Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Where This Account Stops

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Where This Account Stops

These thirty two entries, two for each of the sixteen principal odu, are deliberately built to one shape, and it is worth saying at the close of the set what that shape is and why.

They describe the frame: how a figure is produced, how it is written, how sixteen become two hundred fifty six, how the sequence is ordered and how much confidence that ordering deserves, who the diviners are, how the corpus passes between them, what the published scholarship contains and what it does not. Every sentence in that account can be checked against the record.

They do not give the ese, the divinatory readings, the interpretations offered in consultation or the sacrifices prescribed. Those are the property of a living initiatory tradition, conferred on initiated practitioners through years of training, and applied to individual people in a relationship a page cannot stand in for. Their absence here is a decision, and it is the correct one.

The alternative was a fuller looking entry assembled from circulating material of unverifiable provenance, presented in the atlas's own voice. On a subject that is somebody's religion, that is not a better article; it is a worse one wearing more words.

Ofun Meji closes the sixteen. What it says when it falls belongs to the diviners who hold it.

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