Odu & Divination Signs

Oyeku Meji

Ifa Odu

Citation Formats

General Reference

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

APA Style

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

BibTeX

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

Oyeku Meji is the second 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. Oyeku Meji's own figure is drawn as two identical columns of four double marks each, all eight marks double, the notation recorded in William Bascom's 1969 study of the system; it is the exact opposite of Eji Ogbe at position one, whose eight marks are all single. Oyeku Meji follows Eji Ogbe and precedes Iwori Meji 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, Oyeku 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 double marks each (II-II-II-II); all eight marks double, the exact opposite of Eji Ogbe, whose eight marks are all single. 1

Divination System

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

Identity

Position

2 of 16 principal odu (Odu Meji) 1

Learn More

Two Columns, Eight Marks

Every figure in Ifa is written the same way: eight positions in two columns of four, read as a pair rather than as a single run of eight. Each position is either one stroke or two. That is the entire notation, and it is what makes the corpus countable. Sixteen patterns exist for a column of four, so sixteen figures exist in which the two columns are identical, and those sixteen are the principal odu, distinguished in speech by the word Meji, meaning two or doubled. Oyeku Meji is the second of them in the sequence as ordinarily published.

The pairing is not decorative. A figure whose columns differ is a distinct sign with its own name, formed from the names of the two halves, and there are two hundred forty of those. Together with the sixteen matched figures they make the two hundred fifty six odu that the corpus is actually organised around. A diviner is expected to hold material for all of them, which is why the sixteen are taught first and why the ordering of the sixteen matters to instruction.

Oyeku Meji and Eji Ogbe are the two extremes of the notation, one figure carrying a double stroke in every position and the other a single stroke in every position, so the pair is often introduced together when the notation is explained.

The verses attached to Oyeku Meji, and what a diviner does on casting it, are part of an initiatory transmission and are not given here.

Abimbola and the Literary Corpus

The other name a reader will meet constantly is Wande Abimbola, whose Ifa: An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus appeared from Oxford University Press in Ibadan in 1976, and whose Sixteen Great Poems of Ifa was published by UNESCO the year before. Abimbola approached the ese as literature as well as ritual speech, arguing for the corpus as a body of Yoruba poetry with its own conventions, structures and merits, at a time when African oral material was routinely filed as folklore rather than as literature.

That framing matters to how the record should be read. A verse printed as poetry has been selected, transcribed, lineated and translated, and each of those steps is an editorial decision made by someone. It also means the published corpus is weighted towards material that reads well in print. Neither point is a criticism of the scholarship; both are reasons a reference page should describe what the record contains rather than quote from it as though it were a fixed text.

Abimbola wrote as a scholar and as an initiate, which is a combination the field has more of than most religious-studies subfields, and it is part of why the literature is comparatively careful about what it does and does not publish.

Oyeku Meji, like every principal figure, heads material in that corpus. The atlas points at the scholarship and stops there: the verses and their application in a reading belong to initiated practitioners and are not reproduced.

Cross-Tradition Connections