Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Learning by Apprenticeship

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Learning by Apprenticeship

The Ifa corpus is transmitted by apprenticeship, over years, from a senior diviner to a student who commits material to memory and is examined on it in practice rather than on paper. That is the mechanism by which two hundred fifty six figures and the verse standing under them have survived without a book.

Two features of that mechanism bear directly on how the atlas treats this type. The first is that learning and authorisation are the same process: a student does not first acquire the corpus and then separately gain the right to use it. Competence and standing are conferred together, through initiation. The second is that a great deal of what is learned is not verse at all. It is judgement, about which of many possible verses fits the person consulting, and about what should follow.

Neither of those transfers to a printed page, which is why publishing verse would not put a reader in possession of the practice even if it were appropriate to do so. It would put them in possession of the most quotable fragment of it.

Owonrin Meji is documented in the standard scholarship, chiefly Bascom in 1969 and Abimbola in 1976, as one of the sixteen principal figures, and the atlas is confident in that structural statement. Its interpretive content is conferred by initiated practitioners and is not reproduced here.

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