Yoni,Divination Womb Opon Ifa,the Grail,Cauldron of Ceridwen,the Drink that makes one divine

The Odu are understood at different levels of being. At one level they are perceived as geomantic patterns that emerge when the divinatory instruments are cast. At another level,they are organising categories of the textual corpus of the system. At yet another level,they are understood as living beings,as conscious entities.

At a level that sums up all the others,they are perceived as a means of developing and organising a systemic construction of the scope of existence.This is done in terms of what exists and what could exist,the actual and the potential. From the most abstract to the most concrete.

How does this relate to ideas of female biology? The correlation between this understanding of the Odu and ideas about female biology emerges in the feminine characterisation of the Odu and the resonance of this characterisation in the sculptural realisation of the space on which the Odu are configured in divination.

The Odu are collectively understood as female and, in this collective identity, as being the wife of Ifa. The divinatory process, therefore, could be understood as being characterized as a relationships between a female and a male personality. This implies a generative process that emerges on the space where the Odu patterns are formed.This space is graphically represented by the empty centre of the divination tray. Within this empty space, therefore, the macrocosmic values represented by the Odu in their fundamental characterisation as cosmic forms converge with the microcosmic patterns represented by the client's query.

The empty space, therefore, becomes a generative space, a womb of transformation, akin to the vaginal space where new life emerges after its transformation within uterine space. The correlation of macrocosmic and microcosmic frameworks in the divinatory process could be understood to be expressive of a convergence of forces similar to the integration of the power of life which is universal but manifests anew in each life form with the distinctive genetic encoding that emerges from the gene banks of both parents in the conception and growth of new human life.

Toyin Adepoju