Oyekun Ogunda

Olofin sent for Orunmila to send him to Ife, a place where many people were dying, in search of a remedy.

Hardly had he left his house when a stranger stopped him and advised him to stay: he had heard very unfavorable remarks about him. Orunmila did not stop. When he reached the middle of the town, another man approached him with a similar warning: a trap had been prepared for him. Orunmila was not persuaded this time either. Once on the outskirts, a third man assured him that in Ife they were waiting to kill him. This time fear overcame him: he turned off toward the wilds and hid in an empty trunk, far from watching eyes.

Days passed. Orunmila knew that people were looking for him. A pregnant woman went up to the wilds every day to gather firewood to sell. She saw the hollow trunk and judged that it would be easy to cut it and carry off the wood. At the first blow of the axe, she heard a song; she stopped short, and when it repeated, she wondered who it could be. After the second blow she heard the singing again and concluded that it was Orunmila. She looked into the tree and found him. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “I am hiding, because I have been told they will kill me,” he answered. “Quite the opposite, sir: in the town everyone misses you and is sad.” She gave him the food she was carrying, begged him to wait, and ran to tell the king that she had found Orunmila.

The king promised her all the wealth she wanted, if what she said was true, but ordered her to bring him right away, and assigned her companions. She returned, picked up Orunmila and presented him to the king, who asked him why he had not answered Olofin's call. Orunmila was silent a moment and then asked that three animals be called first, since they were to blame for his absence: the goat, the rooster and the pigeon. He told that the goat had said they were waiting to cast Ogún on him; the rooster, that they were going to kill him; and the pigeon, that there was a trap. With those announcements he had been terrified and had hidden.

Olofin turned to the three deceivers and pronounced their sentence: from that day on they would be material for ebbó and for food. The goat would be for Oshún; the pigeon he would keep for himself. Orunmila kept the woman, the wealth and the servants.

A certain man worked as a stevedore in the market and also carried out errands for Orunmila. He had already received the hand of Ifá some time before when Obatalá found him carrying loads. It surprised him that someone with Ifá would do that, and he asked the man to tell Orunmila not to keep employing him as an errand boy or as a porter in the market.

The man went to see Orunmila and repeated Obatalá's words. Orunmila answered that he neither sent him to that work nor forced him, and that he should tell Obatalá so. When the man brought him the answer, he added that he preferred to work that way because he felt more useful. Obatalá pronounced: “Well, then you will be a porter forever.”

There was a town where an awó lived who had many enemies, also diviners. They had tried every kind of work against him, spiritual and material, without managing to defeat him, and no longer knew what else to try.

Then they invited him to a plante in order to give him poison. But the awó had consulted the osode beforehand, and his Ifá told him that ataré destroys any witchcraft given to an awó. So he put ataré in his pockets.

At the plante, those who had set the trap at once sent him to offer coconut to Osain, because the poison was there. The awó cut a small piece of obí to chew and added ataré meta to it. His enemies were stunned to see that he suffered no harm at all, and they admitted: “There is no dealing with this man.”

Since then the obí is blown to the four winds when Osain is made. And whoever has this sign should always carry ataré with him, to sprinkle on everything he eats in places that are not safe, where someone might try to poison him.