One widely told account of how the vast oral literature associated with Orunmila came into being places him at Ile-Ife, living near a particular palm tree bearing sixteen distinctive nuts, and tells that when the time came for him to withdraw from the earth, his children, unwilling to lose access to his wisdom entirely, came to him grieving. Rather than remain, the tradition holds, Orunmila gave them seeds from that same palm tree as a means of continued contact, and from that gift grew the enormous body of oral verse, proverb, and narrative precedent that Yoruba tradition calls the odu, the corpus this atlas records elsewhere as a literary work in its own right. Wande Abimbola's translations, including his study of sixteen of its major poems, present this material as literature of real scope and sophistication rather than as a narrow technical appendix to any single practice, covering history, ethics, cosmology, and the full range of Yoruba narrative tradition alongside material specific to Orunmila's own cult. William Bascom's independent ethnographic study of the same tradition, recorded from Yoruba practitioners across the twentieth century, corroborates the corpus's scale and its function as a repository of accumulated precedent, story, and communal memory. Read this way, Orunmila's departure from the earth is narrated less as an ending than as a transfer: the witness of every chosen destiny leaves behind not silence but the largest single body of narrative literature attributed to any figure in the Yoruba tradition, still recited, elaborated, and drawn on today.