Odu & Divination Signs

Obara Meji

Ifa Odu

Citation Formats

General Reference

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

APA Style

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

BibTeX

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

Obara Meji is the seventh 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. Obara Meji's own figure is drawn as two identical columns of four marks, reading top to bottom as single, double, 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 Owonrin Meji at position six and Okanran Meji at position eight 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, Obara 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, double (I-II-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), 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

7 of 16 principal odu (Odu Meji) 1

Learn More

Reading the Order of Seniority

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.

Initiation and the Right to Divine

Reading Ifa is not a skill anyone may simply acquire. It rests on initiation, specifically to Orunmila, the orisha associated with the oracle, and the initiated diviner is titled babalawo, with iyanifa used for women where women are initiated. The training that follows initiation runs for years.

Whether and where women may be initiated as diviners is itself an active question, answered differently by different lineages and different national communities, and argued about in the open. The atlas notes the disagreement without adjudicating it, because it is a matter for the tradition and not for a reference work, and because the situation on the ground varies by place rather than resolving into a single rule.

What is not in dispute is that authority to divine is conferred rather than assumed, and that this is the ordinary condition of the practice rather than a restriction imposed on it from outside. UNESCO's 2005 recognition of the Ifa divination system described it as a body of texts and procedures interpreted by a trained diviner, rather than as a message received by anyone who holds the instruments.

Obara Meji, seventh of the sixteen principal figures, heads material within that conferred corpus. The atlas describes the institution and the scholarship. The verses, the readings and the prescriptions belong to initiated practitioners and are not set out here.

Cross-Tradition Connections