Dear Readers;

Some of the questions you ask me return in different forms, week after week:

• What does my Odù mean for the life I am living?

• How can I better understand my relationship with the Òrìṣà?

• How do teachings inherited from another place and time speak to the decisions, relationships, and responsibilities before me today?

These questions deserve time. They also deserve an accessible place in which to study them.

I am therefore expanding DAILY IFÁ ACADEMY into a structured video teaching library, bringing together introductions to all 256 Odù Ifá and more than 50 Òrìṣà and related sacred figures.

You can already begin. All 16 Odù of the Ògbè family have been completed and are available in the Academy. A free introductory video is also available to everyone, offering a starting point before you enter the individual teachings.

This is the next stage of work that has occupied much of my life for the past fifteen years. I would like to explain what I am building, how it relates to the books and newsletters you already know, and what I hope it will make possible for our community.

Begin with the Ògbè Family

The first complete part of the programme is ready: Ògbè Méjì and the fifteen combinations that belong to the Ògbè family.

These sixteen episodes allow you to explore how the teachings change as Ògbè enters into relationship with each of the other principal Odù. They also offer a manageable way to begin studying a body of knowledge that can otherwise feel overwhelming.

The introductory video is freely accessible. The individual Academy teachings form part of the offering for supporting subscribers.

You will find them in the ACADEMY section of daily-ifa.news. If you are new to this work, I recommend beginning with the introduction and then exploring the Ògbè episodes at your own pace.

You do not need to understand the entire system before beginning. What matters is giving an individual teaching enough attention to recognize its questions, follow its stories, and consider its relevance to your own circumstances.

Why Odù and Òrìṣà Matter to Our Lives

Many readers approach these traditions through a personal relationship with particular Òrìṣà or through an Odù revealed in initiation or consultation. The significance of these relationships, and how they are established, differs among lineages.

For me, these questions meet in our relationship with Orí, the inner head associated with personal destiny and the direction of a life.

Odù offer narratives through which we can examine possibilities, recurring difficulties, responsibilities, and the consequences of conduct. The Òrìṣà open further dimensions of understanding through their histories, relationships, qualities, and fields of action.

Neither should become a label that contains the whole person.

An Odù deserves more attention than a prediction of what must happen. A relationship with an Òrìṣà deserves more depth than a personality description. Both ask us to consider how we live, what we cultivate, and how we respond to the circumstances before us.

That is the approach I want the Academy to make accessible.

A Place to Learn, Wherever You Are Starting

Some of you belong to established houses and have elders with whom you can study. Others live far from such communities or are still finding a trustworthy place within them. Some are already initiated practitioners who want to broaden their resources. Others are encountering Ifá and Òrìṣà traditions for the first time.

You arrive with different experiences, but often with the same desire: to understand more clearly.

As a Babaláwo and Babalórìṣà, I see the transmission of knowledge as an important part of my responsibility. Oral teaching, apprenticeship, and the relationships through which ritual knowledge is entrusted remain essential to our traditions. A digital library has a different purpose: it can provide context, introduce sources, and help people ask better questions.

For readers who already have a house, I hope these teachings will enrich the conversations you have there. For those without that access, I hope they will offer a thoughtful foundation for further study.

The Academy is an educational resource. Its value lies in making serious learning more accessible while respecting the forms of knowledge that depend on direct transmission.

Fifteen Years Behind the Teaching

Over the past fifteen years, I have devoted considerable time and personal resources to gathering written material on Odù Ifá, Òrìṣà, and related African and Afro-diasporic traditions.

I have searched university collections, libraries, antiquarian catalogues, and private sources. I have bought books, borrowed material, and obtained copies of works that are difficult to find. Some discoveries were immediately useful; others took years of further reading before I could understand their terminology or context.

My working archive now contains more than 30,000 mythological narratives and variants, alongside extensive collections of teachings, ritual references, prohibitions, interpretations, and other material.

The collection brings together sources in several languages, including English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish, as well as Yorùbá terminology and material from Fon/Ewe and Bantu cultural contexts. Cuban and Brazilian sources introduce further layers of language, transmission, and interpretation.

These differences matter. Similar names do not always indicate identical understandings. A practice described in one tradition cannot automatically be transferred into another.

Much of the work therefore consists of establishing context: identifying which source is speaking, what its terms mean, and where versions agree or diverge. Old scans, incomplete translations, inconsistent spellings, and specialized ritual vocabulary make that process demanding.

Historical material also requires judgment. Age alone does not guarantee accuracy. A source may preserve valuable testimony while carrying misunderstandings, omissions, or the assumptions of its author.

The task is to make this material more readable while preserving the distinctions that give it meaning.

Bringing Inherited Wisdom into Contemporary Life

The questions guiding this work are often very practical.

How should a person living in a European city understand a myth shaped by agricultural life in West Africa? What changes when a teaching travels from Africa to Brazil or Cuba? How do we distinguish an enduring ethical insight from a recommendation tied to a particular historical situation?

A prohibition may require knowledge of its ritual setting. A myth may contain several levels of meaning. An apparent contradiction may reveal that two sources are speaking from different lineages.

These are precisely the places where teaching becomes necessary.

My interest also extends to how these narratives can deepen self-understanding and spiritual care: how they help us examine grief, ambition, conflict, belonging, or the difficulty of making a decision.

The Academy will approach such questions through the sources and through my own perspective as a contemporary practitioner. Where I offer an interpretation, I want readers to understand it as an interpretation and to have enough context to think alongside me.

What You Will Find in the Videos

Each episode is designed to take approximately fifteen to twenty minutes. It introduces an Odù or an Òrìṣà through selected stories and explores what those teachings may mean within a human life.

A myth may become the starting point for discussing character, partnership, authority, patience, prosperity, or the responsibilities attached to a particular gift.

The emphasis is on understanding relationships and consequences. Rather than presenting a long sequence of disconnected prescriptions, I want to explain why a teaching matters and what questions it asks of us.

The Òrìṣà episodes follow the same principle. They explore mythology, history, spiritual meaning, and contemporary relevance, with attention to differences among regions and traditions. Where the programme includes related sacred figures, their place will be identified clearly.

My aim is for each episode to leave you with a stronger sense of the subject and a useful basis for further reflection.

How the Videos and Books Work Together

A short teaching video cannot contain the material of a detailed volume running to several hundred pages.

The books provide the wider record: more narratives, more source material, and the depth needed for extended study. The videos offer an accessible point of entry, helping you identify central questions before moving into greater detail.

The newsletters retain another important role. They are where I can take a contemporary subject—doubt, identity, family life, leadership, or another question you bring—and explore it through Ifá.

These formats will therefore continue alongside one another. You may watch an episode to become familiar with an Odù, read a newsletter to explore one of its implications, and turn to a book when you want to study the material more extensively.

The book project continues, with English and Brazilian Portuguese editions remaining central to my plans.

Why I Am Building This Here

The research and production process has reached a point where I can prepare material more efficiently than before. Publication and distribution, however, introduce constraints of their own.

Amazon KDP currently allows up to two new title creations and two new title submissions per book format each week. Those limits apply separately to eBooks, paperbacks, and hardcovers. For a project comprising 256 Odù in two languages, the scale is substantial: 512 language editions within a single format would occupy roughly five years of release slots at two per week.

That calculation illustrates why a publication schedule can become much longer than the preparation of the material itself. Other books, interruptions, and the practical work of publishing also need to be accommodated.

Visibility creates another difficulty. In my experience, reaching readers interested in these traditions requires sustained effort, including paid advertising. Broad categories and search results often struggle to convey the distinctions that matter within our field.

I find this frustrating, especially when the material is ready and readers are asking for access. I have raised these difficulties with the relevant platforms, but I also need a way to continue the work under the conditions that exist.

As a child of Àjàgùnnà, I am inclined to look for a way forward.

Making daily-ifa.news the main home for this teaching programme gives me a more direct relationship with you. Substack requires some compromises, but it allows us to build an organized body of teaching around the community already gathered here.

What Comes Next

The Ògbè family is available now. The programme will expand through the remaining Odù families and the Òrìṣà teachings.

My working goal is to make the complete introductory video library available by the end of 2026. That is an ambitious target, and I will announce new material as it becomes available.

As the collection grows, I intend to improve its navigation, with clearer routes into the Odù and Òrìṣà material. Finding the teaching you need should become easier as the library develops.

I am also exploring further ways to make the books available digitally, including the possibility of reading editions linked beneath the relevant videos. These formats still need testing, with attention to readability, reliable access, and the protection of the work.

For now, the immediate invitation is simple: begin with what is already there.

How I Use AI in This Work

I want to be transparent about the tools involved.

The teaching rests on the historical authors and documented collections I have gathered, principally from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I do not build its source base from internet summaries or treat AI-generated statements as evidence about the tradition.

AI assists with parts of the editorial and production process, including translation, language revision, work on imperfect source texts, and audiovisual preparation. It can be especially useful when material exists across several languages or survives in difficult scans.

It also makes mistakes. Specialized terminology, names, and ritual language require particular attention.

I determine the focus of the teaching, select the narratives, and take responsibility for the interpretation and editorial decisions. The tools help me carry out the work; the responsibility remains mine.

The videos use synthetic narration to offer clear, consistent English. For a readership spread across more than thirty countries, I hope this makes listening easier and supports the use of transcription and translation tools. Digital tools also assist with aspects of the imagery and music.

For personal reflections and possible live conversations, I intend to use my own voice. I would like to explore occasional sessions in which you can hear more directly how I approach a question or interpret a teaching. I do not yet have dates to announce.

I also want to preserve enough time and quiet for the study on which this work depends. The project needs a thoughtful rhythm if it is to remain useful.

What Your Supporting Subscription Makes Possible

Much of DAILY IFÁ will remain freely accessible, including the introductory Academy video. The more extensive teaching library forms part of the offering for supporting subscribers.

I am fortunate to be financially independent and able to devote substantial personal resources to this work. I do not depend on the project for my livelihood.

Nevertheless, acquiring sources, preparing texts, producing videos, maintaining the tools, protecting the work, and helping readers find it all involve costs. Supporting subscriptions contribute toward those expenses and make it easier to continue developing the library.

Your participation also helps me understand which subjects deserve further attention. Reading figures and viewing patterns provide some guidance, while your thoughtful questions often reveal needs that numbers cannot show.

I value both forms of feedback. They help me decide where the next investment of time will be most useful.

A Note About the Reader Tools

Some of you also use the supporting AI guides, including Voice of Orisha and Wisdom of Ifá.

Those tools require maintenance as their underlying platform changes. I am reviewing how best to migrate or rebuild them so that they can continue to serve readers. During that process, access may temporarily change or be interrupted.

I will share clearer instructions and updated access information as the arrangements are confirmed. Thank you for your patience with this less visible part of the project.

How We Can Help This Work Reach Others

Your questions, suggestions, and corrections remain valuable to me. I cannot implement every idea, but I read them as part of an ongoing conversation about what this community needs.

If you find the teaching worthwhile, telling an interested friend is another meaningful form of support. Many people are looking for serious, accessible material on these traditions without knowing where to begin.

A personal recommendation can help someone find the free introduction, explore the newsletter, and decide whether further study is right for them.

That is how I hope the Academy will grow: through useful teaching, careful attention, and relationships built over time.

An Invitation to Begin

Fifteen years of gathering material have convinced me that access is only the beginning. A reader also needs orientation: enough language, context, and explanation to understand what is before them.

This is what I want DAILY IFÁ ACADEMY to provide.

The books will continue to deepen the record. The newsletters will continue to explore the questions of contemporary life. The videos will offer a structured way into the teachings, one Odù and one Òrìṣà at a time.

You can take the first step today.

Visit DAILY IFÁ ACADEMY, watch the free introduction, and explore the complete sixteen-part Ògbè family.

May your Orí guide your learning, and may what you discover deepen your understanding of the life you are here to live.

Baba Tilo de Àjàgùnnà
DAILY IFÁ

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Dear readers,

“My Òrìṣà is Ògún.”

Many of us have heard that sentence. Perhaps some of us have said it. Now imagine that its speaker, a practitioner of the Yorùbá Ifá–Òrìṣà tradition, is seated beside two other people. One comes from a Vodun family in the Republic of Benin. The other practices Cuban Palo, a tradition shaped by Kongo inheritances. A blacksmith sets an iron blade on the table between them.

“Ògún has a particular place in my life,” says the Ifá practitioner.

“We honor Gu at the forge,” says the visitor from Benin.

“In my house, we work with Sarabanda,” says the practitioner from Cuba.

For an instant, the answer seems obvious: three names for the sacred power of iron.

Then they begin to explain how they know that power. The conversation becomes much more interesting.

What does the iron open?

For the Yorùbá practitioner, Ògún is present in iron, in the work that clears a road, and in the danger of a blade that can build or wound. But “my Òrìṣà” cannot mean that this person owns Ògún. Whole families, trades, and towns have honored him. The intimate question is how this life has come into relationship with him: through divination, inherited practice, initiation where appropriate, offerings, and the obligations that follow.

The visitor from Benin knows Gu as a power of iron, forging, and the opening of a path. This is no distant abstraction. A forge in Porto-Novo can be dedicated to Gu; a practitioner may keep a small private shrine of iron, while a larger shrine serves a public place. Ògún and Gu belong to neighboring, historically connected worlds. Their likeness is real, but their names do not make every rite, story, or relationship interchangeable.

“Wait,” says the third visitor. Sarabanda belongs to Cuban Palo’s Kongo-rooted history; we should not put that name in the mouth of a priest from the historical Kongo and pretend nothing happened on the Atlantic crossing. In one Palo house, a particular Sarabanda is encountered through a particular nganga (nkisi): a consecrated vessel, its prepared substances, its relationship with the dead, and the people charged with tending it. Another house’s Sarabanda is not simply an identical copy. Even the word nganga has made a journey: in historical Kongo it names a ritual specialist; in Cuban Palo it can also name the prepared vessel.

The blade is still lying on the table. Already it has taught us something: recognizing a shared element tells us very little about where a spiritual relationship lives.

Whose power is personal?

Here is the surprise. It would be easy for an Ifá reader to say, “Our relationship is personal; theirs is collective.” But the evidence will not let us say that. Gu can have a private shrine. Imagine a historical Kongo nkisi bearing an iron nail placed for one person’s appeal: the same powerful figure might be consulted again by another person or called upon for the peace of a community. In Palo, the relationship between a practitioner, a particular nganga, and a particular dead person can be profoundly specific. And Ògún, whom an individual serves, can also belong to the life of a forge or a town.

So “personal” and “collective” are not two separate religions. They are questions we must ask inside each tradition. Whose life is being addressed? Who tends the shrine? Who is entitled to ask for help? Who else bears the obligation? The answers may differ even between houses within one tradition.

In Ifá, one further question gives this conversation its center: What does my Orí require?

Orí is the inner head: the person’s own spiritual center and the path that must be lived. It is not another name for Ògún, nor is the Òrìṣà of one’s head a substitute for Orí. A historical Yorùbá ilé-orí, a shrine for a person’s inner head, makes the intimacy of that relationship visible. Consultation with Ifá can bring a person’s circumstances, duties, and relationships with Òrìṣà into focus. The answer is not exhausted by saying the name of a single power.

This matters especially when the conversation crosses into Brazil. In many Ketu Candomblé houses, an initiated person’s orixá de cabeça (means: head Òrìṣà) and other significant Òrìṣà relationships are carefully distinguished; a personal assentamento (shrine) is cared for within a shared terreiro (spiritual house). Some houses articulate a second or further Òrìṣà relationship in particular ways. Those arrangements are meaningful, but they should not be projected as one fixed list of three Òrìṣà assigned to every human being in every Yorùbá community.

And the historical surprise runs in the other direction, too. Records from eighteenth-century Angola describe named minkisi coming to the heads of named people. A sacred power’s relation to a particular head was not invented when Kongo-Angolan practices met Ketu practice in Brazil. Candomblé Angola has its own inheritances as well as centuries of exchange with its neighbors.

Who stands behind the person?

Now ask our three guests about the dead. The conversation changes again.

Yorùbá people honor ancestors, and their presence cannot be erased from a discussion of one person’s path. Yet honoring one’s ancestors, tending Orí, and serving Ògún are not three interchangeable acts. In Fon communities, an asen can commemorate one particular dead person while standing inside the family’s shrine house. The ancestor is individual; the duty to remember is shared. In historical Kongo practice, the realm of the dead can empower a nkisi. In Cuban Palo, the dead may be woven into the life of a specific nganga and its ritual family.

None of these observations makes one tradition “warm” and another “cold.” Gu and Ògún can both protect and demand integrity. In Fon accounts of Fá, coolness can name a hoped-for balance and well-being, not emotional indifference. The useful question is more precise: How do the living, the sacred powers, and the dead become answerable to one another here?

Our visitors have not given us three versions of an iron god. They have shown us three ways to form and sustain a relationship—and, within each, a living weave of person, house, and community.

The question I bring back to Ifá

When someone tells me, “My Òrìṣà is Ògún,” I hear an important beginning. I also want to ask: How was this relationship recognized? What has Ifá revealed about the person who must live it? Which duties belong to that person, and which belong to the house and community? What counsel comes from Orí, and what conduct will honor it?

This is the depth of individualization that matters to me in Ifá. It does not make us solitary owners of divine forces. It asks us to take responsibility for a life whose Orí is our own, while learning from divination, Òrìṣà, ancestors, and the people with whom we worship. Spiritual agency grows through those relationships; it is not freedom from them.

The blacksmith’s blade can clear a road. It can also cut what we were meant to protect. Knowing the sacred name of iron does not choose between those acts for us.

Before we ask which power walks beside us, we might ask what our own Orí is asking us to do with the path ahead.

With blessings,

Babá Tilo de Àjàgùnnà
DAILY IFÁ

Welcome to Ẹṣẹ Ifá: Sacred Wisdom & The 256 Odùs. This free opening video introduces the verses, stories, and teachings of Ifá and the questions they raise about responsibility, relationships, character, and the direction of a life.

In this introduction, you will discover:

• The relationship between an Odù sign and the Ẹṣẹ Ifá verses associated with it.

• How sixteen Odù families provide a path through all 256 Odù.

• The place of Orí, discernment, and personal responsibility.

• A way to listen thoughtfully to traditional stories and explore their relevance to everyday life.

The complete series is planned around 256 teaching videos of approximately fifteen minutes each, organized into sixteen families. DAILY IFA ACADEMY will bring these lessons together as the series grows.

Whether you practice within an Ifá tradition or are encountering it for the first time, you are welcome to begin here. This introduction is free and open to everyone. The full teaching series is intended for paid subscribers.

Presented by Babá Tilo Plöger de Àjàgùnnà. Original writing and prayer recording, with AI narration and symbolic AI illustrations.

Video chapters

00:00 — Adúrà and welcome
01:18 — The living verse: Ẹṣẹ Ifá
03:46 — 16 playlists, 256 Odù
05:57 — What a story asks
07:44 — Orí and responsibility
10:26 — Living traditions and languages
11:39 — Your path through the series
12:57 — A free invitation to begin

Continue reading at daily-ifa.news.

Dear readers;

When someone first sees an Odù written on the divining tray, the question often comes quickly: Why four marks on one side and four on the other? Why should a few strokes carry counsel about a marriage, a journey, an illness, or the obligations we have neglected? And if similar arrangements of marks appear in other parts of the world, where did the signs of Ifá actually come from?

I take that question seriously as a Babalawo. It asks about history, certainly. It also asks how a visible mark becomes knowledge. Those questions belong together, although they cannot be answered in exactly the same way. A drawing can tell us how an Odù is identified. It cannot, by itself, recite the ẹsẹ̀ Ifá that gives a consultation depth.

Today I want to show you how I approach that difference. We will begin with two columns in Ifá, look at the disputed historical relationship with ʿilm al-raml, the Islamic science of sand divination, and then follow a question across other African and diasporic traditions: What does the shape reveal, and what must we learn from the people who use it?

The first lesson: an Odù is an address into a body of knowledge

An Ifá configuration has two columns. Each column has four ordered positions; each position appears in one of two graphic states, commonly shown as one stroke or two. Four positions allow sixteen different columns. Pair one column with another and there are 16 × 16, or 256, possible complete configurations.

That arithmetic is useful, but it is only the entrance. Take the column conventionally represented by four single strokes, Ògbè, and the one represented by four doubled strokes, Òyèkú. When they stand together, the two columns identify one ordered pair. Exchange their positions and you have another ordered pair. Even though neither column has changed internally, their relationship has. Traditions and printed tables differ on which side is named first, so a reader should establish the convention before speaking an Odù’s full name.

Now imagine two people consult on different days and the same Odù appears. One is deciding whether to leave home for work; the other is trying to repair a broken relationship. The graphic address can be the same, while the question and the appropriate remembered verses differ. A Babalawo does not extract a fixed sentence from an isolated bar of ink. The sign opens a recognized field of stories, praise, warnings, precedents, and counsel. The consultation calls for judgment about which of those inherited voices speaks to this person, now.

Here is the first useful distinction: the marks identify; the verses and the encounter interpret. An Odù is therefore neither an abstract bit of mathematics nor a picture of an Òrìṣà. It belongs to a cultivated relationship among sign, corpus, diviner, and the person seeking guidance. For readers of DAILY IFÁ who already know a few Odù names, that shift in attention can transform how an illustrated table looks. The table is a map of addresses. It is not the conversation itself.

Did Ifá’s signs come from al-raml?

This is the historical question behind the visual comparison. In ʿilm al-raml, figures are formed from four ordered rows, each with one or two points. Sixteen such figures are possible. Across large parts of Africa, sand divination traveled through trade, scholarship, healing, and exchange; in several places it encountered systems of divination with their own established specialists and stories. The formal resemblance between an al-raml figure and one column of an Ifá sign deserves examination.

Some scholars have proposed that elements of geomantic notation or organization entered Ifá through contact with Islamic geomancy. Ayodeji Ogunnaike suggests a more precise possibility: Yorùbá specialists may have incorporated the useful structure and figures of geomancy into an existing divinatory tradition. Amidu Sanni documents the long conversation between Muslim and non-Muslim forms of divination in Yorùbá settings and reports the arguments for influence in forms and procedures. Their work does not give us a dated eyewitness account of the first transmission or settle every direction of influence.

So when someone says, “Ifá comes from al-raml,” I ask: Which part of Ifá do they mean? The use of four positions? A method of generating figures? The names of the Odù? The ẹsẹ̀ Ifá? The sacred standing of Ọ̀rúnmìlà? A proposed history of the graphic framework is not a documented origin for all those things. The very possibility of adaptation points to the skill of the people who received, reshaped, named, and taught what they used.

Nor does this historical inquiry force a practitioner to set aside the accounts through which Ifá understands its own sacred authority. The historian investigates contacts and dates; the devotee speaks of Ọ̀rúnmìlà, revelation, inheritance, and obligation. We learn more when we state clearly which question we are asking. For me, the most fruitful historical claim is a modest one: al-raml and Ifá have comparable graphic architecture, and their relationship is a serious subject of research. The story of the whole tradition is larger than the resemblance between their marks.

That is an important lesson for anyone searching for ancestral roots. African religious knowledge developed amid movement and encounter. An influence, where it can be demonstrated, tells us something about African intellectual choice and creativity. It cannot by itself measure the spiritual authority or depth of the tradition that made the borrowed or shared form its own.

A Kongo example: the line you cross matters

Let us leave the columns of Ifá for a moment and consider the Kongo Dikenga, often drawn as a circle intersected by a cross. In the account given by Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau, the four positions accompany the sun through rising, maturity, setting, and the unseen beginning of another cycle. Kala, Tukula, Luvemba, and Musoni name moments in that movement. The horizontal Kalûnga line distinguishes the visible world of the living from the ancestral dimension.

Now look at the horizontal stroke again. Its meaning is not supplied by the fact that it is horizontal. It gains force because it is a threshold in a named account of life, death, ancestry, and return. Rising and setting have different positions in this cycle; crossing the horizon changes the relation between realms. If you rotated the teaching diagram and still called the right-hand point “rising” without explanation, you would have changed the map while pretending it stayed the same.

This is a second lesson: position can carry a worldview. Ifá’s two columns distinguish ordered Odù configurations; the Dikenga’s horizon gives us a way to think about passage between dimensions of life. Both reward close attention to relationships among marks. They do different spiritual and intellectual work. A cross seen in a Cuban firma or a Brazilian ponto riscado does not become a Kongo cosmogram merely because we can draw a circle around it. A documented chain of people, teaching, and use would be needed to make a historical connection.

An archive example: a curve cannot tell the whole story

Nsibidi brings a different kind of difficulty. Within the Cross River region and its connected communities, graphic forms have been used in social, artistic, and restricted contexts. In the numbered archive reproduced in my book, one bowed figure, number 01, is accompanied by a caption about a woman walking with a man following her. Number 02 shows opposed bowed figures; its recorded caption describes a man and a woman turned away after a quarrel. A further figure, number 07, adds crossings and a short horizontal tie. The original maker and occasion of these particular copies are not recorded.

We can make a real observation before reading any caption: one curve has become two opposed curves, and then a different arrangement introduces crossing. We can describe that change with confidence. We cannot infer from the shape alone that every bowed line everywhere means “woman,” or that a crossing always means reconciliation. The captions tell us what one compiled source said about particular figures. Their value lies in the connection between a recorded form and a recorded reading.

I find this especially helpful when viewing images shared online without an archive number, a maker, or a source. A confident translation may be more attractive than a careful one, but the form cannot restore a missing speaker. Learn what the diagram actually shows; then seek the context that lets someone say more.

From Haiti to Cuba and Brazil: who speaks through a drawn sign?

Consider now three practices readers may know from the Black Atlantic: the Haitian Vodou vèvè, the firma of Cuban Palo, and the ponto riscado of Brazilian Umbanda. Their histories differ. Each can be flattened when a photograph turns a mark made in a particular place and moment into a free-floating “symbol” with a one-line meaning.

A vèvè associated with a lwa may be drawn on the ground in a ceremonial setting. A printed image can preserve a design, but the ground, materials, songs, people, and moment of its making matter to the event. In Palo, a firma belongs to a different field of relationships, offices, and obligations. Seeing a cross in both does not entitle us to name the same spirit or reconstruct the same ceremony. In Umbanda, a medium may draw a ponto riscado with pemba in connection with an entidade and the understanding of a particular house. Familiar components include stars, arrows, circles, crosses, crescent forms, and straight or curved forks; their assembly, placement, and interpretation are not fixed across all houses. Some Brazilian repertoires also draw upon European esoteric and alchemical graphic conventions while developing their own doutrinas and hierarchies.

Here is a concrete way to examine an unfamiliar Umbanda drawing without pretending to decode it. Suppose an arrow ends at a circle. First record the relation: a directed line meets an enclosed form. Compare a second drawing in which the arrow points away from the circle. The composition has changed from approach to departure as a description of geometry. Whether either image concerns a path, a person, a spirit, protection, or something else requires the name of the entidade, the house’s teaching, and the circumstances in which the mark appeared. Even an apparently familiar fork cannot supply that missing information by itself.

When people tell me that a vèvè, a firma, and a ponto “all mean the crossroads,” I ask them to show where that meaning was taught and by whom. Crossroads can matter powerfully in more than one tradition. Shared concerns such as passage, protection, ancestors, and spiritual presence do not dissolve the distinct histories that give a drawn sign its life.

Three questions to take into your next encounter with a sign

What changes if I change one relation? In Ifá, reverse two columns and identify the new ordered address under an explicit convention. In an archived Nsibidi drawing, notice whether figures face, turn away, or cross. Describe the visible difference before naming its lesson.

What world does the diagram presume? A line in the Dikenga can name the Kalûnga threshold within a cycle of living and ancestral being. The one-or-two-dot row of al-raml belongs to a different method and interpretive history. Geometry tells us where to begin asking; it does not answer for every community.

Who has the standing to explain it here? Ask for a named source, a transmitted verse, a house, a lineage, or an archive caption. In a consultation or ceremony, attend to the people and the moment. Even when a sign is publicly pictured, its full use may belong to those who have learned its responsibilities.

These questions are available whether you are an initiated practitioner, a descendant trying to reconnect with family memory, or an interested reader entering from another diaspora tradition. They also help us recognize when a resemblance is a promising historical clue, when it is simply a resemblance, and when we have reached the edge of what a photograph can teach.

Why I wrote Signs of the Black Atlantic

In Signs of the Black Atlantic, I follow these questions through Ifá and Fá, Kongo worlds, Nsibidi, Haitian Vodou, Cuban Palo, Candomblé, Umbanda, and neighboring traditions. The book includes many illustrated examples and attends to how signs are constructed, transmitted, and read in their own settings. Its Brazilian edition, Símbolos Sagrados Africanos e Afrodiaspóricos, brings the conversation to Portuguese-speaking readers. I wrote it from years of Ifá and Òrìṣà practice and from work across related traditions, knowing that even a substantial book cannot replace a living teacher, an elder, or the knowledge of a particular house.

If you have ever searched for the meaning of a sign and found only an isolated image with an absolute translation, this book offers a deeper route. It gives you actual forms to examine, questions worth carrying, and historical connections to investigate. It is written for those who want to understand their roots more fully, including devotees, Babalawos, Babalorisas, and readers from neighboring traditions who care about the integrity of each one.

The English edition is here: Signs of the Black Atlantic on Amazon. You can continue the conversation with me through DAILY IFÁ. If this essay brought a particular sign or family teaching to mind, I would be glad to hear which question it raised for you.

Babá Tilo Plöger de Àjàgùnnà
DAILY IFÁ

Sources for the historical and Kongo examples

Ayodeji Ogunnaike, “The Dynamic Spread of Geomancy in Africa”; Amidu Sanni, “Muslim-Yoruba Rosary Divination and Geomancy”; Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau, statement reproduced by the Seattle Art Museum.