of how to relate to non-traditional ese ifa, and whether or not to accept them into their practice. I don’t see any danger to Ifa as a spirituality and a system of divination from this development.
What would emerge is the liberation of the creative possibilities of ese ifa as
a demonstration of the creative, reconfigurative power of the human mind
expressed in varying degrees of intensity, as Isidore Okpewho describes myth (
‘’Rethinking Myth’’, African Literature Today 11: Myth and History, 1980,5-23,
19).
Moyo Okediji’s Ifa Tuntun, New Ifa
What leads me to return to this subject now, having addressed it intermittently over the years?
Yoruba culture advocate, scholar, artist and writer Moyo Okediji composed some poetry on his Facebook wall on Dec 2024, adapting ese Ifa structure in addressing contemporary Nigerian social issues.
Does he see his efforts as new ese ifa or simply as adaptations of ese ifa creativities to new ends without understanding them as part of an expansive understanding of the sacred corpus?
He has not said but he went ahead to initiate what he calls Ifa Tuntun, New Ifa, representing his own understanding of an Ifa purified of what he currently describes as its negativities, represented by both older misogynies and later excessive monetizations. He also engaged in a deconstructive reading of a particular ese, ifa, suggesting its centralization of a conflict between misogynistic and humane values.
Traditionalists see him as trying to bring down the tradition, particularly since he has written various essays challenging what he describes as negativities in the tradition, efforts alarming for the traditionalists on account of the visibility and authority of Okediji's Facebook platforms as constructed over more than a decade of diligent effort, further driven by his cultural capital as a Yoruba culture bearer who has long sustained a very successful Facebook group, University of Ifa, using his Facebook wall in promoting Yoruba culture through rich autobiographical, essayistic and artistic explorations, a prominent name in Nigerian art history, and a very successful academic in the particularly prestigious location represented by the US, a professor of art at the University of Texas, described by one view as "the Harvard of the South".
This latest initiative follows Okediji's earlier presented effort at expanding the configurations of odu ifa, the divinatory patterns in terms of which the ese ifa texts are organized, the odu ifa functioning like the chapters of a book and the ese ifa as the contents of this book, the difference between this and conventional books being that the scope of the contents is unknown, since the totality of ese ifa have never been fixed, being oral texts memorized piecemeal by various babalawo, and in my view, added to by them as time went on, leading to continuous expansion of the canon.
Okediji describes himself as expanding the odu ifa, the Ifa chapters, as it were, beyond its current 256 patterns, if I understand him well, a stance that has alarmed the traditionalists, given their reverence for the precise and intricate mathematical ordering of those patterns, evidence of the perfection, and for some, the divine completeness of odu ifa, in particular, and Ifa, in general.
I consider Okediji's initiative as one of the most important achievements in Yoruba thought systems, in general, and Ifa, in particular.
Breaking Open
The kolanut is broken into its constituent parts, as the sun cracks open the pod of darkness to reveal the glory of day, as Ogonna Agu describes the symbolism of the Igbo kolanut ritual in The Book of Dawn and Invocations.
To " pa ìtàn", in Yoruba, states Olabiyi Yai, is to break open the possibilities of time by exploring the potential of history, as history embodies the embryos of cultural forms awaiting further rethinking and expansion in terms of traditions continually reworked as new modernities.
This perspective demonstrates an understanding of existence as
a journey of recreation unfolding unsuspected possibilities at the intersection
of the ultimate and the contingent, the timeless and the temporal, Ori and ori,
So and so, Chi and chi, adapting an interpretation of Yai from various essays
of his in terms of the cognate expressions of ultimate and human possibility
evident in the synergies between Yoruba, Igbo and Kalabari thought, part of the West
African complex of intimately related philosophies, unique variants of an
overarching world view, demonstrated by West African systems of thought.
Texts Implied but Not Stated in the Essay
Olabiyi Babalola Yai
''In Praise of Metonymy: The Concepts of 'Tradition' and 'Creativity' in the Transmission of Yoruba Artistry over Time and Space'', Research in African Literatures , 1993, Vol. 24, No. 4, 29-37, 31.
"Tradition and the Yoruba Artist’’, African Arts, Vol. 32, No. 1, 1999, 32-35+93.
Review of Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought by Henry John Drewal, John Pemberton, Rowland Abiodun and Allen Wardwell, in African Arts , Jan., 1992, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Jan., 1992), pp. 20+22+24+26+29.
On So and so
Books of Nimi Wariboko, such as The
Depth and Destiny of Work: An African Theological Interpretation, Africa World Press, 2008.
On Chi and chi
Chinua Achebe, ''Chi in Igbo Cosmology'', Morning Yet on Creation Day : Essays, Heinemann, 1975
On Ori and ori
Akinsola Akiwowo, ''Contributions To the Sociology of Knowledge From an African Oral Poetry'', International Sociology, Volume 1 Issue 4, December 1986, 343–358.
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