Yoruba narrative tradition tells the story of Babalu-Aye's exile as a fall brought on by his own reaction to public humiliation. In the fullest tellings, Babalu-Aye, already old and lame, attended a great gathering held at Obatala's own palace, where all the orisha came together. When he tried to join the dancing, he stumbled and fell, and the other orisha, seeing him fail where they succeeded easily, laughed at him openly. Wounded by the mockery, Babalu-Aye turned the affliction that was already his own domain against the very company that had shamed him, threatening to loose disease among them rather than accept the humiliation quietly. Obatala, presiding over the gathering, intervened directly, restraining Babalu-Aye and driving him out of the company of the orisha into the bush, where storytellers say he has lived as an outcast ever since, at a remove from the settled world he can nonetheless still afflict or spare at will. The scars the disease left across his body are the reason given for the straw covering that has become his most recognisable emblem, concealing wounds too disfiguring to leave uncovered rather than serving any ceremonial purpose. Some tellings extend the exile further, carrying him west among the neighbouring Fon peoples before his worship returned into Yoruba territory, a detail some scholars read as a memory of the cult having genuinely crossed between the two peoples rather than as embellishment. Either way, the story gives a single cause for both halves of Babalu-Aye's character that devotees still hold together: an orisha shamed into becoming feared, whose power to punish and power to heal are shown, in the myth's own terms, to be one and the same capacity turned in different directions.