Oyekun Meyi: death cannot be defeated — it is negotiated

Oyekun Meyi — Ọ̀yẹ̀kú Méjì in Yoruba spelling — is the second of the sixteen Meyis and, according to its own entry in the Tratado, the oldest of all the signs: said to have been born before the others, a survivor of the disaster of a previous civilisation. It is a female Odu, daughter of two women — Oyantaro and Omiloshe — and its oriki sums up the human condition in a handful of words: Oyekun Yeku Mayeke, "we are made of life and death" (p. 366).

The entry opens with an extraordinary statement: it was Oyekun Meyi who revealed how Orunmila taught humankind to protect itself from premature death (p. 349). Because in the beginning, Death was the only divinity who rejoiced at the creation of man. To her, the new creature was neither servant nor child: it was food.

This study retells three patakís from the Baba Oyekun entry (pp. 348–556): the secret that drove Death away from the human body, the gourd left at the door that made Ikú forget a vendetta, and the son who refused to pay his father's funeral honours — and learned the price of forgetting. Along the way, the sign's proverbs and the question that runs through everything: if death cannot be defeated, what is to be done with it?