LECTURE BY

GBAWONIYI ADEBOLU FATUNMISE AND

AWO FA’LOKUN FATUNMBI – PART II
April 21, 2001 at the African Culture Center,
Atlanta, Georgia

Falokun: When you come out of igbodu (initiation) hopefully

you have an experience of the head and heart in alignment.
You have absolutely no new information about the spiritual
technology of Ifa just because you’ve been initiated.
Completion of initiation is simply permission to study. People
who come out of igbodu and think they’re the Pope, who think
they know everything, or who think every thought they have is
God’s will, miss the whole point. Initiation is permission to
study, baba gets to decide what you’re going to learn.
Anything you think you know is irrelevant, baba is still the
boss, he’s the keeper of the tradition. He gets to decide when
you’re ready to learn more.
The first and foremost attribute of an initiate is humility.
I’ve had so many people smile in my face up until igbodu, I’m
getting leery of doing any more initiations. Get the point.
Initiation is permission to study, that’s all it is. In the past
thirteen years I have never ever called myself a babalawo,
never. Why? Technically you could say I was, but a babalawo
is somebody who is fully trained. A babalawo is the Araba of
Ile Ife. Baba is a babalawo, Orunmila was a babalawo. I am
an Ifa student. I had a chance to lecture at colleges across the
country and make a lot of money, but the guy promoting it
wanted me to say I was a master of Ifa. I said, “Please, forget
it, no.” Any African who comes to hear me is going to laugh
me off the stage. I am a student of Ifa.

Fatunmise: Kekere awo.

Falokun: Kekere awo, exactly a child of Ifa. In fact in Ode

Remo, when my Ifa brothers are alone, we call each other
babalawo and laugh. None of us are that sophisticated that
we would call ourselves that. The big chesse, the grandfather,
the Araba who was initiated at four and is now eighty-five, if
he called himself a babalawo, people might take him seriously.
Anything else is suspect. All this profiling about who knows
the most, who’s the chief, who do I kunle (bow) to first is
foolishness. If someone is older than you they’re your elder
give them their props, everything else is foolishness.
Whatever you think you know pales in comparison to the
deep wisdom from Africa that remains to be learned in this
country. They have entire subjects over there that we aren’t
aware of, let alone adept at. I stopped telling people about
gidigbo (Ifa martial art) because nobody believed me. Ifa has
it’s own martial art. I’ve been called an idiot for saying that.
Come on, no culture on earth doesn’t have their own system of
martial arts. Is there gidigbo in Africa?

Abi: Of course.

Falokun: You know what I’m talking about don’t you?

Abi: Yes.

Falokun: I’m not making it up.

Abi: O ye ye.

Fatunmise: You fight in a circle.

Falokun: In a circle, you play king of the mountain.

Fatunmise: In fact you will be fighting. They do it at the start

of the Ifa festival.

Falokun: For the Ifa festival I’m going to bring Esubi down
here, we’ll do gidigbo first thing in the Ifa festival.

Fatunmise: Okay.
Falokun: I’m going to toss people outside the ring. This old
man can fight, I love gidigbo. I’ve got pictures of Africans
throwing me through the air doing gidigbo. When you are so
high in the air you can think about how long it’s taking to hit
the ground, you know you’re in trouble. It’s the real thing. In
Yoruba gidigbo roughly translates to “let’s fight”. The real
name of the system is Akin which means “brave man from the
Yoruba” - aki meaning “bravery”. Gidigbo is a test of aki, a
test of bravery. They do it in the context of Ogun dancing.
They start dancing until someone yells gidigbo, then it turns
into a free for all. We start singing “Ogun, ogun karanga,
karanga, karanga e”. That’s just one of many topics we don’t
know much about in this country.
Think about something other than Ifa that you know how
to do and think about teaching that and think about how
people approach you to learn. Bring that to the table. What
I’ve told folks is that we’re all too young to bother baba with
questions. We’re young enough so that all of our questions
are things that baba can’t be bothered with. If you want to
know how to pronounce the prayers we talked about today
bother Ade. He’s young enough so it’s appropriate. If you
want to know how to sing a song, bother Ade. How old are
you?

Ade: Thirty-three.

Falokun: Your job is to teach the thirty year olds. When you
see a young man who is thirty he has to learn everything you
know before he can sit at baba’s feet. I can guarantee, you
won’t make progress any other way. Help me out Ade. In
Africa if a young man asks babagba (grandfather) a question
he’ll get smacked with a stick, igi ate (long stick), wop, wop,
wop. Am I right?

Fatunmise: You are right. When you are initiated you must
initiate yourself by learning. There are four levels of babalawo,
for categories. We call the first one awo kekere, or awo lekum,
awo oni. We have what we call kekere awo, kekere awo is an
apprentice. Awo lekum knows the first sixteen major odu
(verses of sacred scripture). They talk about sixteen just like
that. Awo gedameji knows the two hundred and fifty six odus.
Awo adosi, we say egbe du wo, ogbomoran, that means we
understand the odu and understand the wisdom.

Falokun: The last category is what we would call in America a

priest. These other categories would be priestly helpers. In
Ode Remo there are thirty babalawo. Four of them are adosi.
The rest of them don’t divine for anybody, they don’t do
ceremonies, they don’t do ebo (make offerings), they just work
and watch which is the way you learn.
You want to learn Ifa, here’s how you do it. You come
here early Saturday morning at seven o’clock and you say
“Baba what can I do to help?” Baba says you need to go to the
grocery store and pick up some milk. You’re thinking “What
the heck does that have to do with anything, I want to be the
chief.” What you do is go to the grocery store and pick up the
milk. Baba thanks you for getting the milk by saying “Let me
show you something.” That is the African model.
We are use to sitting down, getting organized, having a
lesson plan. I am a product of my own ancestry so I can use
the western approach. It isn’t going to work with baba. That
is why I am here today to hopefully serve as a bridge to show
the way the Europo-centric model conflicts with the Afro-
centric model, to be able to bridge that gap without offending
baba. It is a tenant of Yoruba culture that if you piss baba off
you’ll never know about it unless you are way, way out of line.
You can be doing the wrong thing, for example saying “Hi
baba.” No, we don’t do that. If I said “Hi baba” in Ile Ife
everyone in town would reach for their stick and run me out
and I wouldn’t be welcome back. It’s not “Hi baba,” it’s “A
boru a boye”, meaning “I lift my negativity from the earth and I
give it to baba.” You are not prostrating to him in the sense
that he is a better person, you are asking him as an older and
wiser person to clean you of your burden. When he says “A
boye a bosise”, he is saying “I take your burden and I give it to
heaven.” The greeting is a cleaning, it is a spiritual act. It is
not a gesture suggesting you think he is better than you. You
are asking for his blessing and acknowledging in the scheme
of things that he has answers to problems you can’t fix. That’s
what he’s doing. If he doesn’t want to give you his blessing he
will say “Dide” meaning “Stand up.”
Yoruba culture does not sanction public displays of
anger. It is very easy for Americans to take advantage of that
by being rude and wrongly thinking they are being
intimidating.
I went to an initiation once and we had to stop the
initiation because someone brought a tuna casserole and
someone brought macaroni and the person who brought the
tuna wanted to use the microwave before the person who
brought the macaroni. The reason we had to stop the
initiation is because the argument got totally whacked. Do
you understand? If you come to an initiation to help the
process, you need to consider this – it’s a wedding and you’re
not the bride. Whatever is going on with you personally is
irrelevant. If the ritual is not about you, what you are feeling
is not relevant. That is hard for Americans to understand.
That doesn’t mean you can’t deal with it later. It doesn’t mean
the issue might not be important. It is not intended to
denigrate what you are feeling. In a ritual context if what you
are feeling does not relate to the job at hand it is irrelevant
and disruptive to the process. You need to stuff how you’re
feeling and take care of business. In my experience Americans
find that very difficult.
You have to join the ritual with pure intent. I don’t care
who cooks the casserole first when I am in the process of
trying to save someone’s life. During heart surgery the janitor
doesn’t go into the room and tell the doctor where to make the
cut. Everyone has a job to do and everyone must do it well. If
you are here to help, do you job, do it well, don’t bother baba
with trivial matters.
Some people in American think I’m an authority on Ifa.
My African brothers are glad that I’m interested, but they
understand I don’t know much compared to their elders.
When I go to Africa everybody loves me, they’re going to make
me a chief, but when it comes time to do ritual there isn’t
much I can do. They let me carry the water buckets. Do you
understand? A few times they let me pray. The old
grandfathers look at me shaking their heads thinking, “What
is he trying to say?” The younger men tell the grandfathers
what I’m trying to say. Do you understand?
We simply need to join hands around the notion that we
don’t know much. That isn’t bad. If you get that the purpose
of an Ile (Ifa congregation) is to fix problems there are a lot of
problems we can fix while we continue to learn Ifa. Hear this –
there are problems we can fix that baba can’t fix because he
has no experience dealing with them. Some of the problems
we deal with are different in America then they are in Africa.
Baba doesn’t understand homelessness. When I speak of
sexual abuse baba doesn’t get it. Sexual abuse in Africa is a
capitol offense. You’re dead the day you’re caught. There is no
such thing as repeat offenders. We can’t deal with it that way
in this country. Baba has to decide who the experts are at
dealing with problems he is not familiar with and designate
that authority. He still gets to decide, he’s still directing
traffic, he’s the once who consults the oracle. Not because he
has all the answers, not because he’s all knowing, not because
he’s the voice of God, but because someone has to keep it
coordinated.
There is a big debate in this country about whether or
not Ifa priests can initiate orisa. Come on, stop it. When you
get initiated into Ifa they give you the first sixteen odu, then
they invoke Osetura, then the first sixteen odu copulate and
you have all the odus. Having all the odus means the entire
world, there is nothing that exists that is not born of odu.
Nothing exits that Ifa can’t invoke, that’s our job. We can
make orisa.

Fatunmise: We can make all the orisa.

Falokun: We can, but we don’t because that’s the job of the

specialists. We know how for this reason, get it in the village
context. When a village is founded an awo is brought in who
does divination and determines the village needs an Esu, an
Ogun, a Sango, an Oshun and it needs whatever else to
survive. The awo invokes all those things and says you guys
become experts at each of these things. Then a hundred years
later an epidemic hits the village and all the Oguns pass away.
Is Ogun’s mystery lost? No because Ifa has kept a piece of it.
Ifa comes back and says you are the new Ogun expert. This is
a process of checks and balances. I have seen it happen.
Every time there is an orisa initiation in Ode Remo, the
elders of the Orisa community come to baba (chief Ifa priest)
and say so and so needs to receive orisa do you want to do it?
Baba always says no. They go away and I think “Why are they
doing this?” They are keeping things coordinated. If he has
an issue with it, they met in the elders council and sort it out.
When I came to be initiated the issue was not that I was
of European ancestry, the issue was that I was not from Ode
Remo. You don’t go to Ode Remo to be initiated if you are
from Ile Ife. If a person from Ile Ife went to Ode Remo to be
initiated they would say “What is wrong with you, why doesn’t
your family take care of you?” The issue is being initiated
outside of your village.
For Africans to initiate people from outside of Africa was
a big change in protocol. The elders of Ode Remo met and did
divination, unknown to me. The day we were ready to start the
elders came to me and said, “We have met, we have discussed
your character and we have determined you are worthy.”
Those are issues that are worked out behind closed doors. I
will never know what they discussed and what they
determined. The just gave me the green light.
They will initiate you in Africa based on the assumption
that you will follow their guidance. The problem is people go
to Africa get initiated, think they’re the Pope, never go back
never get any guidance, never learn anything. The system
breaks at that point because people are taking advantage of
the implied agreement to follow the guidance of the elders.
The point is in the African system there is no place to put your
resistance.
If baba says you should stop taking crack, or you should
stop drinking, the first thing you are going to do is say, “Oh
baba doesn’t know what he’s talking about, the heck with
him.” You will immediately find five people who agree with you
and the five of you will start your own Ifa temple and the
founding principal of your religion will be baba doesn’t know
what he’s talking about. You will do anything except deal with
the addiction. If you are in an African village there is no place
to put that attitude. If you go to the next village and say baba
doesn’t know what he’s talking about, it will get no play. The
elders will take you back to your village and say “Baba what
were you talking about? This guy seems to think you don’t
know what you’re doing.” There is no room to resist the
guidance of the elders. This maintains the structure of the
family as a mystery school. Do you understand?
Does this mean they always get it right? No. Does this
mean they are infallible? No. It means you have no place to
put your projections. You have to deal with your own growth,
that’s your job, that’s the only thing you need to worry about.
If baba has a problem, believe me the folks in Ile Ife are much
harsher with him than you could possibly imagine. If he is
concerned about keeping them happy or keeping you happy,
you loose. He doesn’t even have to take the time to think
about it. His elders have more to teach him, you have nothing
to teach him. His obligation is to keep his elders happy so they
will continue to give him guidance. That’s the way the system
works.
I am going to give you a big hint on how to learn. You
learn by watching. The amount of information you might have
to absorb seems overwhelming. It is much easier to learn by
watching when you realize everything we do in Ifa follows the
same ritual sequence. No matter what we are doing we always
do the following:

Wash it
Anoint it
Invoke it
Feed it
Read it

We can remember the sequence by remember the word

“wafer” – W.A.I.F.R.
 Why do we wash something? To clean away any prior
influences. This is true of a pot, of an initiate, of a power
object. This is true when we are doing a healing.
I want to give you simple things you can do in each of
these segments, then you can spend the rest of your life
becoming more and more adept at each one of them. Ifa has
very elaborate and complicated herbal mixtures it uses in
water for the purpose of cleaning something. The most
universal ingredient, the “all purpose cleaner,” is efun. If you
don’t know what to use, use efun. Grind the efun into power
like talcum power and sprinkle a little in a bowl of water.
The next thing you want to do is to say a prayer into the
water. If you don’t know the Yoruba prayers, say the prayers
in English. Say a prayer about what you are doing with the
water. If you are using the water to heal somebody who has a
physical illness you invoke the power of healing into the water
– “ire omi tutu, ire ara, ire alafia, ire agbo ato”, meaning “good
fortune from cool water, bring the good fortune of physical
health, peace, and long life”. Now there are more and more
complicated prayers you can do, but you can leave here today
and be able to say that much. It’s a place to start.
Here’s the big clue. If you know we pray into the water
and this is a core ingredient. Listen to baba when he prays
into the water. You will hear what I just said and more. That
is how you learn. You wouldn’t listen for this unless you knew
that is what he is up too. Peep what he is up too and let it
register. If you are washing something for a specific orisa you
will invoke that orisa. Hello, this is not complicated, you just
need to figure out what you are doing and put the pieces
together.
Anointing, I can tell you most of what you need to know.
We anoint with the following ingredients – palm oil, efun,
charcoal, irosun, molasses, and honey. Your elder will tell
which element is sacred to which orisa when they feel you are
ready to learn. When you anoint something you rub these
things onto a sacred object and these things become like a
magnet holding the prayer on to the object.
You see where we are, we’ve cleaned away the booboo
from something, then we have anointed it to catch the prayer,
now we are ready to invoke the power of the thing that we are
making or doing.
While you are doing the oriki (invocation) you want to
mark the odu that gives birth to the spirit you are invoking on
the ifa tray.
If you are an orisa priest you want to place the cowry
shells on the tray to mimic the meji odus of Ifa. The mouth
equals a single line, the stomach equals a double line. Ifa has
eight positions on the tray, there are sixteen cowrie shells in
merindinlogn. You mark the meji of ifa by doubling the lines.
For example Irosun meji in Ifa looks like this:

I I
I I
II II
II II

Using cowry shells irosun meji would look like this

I I I I
I I I I
II II II II
II II II II

Two rows of cowry shells equals one leg of Ifa. You place
the marks on the divination mat along with efun. In Ifa
prayers are said first on the tray or mat then transferred to the
object. After you say the prayer you pick up a small amount
of either iyerosun from the tray or efun from the mat and
sprinkle it on the thing that you are empowering.
The rule of invocation in Ifa is that everyone can invoke
the ancestors and everyone can invoke ori and then you are
sanctioned to invoke that which you have received through
initiation. If you haven’t been initiated into anything you can
invoke your ori, your ancestors and everybody can pray to God
who we call Olodumare.
You hear baba doing these iba prayers, that’s powerful
stuff and we wonder what the heck is he saying? I’m about to
tell you. The iba prayers are more or less in the same
sequence. Let’s take the words iba se. That means “I give
repect to”, or “I pay homage to”. If I say “Do an oriki
(invocation) to Esu”, iba se Esu is the least you can say. Some
of the oriki to Esu are three or four pages long if they are
written out. Here is my recommendation, here is what I do.
You take the first sentence of the oriki and your memorize
that. Now you can say something more than iba se Esu. Now
you can say iba se Esu, Esu Odara, Esu lanlu, ogiri oko
okunrin ori ita. This means Divine Messenger, Esu Odara
means; Esu of power, Esu lanlu, The Divine Messenger
responds to the drum, ogiri oko, source of fertility, literally
erect penis, and okunrin ori ita, the man who stands at the
cross roads. That all means something in Yoruba. This is
doable. You can memorize this in a day. It’s the first sentence
of Esu’s oriki. Then you learn the second sentence and add
that to it so you don’t get overwhelmed. You do this with each
of the orisa in your shrine. Look at it this way, if you learn
one word a day, at the end of the year you have three hundred
and sixty five words. That is a very respectable iba prayer
even in Africa. Go to my web site get the oriki for Esu. That’s
a start. Don’t get overwhelmed. Memorize it in segments,
start to use the segments, say it with feeling.
Here is the format that I use. I always start with a
statement of humility. Ope ni fun Olorun - My blessings come
from heaven. You can start any prayer with this phrase. The
next thing you want to say is Olodumare mo ji loni - I wake up
today, mo wo gun merin aye. Igun kini, igun keja, igun keta,
igun merin. We are thanking the Creator for the four
directions of the earth.
The point is; this is a simple two sentence prayer.
Olodumare mo ji loni, mo wo gun merin aye, igun kini, igun
keja, igun keta, igun kerin. After this I invoke the six
directions, Iba ila oorun, (east) iba iwo oorun, (west) iba ariwa,
(north) iba guusu, (south) iba oba igbaye, (king of the world)
iba orun oke, (the mountains in heaven).
Fatumise: In the Yoruba language Olodumare means God,
Olorun means owner of the sky. Orun is the sky, Olorun is
the owner of the sky. Oba to laye is the King of the World.

Falokun: That is a different dialect, I say “oba igbaye”, say it

his way because that is the way he does it here.

Fatumise: That is more common Yoruba. Oba means king,

so Oba to laye, the king who owns the world. “To” means
everything.

Falokun: Get a sense of it so you can do it with him. I say

“Iba se ila oorun”, your response is “mo juba”. So lets try it.
“Iba se ila oorun”.

Audience: Mo juba.

Falokun: Iba se awo oorun.

Audience: Mo juba.

Falokun: Iba se ariwa.

Audience: Mo juba.

Falokun: Iba se guusu.

Audience: Mo juba.

Falokun: Iba se Oba to laye.

Audience: Mo juba.

Falokun: Iba se Orun oke.

Audience: Mo juba.

Fatunmise: The mo juba he is saying is the same thing as

when we say ase.
Falokun: The person saying the prayer says the iba se on
behalf of the congregation and the congregation says mo juba
as a response. You are co-signing what I am saying. There
are different responses at different times. The response in the
directions is mo juba. The prayer to Olodumare the response
at the end of each sentence is “ase”.

Fatumise: That is the one we say a lot. We say “ahhh

shayyy”.

Falokun: So if I say “Ope ni fun Olorun”. You say “ase”.

Right?

Fatunmise: Thank you.

Falokun: Let’s try it. Ope ni fun Olorun.

Audience: Ase.

Falokun: It becomes a call and response. You know the

southern Baptist preacher who says “hep, hep, hep”. It’s a
retention of the same thing. We want the ase to build by the
effect of the call and response. Baba can’t get his ase flowing
unless you are saying ase to his prayer. Because you don’t
speak Yoruba you have to pay attention and wait for him to
pause and hope it is the end of the sentence.
We’ve got the directions, what comes next? We stand on
the shoulders of those who come before us. The ancestors
come next. Again know you can say minimally “iba se Egun”.
Then we can say “Iba se Egun, Egungun kiki Egungun, Egun
iku ranran fe”, meaning “I respect the ancestors and praise
the mediums who praise the ancestors who bring love”.Then
you either invoke the orisa in your shrine or the orisa you are
working with depending on what you are doing. To complete
the process you feed it, make an offering, then you read it – do
divination to make sure the work you have done is accepted by
spirit.
(Part III coming soon…)