splashing over the boulders that kneel and thrust their stone breasts into the

onrushing sacredness. Another incident, however, kept him from searching

for the river. A mighty horned antelope with bronze earings and necklace, an
agbnrere out of the mythic past, appeared and stared for a hypnotizing
instant into his eyes. He was a child of Osun, stemming from her nearest
entourage. The animal fled, and he pursued it impetuously, forgetting about
everything elsea hunter possessed by the chase.
There where Ojubo Osogbo is now the most powerful aspect of Osun river
worship, the antelope disapeared - transdimentionaly - into a mighty tree.
Duped of the kill, Timoyin set the tree on fire, which he kindled by means of
the appropriate magic formula. Bursting into flames, the holy giant plunged
with a thunderous thud into the river's dark and deepest pond. It fell precisely
into that still waterhole that is the 'idi aro', the indigo dye place of the
goddess Osun. She emerged furiously calling along the reverberantly
echoing river valley: Who was it that had disturbed her peace in so unheardof a manner, had thrown fire into her sacred coolness - an unpardonable
offense - and had smashed her dye pots? From all the other forty-two water
holes, which are sacred and have ritual particularity, her junior wives, her
iyawo, emerged, all of them being dimensions of the goddess's multifarious
sacredness. They all declared their sympathy, crying out, "Osun Osogbo,
pelee oo! This shout is still today the devotee's call as they enter the sacred
premises.
When Osun after all this had seen the imposing manliness of the hunter, she
cooled down and changed her feelings. There came a heartfelt reconciliation.
Timoyin stood for some time with her, reconnoitering the situation. Later he
left Osun soas to take to Ipole her promise to confer her good will on the
foundation of a city. The precondition was that it should not be on the
riverbank, but that it should be erected where the sacred elephant-calf was
worshiped by Timoyin. In Ipole then it was decided that Owate should

Talvez seja de ajuda na compreenso do conceito de Orix se aplicarmos o

preceito do Budismo Mahayana que nada no universo isolado - nenhum
fato, nenhum ser, nenhum evento. Por isso impossivel tentar capturar a
natureza do ideal de alguem (do Orix de algum) de modo isolado sem que
ocorra uma distoro do mesmo.
(181)
It may help the understanding of orisa if we apply to it the precept of
Mahayana Buddhism which states that nothing in the universe stands by

itself no fact, no being, no event. For that reason it is impossible to try to

grasp the nature of one's ideal (one's orisa) in isolation without distorting it.
One may even lose one's former grasp of it because it loses its own truth
outside the complex intertwined reality of the whole. To assist the
understanding of myths which relate to events within time (which correspond
to one psychic dimension) when an orisa acted, experienced, suffered, failed,
despaired in and vanished from the world (which does not contradict his

(84)
"Each orisa represents one humanly realizable situation on earth. Orisa fits
perfectly into one specific type of subconscious-conscious mindform. "

(84)
Every birth is a link in the transcendental force-chain by which orisa (as a
complexity), beyond time and space, 'descends from Heaven so as to create
the world' (one individual aspect of the universe that we all are).

(158)
"As Ogun killed his own children, so war kills the warriors, who are war's
kinsfolk. In his myth, Ogun is the immortal hero struck down by his own
impetuous self, by his primal Ego, the essence of

" A Hunter's Burial Epa, the death rite of an Ogun devotee, is a grand
ceremony. An gal or other big antelope is killed in a batue and carried
home on a bier, buried in fresh greenery. Borne on the head of a strong young
hunter, lying in its cool death-bed, the antelope personifies the dead hunter,
who there dances the last dance of this lifespan's completed phase, spinning
into the mandala of rebirth and eternal returns. Epa's emanating energies are
magnified by the sacred medicines, which load, rather than adorn, the men,
hanging in little lumps and parcels all over their short, broad garments.
Medicines also fill the magic arteries which are their girdles and armbands

(both called ond), on the throats of the mightiest hunters palpitate gbn,
pendants edged with lion's teeth. Cataracts of k`onn`o`ng and gdgd
drumming splash together over the whirling, collective body of gn-in-man.
Rain can be diverted from falling on an Epa procession by a finger, licked and
pointed at the cloud. The dead hunter is buried "