All Diloggun Signs

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Diloggun Odu gathers the sixteen basic signs of the Diloggun system, the cowrie shell divination of the Lucumi tradition of Cuba and its diaspora, reached across the Atlantic by enslaved Yoruba people and preserved inside the Regla de Ocha religious structure.

Each sign is cast by the number of the sixteen shells that land mouth up, from Okana, cast when exactly one shell falls mouth up and the simplest configuration, opening the sequence, through to signs cast with several shells open at once, such as Irosun with four. Several of the sixteen share their names, in different spellings, with the corresponding sixteen principal figures of Ifa divination, tracing back to one common Yoruba source despite the two systems' different casting methods, cowrie shells among initiated priests and priestesses of the orishas against the palm nut chain reserved to babalawos, and their separate lines of initiation. Bascom records that a small number, Eji Oko and Ejila Shebora among them, are parent signs whose Diloggun name does not carry directly across to a corresponding Ifa figure at all, a point where the two vocabularies diverge rather than mirror one another.

What the atlas records for each sign is its shell count, its position in the numbered sequence and, where it holds one, its relationship to the parallel Ifa figure. The praise lines, proverbs and prescribed remedies that belong to each sign are held by initiated diviners, italeros and oriates.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

William Bascom's study of Yoruba divination as it was carried into the Americas traces how the sixteen principal odu, and the system of casting them, survived transatlantic slavery and took on a documented new form, the Cuban and wider Caribbean diloggun system cast with cowrie shells rather than the West African divining chain, while preserving a recognizably related underlying structure.

That documented continuity and change matters for an odu entry because it shows the corpus is not a single, frozen West African system but a living tradition with more than one documented regional form, a figure carrying a related but not always identical name and position depending on whether the entry follows the West African Ifa system or a New World diloggun tradition descended from it.

An odu entry therefore names which documented regional tradition, West African Ifa or a New World descendant, a given account follows, rather than presenting one region's ordering as the single universal system, while continuing to describe structure rather than reproduce restricted verse content in either case. That same naming discipline extends to any future odu entry drawn from another regional tradition descended from the same West African source.