Quick Answer
Bascom's 1969 book is still the largest collection of Ifa divination verses in English, with the Yoruba text printed alongside, and it remains the standard reference more than fifty years on. It is also an outsider's ethnography written in the anthropological idiom of its decade, and anyone using it should read Wande Abimbola next to it.
Key Takeaways
- 575 pages, and over four hundred of them are verses in Yoruba with facing English. That is the reason to own it.
- The client never states the question. That single protocol detail tells you more about Ifa's design than any theory of divination does.
- 256 odu, roughly eight hundred verses each, memorised by human beings over decades. The scale of the oral corpus is the real story.
- The Leibniz binary claim is not supported. The resemblance is genuine, the historical link is not documented.
- Read Abimbola alongside it. He is a scholar and an initiated authority, and the difference in what each man can see is instructive.
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What This Book Is
William Bascom, who lived from 1912 to 1981, was an American anthropologist and folklorist who taught at Berkeley and directed its anthropology museum. He did fieldwork among the Yoruba in Nigeria beginning in the late 1930s and returned to the subject for the rest of his life. Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Africa was published by Indiana University Press in 1969 and runs to 575 pages.
Roughly the first quarter explains the system: who the diviners are, how they are trained, what the equipment is, how a consultation proceeds, and how the results are interpreted. Then, from page 140 to page 563, comes the reason the book has never been superseded. Bascom prints the divination verses he collected, in Yoruba, with English translation on the facing side.
Nothing else in English gives you that much of the corpus in one place with the original text available for checking. Fifty-seven years later it is still the book people cite.
A note on terms: Ifa is the divination system and also, in some usages, the body of knowledge itself. A babalawo is an initiated diviner, the word meaning something like father of secrets. Orisha are the divinities of Yoruba religion. Odu are the 256 signs. Ese are the verses attached to them. This article uses the common English spellings without diacritics, which the scholarship does mark.
How the System Actually Works
The mechanics are more interesting than most summaries make them, so it is worth being precise.
The full method uses sixteen sacred palm nuts, the ikin. The diviner holds them in one hand and grabs at them with the other. If one nut remains in the first hand he makes a double mark; if two remain, a single mark. Any other result is discarded and the pass is repeated. Each valid pass produces one mark, which he traces with his finger in a layer of pale wood dust spread on a carved wooden tray, the opon Ifa.
He does this eight times, working right column then left, top to bottom, producing a figure of two columns of four positions each. Since each position is either single or double, there are sixteen possible columns, and pairing two columns gives 256 possible figures. That figure is the odu.
For quicker consultations the diviner uses the opele, a chain with eight half-shells or seed pods attached, which is thrown once and produces the whole figure at a stroke. The palm nuts are the more formal instrument and the chain is the working one.
What is worth pausing on is the discarding rule. The diviner keeps grabbing until he gets a one or a two. Any other outcome is not an answer. The system builds a filter into its own randomising mechanism, so that the physical procedure produces clean results by design rather than by luck.
The 256 and Their Verses
The odu are not the answer. They are the address of the answer.
Each of the 256 signs has a name and an order of seniority, and each carries a body of oral verse. A verse typically opens with the names of the diviners who cast in some previous case, states who came to them and what the matter was, records the offering that was prescribed, says whether it was made, and reports the outcome. It is a precedent, in something close to the legal sense.
Estimates put the number of verses at around eight hundred per odu, which if taken at face value gives a corpus of roughly two hundred thousand pieces of oral literature. No individual diviner knows all of it. The number is also not fixed, because verses continue to be composed and absorbed, which is one of the reasons the tradition is described as living rather than preserved.
Training is the obvious consequence. A babalawo apprentices for years and the work is largely memorisation, of verse, of the order of the odu, of the offerings, and of the relations between signs. The system's real technology is human memory operating at a scale that literate cultures have mostly lost the ability to imagine.
Consider what the verse structure implies. The diviner does not tell the client what will happen. He tells them what happened to somebody else in a comparable position, what was recommended, whether they did it, and how it turned out. The client is being handed a case file and asked to see whether it matches. That is a different epistemology from prediction, and it is much harder to argue with.
The Client Does Not Say the Question
Here is the detail that ought to be in every introduction to Ifa and rarely is.
In the standard procedure the client does not tell the diviner what they have come about. They whisper their question to a coin or a cowrie shell, or simply hold it in their closed hand while thinking of the matter, and the diviner casts without knowing what has been asked.
He then identifies the odu and begins reciting its verses. The client listens and indicates which one applies. The diviner may cast again to narrow between alternatives, and further casts determine which offering is required and to whom.
Two things follow. The first is protective: a diviner who does not know the question cannot tailor the answer, and the tradition built that safeguard into the ritual rather than relying on the diviner's honesty. The second is that the interpretive work sits with the client. They are the one who recognises their situation in a story about somebody else. The system is designed so that the moment of insight belongs to the person who came for it.
What Bascom Actually Collected
Bascom's fieldwork centred on Ife and he worked with named diviners, recording verses as they were recited and transcribing them in Yoruba with tone marking. He then translated, annotated, and organised the material by odu.
The value of this is hard to overstate for anyone who wants to work with the material rather than read about it. Having the Yoruba on the page means a reader with the language, or with access to someone who has it, can check the translation. It also preserves the verse as verse. Yoruba divination poetry has form, and a translation that flattens it into prose loses the thing that makes it memorable, which for an oral corpus is not a decorative matter.
What he collected is a sample. It comes from one region, from a limited number of practitioners, at one period, and it represents a fraction of what the corpus is estimated to contain. Bascom says so. Readers who treat the book as the complete Ifa are making an error the author did not make.
Orunmila, Eshu and the Offering
The theological frame matters, because without it the procedure looks like a randomiser attached to an anthology.
Orunmila is the orisha associated with wisdom and with divination. In the standard account he was present when each person, before birth, knelt and chose their destiny, and he therefore knows what each person selected. Divination is understood as consulting that knowledge. This is why the system is oriented toward alignment rather than fortune-telling: the question is usually whether a course of action fits what you came here to do.
Eshu, the messenger and keeper of the crossroads, is the other constant presence. He opens and closes roads, carries offerings to their destination, and receives a portion himself in nearly every consultation. Skipping Eshu is not an option in the tradition, and the reason is structural: he is the one who makes communication between levels possible at all.
The consultation nearly always ends in a prescribed offering, ebo. This is the part that outsiders find easiest to dismiss and that practitioners consider essential. The reading identifies the situation; the offering is what changes it. A divination that stops at the diagnosis has done half the work.
What this shares with other systems: the I Ching also uses a manipulation procedure to select from a fixed set of figures, each with an attached text, and also treats the reading as a description of a situation's dynamics. The resemblance is real and it is almost certainly independent. Two societies arrived at the same solution to the same problem: how to consult something outside your own preferences without the consultant being able to steer you.
What Crossed the Atlantic
The transatlantic slave trade carried Yoruba people, and Yoruba religious practice, into Cuba, Brazil, Trinidad and elsewhere, where it survived under pressure and in altered forms.
In Cuba the tradition became Lucumi, often called Santeria, with an Ifa priesthood of babalawo that maintains the odu system, alongside the more widely practised divination with sixteen cowrie shells. In Brazil, Candomble preserved much of the orisha pantheon with its own divination practice. Among the neighbouring Fon and Ewe peoples the related system is called Fa or Afa, and it uses the same sixteen-by-sixteen structure with different names.
Bascom worked on this too. His later book Sixteen Cowries, published in 1980, deals with the cowrie shell system in Africa and the New World, and the two volumes are companions.
The diaspora traditions are not degraded copies. They are lines of transmission that were maintained across a rupture that should have destroyed them, and their practitioners are authorities in their own right. Anyone approaching this material from North America or Europe today is far more likely to encounter Ifa through a Cuban or Nigerian diaspora lineage than through a book, and that is the correct order of things.
The Binary Claim
Because each of the eight positions in an odu is either single or double, an Ifa figure can be written as an eight-digit binary number, and 256 is two to the eighth power. This is a real and elegant property of the system.
From it a claim has grown that Ifa was the source of the binary arithmetic behind modern computing, usually via Leibniz. The claim does not hold up. Leibniz left a clear account of his own path to binary notation, and the influence he acknowledged was the I Ching, whose hexagrams were sent to him from China by the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet, and which he took as confirmation of a system he had already developed. There is no documented route from West African divination to Hanover.
What is true is more interesting than the false version. West African diviners built and operated a base-two combinatorial system of 256 states, with a full addressing scheme and a body of content attached to every address, and did it entirely in oral transmission. That is a genuine intellectual achievement and it does not require a link to European mathematics to be one. Attaching it to Leibniz makes the achievement dependent on a European for its significance, which is exactly backwards.
The Limits of an Outsider's Book
An honest review has to be specific here rather than gesturing at bias.
Bascom writes in the functionalist idiom of mid-twentieth-century American anthropology. That frame asks what an institution does for the society that maintains it, and it produces good answers to that question: how divination distributes responsibility for hard decisions, how it manages anxiety, how it channels disputes. It is much weaker at the question of what the practice means to the person doing it, and it has a tendency to explain religion in terms of its social effects, which practitioners reasonably experience as being told what they really believe.
Second, the sampling problem. Verses vary by region, by lineage and by individual diviner. Bascom's collection reflects the diviners he worked with, and a reader who assumes it is the canonical text of Ifa has misread a snapshot as a scripture. Ifa has no fixed authorised version, and this matters more than it would for a written tradition.
Third, the period. The book reflects the situation of the 1930s to 1960s, before the enormous expansion and reorganisation of the tradition in the past fifty years, including its formal institutional presence in Nigeria and its growth in the Americas.
None of this makes the book unreliable on what it directly reports. It means the framing around the data is dated, and the data itself is partial, and both should be held in mind while using it.
This documents a living religion. Ifa is practised now, by initiated priests, within communities that have their own authorities and their own rules about what may be shared. A book of verses collected by an anthropologist in the mid-twentieth century is not a licence to perform divination, and the training required to do it properly takes years and happens inside a lineage. Read the book as an outsider learning what a tradition looks like from outside. If you want to engage with Ifa, that happens through people, not through a bibliography.
The Scholar Who Was Also Inside
The essential correction to Bascom is Wande Abimbola, whose Ifa: An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus was published by Oxford University Press in Ibadan in 1976, seven years after Bascom's book.
Abimbola is a professor and a linguist, and he is also an authority within the tradition itself. He writes about the verses as literature, analysing their poetic form, their stylistic devices, their structure and their conventions, and he does so from a position where the material is his own inheritance rather than his subject matter.
Reading the two books together is the most useful thing a serious reader can do with this subject. Bascom shows you what a careful outsider can document. Abimbola shows you what an outsider cannot see, which is mostly a matter of what counts as significant. Where Bascom records a verse, Abimbola hears a form; where Bascom describes a function, Abimbola describes a meaning.
His Sixteen Great Poems of Ifa from 1975 is the other book to look for, and Jacob Olupona's work on Yoruba religion is the modern academic study that takes the tradition's own categories seriously.
After 2005
On 25 November 2005, on Nigeria's nomination, UNESCO proclaimed the Ifa divination system a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, and it was subsequently inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
The designation had practical consequences. It supported institutional efforts to document and teach the corpus formally, including the Ifa Heritage Institute in Oyo, and it changed the tradition's standing in a country where it had been under sustained pressure from both Christian and Muslim missions for well over a century.
It also raises a question worth naming. Heritage designation tends to treat a practice as a thing to be preserved, and preservation and living practice are not the same activity. A tradition that keeps generating new verses is doing something a museum cannot help with. The people running the Nigerian institutions are aware of the tension, and it is worth being aware of it too when reading anything written about Ifa since 2005.
How to Use This Book
Read the first quarter straight through. It is the clearest short account in English of how a consultation is structured and it is worth having even if you never open the verse section.
Then use the verse section as a reference rather than reading it front to back. Take one odu, read all the verses Bascom gives for it, and notice what the sign is actually about. The character of an odu emerges from the accumulation of its cases, in the way a legal principle emerges from a line of decisions, and no summary of an odu's meaning conveys it.
Keep the Yoruba in view even without the language. The repetitions, the name formulas at the head of each verse, and the recurring phrases are visible on the page and they tell you something about how this material was held in memory.
Pair it with Abimbola from the start. Reading Bascom alone will give you a competent outsider's map, and you will not know what is missing from it.
A reading exercise for one evening: pick a single odu and read every verse Bascom prints for it, in order, without looking anything up. Write down, in your own words, what kind of situation this sign describes. Then read a second odu and do the same. The difference between them is what the system is actually made of, and you cannot get to it from a table of keyword meanings.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you are studying Yoruba religion at any depth, because everything else in the field is in conversation with it. Read it if you are interested in divination systems comparatively and want to see one documented at full scale rather than summarised. Read it if you work with oral literature, because the corpus is one of the largest of its kind ever recorded.
Read it if you are involved with any of the orisha traditions and want the textual ground under the practice, whether your entry point is Oshun, Ogun, Obatala or another.
Do not buy it expecting an accessible introduction. It is a dense academic monograph from 1969 and it is priced and written accordingly. Do not buy it as a divination manual, because it is not one and using it as one misrepresents a living priesthood. And do not treat it as the last word, because the author would not have, and because the tradition it describes has had another sixty years of history since he closed his notebook.
The most portable idea in the book is the structure of the verse itself. Somebody was in this situation. They consulted. They were told to do a specific thing. They did it, or they did not. This is what followed. That format holds a piece of practical wisdom in a form that resists both abstraction and command. It does not tell you what to do and it does not leave you with a principle you cannot apply. It gives you a case and lets you decide whether it is yours. Almost every wisdom tradition has some version of this, and Ifa has built an entire consultation system around it.
Two hundred thousand verses, held in human memory, and this is where they were first written down in English.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is Bascom's Ifa Divination?
A 575-page ethnography published by Indiana University Press in 1969, based on William Bascom's fieldwork among Yoruba diviners in Nigeria. It explains how the Ifa system works and then gives hundreds of pages of divination verses in Yoruba with facing English translation. It has been the standard English reference on the subject for over fifty years.
How does Ifa divination work?
The diviner manipulates sixteen sacred palm nuts between his hands, or casts a divining chain, and records the result as a mark in wood dust on a tray. Eight passes produce a figure of two columns of four marks each. That figure identifies one of 256 signs called odu, and the diviner then recites verses belonging to that odu until the client recognises their situation.
What are the odu?
The 256 signs of the system, formed by pairing sixteen basic figures with each other. Each odu carries a body of oral verse called ese, containing precedent cases, mythological narratives, proverbs and prescribed offerings. Estimates put the number of verses at roughly eight hundred per odu, and the total is not fixed because the corpus keeps growing.
Does the client tell the diviner the question?
No. In the classic procedure the client whispers the question to a coin or a cowrie and holds it, and the diviner casts without being told what is being asked. The diviner recites the verses of the odu that comes up, and the client identifies which verse fits. It is a deliberate protection against the diviner steering the answer.
Who is Orunmila?
The orisha of wisdom and divination, who is said to have been present when each person chose their destiny before birth and who therefore knows what that destiny was. Ifa divination is understood as consulting Orunmila's knowledge. Eshu, the messenger who opens and closes roads, receives an offering in almost every consultation.
Is Ifa the same as Santeria?
They are related and not identical. Ifa is the Yoruba divination system with its own priesthood of babalawo. Lucumi or Santeria in Cuba, Candomble in Brazil, and Fa or Afa among the Fon and Ewe are traditions that carried Yoruba and neighbouring practice across the Atlantic and developed their own forms. Bascom wrote about the New World branches as well.
Did Ifa influence Leibniz's binary system?
There is no evidence for it. The claim circulates widely because Ifa figures are built from paired single and double marks and can be read as binary numbers. Leibniz's own account traces his interest to the I Ching, sent to him by the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet from China. The mathematical resemblance between Ifa and binary notation is real; the historical connection is not documented.
What are the limitations of Bascom's book?
It is an outsider's account written in the functionalist idiom of mid-century anthropology, so it tends to explain what the system does for a society rather than what it means to a practitioner. The verses were collected in a specific region from a limited number of diviners at one period, and they are a sample rather than the corpus.
Who should I read alongside Bascom?
Wande Abimbola, whose Ifa: An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus appeared in 1976. Abimbola is both a university scholar and an initiated authority within the tradition, and reading him next to Bascom shows you clearly what an outsider's frame includes and what it leaves out.
Is Ifa recognised by UNESCO?
Yes. UNESCO proclaimed the Ifa divination system a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity on 25 November 2005, on Nigeria's nomination, and it was later inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Can I use the book to divine for myself?
No, and the book does not present itself that way. Ifa divination is performed by initiated babalawo after years of memorising the corpus, within a religious community and with prescribed offerings. Bascom's book is a description of a living priesthood, not a manual, and treating it as one misrepresents the tradition it documents.
Is it still worth buying?
Yes, for anyone serious about the subject. It remains the largest single collection of Ifa verses available in English with the Yoruba text alongside, and no later work has replaced it as a reference. Buy it as one source among several rather than as the account of the tradition.
Learn from the protocol
You can take one thing from this system without touching the religion at all, and it is the sealed question. The client does not say what they came about. The reason is that a consultant who knows what you want will find a way to give it to you, and both of you will believe it was independent. Next time you take a problem to someone whose judgement you trust, try describing the situation without telling them what you have already decided. The Yoruba built that safeguard into a ritual four centuries before anyone wrote a paper on confirmation bias.
Sources & References
- Bascom, W. R. (1969). Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Africa. Indiana University Press.
- Bascom, W. R. (1980). Sixteen Cowries: Yoruba Divination from Africa to the New World. Indiana University Press.
- Abimbola, W. (1976). Ifa: An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus. Oxford University Press, Ibadan.
- Abimbola, W. (1975). Sixteen Great Poems of Ifa.
- UNESCO, Ifa divination system, proclaimed 25 November 2005 and inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
- Olupona, J. K. Studies on Yoruba religion and its diaspora.
- Leibniz, G. W. Correspondence with Joachim Bouvet on the I Ching and binary notation.