Tarot and Ifá: Reading an Authored Bridge between Cards and Òrìṣà

What happens when the Fool meets Èṣù, or the Wheel of Fortune meets Ọ̀ṣùmàrè? A familiar image can become a reason to ask a less familiar question. It can also become a misleading shortcut, especially if a reader assumes that a card contains the whole religious identity of an Òrìṣà. The value of comparison depends on keeping both sides available for further learning. A good pairing invites attention beyond itself.

Bàbálórìṣà and Bàbáláwo Tilo Plöger de Àjàgùnnà's Tarot Ifá proposes such pairings through Major Arcana, suits, court cards, Òrìṣà figures and named Odù. This is the book's contemporary interpretive design. The cards are presented as a complement for reflection and everyday inquiry, with an explicit distinction from the instruments and authority of established religious rites. That scope makes it possible to examine the design closely without claiming that Tarot and Ifá are exact equivalents, or that the proposed correspondences reveal one proven ancient universal system.

Two histories before one conversation

Tarot has a documented history as European playing cards. Tim Husband's Metropolitan Museum account places early references in fifteenth century northern Italy and explains the suits, trumps and fool within a game. The museum distinguishes that history from the later prominence of occult fortune telling. A modern Tarot interpretation can be spiritually significant without having been the original purpose of the cards. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Before Fortune-Telling.”

The V&A describes the familiar seventy eight card deck through twenty two Major Arcana and fifty six Minor Arcana, while tracing changing designs and later divinatory uses. It identifies Pamela Colman Smith's importance to the Rider–Waite–Smith deck and its illustrated scenes. These are histories of makers, printing, patronage and interpretation. They give modern readers a better account of the images they inherit than an unsupported assertion that the deck has always carried one hidden religious meaning. V&A, “A history of tarot cards.”

Ifá's Odù are organized differently. UNESCO identifies a corpus of 256 parts with verses called ẹsẹ, transmitted and interpreted through specialist knowledge. Tilo's Odù Ifá Divination explores the configurations, narratives and counsel within that system. Seventy eight cards do not map exactly onto 256 Odù, and the twenty two Major Arcana are not another name for the sixteen principal signs. Numerical disagreement does not prevent dialogue. It prevents describing the dialogue as a simple substitution table. UNESCO, “Ifa divination system.”

Tilo also proposes a historical bridge through Arabic geomancy. There is a legitimate scholarly field comparing geomancy and African sixteen figure systems, but this does not establish that Tarot was derived from Ifá or that a particular Tarot–Òrìṣà pairing is inherited from medieval transmission. The book's historical suggestions and its creative design should therefore be evaluated separately. The dedicated geomancy comparison follows that distinction in greater depth.

What a correspondence actually claims

The book's entries typically bring together a card title, an Òrìṣà name, an Odù name, a narrative and suggestions for upright and reversed interpretation. This creates several relationships at once. A reader may recognize a quality in an image, find an ethical question in the narrative, and compare both with a situation. None of these acts automatically establishes the next. Resemblance between an image and a theme does not authenticate the narrative's placement within an oral lineage.

The following examples preserve the book's assignments in a compact form. They describe its design rather than a universal correspondence accepted across communities:

Spelling is retained where it identifies an entry. Elsewhere this article uses Yorùbá and familiar Brazilian forms as appropriate to its discussion. Eshú and Èṣù, Orunmila and Òrúnmìlà, Oshumaré and Ọ̀ṣùmàrè do not become unrelated simply because spelling changes. Equally, a shared spelling does not prove that every community describes the same relationships in the same terms. Language can help readers find connections while still requiring them to ask where an interpretation belongs.

The Fool and Èṣù: freedom under examination

The Fool entry connects beginnings, uncertainty and choices at a crossroads with Eshú Elegbara. Its narrative asks the reader to think about attractive appearances and difficult decisions. For comparative reading, the fruitful question is not whether Èṣù “is” the Fool. It is what the pairing makes us notice about beginning something before its consequences are known. The card can bring a hesitation into view; the religious name adds a demand to learn beyond the card.

Freedom is an especially revealing theme. A person may describe leaving a job as liberation while leaving colleagues to repair an unfinished commitment. Another may remain in a position from loyalty when fear is doing most of the work. The same attractive word, freedom, can describe very different conduct. Reading the pairing seriously means allowing it to disturb the client's preferred story, rather than automatically praising every leap as courage or condemning every hesitation as weakness.

The crossroads also resists a simplistic binary. Choosing between two roads may conceal a prior question about whether the person has gathered enough information, spoken honestly or understood the obligation they are accepting. A reflective image can slow the demand for an immediate verdict. This is an interpretation developed here from the book's theme, not a traditional verse or a cast under Ogbe Otura. Keeping that attribution clear leaves room for the actual Odù corpus to offer meanings beyond this example.

Òrúnmìlà appears in more than one role

The Magician and Hierophant entries both turn to Orunmila but emphasize different questions. The first concerns mastery, resources and putting knowledge to work; the second concerns teaching, discipline and inherited wisdom. Their coexistence shows that the book's design is not a one to one identification of each deity with a single card. One religious figure can illuminate more than one problem within the deck. The card selects an aspect for attention without containing the personhood or history of the Òrìṣà.

This is useful when thinking about expertise. Possessing tools, knowing their names and having authority to use them are different achievements. The Magician comparison can invite a person to consider what they can actually do. The Hierophant comparison can ask how they learned, whose judgment they recognize and what obligations accompany their knowledge. Together they can challenge the fantasy that insight makes a person self authorizing. Expertise includes an ability to recognize when another office is required.

A contemporary student might therefore ask why a compelling private insight feels more persuasive than a teacher's correction. Sometimes the student has identified a real problem; sometimes the correction touches a cherished self image. Neither card settles that question. Their paired use can make the conflict more precise: is the issue competence, obedience, disagreement, pride or an institution's failure to explain itself? Good reflective reading should increase the quality of the ensuing conversation, not make conversation unnecessary.

Oyá across trumps and courts

Oyá appears with the Chariot, Queen of Wands and Queen of Swords. These entries distribute attention across directed movement, confidence and discernment. The repeated association is important because a superficial summary might reduce Oyá to storms or change. The book instead uses a constellation of cards to explore how action is directed. Intensity alone is insufficient: a forceful decision can be well considered, poorly timed or harmful to the very people it claims to protect.

In the Queen of Wands discussion, the book emphasizes initiative and leadership. The Queen of Swords discussion turns toward clarity, boundaries and disciplined judgment. Read together, they let a student compare the confidence to act with the capacity to distinguish. A leader can have the first without the second. Another can see the problem clearly while avoiding the public responsibility of deciding. The value of the pairing lies in exposing this difference without defining every follower of Oyá by a fixed personality.

Court cards require special care here. Queen and king are inherited card titles, not instructions that a particular quality belongs only to women or men. Nor does appearing under a court title establish priestly rank. A reader can explore leadership, care or judgment without announcing that a person has acquired the religious office imagined by a card. The interpretive categories remain available to different lives while the history and authority of the actual communities remain intact.

The Wheel, repetition and change

The Wheel of Fortune entry pairs Oshumaré with Irete Meji and examines cycles, variation and continuity. A useful reading moves beyond the comforting idea that everything will improve because the wheel turns. Repetition can mean renewal, but it can also mean returning to an unresolved arrangement. The question is what persists through change. A new relationship, city or employer may carry an old pattern if the person has changed the setting without changing their conduct.

Cycles also involve unequal experience. A household's season of abundance can depend on another person's unrecognized work. A business's expansion can coincide with exhaustion among its workers. Calling an event a natural cycle should not erase decisions that could be made differently. The pairing can be read as an invitation to observe rhythm and dependence, rather than a reason to accept every loss as inevitable or to wait passively for a guaranteed reward.

The ethical depth emerges when a reader asks what should be carried into the next turn. Gratitude may involve preserving a relationship, acknowledging help or changing the distribution of effort. Letting go may involve relinquishing a claim that has become harmful. These are interpretive possibilities prompted by the comparison. They are not predictions attached to every occurrence of Ọ̀ṣùmàrè's name, and they do not exhaust the deity's religious histories.

Suits provide another level of organization

Tilo organizes Cups through water, Swords through air and Pentacles through earth, with Wands completing the elemental framework through fire. These associations form part of the deck's comparative vocabulary. They offer broad domains through which entries can return to relationships, judgment, resources and action. They should not be used to assign every Òrìṣà a single element and declare the religious world fully classified. The book itself repeats figures across suits and roles, making a rigid partition difficult to sustain.

The Ace of Cups entry associates Yemanjá with renewal and compassion, while the Ace of Pentacles associates Olokun with opportunity and the responsible use of resources. Read beside each other, these entries can separate the desire to receive from the capacity to care for what arrives. New resources may require knowledge, maintenance and cooperation. Emotional openness may require limits. A beginning is not yet the fulfilled relationship or the sustainable livelihood that a person hopes it will become.

The Olokun narrative in the supplied entry also links material prosperity with stewardship. This makes a useful interpretive challenge: what will the recipient owe to the sources of their benefit? The question can be applied to education, inherited property or access to a community's knowledge. But the episode should be introduced as the book's narrative presentation. Without independent textual or oral documentation, attaching an Odù name to an episode does not justify calling that precise wording an authenticated ancient ẹsẹ Ifá.

Images, narratives and the problem of recognition

A card image can be immediately arresting because it offers bodies, movement and objects that a reader can describe. An Odù configuration does not depict its corpus in this way. Someone who recognizes a boat, cup or crown has not thereby identified the story through which an Ifá interpreter will understand a consultation. Tilo's Signs of the Black Atlantic makes a related distinction between a visible form and the knowledge required to interpret it in an actual event.

Images can also overdetermine a reading. A stern face may be assumed to signify cruelty, a dark palette misfortune or an attractive figure benevolence. Such assumptions may come from the viewer's habits rather than the method. A careful reader separates description from inference: what is pictured, what the guide assigns, and what the reader brings from their own associations. That separation creates room to recognize prejudice or projection instead of treating the first impression as a message that cannot be questioned.

Narratives need the same patience. A story of conflict may concern failed reciprocity rather than the presence of an enemy. A story of abundance may concern distribution rather than acquisition. If the reader chooses only the detail that fits an existing suspicion, the narrative has lost its ability to teach. Reading deeply means staying with the part that complicates the obvious conclusion and allowing the apparent lesson to change as other agents and consequences become visible.

Upright, reversed and unresolved

The book gives upright and reversed meanings for entries, often juxtaposing a capacity with its distortion: confidence with domination, openness with depletion, initiative with recklessness. This is best read as a structured way of examining a theme from more than one direction. Upright should not mean that every associated action is approved, and reversed should not become a diagnosis of the client's worth. The same capacity can be useful or damaging according to its object, timing and measure.

Ambiguity is therefore more than an inconvenience. A reader may genuinely be unable to determine whether withdrawal is restorative solitude or avoidance. The next useful step might be an ordinary question about the person's conduct and relationships. Symbolic reflection can help articulate that uncertainty without pretending to settle it. The book's practical register becomes most valuable when it encourages decisions proportionate to what the reader understands, rather than supplying an extravagant claim of certainty to accompany an ambiguous image.

Repetition across readings deserves attention for the same reason. Seeing the same card again does not by itself prove that a spirit is intensifying a demand. The person may be returning to an unresolved concern, or their interpretive habits may keep returning to the same vocabulary. One can take the recurrence seriously as an invitation to examine a question while remaining precise about what has actually occurred. A pattern in reflection and a formally received religious instruction are different kinds of claim.

When a pairing fails to fit

A serious comparison also needs room for refusal. A reader familiar with an Òrìṣà through a house may find that a card title brings the wrong associations to the relationship. That response need not mean that all contemporary adaptation is impossible. It may identify a specific mismatch: a courtly hierarchy where the reader expects another form of authority, an individualized triumph where the religious narrative stresses reciprocity, or a psychological description that leaves a deity's agency unacknowledged. Naming the mismatch teaches more than demanding agreement because two symbols share a theme.

The design can be assessed by asking what would be lost if one side disappeared. If an entry says only “be confident,” substituting any prestigious figure would leave its advice largely unchanged. The comparison becomes more substantial when an actual narrative, named relationship or distinctive dilemma challenges that interchangeable wording. Conversely, a long religious name cannot compensate for a card image that contributes nothing to the interpretation. Both sides should be doing recognizable work.

This gives the reader an active role without making personal preference the measure of every religious claim. One can judge whether an analogy helps explain a human problem while remaining unable to authorize a ceremony or authenticate an oral attribution. Those are different competencies. A thoughtful reading can record both its insight and its limit: this pairing clarified a conflict about leadership; the community's own teaching is still needed to understand the Òrìṣà. The result is deeper curiosity rather than a premature sense of completion.

Repeated Odù assignments also reveal the design's structure. Irete Meji appears with the Wheel of Fortune and the Ace of Cups, while Òfún Méji appears in entries associated with several distinct figures. A reader should therefore resist turning any single card into the exclusive representative of its named Odù. The repetition creates thematic paths through the book, not a claim that an entire corpus belongs to one image. Following those paths can become a useful reading exercise: compare what each entry selects, what it leaves aside and how its card changes the emphasis. The difference among entries is part of the authored interpretation.

What the deck can accompany

Tilo explicitly distinguishes his deck from sacred instruments used in initiation and the recognition of particular religious relationships. That boundary gives the project its educational usefulness. A person can study courage, grief, judgment or responsibility through its comparisons without claiming to know their guardian Òrìṣà or enduring personal Odù. The deck may also prepare more articulate questions for a qualified practitioner. Preparation becomes valuable precisely because the subsequent religious encounter has its own method and authority.

Martin Holbraad's Havana fieldwork examines the force of Ifá statements within a particular divinatory world. His study makes clear why a religious consultation cannot be reduced to looking up a symbol's general meaning. That ethnographic setting should retain its specificity rather than becoming a rule for every Ifá community. It nevertheless helps explain what a contemporary comparative deck cannot silently inherit merely by printing Odù names. Holbraad, “Truth beyond doubt: Ifá oracles in Havana.”

The Odù introduction and reading ẹsẹ Ifá offer further study of corpus and interpretation. The Orí article develops direction and character beyond a personality label. Readers using Personal Exploration can treat it as an educational and reflective companion. These resources do not cast an authorized oracle or confer initiation. Their contribution is to make learning more specific, questions more thoughtful and an authored comparison easier to assess on its actual merits.

Sources and further reading

• Tilo Plöger de Àjàgùnnà, Tarot Ifá. Supplied introduction, complement-to-tradition discussion, named Major Arcana entries, court entries and Ace of Cups/Pentacles bodies consulted. Correspondences and narrative assignments are presented as this book's design. Matched book.
• Tilo Plöger de Àjàgùnnà, Odù Ifá Divination, The Geomancy of Ifá and Signs of the Black Atlantic. Substantive terminology, historical proposal and sign interpretation sections consulted. Books.
• Tim Husband, “Before Fortune-Telling: The History and Structure of Tarot Cards,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, 8 April 2016. Museum history and collection based account.
• Rebecca Billingham, Ruth Hibbard and Josephine Nardecchia, “A history of tarot cards,” V&A. Museum account, updated 16 July 2026; used for deck structure, changing designs and Colman Smith's contribution.
• UNESCO, “Ifa divination system”. Indexed institutional description consulted for corpus organization; direct retrieval returned an access challenge.
• Martin Holbraad, “Truth beyond doubt: Ifá oracles in Havana,” HAU 2, no. 1 (2012). Full scholarly article available and consulted for its situated account of oracular interpretation.
• DAILY IFÁ Academy. Published teaching collection.