Odu & Divination Signs

Ika Meji

Ifa Odu

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Ika Meji." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://www.divinityatlas.com/odu-divination-signs/ika-meji.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Ika Meji. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://www.divinityatlas.com/odu-divination-signs/ika-meji

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-ika-meji,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Ika Meji},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://www.divinityatlas.com/odu-divination-signs/ika-meji},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Ika Meji is the eleventh 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. Ika Meji's own figure is drawn as two identical columns of four marks, reading top to bottom as double, single, double, double, one single mark and three double marks in each column, the notation recorded in William Bascom's 1969 study of the system. It falls between Osa Meji at position ten and Oturupon Meji at position twelve 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, Ika 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 double, single, double, double (II-I-II-II); one single and three 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), read by eye off two independent clean page images of the same edition that agree character for character, not only against convergent secondary sources.

Divination System

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

Identity

Position

11 of 16 principal odu (Odu Meji) 1

Learn More

How the Compound Figures Are Named

The sixteen principal odu are the smaller half of the corpus. The larger half is the two hundred forty figures in which the two columns of the cast carry different patterns, and those take compound names built from the names of their two halves. Learn the sixteen and the naming system does the rest: any of the two hundred fifty six figures can be named on sight from the two patterns in front of you.

That is why an entry on Ika Meji, eleventh of the sixteen in the published sequence, is an entry on a component. The compound figures are not lesser or secondary; they are simply the cases where the two halves differ, and they carry as much of the tradition's working material as the matched sixteen do. Ika appears as one half of a great many of them.

Naming conventions for the compounds vary between sources and between regions, in the ordering of the two halves and in the contracted forms the names take in speech, which is one more reason a reader should expect variation between published tables rather than treat any one of them as definitive.

The atlas holds the sixteen principal figures because they are the structural index of the corpus and because they can be described accurately without reproducing anything held in confidence.

The verses gathered under Ika Meji, and the readings and prescriptions drawn from it, belong to initiated practice and are not reproduced here.

Recording an Oral Corpus in Print

Putting an oral corpus into a book changes it, and the scholarship on Ifa is unusually frank about this.

A recited verse has a performer, an occasion, an audience and a purpose. Transcribed, it loses all four. It also loses tone, since Yoruba is a tone language and most publication in English drops the marks; it loses the variation between one telling and the next, because a transcript freezes one telling; and it acquires a fixity the original never had. Bascom's 1969 volume prints Yoruba text with facing English translation precisely so that a reader can see some of what the translation is doing. Abimbola's work treats the ese as poetry with its own formal conventions, which recovers something a plain prose rendering loses.

None of that makes the record untrustworthy. It makes it a particular kind of evidence: good for showing that material of a certain shape existed, held by identifiable people, at a known date, and poor for settling what any figure means in general.

Ika Meji is documented as one of the sixteen principal figures and the atlas states that with confidence. How much verse stands under it, and which verse is authoritative, are questions with answers only inside a lineage. Those answers are conferred through initiation and are not reproduced here.

Cross-Tradition Connections