The provenance file on Ọbà
Catalogue entry — Ọbà. Every claim below carries its chain of custody.
Provenance
1. The attestation. Ọbà, from the tradition's own record. On record: William Bascom, African Folktales (1975) — the three-wives cycle, Wande Abimbola, Ifá: An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus (1976), Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit (1983), John Mason, Orin Orisa: Songs for Selected Heads (1992).
2. The preserved evidence. a → à (Grave: low tone) — absent from the ASCII form oba, present in the restoration, verifiable against the sources above.
3. The narrative record. Three Wives, One Storm — Ṣàngó, the thunder-king, took three river-wives: Ọba the senior, Ọṣun the beloved, and Ọya the storm-sharer. The cycle survives in the oríkì praise-poetry and the folktale corpus recorded by Yoruba specialists from the mid-twentieth century — Wande Abimbola's editions of Ifá verse, William Bascom's collections of tales — and in the diaspora the three wives became the standard cast of every household drama. The Ear in the Soup — The trap is the cycle's most famous scene, preserved in the folktale collections (Bascom, African Folktales) and endlessly retold in the diaspora. Ọṣun — in some tellings Ọya — let fall that the king loved, above all things, the taste of his beloved's ear in his soup.
4. The physical record. Her river rises in the hills of the Ọyọ country, and her cult-centers at Ọṣogbo and the Ọba lake preserve her shrines and her priests; the brass and terracotta figures of the covered-ear goddess are documented in museum collections from Ifẹ̀ to Havana. The oríkì of the three wives, recorded by Bascom and others, is among the finest domestic myth-cycles in the Yoruba corpus — an archive kept not in stone but in living recitation, which is precisely the kind of evidence this tradition chose to leave.
5. The current holding. The temple at /oba/, classified Tier 1. What survives here cannot be shown in ASCII: a feature of the original that the fallback alphabet flattens. That is the Tier-1 test, and this name passes it without argument.
6. The documented resonances. Faith & Spiritual Organizations, Freshwater & Hydrology, Travel, Tourism & Place Branding — seats argued and weighted in the pattern atlas, read through the myths in this temple's Resonance File.
7. The primary sources. Nigerian Studies — The Orisha Myths — the library this file answers to, open at the Sacred Texts collection.
8. The continuing record. Her image — the crowned figure hiding her ears — is one of Yoruba art's most intimate: the wound as regalia. The co-wives' cycle structures the orisha households of two continents; her river in Yorubaland keeps her shrines active; and the 'Obá' of Cuban Santería is beloved as the most patient of the female orisha — the one who teaches that endurance is also a form of power.
At a Glance
- Restored name: Ọbà
- ASCII form: oba
- Meaning: "The river orisha Ọba — co-wife of the thunder god, lady of the sacred waters"
- Domain of influence: River, Devotion, Sanctuary
- Pantheon: Yoruba
- Classification: Tier 1
- Original script: Ọbà
- Series: The Restoration Files, No. 349 of 546
The File Continues
Read the founding dispatch for the name's full story, the Resonance File for the archetype at work — or the whole archive in one sitting.
Continue the series — previous file: Nǚwā (read it here) · next file: Ọbàtálá (read it here).
The Restoration Files are written from the same canonical record as the temples themselves: the lexicon, the lore catalog, the pattern atlas, and the cited scholarly sources. If a file ever disagrees with its temple, the temple is right — tell us, and the file will be corrected.