The Ifá Genesis: The Creation of the Universe, the Òrìṣà, and Human Destiny in Yorùbá Sacred Mythology (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798259084292)

What did Ifá teach before the world had a name?

The Ifá Genesis is a major theological and mythopoetic work on the creation of the universe, the Òrìṣà, and human destiny in Yorùbá sacred tradition. Written in the voice of a practicing Babalawo and rooted in years of study, divination, transmission, and spiritual reflection, this book gathers the scattered creation teachings of Ifá into one coherent sacred landscape.

Unlike religions built around one fixed canonical Genesis, Ifá preserves its beginnings across Odù Ifá, ancient verses, oral revelations, sacred myths, ritual memories, praise names, and the living traditions of Yorùbá religion, Candomblé, Lucumí, Santería, and the wider Afro-Atlantic world. This book does not invent a Genesis for Ifá. It listens deeply to the one already hidden in thousands of myths, Odù revelations, and ancestral teachings, bringing them into a powerful narrative order without reducing their mystery.

Here the reader enters the unseen before the seen: Olódùmarè as first cause, Odù as the hidden architecture of existence, Ọbàtálá and Odùduwà in the making of earth, Òrìṣà as cosmic powers, Orí as the personal destiny chosen before birth, Èṣù as the principle of movement and consequence, Ẹbọ as sacred exchange, and death not as punishment but as return.

This is not a ritual manual and not a simplified mythology. It is a theological, literary, and spiritual reconstruction of Ifá's vision of creation. It asks what kind of world Ifá reveals: a world not fallen, but unfinished; not cursed, but relational; not abandoned by the divine, but alive with Àṣẹ, responsibility, ancestry, destiny, sacrifice, and return.

For devotees of Ifá and the Òrìṣà, for Babaláwos, Ìyánífás, Olorishas, Santeros, Babalorixás, scholars, initiates, and serious students of African and Afro-diasporic spirituality, The Ifá Genesis offers a rare and profound exploration of the beginning of existence through the sacred intelligence of Ifá.

A book for those who know that myth is not fiction, Odù is not symbol alone, and creation is still speaking.