I was almost shocked today to find Pierre Verger's Ewé: The Use of Plants in Yoruba Society on sale at standard online outtlets Amazon and Abe Books and even available to read on subscription at Scribd.
A search at Bookfinder, the best book search engine known to me, covering Europe, North America and Asia, gives even more outlets for this work, unrivaled to the best of my knowledge, in Yoruba/Orisa/Ifa and perhaps African studies.
Before now, this unsurpassed work was not readily available.
This is the Bookfinder link, with prices in £s covering both the cost of the book and delivery within the UK, but which can be modified to a large range of other currencies and other destinations:
http://www.bookfinder.com/search/?author=Pierre+Fatumbi+Verger&title=Ewe.+The+use+of+plants+in+Yoruba+Society&lang=en&st=xl&ac=qr
This is the Scribd link:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/111001288/Ewe
I wonder if the kind of discipline and access to knowledge that produces a book like this still exists in relation to the culture the book came out of or how readily such discipline can be cultivated or if an equivalent body of knowledge in this field in Yoruba culture still exists.
This book is a demonstration of one aspect of the multi- disciplinary scope of Ifa, which may be understood as the central knowledge system created by Yoruba civilization.
Ifa demonstrates a cosmology projecting a spiritual and philosophical vision, organised in terms of a relationship between mathematics and literature, the system being applied as a herbal and divinatory system, a quest for knowledge beyond the conventional accessibility of the human being, its divinatory and ritual instruments being some of the most powerful examples of classical Yoruba sculpture.
This book presents the herbal dimension of what constitutes a cognitive discipline, suggesting a distinctive metaphysics, a conception of the nature of the cosmos and an epistemology, an understanding of the the nature of knowledge and how it may be reached, evaluated and applied.
This book is wonderful in demonstrating a system of organization in which each description of the works that may be performed with each assemblage or combination of plants is linked with a particular odu ifa, the odu being the organizational categories of the Ifa system.
The implication of this is whatever might be one's attitude to the collection both medicinal and magical properties claimed for these prescriptions, one is faced with the grand achievement resented by the systematization of human activity with an abstract system represented by the odu ifa.
What will happen if one bathes for seven days with the prescribed combination of plants while chanting the prescribed lines from a particular odu ifa, an action meant to enable one become one of the Iyami Aje, the female spirituous powers both dreaded and venerated?
I dont know and one day I would like to be bold enough to try the prescribed procedure, observe the experience and report it.
The book is rich with herbal prescriptions for a broad rage of works, some classified as good, others as bad, the introduction suggesting how one may approach this distinction between good and bad.
The book is not cheap.
It is unlikely it will ever be cheap.
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