Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Why the Verses Are Not Reproduced Here

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Why the Verses Are Not Reproduced Here

This entry, and the fifteen beside it, deliberately stop short of the ese. That is worth stating directly rather than leaving as an absence.

Ifa is a living initiatory system. Its interpretive content is not secret in the sense of being hidden, but it is conferred: acquired through years of apprenticeship, held by people who have been initiated, and applied to a particular person in a particular consultation by someone trained to do it. A verse copied out of a book and set beside a figure on a web page has been stripped of every one of those conditions. It reads as though anyone can pick it up and use it, which is precisely what the tradition does not hold.

There is also a plainer reason. Per-figure content is easy to get wrong from a distance and hard for a reader to check. A wrong verse attributed to the wrong odu, presented in the atlas's own voice, would misrepresent somebody's religion. A structural account of the corpus can be checked line by line against the published scholarship; an invented reading cannot be checked at all.

So the atlas describes: the notation, the count, the instruments, the sequence, the state of the scholarly record and the manner of transmission. Irosun Meji is the fifth of the sixteen principal figures and heads a body of verse. What that verse says belongs to the diviners who hold it.

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