Ọ̀bàrà Meji (Obara)

The verse recorded for Ọ̀bàrà in the Diaspora corpus is the pumpkin story, and it carries no offering list of its own: the odù's prescription is character rather than materials. Other houses attach ẹbọ for the tongue — that the person's speech not become the instrument of their own loss — and offerings to Ṣàngó, who is Ọ̀bàrà's orìṣà in the Cuban reading. The commentary's warning is that wealth arriving this way invites envy, so the offering is for protection from àràyé.

Ọ̀bàrà is the odù of the tongue, of eloquence, and of wealth that arrives out of something worthless. The verse the tradition tells is the one in which Ọ̀bàrà's companions push their pumpkins onto him and he finds that the king had hidden money and treasure inside them — so the odù is read as sudden fortune from a source nobody valued, and as the reward of the person who does not refuse what is given. It also makes the person a talker, which is both the odù's gift and its danger: the same tongue that wins the case can lose the friends, and the tradition's counsel is to use it to defend rather than to wound.

1 = single line (I); 2 = double line (II). Eight marks: the first four are the right-hand leg, the last four the left-hand leg, each read top to bottom. In the 0/1 notation used in the scholarly literature, 1 here = 0 there and 2 here = 1 there.