Olojo is built around an absence and then an appearance. For several days before the festival the Ooni of Ife is not seen. He withdraws, keeps a fast and, in the palace account, communes with the ancestors and prays for the town. While he is out of sight the women of his paternal and maternal houses sweep the palace, a clearing rite that removes what should not be carried into the day. Then he comes out wearing the Are crown.
The Are is the point of the festival. Ife tradition holds it to be the crown of Oduduwa, the first king and the ancestor from whom the crowned Yoruba lineages descend, and it is worn on this day and by custom on very few others. It is old, it is heavy, and the accounts of it are surrounded by prohibitions the palace does not discuss in detail. What follows is a procession: the Ooni, the chiefs and the priests walk from the palace to the Okemogun shrine, where the rites for Ogun are performed.
Ogun is the reason the day belongs where it does. He is the orisha of iron, of the forge, of the road and of the sudden clearing of obstacles, and Ife tradition counts him among the sons of Oduduwa. A festival that puts a king in an ancestral crown and walks him to Ogun's shrine is saying something specific about where authority comes from and what it is made of. Kingship and cult are not two things being combined here. On Olojo they are one sequence.