Every reigning Yoruba oba's legitimacy runs back to Oduduwa at Ile-Ife, and nowhere is that claim performed more visibly than at Olojo, the annual festival of the first dawn. For several days beforehand the Ooni of Ife, Oduduwa's senior living descendant, withdraws from public view, and the women of his paternal and maternal houses sweep the palace clean before he reappears. He then comes out wearing the Are, a crown that Ife tradition holds to be Oduduwa's own, and leads chiefs and priests in procession to the Okemogun shrine, re-enacting a founding that the festival treats as still current rather than as a closed historical event.
The crown itself carries the same claim in miniature. The beaded royal crown, the ade, worn more generally by an installed oba is believed to carry the ase, the vital force, of the royal ancestors and of Oduduwa specifically, and its beaded veil is understood in Yoruba thought to mark the transformation of an ordinary man into a sacred office continuous with that founding figure rather than a costume he merely wears. Robert Farris Thompson's study of Yoruba art situates that veiling as central to how the crown functions: it is the office, carrying Oduduwa's ase, that is sacred, not the individual holding the title on a given day.