From Two to Infinity: Ifa and the Unity of Yoruba Origin Orisha Cosmology: Tales from Ifa Tuntun
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
From Two to Infinity
Ifa and the Unity of Yoruba Origin Orisha Cosmology
Tales from Ifa Tuntun
Opon ifa, Ifa divination platform and cosmological symbol,
from Babalawo Ifasola Ifa Consultation and Orisa Spiritual Home on Facebook
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
''Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
Abstract
A dialogical exploration of the possibility of unifying Yoruba origin Orisha cosmology in terms of the symbolism of the binary, the quaternary, the sphere and colour.
Centuries ago, there were two friends in the great city of Ife, Odu and Orunmila. They spent a lot of time in each other’s company. They particularly enjoyed talking about their observations of the lives of people around them. They were also both deeply interested in questions about issues that did not concern everyday affairs but which are important nevertheless.
On this day, they were both seated on the veranda in front of Odu’s house, looking at people going to a festival, the festival of the orisa Ogun, orisa being the name given to deities among the people, who, centuries later, would come to be called Yoruba, a group of people to which Ife belongs.
“Everyday in Ife is used in celebrating an orisa. If it is not Ogun, it is Orisanla. The whole thing can be rather confusing”, Odu said.
“True”, replied Orunmila. “How is one supposed to remember it all?”
“One has to be guided by the announcement made by the Oba’s record keeper”, Odu responded.
“How are those records kept?”, Orunmila asked.
“They are all in his head”, Odu stated.
“Wow. Will the head not be heavy, carrying such a magnificent load?”, Orunmila wondered.
“No heavier than yours, with all that information you have gone round collecting on the various orisa”, Odu stated.
“Fascinating subject. Always something new to learn. A new perspective from someone one has not met in the city or in the villages some distance away”, Orunmila agreed.
“You know what? I’ve been thinking that can’t one develop an easily learned method of remembering all this information about orisa? The stories about them, their roles, you know, all the diverse information people have about them”, Odu offered.
“Hmmmm…the idea has been buzzing in my head but I have not been able to give it any definite shape,” Orunmila contributed.
“Its possible to organise them in terms of an idea,” Odu offered.
“What idea could that be?” Orunmila asked.
“The idea of giving birth”, Odu clarified.
“Hmmm…. explain”, Orunmila requested.
“Does anything come from nothing?”, Odu asked.
“Not as far as I know. People even go so far as to tell stories of how the universe came from something or some being”, Orunmila stated.
“So, we can describe the orisa as coming from something or someone, something or someone who gives birth to them. Then go ahead to classify them in terms of the characteristics of who gave birth to them”, Odu explained.
“A useful beginning. Diversity from unity. How would you proceed from that point?”, Orunmila wondered.
“Let us work out the point first. We can describe those characteristics in terms of your interest in both the stories about the orisa and your reflection on the qualities that are associated with them”, Odu explained.
“Okay. Unifying the concrete and the abstract. The concreteness of the stories and the abstraction of the values the orisa represent”, Orunmila agreed.
“Exactly. We can describe all the orisa as coming from the union of a male and a female personality. We can call the male ‘wisdom’ and the female ‘power’ ”, Odu clarified.
“Why?”, Orunmila questioned.
“The male contributes to conceiving a child but does not bear the child. The female bears and gives birth to the child. The male can be said to contribute potential. The female can be understood as actualizing that potential through bearing the child and giving birth to the child”, Odu explained.
“Are you describing wisdom, then, as a potential but a potential that needs to be actualised?”, Orunmila questioned.
“You got it”, Odu affirmed.
“Look at you and I, for example. We help each other refine our ideas and work out how to put them into action. It’s vital to have ideas but also vital to be able to apply them”, she concluded.
“Does the fact that I am a man and you a woman play any part in your thinking on this?”, Orunmila queried.
“Not directly. I can’t claim to have all the ideas nor can you claim to have all the good plans. The image from conception and child birthing is a general image meant to present the idea”, Odu said.
“Ahhh…very good. I feel better now. I am pleased you are not suggesting that I am all abstraction and no concrete plans while you provide that pragmatic approach. I like to think that I can be pragmatic too”, Orunmila exhaled in relief.
“Is there any image more beautiful than a sphere?”, Odu wondered aloud.
“Not thought much about it but a sphere is beautiful”, Orunmila agreed.
“Imagine this idea as a sphere. These two qualities of wisdom and power are unified, the way that all the sides of a sphere are unified through a circle that never ends,” Odu continued.
“Hmmm…we can also relate the sphere to the womb. The way a woman’s stomach bulges into a semi-circle when she is pregnant,” Orunmila offered.
“True. So, this sphere is both the unity of wisdom and power and the generative capacity to demonstrate this unity,’’ Odu further stated.
“Okay”, Orunmila affirmed.
“Let us imagine the sphere divided into four parts”, Odu suggested.
“Why four?”, Orunmila asked.
“The number four is
useful as a means of correlating all elements in existence. It takes its rise
from the number two. One can describe most things in terms of twos, whether concrete
or abstract, good or evil, male or female, hot or dry etc’’, Odu explained.
‘’Most intriguing’’ Orunmila concluded.
“Of course, this might not always work
but it’s a useful shorthand”, Odu continued. ”By the time you try to account for
greater complexity in each of these elements, you arrive at a further division
into multiples of four, from eight to sixteen, a multiplication that may
continue into infinity”, Odu concluded.
“Interesting’’, Orunmila responded. ‘’One can represent this scheme of yours’’ he continued, ‘’by a pair of lines, one side standing for one set of qualities, the other for its opposite, male, female, good, evil, light, darkness, morning, night, and so on. Like this’’ drawing two lines on the sand of the ground-
I I
“Superb,” Odu agreed.
“How far can you take this iteration? You cannot continue infinitely”, Orunmila wondered.
“Perhaps one can. For now, though, one might be able to reach a satisfactory number that would demonstrate the scope of the ideas being dealt with and from that point further iterations may be developed as one chooses”, Odu clarified.
“Very good”, Orunmila stated.
“These ideas are very valuable as a means of systematising the various orisa. I expect that one can work out their correlations in terms of each aspect of this scheme. But take note, in dealing with ideas of deities, we are dealing not only with abstract ideas but with beliefs in powers people believe they can relate with. How can that be addressed in terms of a scheme like this one?”, Odu wondered.
“Not difficult. The sphere becomes a shrine. Each chamber of the sphere is the zone of one of the orisa. You relate each orisa to a sequence of others till you have all the orisa”, Orunmila took the idea forward.
“Hmmm…the small space of the sphere standing for the totality of existence. Each section of the sphere representing an orisa, the universe as viewed from a particular perspective. The sphere represents existence understood in its total form at any point in time as well as in terms of its potential”, Odu summed up.
“You develop the possibilities so well”, Orunmila stated.
“Inside each section of the sphere one can place a substance representing the orisa related to that section”, Odu indicated.
“What kind would you suggest?”, Orunmila asked.
“Substances that symbolise the attributes of the orisa’’, Odu concluded.
“Hmmmmm,” Orunmila mused.
“An expression in matter of various attributes of the Orisa-attributes which are thought of as being inherently contained in certain substances, each valued for qualities proper to itself,” Odu concluded.
“What substances could those be?” Orunmila asked.
‘’Chalk, mud, camwood, charcoal’’ responded Odu.
‘’What would they represent?’’ Orunmila enquired.
They stand for the four elements-
chalk for air, representing Olorun, symbolized by the expanse of the sky, identified with Orisanla, standing for the primal generatrix.
Pure black mud from the river, evoking Ille, Earth, for Oduduwa.
Powdered camwood, standing for blood and its association with water, for Babaluiaye.
Powdered charcoal, representing fire, collected from fires on which food has been cooked, indicating the human being, pointing to Ogun’’, Odu summed up.
‘’Interesting’’, Orunmila responded.
‘’Chalk for Orisanla
Charcoal for Ogun
Camwood for Babaluiaye
Mud for Oduduwa”
Orunmila clarified
‘’Exactly’’, Odu concurred.
Odu and Orunmila later set up a school for developing and teaching these ideas, leading to the development of Ifa and Ogboni, both forms of awo, mystery, understood as fundamental to reality. Ifa and Ogboni are both approaches to exploring the meaning and direction of the universe, in relation to human life.
How, eventually, did the two friends develop their understanding of the binary principles in terms of which they aspired to unify what would become known as Yoruba cosmology?
I am still in search of records of their later efforts but the following summations from Akinwumi Ogundiran’s The Yoruba: A New History, suggest the open ended nature of their quest. The first two lines are adaptations of Ogundiran’s words. The rest are direct quotes:
everyday social lives: filial relationships: òrìṣà: parallel mirrors: infinity: a series of reflections receding into an infinite distance.
It would take deep learning, knowledge, and expertise to observe, read, and interpret these reflections. And, inasmuch as everyday life is not static, the pantheon could not be static. New deities (new parallel mirrors) were therefore created from time to time to capture and account for these new everyday experiences.
This system became an epistemology and a compass for navigating life’s journey and memory, managing both social order and turbulence, exploring the relationships between the earthly and the spiritual worlds, and seeking meanings.
What is This?
This is an effort at developing a philosophical and theological unification of Yoruba origin Orisha cosmology using ideas from the Ifa system of knowledge.
The method employed is an imagined dialogue between two figures central to the system, Orunmila, described aa the male founder of Ifa, and Odu, a feminine identity described as his wife and by whose name the odu ifa, the organizational categories of the system, are known.
The dialogical format facilitates the process of thinking through the effort of developing this ideational unity, the oscillation of ideas between the two characters evoking the course through which the mind reasons with itself in developing ideas.
The dialogue also goes beyond such instrumental goals to evoke a sense of tender camaraderie between both figures, suggesting an intimacy evoked by various symbolic forms in Ifa but not explicitly expressed.
The polyamorous character of Orunmila’s characterization in the classical literature might not allow for such intimacy even as the feminine is not prominent in ese ifa, Ifa literature, known to me.
The comparative descriptions of relationships between the God Shiva and various feminine figures in Hinduism, understood as multiple expressions of a unifying feminine principle, Shakti, however, is able to foreground such intimacy through words, painting, sculpture and symbolic hand gestures, mudras.
The Ifa cosmology I’m developing through theoretical statements and imaginative expressions aspires to emphasize both the masculine and the feminine in Ifa, making sure they are both equally prominent.
This is the first part of a projected three-part series prominently depicting the central Ifa feminine principle Odu. The other two are based on an Ifa poem describing a central symbol of Ifa in terms of the material symbols for the orisa described in the dialogue above.
Sources
This piece adapts the image of the sphere, specifically the calabash, prominent in classical African thought. The specific source here is the ese ifa describing Odu as becoming a calabash, a calabash unifying the four calabashes given by her children, Obarisa/Orisanla, Ogun, Babaluaiye and Oduduwa, calabashes containing elements representing fundamental qualities of existence.
(The ese ifa is from “Oshe Yeku: Igbadu” by Baba Falade at “Ifa Stories & Teachings” http://babafalade.tripod.com/teaching/ifateach.htm [defunct]).
This unity of elements within the calabash matrix is reinforced by the identical nature of the symbolic forms described by Dennis Williams as buried under the ground in the Iledi, the Ogboni meeting house, to constellate primordial values and powers at the intersection of Ogboni history and the spiritual cosmology central to this history ( Dennis Williams, “The Iconology of the Yoruba ‘Edan Ogboni’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 34, No. 2, Apr., 1964, 139-166).
What is Ifa Tuntun?
Ifa Tuntun, New Ifa, is an effort to rethink Ifa, developing it in new
directions or novel interpretations of its old forms, addressing inadequacies,
developing possibilities, a term developed by Moyo Okediji but adaptable by
anyone who identifies with it.
Also Published In
Folami Kolade
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAGBtzfP63%2BPn672Ycv_%3DxSsPZg62H4xSM_oi_XdwfCVrqfYP5A%40mail.gmail.com.
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Great thanks Folami.
Thanks for the description of Odu and birthing.
Please help me understand what you are clarifying in referencing that definition of Odu and the role of the womb.
Thanks
Toyin
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAKp95oSwKcoLaA%3DTGsK-tiQwtkvNk7xkG8-3ttq8p2HWNABEXg%40mail.gmail.com.