From Sixteen Cowries to Opele

Ninety percent of everything is bullshit

Sixteen "loose" things

This a page in the making... I'm recovering old material and reorganizing it, so it's messy right now, not to mention incomplete. But... it will improve!

There are many misunderstandings about the origins of Ifa divination. There are even misunderstandings about its very name, lots of people especially in the diaspora believing that Ifa is the real name, and that Fa, Evwa, Afa, Ebba etcetera are different systems with different techniques and different origins. On such ideas "Sturgeon's Law" might be used as a comment: "Ninety percent of everything is bullshit" (wide and wicked grin)! Of course that goes for everything I say too, but here I'm talking about your bullshit - not mine (even wider grin)!

From "loose" to "fixed"

16 Things on 4 strings

Present day Ifa divination wasn't parachuted down onto eearth from heaven - it developed from casting a collection of loose objects to the casting of a string of fixed object, the Opele. The sequence (time line) seems to have been: sixteen cowries, four strings with four cowries or medallions or seed pods each, two double strings with eight medallions each (still uses in Agbigba), one double string with eight pods (the Opele). When this Ifa/Fa/Evwa/Ebba etcetera system that seems to have had its origins around the Niger/Benue confluence (if I have my geography right) spread to the Yoruba (or proto-Yoruba... wide grin!), some probably indigenous Yoruba system with 16 palm nust was incorporated into it. The problem with 16 palm nuts is that they're the very best instrument for potential cheats. Even I, with my arthritic hands, can produce the EXACT double Odu I WANT to produce, when "beating" the nuts. The name "Orunmila" was probably added at some point in history, probably post-Islam. Really sounds like a subsaharan pronounciation of the Arabic "Er-Raml" or "sand cutting"... a similar divination system. It's good to be a heretic! I can tell what I believe to be the truth and the facts without running the risk of being taken serious! The worst that can happen is the occasional death threat... as was the case when I published extensively on this subject, ten years or so ago. But one gets soon used to it (wide and wicked grin)!

Look for the fuck - not for the birth

16 Things on 2 double strings

Methinks that, whatever one says about these subjects, nobody can be fully wrong or fully right. I know I'm not... because I'm speaking from a frame of reference that's only one of many. Concerning this sort of discussion I think mine is WIDER than some, but yet it's limited to what I know and believe. On another site I have seen stated: "(...) almost every student of IFA throughout the world would agree that Orunmila was at least one of the first Orisha on the planet and I think most agree man came after (...)"... to which I have to politely yet vehemently (and for the sake of clarity a bit exaggerated) reply: "Bullshit. Almost every student of Ifa throughout the world has never even heard of Orunmila - only within the fragment called the "Orunmila system" he's a somebody... but in Ifa divination in general he's a nobody: 'Orunmi... who? Never heard of him. Must be one of your local yokels'."

Everyone discussing the subject, especially the more religiously driven, is prompted, motivated and led by a belief about reality... which are two different things that are far too easily confused, the one (belief) being promoted as the other (reality). What I see happen in many discussions of this nature is the full belief that Christ was born from a virgin who had been impregnated by Yahwe - which is a mighty good piece of religious propaganda and pretty amusing as a belief... but it is a belief about reality and not necessarily reality itself. In a very small part of the "divination world" Orunmila became the head honcho. This particular small part simply got the best press and the best access to the internet, just like the Roman Catholic version of Christianity suddenly got the wind in the sails after the Roman emperors embraced it... and out went the real Jesus, the early Christian gnosticism, the pre-Paulinic Church of Jerusalem. and the teachings of Jesus' own brothers who had know the bugger well, and their lives long.
It's happening in Lukumi too (and in fact in Nigeria as well). Orunmila (whether he existed or not) has the best spin doctors. Right now the vast majority of Ifa diviners don't have nor need an Orunmila, right now the vast majority of Ifa diviners are aware that the Yoruba's didn't invent it. But if the present tendency keeps on track, a younger generation than mine will be burned at the stake if they don't "believe in Orunmila".
In order to get to some real hard stuff about these issues, one has to step out of religion and propaganda, and look at other branches of knowledge and information. Before birth there was conception, before conception there was a f*ck. It's the f*ck I'm looking for... not the stories of immaculate conception or "I suddenly got pregnant because I sat on a dirty toilet seat".

Reconstructing proto-Ifa

8 Things, 1 string: Opele

In all the above I'm not referrring at all to Ifa-like forms of divination outside Africa, I'm talking about Ifa divination within Africa! Nor do I buy into the bull that humankind originated anywhere else but Africa... Africa is the source, the cradle, and I can trace my own DNA-track (haplogroup R1B1A2) quite detailedly back to Africa. I know how my (male - it's about Y chromosome DNA) ancestors travelled from East Africa to Holland, and quite a trip it was. Oh, well... they had some 60,000 years to do it, so nobody had to run or hurry (wide grin)!
My point is entirely about Ifa/Afa/Fa/Evwa/Ebba etcetera in Africa, and I have more than sufficient information to be willing to bet my left ball that it wasn't a Yoruba thing to begin with! Not that it matters (who cares?)... it's just that as a dedicated autist (Jaap "Rainman" Verduijn) I like to see the i's dotted and the t's crossed.

Anyway, the "proto-Ifa" would probably have been 16 loose "things" without strings, although I wouldn't dismiss the possibility of only 8. The reasonably reconstructable sequence though is 16 loose things (cowries or pods), 16 things strung on four separate strings, 16 things strung on two "double" strings (i.e. 2 opele), and finally the single opele. The Yoruba Ifa tray with it's "fingered on" signs may (or may not - I dunno) be a development of "derb er-raml" with the signs fingered into stuff (like iyerosun) on the tray instead of into the sand/soil. I'm going to try to reconstruct the "proto-Ifa" on these pages, which will be a difficult job because, oh dear... I really wish I could easily find my notes and the original article(s) I wrote with professor/diviner/sangoma Van Binsbergen. My best bet (considering the piles and piles of papers in my home) is contacting my then co-author/researcher, who is probably a bit more neatly inclined than I am (wide grin)! Haven't been in contact for some 15 year or so, but I guess the University can re-establish contact. Be well!

Sixteen cowries make two Opeles!

As an illustration of how it all started with 16 "loose" objects and after many centuries finished up with the well-known Opele, I made a little video that will probably piss of half of my readers, and make the other half think "Geez! The bugger may have a point!" (wide and wicekd grin)! The principle has always been there, seen by many but noticed by few. And the few who did notice, kept their mouths shut, because it's heresy. Eventually, as time passed, the original system with Sixteen Cowries (or seed pods, or coins, or trouser buttons) evolved into something different that is now called Dilogun or Owo Merindinlogun... the system that just counts the "mouths up" without taking in account the position or sequence of the sixteen objects. But hey... if you're a Dilogun diviner and you just look carefully at what you're doing, you'll see in one cast with your Sixteen Cowries what the Ifa diviner needs two casts with his Opele for...

Now don't go make my life difficult by insisting "Jaap, you're manipulating the cowries to produce two double Odu Ifa!" because I don't. In this video I simply shove them for your convenience into a somewhat easier recognizable four-by-four grid... but that grid was already there to begin with! Of course I am not one hundred percent sure if this was the way the whole development towards Opele started... but neither are you one hundred percent sure that it didn't! So think about it... that's all I want you to do. I want you to think!

Here comes another, more difficult, example of how to superimpose 16 cowries or Owo Merindinlogun on an underlying imaginary grid of four by four. The video below is a bit wonky, in the sense that I didn't zoom in well all the time, and I pottered about a bit with the camera. But methinks you'll get the gist! And if you don't, there's no reason to worry. Just try it out a few times for yourself, and in no time at all you'll be able to do it all the time! I'll probably replace this particular video with a better version one of these days, but that's not high on my list of priorities right now so: keep experimenting until it comes naturally to you.