No odù is spoken until Èṣù has been saluted. He is the messenger who carries offering between the human and the divine, the power at the crossroads and at the threshold, and the one who tests — the tradition does not treat him as evil, and does not treat him as safe either. Because he is the one who carries, nothing carried arrives without him, so the opening of a divination and the opening of any rite is his; and because he is the one who tests, a neglected Èṣù is read as the cause of confusion, mislaid intention and apparently senseless obstruction. The Ogbe corpus says as much in its own way when it names the feeding of Èṣù as what 'locks in' the ìre of the odù.