NEW WISDOMS FOR NEW WORLDS - an oracular """resolution mechanic"""

 

an ọpọ́n Ifá/divination tray brought to Europe from the Allada Kingdom in the 1650s, possibly the oldest African wood sculpture in a Western collection.

Ọsa Otura says, “What is Truth?” 

I say, “What is Truth?”

Ọrunmila says, “Truth is the character of Olodumare. 

Truth is the word that cannot fall. Ifá is Truth. 

Truth is the word that cannot spoil. 

Might surpassing all. Blessing everlasting.”  

— from the Odù Ọsa-Otura

Let be, my soul, fold your rebellious pinions, There is no way out of the web of things, It is a snare that never will be broken, And if you struggle you will break your wings. Be still a while, content to brood on beauty; Caught in the trap of space that has no end, See how the stars, august in their submission, Take their Great Captor for their changeless friend.

— In the Web, Sara Teasdale

the Birdking of the Prismatic Wasteland has issued a challenge! many worthies have already offered up their responses - artisans of wonder piling | jewels | mechanical at his weird avian feet (we haven't seen them but we know.) now: a cold wind blows into the throne room, 1d10 torches gutter out, and a cowled figure with kola-nut chains round their neck stands in the open doorway screaming mantic truthtruthTRUTH.

a thousand hands from a thousand lands grasp at diviner's wisdom, yet none possess even a third of the swiftness or subtlety found in Ifá's twine-wrapped embrace. none!! again i say, none!!! for Ifá is the love gift of Ọrunmila Swallower-of-Knowledge's-Gourd, Ọrunmila Youngblooded, Ọrunmila who knows and sees all except that which the High One hides in HisHer infinite holy darkness. Ifá is the body of Ọrunmila made proverb and the inner cosmos made legible, the master of mysteries walking with prophets and spirits, the 256 passages committed to heart and called up in dreams, the lines drawn in camphorwood powder between Ilé-Ifẹ̀ and Houston.

“Ifá divination is based upon recognizing a given cosmic pattern, which is revealed in a sequence of odù that provide a diagnosis of the situation at hand. The interpretation of the patterns is found in the corpus of Ifá, in the many verses that contain myths, riddles, songs, enchantments and advice of every kind related to each of the 16 méjì odùs and the 240 combination odùs…If a client comes for a reading and this odù appears, the client is repeating a pattern that people before him experienced and found solutions for, thus the solutions of the same problem in the past are applied to the same situation in the present. Ifá divination is a process in which Olódùmarè is looking back at itself.”

this is not Ifá; Ifá reads the world. we already stole the right to create little worlds for our tables from the orisha, tho, so maybe there can be little Ifás too. patternreading is a descriptive but edgy general name for the process, perfect for our purposes. 

you must first assemble the odù - spiritual principles and archetypes that order worlds, gods as signs. all else pours down from them. the great seer Ty names them world anchors,"[forged] from the heart of your world," and that is a truth. there can be as many of these fixed poles as you want. let's say 20 for now. some examples from our universe: 

• ÔYĚKÚ MÉJÌ who is MOTHER OF THE SPIRIT OF DEATH, darkness, inhalation and the womb that gestates the light.
• ÌWÒRÌ MÉJÌ who is CELESTIAL AGRICULTURE IN THE LAND OF TRANSFORMATION, power of transformation, the root of consciousness
• ÌKÁ MÉJÌ who is WICKED COBRA OF FIRE, power of contraction, energy of deception and curses, of self sabotage and snakes. 
• ÒTÚRÚPÔN MÉJÌ who is SECRET PATH OF TRUTH, power that brought sickness to the world, and also medicine

for each of these new odù, create a wisdom literature: sayings, plant cuttings, songs, fragrances, jokes, weird .mp4s, prayers, poems, or really whatever as long as it connects to the pattern - oblique relationships are encouraged. you can make your own, of course, but the screw-headed priestess teaches us to weave meaning from scraps; just use the Palimpsest generator tbh it’s very good. they're suggestions that aid the diviner's work. whenever a player is uncertain of their destiny (in a "risky or contested" situation) roll a d2o to find out which odù rules this moment in time. the diviner reads the canon in light of the player's situation - they peek into ancestorland and relate what must happen to the afflicted. the player may reject this version of their fate and say what they want to happen instead; it comes true and the pattern is now bent against them. a player who has refused ÔYĚKÚ MÉJÌ finds it harder to breathe in dark spaces, the devious plots of a vizier who slights ÌKÁ MÉJÌ subtly undermine their own position at court. you can reject the odù's histories as many times as you want! antagonize all of Creation or deepen your feud with one of its Souls over time. if a penitent player wishes to repair their relationship with the odù, they can be placed back into the law with enough propitiation...but they may never challenge that odù again. whatever the diviner says happens, happens. this is how we learn to love the world. 

i swear ill do a serious Yorubapost at some point. the passage and descriptions of the odù are taken from Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold's Ifá: A Forest of Mystery. a concise + recent description of Ifá divinatory operations (and a much longer philosophical exploration of Ifá's cosmology/theory of time/etc) can be found in Ogunnaike's Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions. apologies to Ty, Jones, and Semiurge - who inspired this post in a dream conversation. also go vote in the Bloggies, y'all!!