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The Libreta and the Unpublished Record

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The Libreta and the Unpublished Record

A great deal of what Lucumi practitioners actually work from has never been published at all. Alongside oral instruction, Cuban religious houses have long kept libretas, handwritten notebooks in which an initiate records liturgy, songs, ritual procedure and divinatory material, copied from a godparent and added to over a lifetime.

Libretas are not books in any public sense. They circulate within a house and between godparent and godchild, they vary from one lineage to the next, they are not edited or reconciled against each other, and they were never intended for outside readers. Scholarship on Afro-Cuban religion has long recognised them as a major part of the record and an awkward one, since the material they contain is both textual and closed.

This has a direct bearing on what a reference page can claim. Any statement of the form "the tradition holds that Eji Oko means X" is a statement about some lineage's material, not about the whole practice, and there is no complete corpus anywhere against which to check it.

Eji Oko, the two-mouth throw, is documented in the published comparative literature as one of the sixteen parent signs. The content recorded against it in libretas and in oral teaching is held within initiated practice, and the atlas does not reproduce it.

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