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One Throw from the Maximum

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One Throw from the Maximum

Marunla, Yoruba for "fifteen," is cast when fifteen of the sixteen Diloggun cowries land mouth up, one shell short of the maximum possible throw. It is among the rarest of the sixteen parent signs in ordinary use, since a throw requiring all but one of sixteen independent shells to agree occurs infrequently even across a diviner's full working career, and the recorded oral corpus for it is correspondingly sparse in most published Lucumi sources compared to the twelve lower, commoner signs. Marunla shares its naming convention, a Yoruba number word rather than an elaborated praise name, with Metanla, Merinla and the maximal throw Merindilogun, the four signs the tradition groups together as its highest and least frequent parent configurations.

As with every parent Odu in the Diloggun system, Marunla functions as one half of whichever of the two hundred fifty six compound signs a full reading actually produces, and it is at that compound level, not at the level of the sixteen-shell parent throw alone, that the tradition's working divinatory literature is organized. Marunla's own interpretive content is reserved to initiated diviners and is not part of this reference entry. Its rarity is sometimes cited by diviners as a reason a Marunla throw draws particular attention when it does occur, precisely because so few practitioners will see it more than a handful of times across a career.

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