Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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The Tray, the Powder and the Marks

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The Tray, the Powder and the Marks

When the palm nuts are used rather than the chain, the figure is not simply read off an object; it is written. The diviner works over the opon Ifa, a carved wooden tray, dusted with a fine powder called iyerosun. Each pass of the nuts determines whether one mark or two are drawn in the powder, and eight passes build the full figure of two columns of four. The tray is the writing surface, the powder is the medium, and the figure exists on it until it is wiped away.

That detail is more than incidental craft. It is why Ifa figures can be described as a notation at all, and why a corpus of two hundred fifty six named signs could be held, taught and cross-referenced by a tradition that committed nothing to paper. The tray is the page.

Owonrin Meji is the sixth of the sixteen principal figures in the sequence as ordinarily published, one of the sixteen in which both columns of the figure carry the same pattern.

Carved trays are among the most studied objects in Yoruba art history, which means the apparatus of Ifa is comparatively well documented in museums and catalogues even where the divinatory content is not. The two should not be confused: a well described tray tells you about carving and about ritual furniture, not about what a diviner says.

The verses of Owonrin Meji and their use in consultation are held within initiated practice and are not reproduced here.

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