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.