The Five Blessings of Ifá: Reclaiming Black Futures Through Afro-Indigenous Spirituality

by Gabrielle Renee Felder

A fierce and inspirational guide to Black resistance, resilience, and healing, using the principles of Afro-Indigenous spiritual practices

Understanding where you came from is crucial to understand where you are going.

The Five Blessings of Ifá explores how Black communities across the diaspora draw strength from ancestral wisdom, family, community care, and mutual aid, using the principles of Ifá—a West African spiritual tradition—as a guiding framework. Gabrielle Felder provides a blueprint for living a more fulfilled and abundant life through the blessings of Aiku (longevity), Aje (wealth), Aya and Oko (relationships), Omo (children), and Isegun (victory over negative forces), providing practical examples of how Black folks have built resilience and learned to thrive in the face of oppression.

Longevity exists in ancestral traditions that we cultivate over generations, which Felder explores through practices of traditional herbalism as well as contemporary sustainability and food sovereignty movements. Wealth , in Felder’s interpretation, has to do with the richness created by community, including cultural traditions of food, dance, and music that connect seemingly disparate African diasporic cultures. Partnership , traditionally understood in Ifá as husband and wife, is reconsidered by Felder to include a wide variety of relationship structures, including familial bonds and queer families. To explore the blessing of children , Felder dives into the important history of doulas and midwives in Black communities, and their crucial role in combatting the high maternal mortality rate among Black women in the US. Finally, Felder draws out the meanings of the blessing of victory through a wide range of examples of Black slave rebellions; the rejection of Euro-centric beauty standards; mutual aid practices among Black revolutionary groups; and the contemporary Black witch movement. As a collective, Black folks have managed to usher in the five blessings of Ifá into our lives despite all odds. This book is a love letter to those who have come before us, and a guide to the possibilities that lie in our collective future.

Genres: Nonfiction

208 pages, Paperback

Published October 28, 2025

Reviews

[Andre(Read-A-Lot) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Started this book way back in the summer, read the first chapter then immediately got distracted by other books, but recently came back to this and finished it. The gap between summer and now has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the text. It was just a focus shift on my part, and here we are. Now, The Five Blessings of Ifa is a spiritual guide to the intricacies of Ifa, which is the spiritual foundation of the Yoruba people of present day Nigeria and Benin.

It focuses on five blessings and how those blessings were incorporated into the daily lives of practitioners. Well, these traditions are fully available to today’s African diasporans if we can just tap into the knowledge, and this text is helpful in that regard. The devastation wrought by the trade of humans is simply staggering, especially when you consider the loss of spiritual practices and knowledge. How much different would African descendants be, if we were able to have the cultural continuity that other peoples have enjoyed?

Anyway, The five Blessings of Ifa, is a good accessible example of how the spiritual experience connects to the communal experience to solve and attack life problems. Our ancestral ways were denounced, denigrated, and destroyed leading us and generations to believe there was something very wrong, indeed evil about ancient African practices. We are, well some?, are just coming to grips with just how destructive and calculated the attack on Ancestral traditions were. And books like this tend to act as a corrective, an attempt to recover, reconcile, redeem , and reclaim ancient practices that served and anchored us in community.

“Our ancestors believed that everything has a spiritual energy. The key to any healing practice is to understand the medicinal and spiritual properties of plants. Spiritual practices like Ifá teach us how to be in relationship with nature. Worshipping the orisa teaches us to approach nature with humility and respect. The earth is our oldest teacher.”

That is a radically different approach to spirit than the Abrahamic religious concepts of male gendered saviors. Take some time to explore this text, it isn’t a big thick book, the page count is merely 208 pages. A great big thanks to North Atlantic Books and Edelweiss for an advanced DRC.

[Dora Okeyo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have long been interested in African Spirituality, and this is because I learned that there were Seers in my lineage and that got me curious, and then immediately after in Wole Soyinka's interview I heard him once say that it is the white man's Jesus that turns the other cheek but his Yoruba god never told him to take brutality lying down- I still search for that interview online hoping to listen to it again.

When it comes to West African spirituality, I think Yemoja, Sango and Aku get more visibility- reading this was like finding a book that I had been searching for. The Five Blessings of Ifá truly explores how Black communities across the diaspora draw strength from ancestral wisdom, family, community care, and mutual aid, using the principles of Ifá—a West African spiritual tradition—as a guiding framework. Thanks to Gabrielle Felder I learned of blessings of Aiku (longevity), Aje (wealth), Aya and Oko (relationships), Omo (children), and Isegun (victory over negative forces).

Thanks Netgalley for the eARC.