Odu & Divination Signs

Ogunda Meji

Ifa Odu

Citation Formats

General Reference

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

APA Style

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

BibTeX

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

Ogunda Meji is the ninth 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. Ogunda Meji's own figure is drawn as two identical columns of four marks, reading top to bottom as single, single, single, double, three single marks and one double mark in each column, the notation recorded in William Bascom's 1969 study of the system. It falls between Okanran Meji at position eight and Osa Meji at position ten 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, Ogunda 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, single, single, double (I-I-I-II); three single and one double mark 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

9 of 16 principal odu (Odu Meji) 1

Learn More

Orunmila and the Name Ifa

The oracle is bound to a particular figure of the Yoruba pantheon. Orunmila, the orisha associated with wisdom and with destiny, is the one to whom a diviner is initiated, and the word Ifa is used in the literature both for the divination system and, in many sources, for Orunmila himself. A reader moving between books will meet the name in both senses, sometimes on the same page.

That is worth flagging on a reference page because it is a common source of confusion for anyone approaching the subject from outside. The atlas files the odu as figures of a divination system; it does not follow that the system is separable from the deity in the way a table of contents might suggest, and the tradition does not treat it as separable.

Ogunda Meji is the ninth of the sixteen principal odu in the sequence as ordinarily published, one of the figures in which both columns of the cast carry the same pattern. Like the other fifteen it is a component of the full set of two hundred fifty six, and like the other fifteen it is taught early because the set cannot be indexed without it.

Names in this field also vary by transliteration. Yoruba is a tone language, most English language sources drop the diacritics, and diaspora spellings diverge further again, so a figure met under a slightly different spelling elsewhere is usually the same figure.

The verses of Ogunda Meji, and the reading a diviner takes from it, are not reproduced here.

The UNESCO Listing and What It Recognised

UNESCO proclaimed the Ifa divination system a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005, and it was subsequently carried onto the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Nigeria was the state party behind the nomination.

The listing is useful to a reference work for what it describes rather than for the honour it confers. It characterises Ifa as a system resting on an extensive corpus of texts and on a procedure of signs interpreted by a trained diviner, and it draws a distinction that matters: Ifa does not depend on a practitioner receiving an oracular message directly. The apparatus produces a sign; the sign indexes remembered material; a trained person applies it. That is a different thing from spirit mediumship, and the difference is structural rather than a matter of degree.

The listing also records something the atlas would otherwise have to assert on its own authority, namely that the practice is living, that it is held by identifiable communities in West Africa and across the diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean, and that transmission is a live concern rather than a historical one.

Ogunda Meji is one of the sixteen principal figures within that corpus. The corpus itself, the verses standing under each figure and the interpretation given in consultation, are conferred by initiated practitioners and are not set out here.

Cross-Tradition Connections