The sixteen principal odu are learned in an order, and the order is treated as one of seniority rather than as an arbitrary list. Obara Meji stands seventh in the sequence recorded here, which follows the arrangement most commonly published.
Two things should be said about that number. The first is that the sequence is genuinely part of the tradition and not a cataloguer's convenience: it governs how the figures are taught, how they are recited, and how they are compared with one another. The second is that published sequences do not agree in every particular. Ifa is practised across a wide area and through many lineages, and the ordering of the figures, especially past the first few, is one of the places where local usage differs. Bascom thought the question important enough to treat the order of the figures in a study of its own, separate from his 1969 monograph.
The atlas therefore records position seven for Obara Meji as the position given in the widely published order, not as a universal ranking that every practitioner would endorse. Where a reader finds a different sequence in another source, the difference is more likely to be regional than erroneous.
How seniority is applied inside an actual reading, when figures are compared and one takes precedence, is part of trained practice. The verses attached to Obara Meji, and what a diviner prescribes on casting it, are not reproduced here.