It is easy to read a list of sixteen odu as though it were the corpus. It is the index to the corpus. The sixteen matched figures sit alongside two hundred forty unmatched ones, in which the two columns of the cast carry different patterns, and the working material of the tradition is distributed across all two hundred fifty six.
The sixteen are singled out for three reasons, all structural. They are the components from which every other figure is named. They are what a student learns first and is drilled on. And they are ordered by seniority, which gives the whole set an arrangement.
None of those reasons is that the sixteen carry more content than the rest, and a reader should not infer it. The unmatched figures are as fully part of the corpus as the matched ones, and in a consultation they are the more likely outcome, since two hundred forty of the two hundred fifty six possibilities have unlike columns.
Irete Meji is the fourteenth of the sixteen in the sequence as ordinarily published, and it appears as one half of a large number of the compound figures.
The atlas holds the sixteen because they can be described accurately as structure. The verses standing under Irete Meji, and the reading and prescription drawn from it in consultation, are conferred within initiated practice and are not reproduced here.