The verses.
Each of the 256 odu carries hundreds of ese — short narratives in verse, each recording who once consulted Ifa about what, what they were told to offer, whether they did it, and how it turned out. The babalawo does not interpret the sign; he recites, and the client recognises which story is theirs.
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The odu of Ifá.
A canon with no book: 256 chapters held in trained memory, indexed by the fall of the divining chain — one of humanity's great oral libraries, still circulating.
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Oriki.
Praise poetry, dense with allusion, belonging to an orisha, a town, a lineage, a king, a person, an animal or a plant. It is performed rather than read, it is learned from grandmothers, and the talking drum can play it — because the drum reproduces the tones of the words, so the drumming is speech.
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Itan.
The narratives — what the orisha did, who quarrelled, who was punished, who founded what. Itan carries theology, history and precedent together, and it is not consistent between towns: Ife and Oyo tell the founding of the world differently, and each version is doing political work as well as religious.
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The library is a person.
A fully trained babalawo holds hundreds of verses across all 256 odu, plus the medicines attached to them, entirely in memory, after years of apprenticeship. UNESCO listed the Ifa divination system as intangible heritage in 2005. When an old babalawo dies without a fully trained student, that section of the corpus is gone.
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Writing it down.
From the late nineteenth century Ifa began to be transcribed — Epega and later Wande Abimbola in Nigeria, and in Cuba the handwritten libretas copied from godparent to godchild. Elders disagree sharply about whether this preserves the corpus or removes the incentive to train anyone properly.
⚖ contested within
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