Odu & Divination Signs

Odi Meji

Ifa Odu

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Odi Meji." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/odu-divination-signs/odi-meji.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Odi Meji. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/odu-divination-signs/odi-meji

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-odi-meji,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Odi Meji},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/odu-divination-signs/odi-meji},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Odi Meji is the fourth of the sixteen principal odu (Odu Meji) of Ifa divination, the senior tier of a wider system of two hundred and fifty six odu in total. Odu Meji, the twinned or doubled figures, are the sixteen where the opele chain or the counted ikin palm nuts produce the same four marks in both columns; where the two columns differ instead, the resulting figure belongs to the two hundred and forty minor odu. Odi Meji's own figure is drawn as two identical columns of four marks, reading top to bottom as single, double, double, single, two single marks and two double marks in each column, the notation recorded in William Bascom's 1969 study of the system. It falls between Iwori Meji at position three and Irosun Meji at position five in the sequence most widely published from Bascom's and Wande Abimbola's academic work, an order the babalawo learn and recite from memory; Bascom's own comparative fieldwork among Yoruba diviners and neighboring peoples recorded that the middle of this order is not identically fixed everywhere, though the sequence given here is the one most widely published. Like each of the sixteen, Odi Meji heads its own body of orally transmitted verses (ese Ifa) drawn on by a babalawo or iyanifa when interpreting a divination cast. A separate sixteen sign system built on counted cowrie shells rather than the opele chain or ikin nuts, used in the Cuban Diloggun tradition, shares several of the same names under different spellings but follows its own count based order. Ifa is a living, initiatory tradition; the atlas describes its structure and does not instruct practice or reproduce what the babalawo and iyanifa initiations transmit.

Facts

Structure

Stroke Pattern

Two identical columns of four marks each, reading top to bottom single, double, double, single (I-II-II-I); two single and two double marks in each column. 1

Primary-verified: this exact stroke pattern is confirmed directly against Bascom's own Table 1, page 4, of Ifa Divination (1969), cross-checked character for character against two independent digitisations of the same edition, not only against convergent secondary sources.

Divination System

Ifa (babalawo opele-chain and ikin palm-nut divination) 1

Identity

Position

4 of 16 principal odu (Odu Meji) 1

Learn More

What Meji Means

Meji is the Yoruba word for two, and in the naming of the odu it marks a figure whose two columns are identical. Odi Meji is therefore Odi doubled: the pattern named Odi standing in both halves of the cast. Fifteen of the sixteen principal figures carry the word, the exception being Eji Ogbe, whose name puts the same idea at the front instead.

The convention is not a flourish. Because a figure is built from two halves, every one of the two hundred fifty six odu can be named from its parts, and the compound names of the two hundred forty unmatched figures are formed by joining the names of the two columns. Meji is what marks the sixteen cases where the two names would be the same word twice. Once the sixteen are known, the whole set can be read off.

Odi Meji stands fourth in the sequence of the sixteen as it is ordinarily published. The atlas records that position because it is what the published record supports; sequences drawn from different areas do not agree in every particular, and the ordering of the figures has been treated as a research question in its own right.

The verses gathered under Odi Meji, and what a diviner makes of the figure in a consultation, are transmitted within initiated practice. They are not reproduced here, and that is a decision about what this page is for rather than a gap in it.

The Diviner Behind a Printed Verse

Every printed Ifa verse came from somebody. That sounds obvious and is easy to forget once the material is set in type with a chapter heading over it. The standard scholarship is explicit about it: Bascom's 1969 volume is built on fieldwork with practising diviners, and its Yoruba texts are recordings of specific people speaking, not extracts from a manuscript tradition.

This has a practical bearing on how the record should be cited. A verse in print is evidence that a named diviner, at a known date and place, held that material. It is not evidence that the verse is universal, nor that it is complete, nor that the wording is fixed. Oral corpora vary by lineage and by occasion, and the scholarship generally says so.

It also means that the people who supplied the corpus were exercising judgement about what to share with a researcher, and that judgement is part of the record too. Where a tradition drew a line, the line is data about the tradition and deserves the same respect as the material on the other side of it.

Odi Meji is documented as one of the sixteen principal figures with material standing under it. What that material says, and what a diviner would do with it, is conferred through initiation and apprenticeship rather than through publication, and the atlas does not reproduce it.

Cross-Tradition Connections