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A Critical Study of Yorùbá in the Ifá Corpus

Omotade Adegbindin

Discipline: Philosophy, Religion

 

Abstract:

Drawing heavily from Ifá oral text, this paper attempts to unearth the error which underlie the overt assumption that the nature of God in Africa is polytheistic and the idea that human destiny has only folkloric significance. More precisely, this paper is a response to (i) ontological questions that border on the seeming polytheistic nature of Yorùbá (prototypical African) religion; (ii) monistic theory that human beings are physic-chemical mechanisms; (iii) the fatalist interpretation of orí (controller of destiny, in the metaphysical sense) which rests on the assumption that human destiny is unalterable.