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Millions of people now eagerly await the “Letra del Añó,” the Ifá sign which is pulled every year just after midnight on New Years Day. Far less people understand that this ceremony is but one of a long series of ceremonies and rituals performed for the betterment of the entire world. Or that this Letter of the Year often entails hundreds of hours of work on the part of the babalawos long before this Ifá sign is identified.
Months before New Year, divination is performed to find out which rituals need to be enacted and which ‘positions,’ egguns and Orichas need to be taken care to open the New Year. The sun, the stars, the moon and the earth are propitiated as well as rivers, the sea, various Orichas, Olófin and Ifá. These ceremonies are all performed as a huge ebbó or offering for the well-being of the entire world. Finally the Letter of the Year is obtained so the world can know what to look forward to and what to avoid. But the work of the babalawos is not done yet, as the ebbos called for in this divination must be performed for the benefit of the whole world and finally a tambor or drumming is performed for the Orichas found to be ruling the world this year.

Although the Letter of the Year itself is important, the long series of ceremonies preceding it are even more important in ensuring the well-being of the world and all who live in it.

A number of groups of babalawos perform these ceremonies with most people following the advice of the one performed jointly by the Comisión Organizadora para la Letra del Año Miguel Febles Padrón and the Asociación Cultural Yoruba de Cuba

The Letter of the Year and its accompanying ceremonies is for the whole world and not for each individual although many things in this Letter will apply to them, therefore personal divination will need to be performed for that person if they wish to get their own Letter of the Year with its individualized advice.

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In our religion most of our ceremonies are secret and have been since time immemorial. We don’t talk about what happens during initiations and non-initiates are forbidden from viewing Orichas inside the soperas or tureens in which they live. Those who receive an initiation are also forbidden to talk about the ceremonies they have gone through. Sometimes those rules are distilled down to the short, pithy phrase, “if you don’t got it, ya can’t see it.”

The initiations are secrets held between the Orichas, their priests and their initiates. In fact, in many of these ceremonies, the initiate is actually imbued with the secrets of the Oricha.

“So… how do you prepare for initiation?” Simply put, there really is no way for you to prepare for what happens during our initiations. Beside the fact that they are secret, there is no way to prepare yourself for the effects of many of our initiations. Often we wouldn’t be able to really describe these effects even if we wanted to.

Some of the ceremonies in an initiation are specifically to prepare the initiate for being in the presence of the Oricha and an unprepared person can be spiritually injured by seeing something they aren’t supposed to without this preparation. In fact, certain Powers (in particular Oddun/Olofin) can actually be deadly if viewed without having gone through the necessary ceremonies.
The Orichas can also become extremely angry with those who look upon them without the prerequisite ceremonies and can punish those who reveal their ceremonies. There is a famous case in Havana, Cuba where a babalawo revealed parts of the initiation process to government ethnologists. Afterwards, he became gravely ill and when he was at death’s doorstep he had to go the babalawos in order to be saved. Ifá demanded he go through the iyoyé ceremony again (the iyoyé is the only public part of the initiation of a babalawo, and is a painful ceremony where the initiate has to pass through a gauntlet of babalawos and is beaten with ‘cujes’ – thin sticks – which often tear the flesh). This time as punishment as well as to save his life. Babalawos came from all over Havana to participate and when they were all through with him, he was truly a bloody a mess. The babalawos videotaped the ceremony and passed it around for good measure as a warning to anyone else who might be tempted to betray Ifá’s secrets.
Orula was good for his word of course, and the babalawo lived for years after the ceremony.
People are attracted to the religion because the power of Ifá and the Orichas is legendary, and the Orichas truly love their children. But there can be a severe side to that great power as well and they can be quite dangerous when they are betrayed. That is why they say, “Con los Orichas no se juega.”     “You don’t play with the Orichas.”

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Some of you may have noticed that when I write about the stories (patakís, itan) and proverbs from Ifa odduns, I usually don’t mention the oddun by name. There are a couple of reasons for this.
One: The odduns, and the information associated with them, traditionally are fully in the province of the babalawos alone. As I mention in my book Babalawo, Santeria’s High Priests, in the 1940s Pedro Arango published a book called Iwe ni Iyewó ni Ifá Orunmila, which gave detailed information on the odduns of Ifá. In his, “Words from the Author,” section prefacing the second edition of the book, Arango admitted copies of the first edition of the book had fallen into the hands of a woman, presumably a santera, and two obá oriatés. Arango wrote that to save his responsibility (and probably his reputation as well), he was publishing the greatly enlarged second edition using much tighter security: he put a different secret mark in each copy so that if that copy was found in a non-babalawo’s hands, they would immediately know exactly who had been the source of the leak. In addition, Arango threatened to publicly denounce any non-babalawo found to be in possession of the book to their elders. Obviously, it was considered sacrilege to santeros and babalawos alike or such a denunciation would not have been much of a threat. In fact, the accessing of books on Ifá odduns by non-babalawos is very likely to have played a major role in the frictions we see today between olorichas and
Two: I often see posts from people asking about an oddun get irresponsibly answered with a cut and paste of all the information from one of these books. I say irresponsibly, because these books are written in the form of notes and is meant to interpreted by an experienced babalawo according to the type of iré (blessings) or osobo (negativity) that the person came with as well as the Witness odduns, etc. Often there is information that will appear to be downright contradictory if you don’t understand how these odduns and these books work. An oddun can also take very, very different forms depending on what kind of iré or osobo the person has come with.

These books may have parts that speak of very dark events meant for the person who came with Ikú (Death) that wouldn’t apply to a person who came in iré or with one of the lesser types of negativity. The same oddun can speak of beautiful things as well, which apply more for the person who has come in certain types of iré (blessings).

The types of work needed will be very different as well. So, dumping all the information on an oddun at best will be confusing and virtually meaningless at best, and dangerous to the person at worst.
Writing without mentioning the actual name of the oddun gives me the ability to share the wisdom of Ifa, without confusing or unintentionally misleading the reader. And things that have been kept secret for centuries can remain, well, secret… Which is particularly important as a babalawo who takes his vows, including those regarding secrecy, seriously.