Opon Ifa

An opon Ifa has a top, and the top is a face. Cut into the raised border of the tray is a head, and the diviner orients the whole object so that head is furthest from him. It is Eshu, the orisha who carries messages between the human world and the orisha, and he is at the top because he is addressed first. Nothing gets through if he is not. The part of the border where the face sits is called the oju opon, the face or the eye of the tray, and the tapper the diviner uses is struck toward it to open the work.

The rest of the border is carved too, usually as a band of figures and geometric fields, and it is not filler. What appears there is chosen, and a tray commissioned for a particular babalawo can carry his own concerns: his orisha, animals, human figures, sometimes a mounted rider. Trays run from the plainest to the most densely worked, and the finest of them entered European collections early, which is why Ifa was visible to outsiders as an art some time before it was intelligible to them as a system.

The working surface inside the border is deliberately the opposite. It is flat, it is plain, and it is meant to be wiped. The tray is not the oracle. It is the ground the oracle is written on, and it is cleared between readings the way a slate is.

The surface is dusted with iyerosun, a fine pale powder worked from the wood of the irosun tree, which takes a mark cleanly and can be smoothed flat again by hand. Onto that surface the diviner marks the figure that has come up.

The casting itself is done one of two ways. Either sixteen palm nuts, the ikin, are moved between the hands and the number left over is counted each time, or the divining chain, the opele, is thrown and read from the way its eight halves fall. Either method yields a figure of eight positions, and the diviner records it in the powder as two columns of four, each position marked with a single stroke or a double one. The result is one of the 256 Odu. Only then does the corpus come in: the diviner recites from the verses belonging to that figure, looking for the precedent that matches the case in front of him.

So the tray does not answer anything. The nuts or the chain produce the figure, the memory of the diviner produces the reading, and the tray is where the figure is held still long enough to be worked with. That is a modest job for the most famous object in the tradition, and it is also why the tray travelled. Opon Ifa sit in museum collections all over the world, admired as sculpture, with the one thing that made them useful, a working diviner, absent.