Divinity Atlas

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Orunmila and the Name Ifa

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Orunmila and the Name Ifa

The oracle is bound to a particular figure of the Yoruba pantheon. Orunmila, the orisha associated with wisdom and with destiny, is the one to whom a diviner is initiated, and the word Ifa is used in the literature both for the divination system and, in many sources, for Orunmila himself. A reader moving between books will meet the name in both senses, sometimes on the same page.

That is worth flagging on a reference page because it is a common source of confusion for anyone approaching the subject from outside. The atlas files the odu as figures of a divination system; it does not follow that the system is separable from the deity in the way a table of contents might suggest, and the tradition does not treat it as separable.

Ogunda Meji is the ninth of the sixteen principal odu in the sequence as ordinarily published, one of the figures in which both columns of the cast carry the same pattern. Like the other fifteen it is a component of the full set of two hundred fifty six, and like the other fifteen it is taught early because the set cannot be indexed without it.

Names in this field also vary by transliteration. Yoruba is a tone language, most English language sources drop the diacritics, and diaspora spellings diverge further again, so a figure met under a slightly different spelling elsewhere is usually the same figure.

The verses of Ogunda Meji, and the reading a diviner takes from it, are not reproduced here.

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