Art and Oracle: A Scholarly Resource of African and Rituals of Divination | Explore & Learn

Diviner's Bag (Apo Ifa)
Yoruba, Nigeria
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Cat. no. 29

Descriptions of each category:

	Oracular Sculpture: Figurative Divination Instruments
	Visual Metaphors: Ifa Divination Instruments
	Dynamic Devices: Kinetic Oracles
	Visual Commentaries: Sets of Divination Signs
	Invoking the Spirits: Musical Devices
	Emblems of Enlightenment and Power: Diviners' Insignias
	Empowering the Individual: Diviners' Prescriptions
	The Iconography of Divination: Monuments of Divine Insight

hroughout history, peoples everywhere have sought the intervention of divine powers to understand their fate. The "Art and Oracle" exhibition presents African artifacts created to communicate with ancestors, spirits, and gods in order to obtain insight into human quandaries. The term "divination" describes efforts to foretell future events or to discover hidden knowledge by supernatural means. In Africa, the legacy of such efforts is evident in works that display an especially diverse range of artistic expression. This exhibition assembles a selection of these from some fifty different African cultures. Their design usually reflects a collaborative endeavor, joining the skill and creative talent of artists with the expertise of ritual specialists. In some instances, their combined efforts gave form to divination instruments used to tap into otherwise inaccessible knowledge; in others, they led to the creation of works prescribed to benefit the diviner's clients and enhance their quality of life. The results range from utilitarian implements to the masterpieces presented here, artifacts that reflect the highest level of execution and ingenuity. "Art and Oracle" focuses on some of the most imaginative works of African art inspired by the human quest to reach beyond the limitations of ordinary experience.

"Art and Oracle" considers the broader complex of ideas, religious beliefs, and ritual practices affecting the creation of divination instruments and the immediate concerns they address. In the essay that follows, Professor John Pemberton III, scholar of African religions, explores five regional traditions and their divination practices. He has selected the Azande, Luba and Songye, Yaka, Yoruba, and Malagasy models of divination as representing some of the most widespread or distinctive forms of divination in African cultures and as points of departure for examining the comparative religious and social structures to which they relate. He considers the nature of the concerns and problems that are analyzed through divination, from chronic ailments to marital infidelity, and the specific divination techniques that have been developed to provide people with insight into their current dilemmas and give them direction for future action.

The works presented in "Art and Oracle" were designed to capture the attention of the spirit world, whether through the efforts of highly accomplished artists in sculptures that evoke or celebrate spiritual forces, or through the application of raw matter that represents the distillation of a diviner's knowledge. They were created to connect personal concerns to those of higher powers, and thus to benefit from insights that lay beyond the scope of ordinary human perception. Like most religious art, this goal was achieved through images that use the familiar as a point of departure. In exploring the nexus of spiritual belief and artistic expression embodied by these works, "Art and Oracle" illustrates some of the many means by which African cultures, each in its own way, seek to transcend the limitations of human knowledge by reaching out for intervention and protection from the realm of the divine.