African cosmologies

Two systems, one way of knowing

This page covers two West African traditions that are often grouped with astrology but work differently from it. The Yoruba of south-western Nigeria, Benin and Togo read destiny through Ifa, an oracle that selects one of 256 signs and then draws on the poetry stored under that sign. The Dogon of the Bandiagara cliffs in Mali hold a creation story of great intricacy and became world-famous for star-lore about Sirius. Neither casts a chart of the planets at birth. What they share with astrology is the conviction that the world is ordered and readable, and that a person's life belongs to that order.

Both also rest on a view of knowledge that differs from the classroom model. Knowledge in these traditions is gathered by the senses, by inherited teaching, by intuition and by divination, which reaches what the senses cannot. It is judged less by whether it is abstractly true than by whether it restores balance: between a person and their community, between the living and the ancestors, between people and the unseen powers. Léopold Sédar Senghor's contrast with Descartes, often paraphrased as "I feel, therefore I am", and the Southern African word ubuntu, a person is a person through other persons, are the phrases most often borrowed to describe this outlook, although neither comes from the Yoruba or the Dogon themselves.

Oral tradition and its critics

The Yoruba and Dogon kept their learning in memory and speech rather than in books. Amadou Hampâté Bâ put the stakes plainly in 1960, telling UNESCO that in Africa an old man who dies is a library burning down.

Orality made these traditions easy for colonial writers to dismiss as custom rather than thought. A sharper critique came from inside African philosophy. The Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji rejected what he called ethnophilosophy, the approach of Placide Tempels's Bantu Philosophy (1945) and the Rwandan scholar Alexis Kagame, which presented the collective, anonymous beliefs of a people as its philosophy. For Hountondji this repeated the colonial picture of Africans as a group without individual thinkers, and real philosophy needed written texts that later readers could argue with.

The historian Jan Vansina answered from another direction. He showed that oral traditions have their own rules of performance, memory and correction and can be weighed as evidence, and he was open about how they drift: memory is selective, and the further back a tradition reaches, the more it compresses. Ifa is the strongest case against the charge that oral knowledge must be static. Its verses are fixed enough to be recognised across regions and flexible enough that a diviner fits them to each new client.

Yoruba cosmology: Orun, Aye and the orisa

At the head of the Yoruba cosmos is Olodumare, the supreme being, remote from daily worship. Beneath Olodumare are the orisa, the divinities who govern natural forces and human work, and the ancestors. The world is split into Orun, the unseen world, and Aye, the visible earth, which tradition says the orisa first reached at Ile-Ife, the city Yoruba regard as the cradle of humankind. Opposed to the orisa stand the ajogun, the powers of death, disease, loss and misfortune.

Two figures matter most for divination. Orunmila is the orisa of wisdom and the patron of Ifa. His praise names include Eleri ipin, witness of destiny, because he was present when each soul chose its fate. Esu is the divine messenger who stands at the crossroads and carries sacrifices from people to the powers above. He is neither good nor evil: he enforces the rules of exchange between the orisa and the ajogun, which is why he is so often mistranslated as a devil.

Ori, destiny and why divination is needed

The Yoruba person has three parts: ara, the body; emi, the breath of life; and ori, the inner head, which carries a person's destiny. In a well-known Ifa story, three friends, Oriseeku, Orileemere and Afuwape, travel to heaven to choose their heads. Only Afuwape consults Ifa and makes the prescribed sacrifice, and only he chooses a good ori. The moral is not that fate is fixed at the gate of heaven but that counsel and sacrifice shape how a life turns out.

Once born, a person forgets the destiny they chose. They can stray from it through their own mistakes, through envy and witchcraft, or through the ajogun. Ifa is the means of finding out where a person stands in relation to their ori and what must be done to bring the two back together. Destiny in this view is a direction, not a sentence.

Tradition explains the oracle's origin with a story of withdrawal. Orunmila once lived on earth, but after being insulted by one of his own children he returned to heaven. The earth fell into disorder: women could not give birth, rain failed, and nothing prospered. When his children begged him to come back he refused, but gave them sixteen palm nuts and told them to consult these whenever they needed him. Other verses give Osun, the orisa of sweet water, a part in the founding of divination, and she is closely linked to the sixteen-cowrie oracle.

The 256 Odu

Ifa's arithmetic is simple and powerful. A sign is two columns of four marks, each mark single or double. Four marks in a column give sixteen possible columns, and two columns give 16 × 16 = 256 Odu. When both columns are the same, the sign is one of the sixteen Meji, the twins, which rank as the principal Odu. The other 240 are combinations named after their two halves, such as Ogbe-Oyeku.

The common order and associations of the sixteen Meji in Yoruba practice are below. The themes are a guide rather than a fixed dictionary: each Odu holds hundreds of verses pointing in many directions, and the ranking of the lower signs differs between Yoruba towns, the Fon of Benin and the Cuban tradition. Eji Ogbe is senior everywhere.

The sixteen four-mark figures are not unique to the Yoruba. The Fon of Benin call the system Fa and the Ewe call it Afa. Malagasy sikidy uses the same sixteen figures, and so does the Arabic sand divination called ʿilm al-raml, which reached Europe as geomancy. Bascom and others took this as a sign of historical contact across the Sahara. The figures alone cannot prove it, since any system of four binary marks has exactly sixteen forms; the shared names, orders and uses are the stronger evidence.

Casting the oracle

A consultation is led by a babalawo, "father of secrets", or by a woman priest, an iyanifa. The tools are the sixteen ikin, palm nuts with at least four eyes; the opele chain; the opon Ifa, the divining tray; the iroke, a tapper often carved from ivory or wood; the agere, a lidded bowl for the nuts; iyerosun, pale yellow powder made by wood-boring insects in the irosun tree; and the ibo, small objects used to put yes-or-no questions to the oracle, such as a pair of joined cowries and a piece of bone.

With the palm nuts, the diviner holds all sixteen in the left hand and tries to take them up with the right in one motion. If one nut is left behind, he draws two marks in the powder; if two are left, one mark; any other number and he tries again. Eight valid grasps make a full figure, recorded in two columns of four with the right-hand column filled first. The opele does the same work in a single throw: eight half seed pods on a chain fall concave or convex side up, and each side of the chain gives one column.

The session opens with the iroke striking the tray to call Orunmila. The client typically whispers the question to a coin or the ibo rather than telling the diviner, so the diagnosis comes from the oracle and not from the diviner's guesswork.

The divining tray

The opon Ifa is carved from one piece of wood, round, square or rectangular, with a shallow well for the powder. The border is where the carver speaks. The top of the tray, oju opon, the face, sits opposite the diviner and almost always shows the face of Esu, watching the reading he will carry to heaven. The bottom, ese opon, the foot, is nearest the diviner, and the two sides are further named quarters, so the tray lays out the crossroads of the world.

Around the rim appear mudfish and turtles, creatures of both water and land and so emblems of a diviner who moves between worlds; birds; interlaced snakes; horsemen for royal power; and kneeling women with bowls, the posture of someone asking the orisa for mercy. Art historians Rowland Abiodun, Henry John Drewal and John Pemberton III have described how some borders tell a single connected story while others set unrelated figures side by side, as the many independent powers that press on a diviner and a client at once.

Ifa verse and sacrifice

Once the sign is on the tray, the reading turns from arithmetic to literature. Each Odu holds many memorised poems called ese Ifa, and a babalawo spends years of apprenticeship learning them. UNESCO proclaimed the Ifa corpus a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005, and inscribed it on its Representative List in 2008.

Wande Abimbola showed that a complete ese Ifa follows a regular pattern of eight parts. The opening parts are the most fixed; the later ones are more open to the diviner's own words, and short verses may leave some out.

The diviner recites several verses from the cast sign, and the client picks the story that matches their situation. The stories work by analogy. A verse about an elephant who ignores the diviner and falls to the hunter is heard as a warning to the client, not as zoology.

Most readings end in ebo, sacrifice: an offering of food, animals, cloth, money or labour, shared out among orisa, ancestors and neighbours. Esu carries its share to the powers above and holds the ajogun back. Sacrifice here is a form of exchange that repairs relationships, not a guaranteed purchase of a result. Because the verses also carry herbal remedies, history, taboos and ethics, Ifa works as an encyclopedia indexed by the 256 signs.

Scattered across the Atlantic

Yoruba tradition remembers the fall of the Oyo empire through a curse. Around the 1790s the Alaafin Awole, rejected by his own army, is said to have shot arrows to the north, south, east and west and smashed an earthenware dish, declaring that as the broken dish could not be mended, his people would be carried away as slaves in every direction. As the empire broke apart in the early nineteenth century, war sent large numbers of Yoruba captives across the Atlantic, above all to Cuba and Brazil. There Ifa and the orisa were rebuilt in Santería, or Lucumí, and in Candomblé, which is why the 256 Odu are consulted today in Havana, Salvador, Miami and New York as well as in Nigeria.

Dogon cosmology: Amma, the Nommo and the Pale Fox

The Dogon settled on and below the Bandiagara Escarpment, a sandstone cliff up to about 500 metres high, between roughly the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. The cliffs sheltered them from the states and raiders of the plains, and helped their religion outlast the spread of Islam in the region. Village life is organised around this religion: the hogon is the senior priest of a district, and the low-roofed toguna, where men gather to talk, is too low to stand up in, which is said to keep arguments seated and calm.

Outsiders know Dogon thought mainly through the French ethnographer Marcel Griaule and his colleague Germaine Dieterlen. Griaule first came with the Dakar–Djibouti expedition of 1931. In 1946 he spent thirty-three days listening to the blind elder Ogotemmêli, whose account became Dieu d'eau (1948), known in English as Conversations with Ogotemmêli. The denser Le Renard pâle, The Pale Fox, followed in 1965, nine years after Griaule's death.

In that account the creator Amma formed the world within an egg, where the seeds of everything developed in pairs of twins. The Nommo, amphibious twin beings linked with water, speech and order, were meant to emerge in harmony. One being, Ogo, broke out before his time in search of his twin, tearing away part of the placenta, which became the earth. His rebellion brought disorder, drought and incompleteness into creation, and Amma turned him into the pale fox, Yurugu. A Nommo was sacrificed to restore order and then descended to earth in an ark with the first ancestors, bringing speech, crafts and farming. Dogon ritual, in this reading, is continuing repair of a world spoiled at its birth. The Dogon still read the fox's tracks across divination tables in the sand, since the rebel who knows the secrets of creation also knows what is to come.

Griaule's purpose was partly polemical. He wanted to show that an African people held a philosophy as complete and coherent as any in the world, against a colonial science that treated Africans as without systematic thought.

The Sirius controversy

In 1950 Griaule and Dieterlen published an article on what they called a Sudanese Sirius system. They reported that Dogon initiates knew Sirius, sigi tolo, to have an invisible companion, po tolo, named after fonio, the smallest cultivated grain. Po tolo was said to be the smallest and heaviest of stars, made of a metal called sagala, and to circle Sirius on an elliptical path once in fifty years. They added a third star, emme ya tolo, the star of female sorghum, with a satellite of its own. Griaule and Dieterlen also linked the sixty-year Sigui ceremony to this cycle.

The parallels with astronomy are real. Sirius B exists; it is a white dwarf, about the size of the Earth with roughly the mass of the Sun, so dense that a teaspoon of its matter would weigh several tonnes. Its orbit takes 50.1 years and is an ellipse with Sirius A at one focus. It was predicted from the wobble of Sirius by Friedrich Bessel in 1844, first seen by Alvan Graham Clark in 1862, and cannot be seen with the naked eye.

Robert Temple's The Sirius Mystery (1976) proposed that the amphibious Nommo were visitors from the Sirius system who taught the Dogon and, before them, the Babylonians, whose fish-man Oannes he read as the same figure. Carl Sagan replied in Broca's Brain (1979) that contact with Europeans was the likelier source. Sirius B was widely publicised in the 1920s, once its extraordinary density was understood, and the Dogon lore that Temple also cited about the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn matched what a European of the time might say, not what an interstellar visitor would know.

The decisive study came from the Dutch anthropologist Walter van Beek. His team worked among the Dogon for years and published a restudy in Current Anthropology in 1991. None of their informants knew po tolo as a companion of Sirius, and many had never heard of the Sirius lore at all. Van Beek concluded that the teaching had grown out of Griaule's long interrogations, shaped by his own knowledge of astronomy and by his informants' wish to give an authoritative foreigner answers. Geneviève Calame-Griaule, Griaule's daughter, replied that esoteric knowledge is held by a few initiates and would not be shared with every villager. Most anthropologists now accept some version of van Beek's view: the lore is best explained by recent contact, however it happened, and it shows how readily a living oral cosmology absorbs new material.

One loose end keeps the story alive. In 1995 the French astronomers Daniel Benest and Jean-Louis Duvent suggested, from irregularities in the orbit, that Sirius might hold a tiny third body of about 0.05 solar masses, a brown dwarf on a six-year orbit. It was never observed, and later imaging and Hubble measurements of the orbit have ruled out any companion of that size on such an orbit. Even if one existed, it would not match emme ya, which the Dogon texts describe as larger than po tolo and do not give a six-year period.

What the two traditions share

Ifa and Dogon cosmology arrive at similar ideas by different routes. Ifa stores its knowledge through arithmetic: 256 figures act as a stable index into a vast oral literature, and the physical tools, the nuts, chain and tray, work as memory aids for the trained diviner. Dogon thought stores knowledge through story, place and ritual: the struggle between the Nommo and the Pale Fox is written into village plans, farming seasons and the sixty-year round of the Sigui.

In both, the world is legible. Order and disorder are built into it from the start, knowledge passes from the unseen to the seen, and people take part in keeping the balance through ritual action and good character. Neither promises that the future is fixed or that a reading will make it so. They offer a way to see where a person stands, and what they might do next.