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An Address, Not an Answer

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An Address, Not an Answer

It helps to understand what an odu actually is. It is not itself the answer to a question. It is an address: a name arrived at by the apparatus, which tells the diviner where in a very large body of remembered material to look. Okanran Meji, eighth of the sixteen principal figures in the published sequence, names one such location.

That is why the count matters so much in descriptions of Ifa. Two hundred fifty six addresses, each heading its own body of verse, is a structure with enough room in it that a diviner can find material bearing on almost any situation brought to them, while the figure itself is produced by an instrument that nobody controls. The unpredictability sits in the apparatus and the substance sits in the corpus, and the two meet at the name.

Understood this way, publishing a figure's verses would be publishing a fragment of the contents of an address, without the corpus around it and without the trained judgement that selects from within it. The address itself, its name and its place in the sequence, carries no such difficulty, which is why these entries can describe the sixteen at all.

Okanran Meji is documented in the standard scholarly literature as one of the sixteen. Its verses, and the reading and prescription a diviner draws from it in consultation, are held within initiated practice and are not reproduced here.

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