Recreating a Scriptural Tradition
Creating New Ese Ifa: Questions and Vision
Collage of me in my study with correlative Ifa, Voodoo and Benin Olokun igha-ede symbols
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Abstract
An exploration of the issues involved in creating new forms of the literature of the Yoruba origin Ifa oracle.
Ese ifa are the sacred texts of the Yoruba origin of the Ifa oracle. These poems and stories of unknown number,] are used as part of the divinatry process, as Ifa's central information system and as sources for the Orisa cosmology to which Ifa belongs. Ifa, as part of the Orisa spirituality, is one of the world's rapidly globalising spiritual systems.
The composition of ese ifa has been done anonymously, dating from a period before the advent of writing in Yorubaland, an anonymity enhancing its air of timelessness, of divine inspiration at times attributed to it.
I, as an Ifa enthusiast operating outside the conventional training system of Ifa diviners and initiates, create new ese ifa, leading to debates at the intersection of the secular and the sacred, imagination and the spiritual, to which I respond in the passages below.
Ese Ifa is literature, as Wande Abimbola has very well demonstrated through his books An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus, Ifa Divination Poetry and Sixteen Great Poems of Ifa.
Being literary, it is verbalization projected imaginatively through techniques demonstrated by Abimbola.
Anyone can learn these techniques and emulate the significatory universe of ese ifa or even adapt these zones of reference to other subjects.
Ese ifa, as Karen Barber has observed, is what may be described as an assimilative genre in Yoruba literature, integrating other genres into its varied expressions.
The issue here is not whether or not ese ifa can be emulated. It can and I have done it, posting the examples online.
In fact, the theoretical and practical study of ese ifa, how to understand and construct it, enriches the cosmos of global literary study.
The question then becomes- does my emulating ese ifa expressive techniques make the outcome an example of ese ifa?
Are there other disciplinary criteria that must be satisfied to fulfill this goal?
That is the stance of Awo Fategbe in the debate we had on the thread of one of my Facebook postings of a traditional ese ifa which I had expanded using my own words.
Fategbe admired my effort but saw it as a contribution to secular literature that does not belong within the ese ifa corpus.
He argued for ese ifa as an oracular epistemology- a means of gaining knowedge- emerging from and activating spiritual realities.
Questions of the relationship between sacred and secular literature are fundamental at the intersection of religion and literature, the context where the ontology of ese ifa belongs, the frame in which it should be studied in comparison with other religious texts.
If ese ifa is understood as emerging from oracular inspiration, as Awo Fategbe argues, how may such inspiration be cultivated?
The construction of technically competent, artistically impressive ese ifa makes it clear that constructing ese ifa is not necessarily an esoteric process.
If it's argued that ese ifa is fundamentally a performative expression, actualized through relationships between diviner and client, as Noel Armherd argues in Reciting Ifa and as Olayinka Agbetuyi argues in a debate at the USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google group, how may one develop such relationships between actors and ese ifa, so as to facilitate using such verbal art as a problem solving, solution finding mechanism?
Are such questions answerable only from within the esoteric hermeneutics disclosed only in traditional Ifa training?
What of such innovators as those who describe themselves as doing Ifa divination without such training, represented by Jaap Verdjuin and his Independent Ifa school, a divinatory process on which he has published a book and the couple who have developed a system of digital Ifa divination?
Is it possible to cultivate relationships with spiritual powers described as anchoring Ifa, using ese ifa, Ifa literature, as a means of cultivating such relationships, akin to the use of literature as an aspirational and invocational vehicle in spiritualities across the world?
Would such strategies be unique to Ifa, particularly since it belongs amongst a complex of structurally and philosophically similar divination systems from Africa to Asia, from the Igbo Afa and Benin City Oguega to the Dahomean Fa and the Chinese I Ching, differing from them largely in terms of Ifa's greater verbal and visual artistic scope?
Like many humanistic spiritualities, the Ifa and the Orisa tradition within which it belongs privilege the individual self as the embodiment of the self's ultimate potential, the nexus of it's interaction with cosmos.
One view holds that the core of Ifa divination is in developing a relationship with the immortal core of the self, the ultimate unifier and enabler of the self's journey through physical and spiritual space and time.
Must relationship with oneself, even at such depth, necessarily be an activity someone else, such as the Ifa diviner, must do for one?
I am developing a do-it-yourself Ifa, one that actualizes Ifa's potential as a method of self exploration, navigating the unfolding links between self and society, self and cosmos, applicable to the daily challenges of living and their integration within the larger universe of life as a mission.
Nothing grows by remaining the same.
Ifa is on the move.
Also published in
Ese Ifa blog
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Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
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