Does Bokki cast Ifá?

No, and it never will. Ifá appears in our atlas of world traditions as honoured, not as a feature. It is a living religious practice with initiated priests, and turning it into a button on a free fortune site would be taking the name of somebody's religion for our traffic.

How many Odù are there in Ifá?

Two hundred and fifty-six. The cast produces two four-mark halves, each of which can be one of sixteen figures, so sixteen times sixteen gives 256 Odù. Each Odù opens onto a body of memorised verses, ese Ifá, and it is those verses — not the figure by itself — that carry the counsel and the offering that follows.

Coding a random Odù would be easy. Why not build it?

Because the easy half is the part that does not matter. Eight seed-pods landing one of two ways is eight bits of randomness, and any programmer can write that in an afternoon. What makes Ifá divination is the other half: years spent learning the verses by heart, the initiation that makes someone a babaláwo, a client sitting in front of a person who knows them, and the ebo that follows as an act in the world. A random number wearing a sacred name is not a shortcut to that; it is a different thing entirely.

Ifá — and why we won't build it

The mechanical half is eight-bit arithmetic — and Ifá is one of the seven traditions our code refuses to build.

What it is, in plain words

Ifá is the divination system of the Yoruba people of what is now Nigeria and Benin, and of the Yoruba diaspora across the Americas. A babaláwo — the word means something like father of secrets — casts either an ọ̀pẹ̀lẹ̀, a chain strung with eight half seed-pods, or sixteen sacred palm nuts called ikin. How they fall gives one of 256 figures, the Odù.

The figure is a doorway, not an answer. Each Odù opens onto a body of verses, ese Ifá, which the diviner has spent years learning by heart. The verses are stories, and from the stories come the counsel and, usually, a prescribed offering — ebo — that the person then actually goes and makes. The witness of all of it is Òrúnmìlà, who in Yoruba thought was present when each person chose their orí, their own destiny. UNESCO added the Ifá divination system to its lists of intangible cultural heritage in 2005 and 2008.

What Bokki does with it: nothing

Ifá appears in our atlas of world traditions with the status honoured. That is not a placeholder for a feature we have not got round to. It means we have decided, and written into the code, that this one is never built, never stamped in the passport, and never sold.

Why we refuse — the easy half is the worthless half

Here is the uncomfortable part. The mechanical side of an Ifá cast is trivially easy to imitate. Eight pods, each landing one of two ways, is eight bits: two four-mark halves, sixteen figures each, sixteen times sixteen is 256. Any competent programmer can write that in an afternoon, and plenty of apps have. What such an app produces is a random number wearing a sacred name.

Everything that makes Ifá divination is on the other side of that line. The years spent learning the verses. The initiation, ìtẹ̀fá, without which a person is not a babaláwo at all. A client sitting in front of someone who knows them and their household. And the ebo afterwards, which is an act performed in the world, not a paragraph rendered on a screen. None of that fits inside a web page.

So building it would not be a shortcut to Ifá. It would be a different object entirely, borrowing a religion's name for our traffic. Bokki names Ifá, says where the authority actually sits, and stops there. We think the stopping is the respectful part.

What you will never see here

No Odù generator, random or otherwise. No verse text written by us or by a model. No sentence beginning your Odù is. No passport stamp, no collection, no paywall — the code that decides what can be stamped refuses this category outright.

If you want to know more, the people to learn from are Yoruba practitioners and the scholarship that works with them, not a fortune site. We would rather send you there than keep you here.

Closing note — why we will not write the half-day of code

To sum up: the mechanical half of Ifá is 8-bit arithmetic and easy to fake; the half that makes it Ifá — the memorised verses, itefá, a person who knows you, the ebo afterwards — does not fit in a web page. Build only the easy half and you have random numbers wearing a sacred name.

For us this article is the opposite of a feature spec. It records a decision not to build, kept in one status field in the code and in these paragraphs. Not turning a living practice on UNESCO's list into traffic is the shape our respect takes.

See the traditions we do compute →