Opón Ifá

The Page, Not the Oracle

First attested
1659Listed in Christoph Weickmann's Ulm inventory of 1659, the printed Exoticophylacium Weickmannianum; the tray itself, Museum Ulm inv. AB 1486, is catalogued as made before 1659 and recorded as from Allada. No date or circumstance of acquisition is documented for it.

The tray form's only hard date is Weickmann's Ulm inventory of 1659, on an object two traditions still claim — Yoruba Ifá and the Fá of the Bight of Benin — and nothing read on it survives, because the odù are marked in dust and wiped.

The carved wooden tray on which a Yoruba babaláwo marks the odù of Ifá in dust, then wipes them away.

Ìyẹ̀rọ̀sùn — wood dust from the irosun tree, or bamboo powdered by termites — is spread on the tray. Sixteen ikin palm nuts are passed from hand to hand eight times, each pass marked in the dust as one stroke or two, until two columns of four name one of 256 odù (Pogoson and Akande, 2011); the ọ̀pẹ̀lẹ̀ chain gives the same figure in one throw. The babaláwo recites the verses that figure holds, from memory (Abimbola, 1976). At the tray's head the ojú ọpọ́n carries Èṣù the messenger, not Ọ̀rúnmìlà, whose oracle this is. No surviving tray is dated earlier than the one at Ulm, recorded as from Allada in Christoph Weickmann's inventory of 1659: Ezio Bassani reads it as a Yoruba opón, Marlène-Michèle Biton as a plateau de Fa, the Bight of Benin's name for the same divination.

Light

The surface is made to be cleared. A reading is marked, spoken through the verses it names, and wiped before the next person sits — nothing accumulates on the tray, and no verdict is filed against anyone.

Shadow

Its only firm date comes from a German merchant's cabinet, not from Yorubaland, and Museum Ulm reviews it under its colonial-context provenance project. That inventory says where objects came from, never how they were got: of its African objects it describes one acquisition, a sword.

Sources and verification9 sources · 3 links

Primary source

  • Museum Ulm, Ifa-Brett, inv. AB 1486 (Weickmann collection), museum-digital: Baden-Württemberg, object 2776, dated 'vor 1659'; wood, 34.4 × 55.7 cm; Herstellungsort Allada; Ethnie Yoruba; listed under the museum's Projekt zur Aufarbeitung der Bestände aus kolonialen KontextenThe tray's date of before 1659, its presence in Christoph Weickmann's cabinet, Allada as its recorded place of origin, and its current status under provenance review.

Scholarship

  • William R. Bascom, Ifa Divination: Communication Between Gods and Men in West Africa, 1969, the divining apparatus and the casting procedureThe mechanics: sixteen ikin palm nuts passed from hand to hand eight times with the result marked in the powder on the tray, and the ọ̀pẹ̀lẹ̀ chain thrown once to give the same figure.
  • 'Wande Abimbola, Ifá: An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus, 1976, the chapters on the corpus and on the training of a babaláwoThe 256 odù and how a verse is deployed in consultation once the figure on the tray is named — the corpus the mark indexes.
  • Adam Jones, "A Collection of African Art in Seventeenth-Century Germany: Christoph Weickmann's Kunst- und Naturkammer", African Arts 27:2, 1994, pp. 28–43That Weickmann's African objects were acquired between 1655 and 1659 from the West African coast — the documentary basis for dating the Ulm tray.
  • Ezio Bassani, "The Ulm Opon Ifa (ca. 1650): A Model for Later Iconography", in Rowland Abiodun, Henry John Drewal and John Pemberton III (eds), The Yoruba Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press), 1994, pp. 79–89The specialist art-historical study of this object: Bassani dates the Ulm tray ca. 1650 and reads it as a Yoruba opón standing behind later tray iconography — the side of the attribution argument that Biton's 2015 monograph argues against.
  • O. I. Pogoson and A. O. Akande, "Ifa Divination Trays from Isale-Oyo", Cadernos de Estudos Africanos 21, 2011, pp. 15–41 — "The head of esu is usually depicted on the oju opon"; iyerosun "got from the irosun tree or from dry bamboo eaten up into powder by termites"Èṣù's head carved on the ojú ọpọ́n, the face of the tray opposite the diviner; the source of ìyẹ̀rọ̀sùn; and sixteen major odù each with sixteen subordinates, making 256.
  • Marlène-Michèle Biton, Un chef-d'œuvre des arts d'Afrique : le plateau de Fa (golfe du Bénin), collection Christoph Weickmann, Ulm 1659 (Paris: L'Harmattan), 2015, 283 pp., série EthnoesthétiqueThat the Ulm tray's attribution is argued rather than settled: a book-length 2015 study presents it as a plateau de Fa of the Bight of Benin rather than as a Yoruba Ifá object. Cited for the existence and framing of that argument, which the title and the publisher's description carry; the text itself has not been consulted.
  • Kim Siebenhüner, "Colonial Objects in the Cabinet of Curiosities? Christoph Weickmann's 'Outlandish Things' in Ulm", in Christina Brauner, Renate Dürr, Philip Hahn and Anne Sophie Overkamp (eds), Encountering the Global in Early Modern Germany: Microhistories of Mobility, Materiality, and Belonging (New York: Berghahn), 2025, ch. 14, pp. 301–22, open access; the 1655 and 1659 inventories in the section on the collection, Haintzel and the sword under 'On the Provenance of Weickmann's Outlandish Things'That the 1659 document is a stand-alone printed inventory, the Exoticophylacium Weickmannianum; that the catalogue's statements of origin are not always correct and cannot always be resolved; and that circumstances of acquisition are recorded for one object in the African collection only, the Fetu sword.

Further reading

  • 'Wande Abimbola (ed. and trans.), Sixteen Great Poems of Ifá, 1975What the verses a named odù calls up actually say, in Yorùbá with facing English, rather than paraphrase.

Linked entries

  • Set againstThe NornsA modern connection

    The Norns fix a fate that is not negotiable; an Ifá reading normally ends in a prescribed sacrifice, so the figure in the dust is a diagnosis to act on rather than a sentence.

  • Set againstThe Greek Magical PapyriA modern connection

    The papyri survive because a working ritual text was written down and Egyptian sand kept it; the odù are written in dust and wiped, so the tray outlives every reading ever made on it.

  • Set againstThe DruidsA modern connection

    Both are dated from the outside — the Druids only by Greek and Roman writers, the tray by a German inventory of 1659 — but Ifá's corpus is still held and recited by living babaláwo.

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