Divinity Atlas

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Commercial Manuals and Why They Are Weak Sources

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Commercial Manuals and Why They Are Weak Sources

A reader searching for the sixteen signs will find a large quantity of published material offering per-sign meanings, and most of it is not usable as evidence.

Commercially published divination manuals rarely say where their content came from. They do not name the lineage, the informant, the place or the date, they reproduce one another without attribution, and they present as settled a body of material that varies between houses. Where a claim cannot be traced to anyone, it cannot be checked, and repeating it in a reference work would launder an unsourced assertion into an apparent fact.

There is a second problem with such material on this type specifically. Setting out per-sign meanings invites a reader to use them, which is what a closed initiatory practice does not extend to a reader.

The atlas therefore restricts itself on this type to what the ethnographic and scholarly record establishes: the mechanics of the throw, the structure of the sixteen and the two hundred fifty six, the comparison with Ifa, and the manner of transmission.

Odi, the seven-mouth throw, is documented within that record. Its interpretive content is transmitted by initiated diviners and is not reproduced here.

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