Orunmila (also Ọrunmila; called Ifá, and Agbonniregun)

Sixteen palm nuts pass from one hand to the other in the dark of a diviner’s room, and the marks they leave in a tray of pale wood dust are read as a message from a god who is not there. The god is Orunmila, and his absence is the point. He does not need to attend. He left behind a system precise enough to speak for him, and for centuries the Yoruba have trusted that system over the memory of any living priest.

Among the orisha, the large family of Yoruba deities, Orunmila holds an unusual office. He is not a god of thunder or rivers or iron. His domain is knowledge itself, and more exactly the knowledge of what is coming. The Yoruba call him Elerii ipin, the witness to destiny, and the phrase is meant literally. Before a soul leaves the sky for a human life, it kneels and chooses its fate, and Orunmila is the one who stands by and sees the choice made. He forgets nothing. When that soul, grown into a person, later sits before a diviner with a trouble it cannot name, Orunmila already knows the shape of it.

What he looks like is harder to say, and the difficulty is instructive. The other orisha come with faces. Eshu loiters at crossroads, Ogun carries the smell of hot iron, Shango cracks the sky. Orunmila is rarely pictured as a body at all. He is known instead through his instruments: the round divining tray rimmed with carved faces, the slim ivory tapper used to call his attention, the cool hard weight of the sacred palm nuts, the green and yellow beads that mark his priests. When artists do give him a form, they tend to wrap him in white or indigo cloth and leave it there. A god of pure intellect resists portraiture. One of his praise names simply calls him the small man with a head full of wisdom, which says plainly where the Yoruba imagination chose to put its attention.

He belongs to the first generation of deities, present when there was not yet an earth to stand on. In the older accounts he descends from the sky with the founding beings at Ile-Ife, the city the Yoruba name as the place creation began. He served as adviser to Obatala through the long labor of shaping land and molding the first human bodies, the quiet figure at the creator’s shoulder who could see which decisions would hold. The stories disagree on how he came by his divining craft. Some say he learned it in heaven before he ever came down. Others say it was Eshu, the trickster who keeps the divine authority that lets any blessing take effect, who taught him to read the palm nuts. The versions agree on one thing: the knowledge was never his to hoard.

The myth that explains the oracle is, at heart, a story about a family quarrel. Orunmila lived on earth for a long age and fathered eight sons, and one of them insulted him. The accounts vary on the offense; they do not vary on the result. He climbed a tall palm and returned to the sky, and the world he left behind came apart. Rain stopped falling. Crops failed. Pregnant women carried their children and could not deliver them. The world simply stopped working. The eight sons were sent up after him to beg him home. They found him at the foot of a great palm crowned with sixteen clustered nuts, and he refused to come back. What he gave them instead was sixteen palm nuts apiece and the instructions for using them. From that day the nuts spoke in his place. The oracle is, in the plainest sense, what a god leaves a grieving world when he will not return to it himself.

A consultation looks ordinary from the outside. A person comes to a babalawo, a priest whose title means father of secrets, and says only that he is troubled. The priest works the nuts, hand to hand, marking the tray after each pass until a figure emerges, one of the two hundred and fifty-six chapters of the Odu Ifá. Each chapter carries a body of verse, and somewhere in it sits the parable that matches the visitor’s trouble along with the offering that answers it. The priest does not announce what will happen. He tells a story, and lets the troubled person find himself inside it.

His power is the oracle and the vast literature standing behind it. The Odu Ifá is an immense memorized corpus, sixteen principal signs and two hundred and forty derived ones, each freighted with verse, history, medicine, and proverb, and Orunmila is the mind that ordered it. He is named second only to Olodumare, the supreme being, and he speaks on behalf of all the other orisha, so that a question put to any of them is often routed through him. He can see a misfortune before it arrives, and, more importantly, he can name the sacrifice or change of conduct that turns it aside. That last point is the whole engine of his cult. Yoruba fate is not a sentence handed down. It is a forecast, and Orunmila trades in the small adjustments that bend it.

His limits follow from the same nature. Orunmila advises; he does not act. He carries no thunderbolt and fights no battles, and the one time the world truly needed him to step in and set things right, he had already left it. His knowledge reaches a person only through a trained intermediary, which means the oracle is never better than the priest reading it, and a misjudged figure or a half-remembered verse fails the very person who came for help. He leans on Eshu as well. Without the trickster’s sanction the palm nuts are only nuts, and the future stays shut. A god who knows everything and changes nothing by his own hand is a particular kind of power, and the Yoruba built an entire profession to carry the rest of the weight.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Orunmila?

Orunmila is the Yoruba orisha of wisdom, knowledge, and divination, counted among the primordial deities present at the creation of the world. He is known as the witness to destiny, because he observes each soul choose its fate before birth, and he is regarded as second only to the supreme being, Olodumare.

What is Orunmila the god of?

Orunmila is the god of wisdom and fate, and above all the god of divination. He founded the Ifá oracle, the system the Yoruba use to consult the will of the gods, and he is the spokesman through whom the other orisha are often addressed.

What is the Ifá divination system?

Ifá is the Yoruba divination system that Orunmila founded and left to humanity. A priest manipulates sixteen sacred palm nuts or a divining chain to produce one of the 256 chapters of the Odu Ifá, a huge body of memorized verse, and each chapter holds the parable and the prescribed offering that address the seeker’s problem.

Why did Orunmila leave the earth?

Orunmila left the earth after one of his eight sons insulted him, climbing a palm tree to return to the sky. His departure threw the world into ruin, with failed crops and stalled births, and when his sons came to beg him home he refused, giving each of them sixteen palm nuts for divination instead so his wisdom could remain with humanity.

What are the palm nuts used in Ifá divination?

The palm nuts, called ikin, are sixteen sacred four-eyed nuts that Orunmila gave to his sons to carry his wisdom after he departed the earth. A babalawo passes them from hand to hand and reads the marks left in wood dust on the divination tray, producing the signs that point to the right chapter of the Odu Ifá.

Related Entries

Eshu, Obatala, Ogun, Shango, Oshun, Yemoja, Olokun, Oshosi, Ajogun, Abiku