Odu & Divination Signs

Iwori Meji

Ifa Odu

Citation Formats

General Reference

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

APA Style

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

BibTeX

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

Iwori Meji is the third 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. Iwori Meji's own figure is drawn as two identical columns of four marks, reading top to bottom as double, single, single, double, 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 Oyeku Meji at position two and Odi Meji at position four 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, Iwori 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, single, double (II-I-I-II); 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

3 of 16 principal odu (Odu Meji) 1

Learn More

Sixteen Figures and Two Hundred Fifty Six Signs

The arithmetic of the Ifa corpus is worth setting out plainly, because it is the part a reference page can state exactly. Each cast marks four positions twice over, producing two columns of four. Four binary positions give sixteen possible columns. Two independent columns give sixteen times sixteen, or two hundred fifty six figures in total. Sixteen of those have matching columns and are the principal odu, named with Meji; the remaining two hundred forty have unlike columns and take compound names built from their two halves. Iwori Meji is the third of the sixteen in the sequence as commonly published.

The reason the sixteen are singled out for teaching is not that they are more powerful but that they are the components. Learn the sixteen and their order, and every one of the two hundred fifty six can be named and located. Fail to learn them and the corpus has no index.

This is also why the sixteen are what a public reference can usefully describe. They are structure. The two hundred fifty six carry the content, and the content is the part held within initiatory transmission.

The same sixteen-figure architecture appears in several West African and Malagasy divination systems and in North African geomancy, and how those systems are related to one another is a live scholarly question rather than a settled one.

Iwori Meji's own verses and the readings taken from it are not reproduced here.

A Published Selection, Not a Canon

It is easy to read a printed volume of Ifa verse as though it were a scripture with an agreed contents page. It is not. The corpus is oral, held in the memories of trained diviners, and what has been published is a selection drawn from particular practitioners in particular towns at particular dates.

Three consequences follow, and all three are things this atlas would rather state than paper over. Material recorded in one lineage may be unknown in another without either being wrong. The proportions in print reflect what researchers collected, so the figures that fall often are better represented than the rare ones. And a printed corpus freezes at the date of collection, while the living one does not.

Iwori Meji is documented in the standard scholarly literature, chiefly Bascom in 1969 and Abimbola in 1976, and the atlas can say with confidence that it is the third of the sixteen in the published sequence and that a body of verse stands under it. It cannot responsibly say how much verse, or which verse is authoritative, because those questions have answers only inside a lineage.

The distinction between describing a corpus and reproducing it is the whole basis of these entries. Ifa is a living initiatory system, and its interpretive content is conferred on people who have undergone training and initiation, not published for general reading. The atlas describes the structure, names the scholarship, and stops.

Cross-Tradition Connections