Odu & Divination Signs

Owonrin Meji

Ifa Odu

Citation Formats

General Reference

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

APA Style

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

BibTeX

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

Owonrin Meji is the sixth 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. Owonrin Meji's own figure is drawn as two identical columns of four marks, reading top to bottom as double, double, single, single, 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 Irosun Meji at position five and Obara Meji at position seven 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, Owonrin 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, double, single, single (II-II-I-I); 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

6 of 16 principal odu (Odu Meji) 1

Learn More

The Tray, the Powder and the Marks

When the palm nuts are used rather than the chain, the figure is not simply read off an object; it is written. The diviner works over the opon Ifa, a carved wooden tray, dusted with a fine powder called iyerosun. Each pass of the nuts determines whether one mark or two are drawn in the powder, and eight passes build the full figure of two columns of four. The tray is the writing surface, the powder is the medium, and the figure exists on it until it is wiped away.

That detail is more than incidental craft. It is why Ifa figures can be described as a notation at all, and why a corpus of two hundred fifty six named signs could be held, taught and cross-referenced by a tradition that committed nothing to paper. The tray is the page.

Owonrin Meji is the sixth of the sixteen principal figures in the sequence as ordinarily published, one of the sixteen in which both columns of the figure carry the same pattern.

Carved trays are among the most studied objects in Yoruba art history, which means the apparatus of Ifa is comparatively well documented in museums and catalogues even where the divinatory content is not. The two should not be confused: a well described tray tells you about carving and about ritual furniture, not about what a diviner says.

The verses of Owonrin Meji and their use in consultation are held within initiated practice and are not reproduced here.

Learning by Apprenticeship

The Ifa corpus is transmitted by apprenticeship, over years, from a senior diviner to a student who commits material to memory and is examined on it in practice rather than on paper. That is the mechanism by which two hundred fifty six figures and the verse standing under them have survived without a book.

Two features of that mechanism bear directly on how the atlas treats this type. The first is that learning and authorisation are the same process: a student does not first acquire the corpus and then separately gain the right to use it. Competence and standing are conferred together, through initiation. The second is that a great deal of what is learned is not verse at all. It is judgement, about which of many possible verses fits the person consulting, and about what should follow.

Neither of those transfers to a printed page, which is why publishing verse would not put a reader in possession of the practice even if it were appropriate to do so. It would put them in possession of the most quotable fragment of it.

Owonrin Meji is documented in the standard scholarship, chiefly Bascom in 1969 and Abimbola in 1976, as one of the sixteen principal figures, and the atlas is confident in that structural statement. Its interpretive content is conferred by initiated practitioners and is not reproduced here.

Cross-Tradition Connections