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Sixteen Cowrie Shell Signs of the Lucumi Diloggun System

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Sixteen Cowrie Shell Signs of the Lucumi Diloggun System

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Diloggun Odu gathers the sixteen basic signs of the Diloggun system, the cowrie shell divination of the Lucumi tradition of Cuba and its diaspora, reached across the Atlantic by enslaved Yoruba people and preserved inside the Regla de Ocha religious structure.

Each sign is cast by the number of the sixteen shells that land mouth up, from Okana, cast when exactly one shell falls mouth up and the simplest configuration, opening the sequence, through to signs cast with several shells open at once, such as Irosun with four. Several of the sixteen share their names, in different spellings, with the corresponding sixteen principal figures of Ifa divination, tracing back to one common Yoruba source despite the two systems' different casting methods, cowrie shells among initiated priests and priestesses of the orishas against the palm nut chain reserved to babalawos, and their separate lines of initiation. Bascom records that a small number, Eji Oko and Ejila Shebora among them, are parent signs whose Diloggun name does not carry directly across to a corresponding Ifa figure at all, a point where the two vocabularies diverge rather than mirror one another.

What the atlas records for each sign is its shell count, its position in the numbered sequence and, where it holds one, its relationship to the parallel Ifa figure. The praise lines, proverbs and prescribed remedies that belong to each sign are held by initiated diviners, italeros and oriates, and are not reproduced here; Diloggun is a living, initiatory tradition, and the atlas describes its structure rather than instructing its practice.

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Sources
Sixteen Cowries: Yoruba Divination from Africa to the New World
William Bascom, Indiana University Press, 1980
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