On May 7, 2025, ISCSD member Erwan Dianteill (Université Paris Cité – UFR SHS Sorbonne; Hutchins Center Fellow, Harvard University) held an online presentation on the YouTube channel of The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. The lecture entitled “Ifa and Geomancy: A Comparative Hermeneutics of Divinatory Systems in Africa, Europe, and the Americas” was very well received by a large audience.
The lecturer’s introduction outlines the talk as follows:
This lecture presents a tripartite research project carried out at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University in Spring 2025, under the auspices of Eshu Elegbara, African god of crossroads, thresholds and semiotic interpretations!
It explores the structural and symbolic convergences between Ifa divination in West Africa and its diasporas, and geomantic divination as it developed in Christian Europe. This research aims to show not only the formal and semiotic continuities between these traditions but also their shared cosmological ambition to mediate between human beings and the divine through interpretive systems based on graphic randomness, actually signs coming from non human beings. To be clear : this research comprises three interlocking components. The first is the editorial preparation of the divinatory lectures of Aristide Falola, a master Babalawo from Porto-Novo, Benin, recorded and translated posthumously. The second is a comparative study of Ifa divination across Nigeria, Benin, and Cuba, incorporating both classical anthropological sources and contemporary field data. The third, and most hermeneutic, is a divinatory-literary interpretation of Dante’s Purgatorio in the Divine Comedy as a structured system of signs shaped by geomantic cosmology.
Each component explores divination not only as religious practice but as an epistemological and semiotic system. Collectively, the project situates Ifa and geomancy within a global history of symbolic interpretation, demonstrating the resilience and adaptability of divinatory knowledge across temporal, linguistic, and cultural boundaries.
The recording of the lecture will remain available on the Hutchins Center’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPTtINqkpI8
Read or download Erwan Dianteill’s presentation summary:
