I remember as a young boy looking up at the stars and wishing that I could learn the secrets of the universe. Little did I know that my simple childhood wish would one day lead me not to some exotic form of Eastern mysticism or a career in cosmology or astrophysics but on a flight to Havana, Cuba, where I was to be initiated as a high priest in a religion regarded by many, albeit erroneously, as primitive at best. In other words, I was being initiated as a witch doctor, but as I eventually learned for myself, this particular path was the best road I could have possibly taken to fulfill that wish. The priesthood I was being initiated into turned out to be as profound as any path toward the knowledge of life, the universe, and everything to be found in the world today.
Hidden within the mysterious Afro-Cuban religion commonly called Santería* there is an even deeper body of secrets and rituals known as Ifá practiced by a group of priests known as babalawos, meaning “fathers of the secrets” in the Lucumí and Yoruba languages. For hundreds of years these babalawos, who serve as the high priests of the Afro-Cuban religion, have jealously guarded these secrets, which may have already been thousands of years old before enslaved babalawos brought them from West Africa to the shores of Cuba.1
Babalawos are initiated into the service of Orunmila (often shortened to Orula), the oricha or deity of wisdom and knowledge, and are the only priests who practice Ifá, the highest and most profound form of divination in Santería. Ifá is probably best known for being a sophisticated and remarkably accurate and effective form of divination, containing within it a system of remedies, but Ifá is much more than merely divination. It is a vast body of knowledge and wisdom covering everything from the human condition to the universe at large, as accumulated and distilled over hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.
Over the last eighteen years as a babalawo, I found the more I learned about Ifá, the more I found myself in awe of its depth, insight, and practicality. While Ifá’s philosophical roots are at least as sophisticated and profound as any branch of Eastern or Western mysticism you might compare it to, Ifá differs from many of them in one very significant way. Ifá doesn’t attempt to somehow transcend nature or our own selves. Instead we constantly strive to achieve and maintain balance and alignment with our own destinies and with the forces of nature that surround us. In fact, as we shall see, balance and alignment is a core concept in Ifá and enters into everything we do, informing our ethics, our worldview, and our actions in daily life as well as in the rituals we do.
Although Ifá is remarkably complex, with 256 odduns, each with innumerable mythic parables, proverbs, recommendations, and remedies, it is ultimately based on the simplest system in the world; a binary system of ones and zeros much like that used by computers. But Ifá goes much further by concluding that, underneath it all, the very fabric of the universe is made up of these ones and zeros, much like an immense computer program. This is only now being echoed by recent discoveries in modern physics that have given scientists the ability to achieve such breakthroughs as quantum teleportation.
We will also experience Afro-Cuban Ifá as a story of incredible self-sacrifice and determination, which allowed this profound body of knowledge to survive and even flourish against the almost insurmountable odds presented by slavery. In fact, Afro-Cuban Ifá has been preserved so well that the foremost spokesperson for African Ifá, Wande Abimbola, recently acknowledged that it is probable that more of the rituals and prohibitions have survived in Cuba than in our tradition’s homeland itself.
This book will not shrink from addressing some of the biggest controversies facing Lucumí religion today including animal sacrifice, the iyanifá (female Ifá priest), and the frictions existing between the obá oriaté and the babalawo. Is the practice of animal sacrifice merely a brutal and barbaric holdover expected from a primitive religion, and how does it fit in with our modern, enlightened society? Why are Cuban-style babalawos so up in arms over the emerging practice of initiating iyanifás in Africa? What is the role of women in Ifá anyway? Why is there such animosity between some oriatés (who act as ceremonial master of ceremonies )and babalawos, and what, or who, started it? The answers may surprise you and could possibly change not only the way you look at our practices, but how you see our own modern society as well.
Over the last fifteen years I have received hundreds of questions about Ifá on my website, OrishaNet, either through e-mail or on the forums. I found that, while there were a number of books that talk about Ifá, none of them seem to adequately lead readers to any real depth of understanding Ifá. They either focused on the technical aspects or were overly simplistic to the extreme. On the one hand, most of what exists out there consists of short chapters on Ifá found in general books on Santería, often written by non-initiates and just as often riddled with serious errors. On the other extreme are the technical manuals aimed at practicing Ifá priests, which even many babalawos find difficult to understand fully since much of the information found in these books came from hastily scribbled notes. While some academic works have attempted to go more in-depth, these accounts too often contain their own errors because academics have little or no way of evaluating what information they get from their informants due to the extreme secrecy surrounding Ifá and the limitations of their own understanding of the subject. This eventually led me to realize there is a need for an in-depth view of Afro-Cuban Ifá from the inside that would be accessible to initiates and non-initiates alike.
It is my hope that other babalawos might also find this book useful, as it explores our heritage and why we do many of the things we do, as opposed to just how. In my experience I have found that the more we grasp the whys and wherefores of the technical aspects that we have learned, the more Ifá’s logic makes sense to us and the more effective we become as babalawos. Or, as Ifá tells us in the refrán,“The babalawo who studies Ifá without thinking about it is ineffectual. The babalawo who thinks about Ifá without studying it is dangerous.” Then there is the sheer joy that comes from that moment of enlightenment when the light bulb goes on and we get it. At that moment, the overwhelming complexity seems to fall away, and things we have struggled for years to fully grasp suddenly seem startlingly obvious and self-evident.
At the beginning of each chapter I have used a patakí and a proverb taken from the odduns to lend Ifá’s insight to the subject in much the same manner as we use them when consulting Ifá for our clients. You will also find these parables and proverbs sprinkled throughout these pages where I use them to further illustrate and reinforce a number of the concepts presented. In this way I am allowing Ifá to speak for himself and to hopefully give readers a glimpse of the richness and depth that Ifá brings to the table. While these parables and proverbs are an integral part of Ifá, the patakís and refránes themselves are not covered by my vows of secrecy, so everybody is invited to learn from the rich insights gathered from thousands of years of wisdom.
This book exists to help you understand our traditions by pulling away the veil of secrecy surrounding Ifá just enough to reveal exactly what Afro-Cuban Ifá is, how and why it works, and to share a bit of our rich history with you. There are, however, some things I cannot talk about in this book. Like every babalawo, upon my initiation to Ifá I was sworn to secrecy, and I take those vows very seriously. But I believe I can show you some of the inner workings of Ifá without resorting to breaking the confidences shown in me by my elders.2
While I have physically been writing for much less time, in a very real way this book has been more than fifteen years in the making as I have painstakingly learned, re-learned, and struggled to truly understand what I have been taught about Ifá. In this journey I have been blessed with the good fortune of having been able to learn from some of the most knowledgeable, kindest, and wisest babalawos and olorichas (oricha priests, santeras, and santeros) in our tradition. This book is really theirs. Any errors are, of course, my own.
Let’s begin by taking a look at what Ifá is, how it works, and how Ifá came to exist in Cuba. What did the Yoruba world look like at the time the first babalawo was forcibly torn from that world and transformed into human chattel in fulfillment of a hideous curse inflicted on his own people by an embittered Oyó emperor? What were the extraordinary measures these babalawos were forced to take to re-create Ifá and Ocha (Santería) in an alien and hostile New World?
* Though commonly known as Santería, insiders often refer to the religion as La Regla Ocha (The Rule of the Orichas), or La Regla Lucumí (The Rule of the Lucumí), sometimes shortened to simply Ocha or Lucumí. Lucumí was originally the term used in Cuba to describe the West Africans now known as the Yoruba. Later it became used to denote the culture, language, and religion as it was preserved and evolved in Cuba.