Epistemic Roots, Universal Routes and Ontological Roofs of African Ritual Archives: Disciplinary Formations in African Thought 3
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Epistemic Roots, Universal Routes and Ontological Roofs
of
African Ritual Archives
Disciplinary Formations in African Thought
Engaging the Toyin Falola Reader
Abstract
An exploration of the significance of developing
Falola’s Image Theory and Praxis : Image as Archive, Image as Initiator
Assuming one wishes to take further an examination of Ifa or any other ritual archive on its own terms, engaging with its own epistemic grounds and their varied expressions. How may one go about it?
Falola dramatizes a form of image contemplation suggesting how one may immerse oneself in the various dimensions of meaning of a ritual archive. He does this through a rich exploration of possibilities of response to a figure of the Yoruba Orisa cosmology deity, Eshu, thereby developing inspiring passages on the power of images, with particular reference to African ritual archives, building a conceptually rich, analytically incisive and deeply evocative description of the convergence of image making and sacred aspiration in classical African culture, and incidentally, across cultures, within and beyond Africa. He thereby brings alive this classical African culture as a continuity into the present from the past in the lives of those who identify with it, in the process demonstrating how an image from Yoruba culture through which he exemplifies his image theory can provoke an engagement with the web created by the intersection of Yoruba epistemology and metaphysics. Toyin Falola's image theory and praxis thereby suggests how styles of engagement with the Orisa tradition, Ifa and classical African spiritual systems may be reworked.
To the best of my knowledge, classical African spiritual systems are generally understood as practiced through concrete structures involving natural forms and human made objects. This is exemplified by Phylis Galembo's remarkable pictures of shrines and their priests and priestesses in Benin-City, by articles like Margaret Thompson Drewals "An Ifa Diviner's Shrine in Ijebuland" and particularly powerfully, I expect, by Robert Farris Thompson's Faces of the Gods.
Wole Soyinka at the Intersection of Physical and Contemplative Ritual
A striking evocation of the dynamics of materially centred engagement with sacred practices in such contexts is provided by an arresting passage in A Season of Anomy, a novel by Wole Soyinka, a master of ritual, classical African and self-created, an aspect of his work that lends itself to adaptation to actual ritual practice, as I point out in “Wole Soyinka's Art as a Psychological, Spiritual and Philosophical Resource” and “Contemplation as a Means of Creativity and Empowerment in the Work of Wole Soyinka : Void Meditation : Theory and Method”:
In the hours before dawn the song-leaders from the dead Custodian’s household followed Ahime through the sleeping town, swift dark-brushing motions of maroon loin-cloths. All paths must be trodden in the pre-dawn hours, heads bent to the ground, acknowledging no one and seeing none. A low moan rose, thrilled in the slumbersome air, the earth gave answer in trembling accents, a lead voice prompted the sleep-washed dirge of earth and a sudden motion of feet would thud in velvety unison.
The dark figures swayed backwards, leant into the yielding night-membrane, uncoiled in a python lunge upwelling into a dark toned monody. Then they leapt forward again along the path, sending soft vibrations along the path.
Blood, oil, colanuts, slain pigeons at every spot where a founder had
fallen, sacrificed or finally rested, at every meaning left behind by the first
progenitors. The departed were appeased, venerated, welcomed, touched and
brought among the living. The new deceased was on his way.
In Myth, Literature and the African World, a related ritual is dramatized in similar poetic terms by Soyinka:
In cult funerals, the circle of initiate mourners, an ageless, swaying grove of dark pines, raises a chant around a mortar of fire, and words are taken back to their roots, to their original poetic sources when fusion was total and the movement of words was the very passage of music and the dance of images.
…
The senses do not at such moments interpret myth in their particular concretions; we are left only with the emotional and spiritual values, the essential experience of cosmic reality.
Soyinka succeeds wonderfully in developing rituals which can be used in a purely contemplative or a dramatized form, as in the ritual at the centre of Death and the King's Horseman, which may be approached as a powerful African version of the famous Tibetan Book of the Dead, described as a means of guiding people leaving the world in death to crossing the borders between earthly existence and the mysterious zones into which they are moving in this fundamental transition.
It is also comparative with the Egyptian Book of the Dead, known to me in an inspiring version titled The Book of Coming Forth by Day, death and its management being central to ancient Egyptian spirituality and architecture. It is also correlative with the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross on death and dying in her book of that title, as a process that needs to be theorised and mapped and the participants in the process guided through it.
Tibetan Buddhism adapts this complex of ideas in the Chod ritual, in which the aspirant imagines themselves in a state similar to that of death, progressively divesting themselves of the material constituents that define themselves, in order to identify with the fecund emptiness that enables existence, its voidness an expression of its transcendence of all human perceptual capacity.
The contemplative method and thematic orientation of the Chod ritual is also correlative with another contemplation of emptiness from a different context, Soyinka's meditation on the nothingness before existence in his "Credo of Being and Nothingness". That Soyinka meditation is itself resonant with his reflections on emptiness in his prison memoir The Man Died, in terms of the infinite possibilities evoked by the inspiring emptiness of a blank sheet of paper, a luxury stirring almost metaphysical appreciation from a profound and prolific writer starved of writing material while in jail, an enforced seclusion often reinforced by his being isolated from human company in solitary confinement.
Howard Philips Lovecraft and John Milton
I wonder to what degree this aspect of Soyinka's work is appreciated and to what degree it is used in actual contemplative or dramatic ritual practice. Adaptations of imaginative literature to serious spiritual and philosophical activity emerge in various contexts, framed by the fact that much religious and philosophical expression is imaginative. A particularly striking example of such transitions is the religious adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft’s Chthulhu mythos inspired by the complex of qualities that animate his unprecedentedly unique oeuvre in which the imaginative exuberance of his characterisations and plots is brought alive by uniquely magnificent language. His universe of wonderfully characterised otherworldly entities within a gradually unfolding but never fully illuminated cosmological matrix thus contributing to its enthralling mystery, dramatizes a compelling evocation of the numinous, the tension between a compelling otherness and its distancing alienness, thus evoking the paradoxical conjunction between the human being’s breadth of cognitive aspiration and the scope of human perceptual possibility.
These qualities make his work fertile for counter cultural forms of mysticism, the most uncompromising of this being a form of demonic mysticism, as in the occult groups Dragon Rouge and other enthusiasts inspired by Lovecraft's unique actualisation of the impulse represented by the older example of John Milton's majestic evocations of the landscape, denizens and psychology of Hell in Paradise Lost. Milton’s projection of the glorification of the infernal, however, may be better appreciated through contrast with the Hell of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, the most impactful evocation of Hell in Western literature, but purely a place of torment and regret within marvellously imagined horrors undergone by the dammed.
The Miltonic Hell and the dreadful cosmos of Lovecraft’s corrosively powerful entities, however, constitute some of the world’s greatest evocations of the cosmic awe that inspires and is projected by religious consciousness. Milton’s and Lovecraft’s creations belong to a guild of creations of masterpieces of the terrible which include Melkor, Saurun and the landscape of Mordor in The Lord of the Rings and the Silmarilon by Milton's 20th century successor J.R.R. Tolkien as well as the Dark Lord, his acolytes and the terrible worlds they inhabit within the conventional human world, the work of Tolkien’s successor J. K. Rowling in her Harry Potter books. These later works resonate with Lovecraft's incomparable landscapes of metaphysical and celestial otherness intersecting with the human mind, constituting a matrix evocative of Immanuel Kant's juxtaposition, in his Critique of Practical Reason, of human finitude with celestial immensity in space and time in the context of the human aspiration to infinity.
Toyin Falola’s Exploration of the Contemplative Potential of Classical African Sacred Art
Soyinka demonstrates the possibility of developing novel, individualistic contemplative and physical ritual from classical African cultures. He does this through his wonderful dramatizations of Yoruba spirituality and his own development of contemplative and ritual strategies distilling both this native orientation and his immersion in a global variety of cultures, from Christianity to Tibetan Buddhism to Hinduism, thus contributing to the growing globalisation of Yoruba and African spiritualties, taking them beyond their traditional geographical contexts and their conventional modes of practice.
Toyin Falola, inspired by the general matrix represented by the continuity between classical and post-classical Yoruba culture, takes this initiative further through a foundational statement of an image theory derived from African art and dramatizes how this theory may be engaged with through contemplation of African sacred forms.
He argues for an approach to African religious images as archives of cognitive possibility, as encodements of ideational and cognitive expansion, as stimulators of theory, ideational networks illuminating the nature of the universe or aspects of it, bodies of ideas capable of flight from within their originating cultural contexts to illuminate other social and cognitive spaces, expansive possibilities of knowing that may be unlocked through the contemplative gaze.
This idea is not new, being the foundation of the contemplation of religious images in such systems as the use of yantras in Hinduism and mandalas in Buddhism, systems that are paradigmatic for the religious deployment of images in the scope and detail of their methods of image navigation as means of mentally mapping entire cosmologies. Image scholars such as Caroline van Eck in Art, Agency and Living Presence : From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object, operate in relation to such considerations in examining what she describes as the power of artistic forms in terms that suggest a form of autonomy of the work of art in its effect on the human mind or an equality of agency between the mind and the work of art. These conceptions of agency of artistic forms suggest ideas of animism central to religious images understood in some devotional contexts as forms of deity, as with yantra theory or as capable of being infused by spirit as in yantra theory and forms of Western magical theory represented by the work of Dion Fortune and in classical African thought.
In my exposure to African art, however, I am not aware of the contemplative use of religious images as a prominent practice. The traditional focus is on material images as part of a physical shrine complex in which offerings are made. In contrast to this purely physical approach to ritual is the Hindu practice, exemplified by the Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram, in which purely physical rituals, the combination of physical ritual and contemplation as well as the exclusive use of contemplation may be employed. The Khadgamala involves the navigation of the cosmos through verbal symbols projecting rich visualisations of anthropomorphic and abstract forms, to which mental rather than physical offerings are made. Thus, the movement from physical to mental ritual described by Surrendranath Dasgupta as central in the development of abstract thought in India in his History of Indian Philosophy Vol. 1 plays itself out in such rituals as the Khadgamala.
Falola's development and dramatization of a theory of religious images in “Ritual Archives” bring such strategies within the purview of classical African art and thought. He does this, however, in a manner that frees the contemplative exercise from the carefully scripted religious contexts of a ritual like the Khadgamala. This is achieved by reworking the religious element in a creatively dynamic manner through free association. The sacred sculptural form is shown as stimulating and inspiring the contemplative’s knowledge of and identification with the specific values associated with the form in a particular cosmology but through the unscripted emergence of ideas within the mind under the impetus of contemplating the artistic form. The intelligence of the contemplative thus drinks from the theological context of the work of art without being circumscribed by the religious conceptions with which the artistic work is traditionally associated. This freewheeling approach inspires intimacy of identification with the specific ideas associated with a particular artistic form complemented by the freedom to go beyond those ideas.
Falola pursues this blend of conventional contemplative strategy and personalised contemplative engagement through a form of what is known in Buddhism as deity yoga and in the Western magical tradition as described in Israel Regardie’s The Tree of Life : A Study in Magic, as the assumption of god form, in which a devotee imaginatively identifies themself with a deity in order to share in the qualities of that entity. Falola evokes the values associated with the Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology orisa or deity Esu through contemplating a sculpture of the deity. This sculpture being anthropomorphic, Falola’s meditation demonstrates how the image may inspire identification with a human being through conjunctions between the values associated with the humanisation of the deity and the human figure.
These values demonstrate Yoruba philosophy as ascribing various perceptual significance to different organs of the body within the context of a holistic assessment of the totality of the self as a unified physical and non-physical entity. The non-physical, in this context, includes and extends beyond the mind as an aspect of the mortal self-conditioned by biology and terrestrial experience to include at the core of the self, an immortal centre embodying the totality of the individual’s possibilities. Dialogue with that ultimate centre is the primary goal of Ifa divination and thus the nexus of Ifa’s verbal, visual, spiritual and philosophical complex, as described by such scholars of Ifa as Wande Abimbola in Ifa Divination Poetry and An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus, an understanding reinforced for me by a conversation with babalawo Joseph Ohomina and central to Adegboyeya Orangun’s investigations of relationships between fate and free will in Yoruba thought through interviews with various bababalawo in Destiny: The Unmanifested Being.
In the succeeding paragraphs, I juxtapose a few of the Falola quotes with quotations from writers in other cultural contexts which his passages take my mind to, thereby suggesting the international and intercultural sonorities of his thought. A key reference I make is to Hindu yantra theory, geometric forms I also discuss in relation to Yoruba Orisa cosmology, using a rich collection of images from Orisa thought and its Ifa iconography, from Benin Olokun iconography and Hindu yantras, in “Esu to the Mahavidyas: Integrating Contraries through Ideas and Art from Orisa to Tantric Cosmology”.
The quotes are rearranged by me in a manner which might be different from the order generated by the writer, a strategy I find useful in distilling the most inspiring ideas in a text in the way I understand them. I also try to present both literal and fuller interpretations of terms Falola does not translate as well as those he translates among those Yoruba expressions he mobilises in exemplifying his conceptions on the power of images.
The contemplative process Falola demonstrates in “Ritual Archives” is grounded in his assertion that in classical African thought, “spirituality and materiality are united”. Within this unity, “Objects encode the characters of the being they represent” enabling “Ritual objects [to] supply ideas on prayers and philosophy[ building] texts on the environment [opening into] multiple worlds of charms, magic, and medicine [opening] a wide door to a large body of mythologies, stories, legends, and many sayings, short and long”.
A consummate example of this in another context is the Sri Yantra, a circle containing other circles in alignment with a structure of triangles, understood to be the mathematical form of the cosmos as the manifestation of the Goddess Tripurasundari in her geometric form, complementing her material, anthropomorphic and sonic embodiments, that geometric structure being a visual landscape through which the metaphysical and material unity of the cosmos is navigated in the Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram ritual of which the richest English version known to me is that produced by the Shakti Saddhana group.
Yantra theory in the Srividya school centred in Tripura is elaborated, among other sources, by Renfrew Brooks’ Texts and Traditions of Hindu Sakta Tantrism in South India and The Goddess Within the Three Cities, with Maddhu Khanna’s Yantra : The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity providing the best overview known to me of yantra theory in English.
Through this plethora of possibilities “Multiple specializations can emerge around image theory, image critical methodologies, image anthropology, image and culture, image philosophy, perceptions and seeing, listening, silences, and image styling”.
Thus:
Falola declares:
Images represent mentalities, power, and strength.
Gates and Faux concur,
Falola continues:
[Some] objects actually fit into the description of an archive as a place to keep historical records, although the collection of such objects may defy categorization.
Like archives, some objects are permanent records. So also are sacred groves that provide data on the past of an enduring nature. This data touches upon culture, history, and sociology.
The location of an archive may be characterized as an archive itself: the grove of a ritual tree is such a place, where the tree and its location constitute a library.
Documents in an archive are treated as primary sources. So also should many ritual objects be treated as such as they communicate messages that can be used to reconstruct the past and understand various ideas about the world.
He continues:
Images can be used to generate image theories and create extensive narratives on cultures, trans-cultures, and inter-cultures. They supply critical issues on hybridity. To carve an object is about the representation of self, history, identity, and much more.
Images are philosophical expressions, connected with thought and life. Located in museums, we tend to see and appreciate them, not necessarily engage in dialogue with them.
Scholarship on art and agency, however, as represented by van Eck, for example, on the range of ways people relate to art in Western history, at times as if they are dealing with living beings, complexifies the meaning of “dialogue” with art. The breadth of discourse on the museum even in the secularity of Western culture, such as Carol Duncan’s consideration of the relationship between museums and human consciousness in “The Art Museum as Ritual” in Donald Preziosi’s The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology , complexifies the scope of “appreciate”, in relation to museum art, arguing for the museum as enabling a sense of sacred elevation, making it, incidentally, a ritual archive in the sense of Falola’s use of the term. Her referencing of Germain Bazin, curator of the Louvre, Paris, one of the world’s great cultural treasures, from his The Museum Age, is particularly telling:
[Bazin] wrote that an art museum is “a temple where Time seems suspended”; the visitor enters it in the hope of finding one of “those momentary cultural epiphanies” that give him “the illusion of knowing intuitively his essence and his strengths”.
Duncan sums up various correlative references in noting that “others…have described art museums as sites which enable individuals to…move beyond the psychic constraints of mundane existence, step out of time, and attain new, larger perspectives”.
Falola’s frame of thought from where he moves to generating his own approach to the subject, therefore, is closer to that of Susanne Wenger, operating within the religious context of the Yoruba culture that is Falola’s closest inspiration in African culture. Falola’s opening conception and Wenger’s summation in her review of Harold Courlander’s Tales of Yoruba Gods and Heroes in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring, 1976), pp. 74-76, focus their sensitivity to the sacrality of art within the conventional religious contexts in which it is demonstrated. Wenger’s summation is richly evocative in contrasting Western museum collections of sacred art from other cultures with the originating contexts from which that art has been displaced:
The Western mind-dreary, apprehensive and exhausted by the chaotic intellectual stock exchange-inclines to retire from this apocalyptic carnival of values into the "simple and hearty" (as some think) world of fable, legend and myth. Resenting tenseness and sterility of monetary ways of life and linear thought, Western man carries his hunger into libraries and galleries, in whose glassy showcases are laid out the exploits of civilizations. Here linger dethroned, humiliated, effaced gods and their now stale insignia of sacred force and transcendent status. Anthropomorphized vessels of God's own glory and gloom, they are heaven's own tormented and disowned sons and daughters, attesting to man's likeness to his creator.
Wenger’s summation is itself correlative with a strand of thought from Western observers of the growth of Western museums like the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London through the acquisitions of artefacts plundered through conquest in foreign, often non-Western cultures. Duncan presents this perspective in a compelling manner that resonates strongly with Wenger’s stand. Referencing Elizabeth Gilmore Holt’s The Triumph of Art for the Public, she describes the18th century German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as deeply enthused by the development of what was then the novelty represented by the culture of the museum but was also appalled at the strategy of building museum collections through plunder, represented by the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s
systematic gathering of art treasures from other countries and their display in the Louvre as trophies of conquest. Goethe saw that the creation of this huge museum collection depended on the destruction of something else, and that it forcibly altered the conditions under which, until then, art had been made and understood. Along with others, he realized that the very capacity of the museum to frame objects as art and claim for them a new kind of ritual attention could entail the negation or obscuring of other, older meanings.
In contrast to the attenuation of value Wenger saw in the museum culture’s divorcing of sacred art from its organic context, Wenger, with her Yoruba collaborators, in what became known as New Sacred Art, created shrines in the sacred Osun forest in Nigeria’s Yorubaland, which, as she depicts these creations in A Life with the Gods in their Yoruba Homeland:
lie open without declaring themselves…a bridge between gods and the human perceptive imagination, in order to create themselves anew in the image of anyone's own spiritual demands.
…
Wine ferments only in the barrel; so sacred force ripens, secluded in the heart of matter.[ Our shrines and sculptures are like ] winebarrels which seclude the god's identity so that it can once again ferment into some primal manifestation.
Falola moves on from this focus on explicit sacred space as the privileged site of sacred encounter which the starting point of his reflections shares with Wenger’s thought, to advocating sacred space as generated through the encounter between the religious image and the human mind. He thereby responds through his image theory and praxis to the epistemic disjointedness in terms of which classical African thought has been engaged with in the Western academy, a problematic reconfiguration of which the populating of Western museums with plundered African artefacts was part of this process of the recreation of African thought through a Western lens.
Falola does not advocate a wholesale return to classical African shrine culture but a new visually activated, mentalistic orientation in which the shrine emerges at the intersection of the human mind and sacred art, incidentally developing a reflective practice active in Hindu, Buddhist and Western esoteric image epistemology and their metaphysical roots, belief systems and their associated practices marginalised within the global dominance of central orientations in Western culture.
He describes the process through which this conjunction between concrete religious form and its mental transposition takes place:
[ Art, particularly the sacred art constituting ritual archives, generates an] epistemology that leads to a series of long conversations on human behaviour and interpersonal relationships in society [ and possibly, as with the Sri Yantra, on the integration of self, society, the non-human terrestrial world and the cosmos].
An image moves you towards the spiritual and religious… there is an aesthetic idea living within it, allowing for texts on cultures, forms and styles.
He introduces the contemplative logic in terms of which this experience occurs:
While gazing without talking, you create the text, saying something, creating what Nietzsche calls an “army of metaphors”. [ A process that] generates a wide range of imaginations, and thought systems.
Falola’s summation on this evocative process may be better understood through comparison with Kant’s reflections on aesthetics in A Critique of the Power of Judgement as translated by James Creed Meredith :
[ By] an aesthetic idea I mean that representation of the imagination which induces much thought, yet without the possibility of any definite thought whatever, i.e., concept, being adequate to it, and which language, consequently, can never get quite on level terms with or render completely intelligible.
In a word, the aesthetic idea is a representation of the imagination, annexed to a given concept, with which, in the free employment of imagination, such a multiplicity of partial representations are bound up, that no expression indicating a definite concept can be found [ thus allowing] a concept to be supplemented in thought by much that is indefinable in words, and the feeling of which quickens the cognitive faculties .
Kant’s perception is itself enriched in comparison with Michael Faux and S. J. Gates’s observations in “Adinkras:A Graphical Technology for Supersymmetric Representation Theory” that “The use of symbols to connote ideas which defy simple verbalization is perhaps one of the oldest of human traditions” .
Illustrating how the stimulation of symbols work in enabling knowledge without exhausting their own evocative depths, an understanding related to Falola’s dramatization of the evocative force of an Esu figurine, Kant further elaborates:
[ Some images give ] the imagination an incentive to spread its flight over a whole host of kindred representations that provoke more thought than admits of expression in a concept determined by words. They furnish an aesthetic idea, which serves the above rational idea as a substitute for logical presentation, but with the proper function, however, of animating the mind by opening out for it a prospect into a field of kindred representations stretching beyond its ken.
Falola describes the contemplative process of engaging in imaginative dialogue with a work of art, referring specifically to a figurine of Èṣù:
What originally appears as a small
wooden object opens up a vastness of knowledge, its edges become borderless,
its existence acquires a force.
He depicts the details of contemplative engagement with the Esu figurine:
We are forced to move into the orbits of knowledge in which all component parts of the body become signifiers as ojú Èṣù becomes different from etí Èṣù, okó Èṣù, ògo Èṣù, and inú Èṣù [ ears of Èṣu, penis of Èṣù, forehead of Èṣù, the inwardness of Èṣù]. Each unit is semi-autonomous but aggregated to gbogbo ara Èṣù [ the totality of Èṣù’s being ] in another layer of meaning.
Add Èṣù pípè [ perhaps Èṣù as embodiment of totality, the owner of all spaces, interior and exterior] yet another meaning. Like your own orí [the head as analogue of the immortal essence of the self, embodying its ultimate possibilities] , that of Èṣù is also the zone of intelligence and emotions. All his calculations and miscalculations reside here. You can see orí Èṣù, with ògo Èṣù, as fronting multiple ideas.
Attributes, then, derive from ojú Èṣù, eti Èṣù, imú Èṣù [ eyes, ears and nose of Èṣù] , all connected with personal foibles and destiny. You must trigger your own wisdom and strength to deal with orí Èṣù, and as you do, your own orí begins to breakdown into a series of components as that of ọgbọ́n (wisdom) oròmùgọ̀ (foolishness).
You draw in your “bowel,” to rely on ọgbọ́n inú [ inward wisdom or wisdom as an inward transmutation of cognitive elements]. Your eyes must work well, to recall your inner essence as in ojú inú [ inward vision, inward perception, a movement beyond corporeal or basic perception to penetration to the essential qualities of phenomena beyond their more obvious qualities], and on your perceptions, ojú ọ̀nà [ the “eye of the mind”, perception as a mental activity].
Should you be confused, look for an ẹnu àgbà (elder’s wisdom)[ wisdom of maturity expressed through speech] for guidance. And following the conversation, your inú (“stomach”)[ inwardness, internal nature, essential being as different from appearances] becomes the point of validation as in inú ẹ bàjẹ́ (you are sad)[ literally- your insides, your interior, your mind as a demonstration of your inner life, is distorted, upset or unhappy ] inú ẹ dùn (you are happy)[ your mind and emotions as the expressions of your inward nature are enjoying a pleasant feeling] , and inú ẹ bu (you are damn stupid) [ literally-your inward state is in bad condition] .
This imaginative encounter mediated through the work of art representing the deity develops a visceral force generating intimacy of deity and contemplative:
The thought that you express to yourself and to others moves you back to the Èṣù image. Its force becomes a part of you. Whether you hate or like Èṣù, the image is activated. In the process, you must generate text around the image, expressing your religiosity, philosophy, and opinions.
…
We are no longer dealing with the aesthetic of difference, as in looking at objects in the British Museum in London and looking at Èṣù in the National Museum, Alẹ́ṣinlọ́yẹ́ at Ìbàdàn or the Èṣù in the Heritage Museum of the University of Ìbàdàn.
…
Èṣù has entered your mental system, active in your conversation with yourself and others. Your thought is a text, on the physical world, on the afterlife, on mythologies, on religions, and more.
He sums up the impact of the experience:
One image of Èṣù tells us about social and cultural issues, portrayal of multiple and ambivalent ideas, representations of hybridity, discourse on difference, perception, semiotics, and religion.
The Èṣù image, coupled with all other objects as well as all texts, and the entire ritual archives lead us to the indigenous intellectuals and their epistemologies. Combined, they deal with the invisible realities of knowledge, as in witchcraft. But they complicate the visible ones, as in all forms of epistemologies.
An artistic production becomes a body of knowledge at various levels— political, cultural, and social. The Èṣù image transfers you to the understanding of culture and society; what is left of the past; and how the past is reformed, deformed, transmogrified, ordered, and reordered. The past may even be disappearing and that image affirms it.
Conclusion
There are few things as satisfying as reading another writer articulate ideas similar to those you have long worked with as your deepest convictions and most intimate practises, but have not been able to organise, talk less express, with the comprehensiveness and clarity as the writer has done. Reading such a writer, your own thinking is magnified in robustness as theirs complements yours and yours enriches theirs, conceptions in one achieving fuller articulation through encounter with the other, seamless convergences creating a synergistic whole in which the sum is greater than its parts. That has been my experience with studying Toyin Falola’s “Pluriversalism” and “Ritual Archives” essays in the Reader, these essays being central works of Falola as a philosopher of the humanities.
Reading his sweeping and incisive analysis, years of aspiration and effort in my cognitive journey are illuminated in ways that excavate their logic, bringing to the surface ideas one has deeply internalised, but, which, before now, existed as inadequately reflexive rationalisations in one’s theoretical landscape.
Reading “Pluriversalism” and “Ritual Archives”, I am moved by discovering ideas I have long conceived and lived by but have never been able to express in the sweeping scope made more powerful by analytical acuity, in which Falola expresses them. I am particularly struck by his reflections on the need to rethink the disciplinary foundations and structures of ideational navigation in terms of which classical African cognitive systems are studied.
Can they be explored in terms of a vantage point enriched by their own epistemic and metaphysical foundations? Can the forms of rationality they embody be placed in fruitful dialogue with the forms of rationality evident in Western thought, the dominant cognitive system unavoidable in its pervasiveness, its humanistic significance in its focus on unaided reason vital even as sensitivity to its negative deployment and limitations are fundamental to critically taking advantage of it, particularly as one seeks to engage with non-Western cognitive systems?
These questions are critical for me on account of my scholarly and practical explorations across various cognitive systems and perceptual strategies from various cultures and within various sub-cultures within dominant cultures, from Western magic to Benin nature spirituality and Hinduism.
These investigations have enabled various self-publications as well as academic publications and a range of perceptual experiences best summed up for me by Babatunde Lawal and John Annechukwu Umeh’s summations, in “Ejiwapo: Representing the Self and its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art” and After God is Dibia: Igbo Divination, Cosmology and Sacred Science in Nigeria of Yoruba and Igbo Afa theories of perception respectively.
They depict these ideas on perception as ranging from conventional to unconventional cognitive forms, from sensory perception to such fundamentals as critical thinking and imagination to such unconventionalities as extra sensory perception and witchcraft and perception of cosmic unity, a conception correlative with Falola’s description of ritual archives as constituting and shaping knowledge about the “visible and invisible world [ about ] forces that breathe and are breathless”.
While I have been working with similar ideas in my individual bodies of work, Falola’s perspective is that of a bird soaring above the creative landscape, its keen eye aggregating possibilities similar to those which I have engaged with in terms of distinctive expressions, his synthesising intelligence transmuting the particular to the general and unfolding the general into the particular, unfurling a tapestry of myriad, interlinked possibilities, integrating potential that is then unfurled, breaking open an ideational consolidation to reveal a schematically organized universe of possibilities, a grain of sand, a tightly woven condensation of myriads, split open to reveal the cosmos, “In the heart of a minute particle of dust/is present a vast scroll/as large as the three thousandfold world/and on this scroll is recorded all things without exceptions/in this world system of three-thousandfold multi-thousand worlds”, invoking an image from the Buddhist Avatasamkasra Sutra similar to another from the English poet William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” on seeing the world in a grain of sand.