Where the Common Corpus Runs Out

Ofun is cast when ten of the sixteen Diloggun cowries land mouth up, the last of the parent signs still comfortably inside the range that most manuals record with a full individual oral corpus before the higher, rarer throws begin. Its name, like the majority of the sixteen, is shared with the corresponding figure in Ifa divination, part of a common inheritance from a single Yoruba source that both the palm-nut oracle of the babalawo and the cowrie-shell oracle of the Lucumi priesthood carried forward, by different routes, into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Bascom's ethnographic comparison, still the standard scholarly reference for the system, documents how the recorded verse thins markedly for the signs above roughly Metanla at thirteen mouths, a pattern attributable to their simple rarity in an honest throw rather than to any lesser standing within the tradition.

Ofun sits just below that threshold. As with every sign in this set, the specific proverbs, prescriptions and myth-narratives recorded against Ofun are transmitted within initiated Lucumi lineages rather than published, and this entry is limited to the structural and comparative facts that can responsibly be stated about it.