Yoruba narrative tradition credits Olodumare with exactly one direct, active scene, and the whole of Yoruba destiny theology depends on it: at the world's founding, each human being, still unborn, is said to have knelt before Olodumare and chosen the course their life would take, a moment tradition calls the choosing of ori, or destined head. In the same founding act, Olodumare is understood to have apportioned ase, the vital force or authority that makes any action effective at all, among the orisha themselves, giving each their particular capacity to act within their own domain rather than retaining all power directly in his own hands. Wande Abimbola's scholarly exposition of the Ifa literary corpus treats these two acts, the apportioning of ase and the witnessing of each person's chosen destiny, as the theological hinge the entire narrative tradition turns on: everything that follows, every orisha's myth and every human life, is a working-out of decisions made once, at a single moment, by a figure who then withdraws from the story he has set in motion. Orunmila's own defining role as witness of destiny depends entirely on having been present at this scene alongside Olodumare, which is why Yoruba tradition treats the two figures as inseparable even though only one of them, Orunmila, goes on to have an active narrative life of his own. Olodumare's single scene is therefore not a gap in the mythology but its structural origin point, the one moment every later story ultimately traces back to.