/1 The (Un)broken Cycle in Death and the King’s Horseman Eni t’o gbón Orí è l’o ní o gbón. He who is wise Is made wise by his Orí. Wole Soyinka cautions in the author’s note that the intercession in Death and the King’s Horseman is not simply a clash of cultures or an indictment against colonial incursions. Instead, he states, the story needs explication through the nuances of Yoruba culture. The paramount focus in this authorial/authoritarian stance is the complex interaction between the metaphysical realm and human action. Soyinka, seemingly, forces our attention to the metaphysical, yet given the inextricable linkages between Yoruba culture and cosmology, the note is a guide to the complementary engagement between ritual and drama. More so, we must grasp Soyinka’s understanding and explication of Yoruba culture, in contrast to its lived praxis, whereby ritual takes the form of drama, (re)presented on the written page and (re)staged in theatric form. In this paper, I offer another theory, one that differs from Soyinka’s, from within this lived ontological corpus to interpret Death and the King’s Horseman. It argues that Elesin is a catalyst, an agent of divine reordering, who allows the Yoruba belief system to transcend oppositional contact and social change. Crucial to this argument is discerning Soyinka’s creative interpretation of Yoruba cosmology, and for this, we must also factor in the colonial issue. In an obvious rebuttal to Soyinka’s assertions Kwame Appiah finds this defocusing of the colonial factor to be “disingenuous” (163). He argues that the colonial state gives rise to a dimension of power that cannot be overlooked or denied because of its profound influence on the African intellectual and, in the case of Soyinka, his literary output. Appiah reads within Soyinka’s disclaimer a barely hidden