Obatala's drunkenness is preserved by the tradition rather than suppressed, and it is told by his own priests. He moulds human bodies from clay before Olodumare animates them, and on occasions when he had been drinking palm wine the work came out otherwise — producing people with albinism, dwarfism, curvature of the spine, missing limbs, blindness. The theological conclusion drawn is not that these are defects but that such people are eni orisa, the orisha's own, under his direct protection, and that mocking or mistreating one is an offence against Obatala himself. The behavioural consequence for his devotees is total abstention from palm wine and, more broadly, the cultivation of coolness and restraint. That a tradition would account for disability by admitting that its senior creator-figure was drunk, and then derive from that admission a strong protective obligation, is a distinctive piece of religious reasoning and it is not softened in the telling.