Odu & Divination Signs

Irete Meji

Ifa Odu

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Irete Meji." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://divinity.interactivelion.com/odu-divination-signs/irete-meji.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Irete Meji. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://divinity.interactivelion.com/odu-divination-signs/irete-meji

BibTeX

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

Irete Meji is the fourteenth 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. Irete Meji's own figure is drawn as two identical columns of four marks, reading top to bottom as single, single, double, single, 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 Otura Meji at position thirteen and Ose Meji at position fifteen 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, Irete 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, double, single (I-I-II-I); 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

14 of 16 principal odu (Odu Meji) 1

Learn More

The Sixteen and the Two Hundred Forty

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.

What the Record Does Not Hold

It is as useful to say what the published record lacks as to say what it contains, and for this type it is more useful.

The scholarship holds the structure in detail: the notation, the instruments, the count, the sequences, the institution of the diviner and much of the verse itself in transcription and translation. What it does not hold, and what no book could hold, is the working practice. Which of many possible verses a diviner selects for the person in front of them, on what grounds, and what follows from the selection, is not written down anywhere because it is not the kind of thing that can be. It is judgement, acquired over years and exercised in a relationship.

There is a second and blunter absence. Much of the interpretive material is simply not published on purpose, withheld by practitioners including those who are also scholars, because it is conferred through initiation rather than circulated. That is a decision by the people whose tradition it is.

The atlas describes Irete Meji as one of the sixteen principal figures, records that a body of verse stands under it, and names the scholarship that has documented the system. It does not fill either absence, because the first cannot be filled by writing and the second should not be.

Cross-Tradition Connections