La Géomancie à l‘ancienne Côte des Esclaves

Abstract

M. MAUPOIL, during a tour of administrative duty in Lower Dahomey during 1933–36, made an extensive study of the Ifa system of divination, which plays such a large part in the religious life of the Yoruba and of their neighbours in Dahomey who have borrowed it from them. Although to the masses Ifa, or Fa as it is called in Dahomey, has become personified as a god, to the initiated it is more truly the voice of god or of fate. Unlike the cruel, capricious and unreliable gods of the Dahomey and Yoruba pantheon, Ifa is infallible, impartial, and never deceives. It consists of an abstract method of divination by manipulation of sixteen palm nuts, in the course of which a number of signs are made with the fingers in a yellow powder placed on a special tray. It is these signs which reveal to the initiated practitioner the past or the future. In its simpler form Ifa gives the consultant an answer to the everyday problems of his life ; in its more esoteric, it gives him an opportunity of discovering his destiny.

La Géomancie à l‘ancienne Côte des Esclaves

Par Bernard Maupoil. (Université de Paris: Travaux et mémoires de l‘Institut d‘Ethnologie, Tome 42.) Pp. xxvii + 690 + 8 plates. (Paris: Institut d‘Ethnologie, 1943.) 320 francs.