{
  "id": "ifa-divination",
  "title": "Ifá",
  "type": "belief",
  "summary": "The Yoruba divination system whose 256 chapters — each a vast memorized corpus of verses — hold a people's philosophy, ethics and medicine entirely in the mouths of its priests.",
  "body": "Ifá is a system of divination and knowledge among the Yoruba of West Africa, centred in present-day Nigeria and Benin and carried across the Atlantic into Cuba, Brazil and beyond. A trained priest — a babalawo, «father of secrets» — casts palm nuts or a divining chain to arrive at one of 256 figures called Odù. Each Odù is a doorway to a large body of memorized verses (ese): stories, proverbs, prescriptions and precedents that the diviner recites and interprets for the person who came seeking guidance.\n\nThe scale of what is held in memory is staggering. The full corpus behind the 256 Odù runs to thousands of verses, learned over many years of apprenticeship and never, traditionally, written down. It is at once a religion, a library of ethics and history, a store of medical and botanical knowledge, and a way of reasoning through a problem — the accumulated thought of a civilization, kept in people.\n\nIfá was proclaimed by UNESCO a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, and it remains vigorously alive both in West Africa and in the diaspora religions — Lucumí and Candomblé among them — that grew from it. It is one of the world's great demonstrations that an entire knowledge system can live outside of writing.",
  "culture": "Yoruba",
  "region": "Nigeria, Benin and the African diaspora",
  "language": "yo",
  "transmission": "oral",
  "tags": [
    "divination",
    "oral-corpus",
    "philosophy",
    "west-africa",
    "unesco"
  ],
  "sources": [],
  "confidence": "documented",
  "contributor": "seed",
  "added": "2026-07-12",
  "updated": "2026-07-12",
  "url": "https://crowdh.com/knowledge/ifa-divination.html"
}