African Ancestral Studies Between Spirit and Intellect, Between Contemplation and Analysis: My Journey Part 1
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
My Journey
Part 1
Indigo Sanctuary Beneath the Stars
''I have withdrawn from the business and pleasure of the moment to measure human potential against the human condition'', the woman in this image by ChatGPT may be imagined as stating, adapting the concept of "withdrawal and return'' developed by English historian Arnold Toynbee in The Study of History.
What information is readily accessible about the processes through which Africans made sense of the ultimate significance of existence, developing indigenous schools of thought in the process, as is known for Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, for example?
Much information along such lines might not exist in writing but the efforts of contemporary thinkers are known. Toyin Falola's celebration of ancestors in the acknowledgements pages of Ifa Priestcraft: Ifayemi Elebuibon and Yoruba Ancestral Knowledge Systems inspires me to approach creatives in African thought, Africans, such as Wole Soyinka, and non-Africans, such as Susan Wenger, as a stream running from the past to the present and the future, a stream I am immersed in, imagining those I don't know about and those I know, calling on unity between the creative drive that animates me and the creative drive that animates them, an expression of the dynamism of the cosmos, a unified blaze lighting up the universe, generating illumination.
I thereby adapt the image of the stream of gurus from Tibetan Buddhist ancestor veneration, correlating it with African conceptions of cosmic force, such as the Yoruba àṣẹ and the Igbo ike, which resonate with similar ideas in Indian and Chinese thought, Shakti and chi, thus further developing indigenous African spirituality through multi-cultural parallels.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
''Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge''
Abstract
In this essay, I continue adapting to my own use Toyin Falola's engagement with the concept of ancestors. This effort is inspired by his account of the inspiration of ancestors in the acknowledgement pages of his Ifa Priestcraft: Ifayemi Elebuibon and Yoruba Ancestral Knowledge Systems, as well as his proposing the Africa centred academic field of Ancestral Studies.
The acknowledgements depicts the spiritual inspiration of ancestors while African Ancestral Studies uses the idea of ancestors as a means of correlating the totality of indigenous African knowledge and its reverberations beyond its temporal and geographical origins, as this interdisciplinary field may be described.
Following that lead, I develop those initiatives as a spiritual and intellectual resource. I employ the intersection of faith and intellect, spirit and ratiocination, contemplation and logic.
Drawing upon my journey through Western esotericism, Tibetan Buddhism, and indigenous African spiritualities, I examine the concept of ancestors across diverse cultural and religious contexts, within and beyond Africa, from family lineage to religious progenitors, exploring the adaptability of ancestor veneration practices in contemporary situations, particularly within African knowledge systems.
This effort is amplified by the evocative power of visual art by ChatGPT and Grok in relation to Falola's work. The images and my commentary on them run across the essay at intervals.
I thereby work across reflection on personal practice, scholarly engagement, and contemplative methods. Historical scholarship, philosophical reasoning, artistic engagement and contemplative experience thereby cohere.
Through the integration of these methods, I argue for a unifying approach that honors both the rationalistic demands of the Western academy and the profound spiritual possibilities inherent in ancestral traditions, ultimately positioning my own approach to African Ancestral Studies as a field bridging intellectual inquiry and spiritual practice.
Contents
Image and Text: Indigo Sanctuary Beneath the Stars
Abstract
Introduction: The Intellectual and Spiritual Context
Image and Text: Inspiration and Expression
Defining Ancestors: Conceptual and Cultural Dimensions
Image and Text: World Tree of Knowledge: The Falola Knowledge Cultures Mandala
The Lotus
The Axe and the Beads
The Roots
The Global Network
Geographical Configurations, the Central Figure and the Tree
Visual Unities
Tree of Life, Tree of Knowledge
Ancestry as Inheritance and Continuing Presence
Images and Text: The Eck Masters
Images and Texts: Rhodia Mann's African Masters and Mystery Schools
Western Esotericism and My Encounter with Spiritual Ancestry
The Evolution of a Personal Practice Inspired by Dion Fortune's Idea of the Cosmic Ancestor
Image and Text: The Destitute Old Man
The Grounded Reality of Ancestor Veneration
Glimmers of African Ancestral Dynamism
Milarepa, My Family Ancestors and the Possibilities of Contemplative Kinship
Image and Text: Intersections of Time and Space
Image and Text: The Ever Present Departed
The Challenge of Adaptation: From Text to Practice
From Falola’s Acknowledgements to Ancestral Prayer
Image and Text: Illumination and Expression
The Concept of Living or Terrestrial Ancestors
Image and Text: A Shrine to Living and Departed Ancestors
Towards an Integrative Practice of African Ancestral Studies
Introduction: The Intellectual and Spiritual Context
Toyin Falola's new, integrative field of African Ancestral Studies may be seen in terms of the largely rationalistic cognitive procedures of the Western academy in the context of which the idea was presented, the Western academy as domiciled in the form of the African universities in relation to which he presented the idea.
Falola's own metaphysics and spirituality and their associated epistemology,
however, suggest the possibility of a more expansive approach to the idea.
I describe this cognitive complex in "Between Eshu and Al Ghazali: From the Threshold to the Crossroads and the Cosmos: Intersections of Spirit and Intellect in Toyin Falola Falola's Metaphysics, Epistemology and Spirituality Within Yoruba Religious Plurality Exemplified by Ancestor Veneration".
Along such lines, I am approaching the idea at the intersection of faith and intellect,
spirit and ratiocination, contemplation and logic, an approach through
which I have engaged the subject from the beginning of my entry into the
study of cognitive processes and systems developed in Africa or inspired
by Africa, studies that Falola's formulations are helping me focus.
Image and Text: Inspiration and Expression
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Streams of inspiration, left, and their systematization in structures of knowledge, right, visualized by Grok AI in responding to my formulation of the idea of the Toyin Falola Professorship in Systems of Thought, adapting the ideational construct from French philosopher Michel Foucault's chair in The History of Systems of Thought at the College de France.
The ideas for which Foucault are known are indicated in a text box at the top right of the image. Those closer to Falola's are depicted at the bottom right.
The entire image is suffused by geometric and other graphic structures, suggesting the crystallization of forms of knowledge, an evocation complemented by architectural constructs, reinforcing the idea of cognitive structures taking shape and active in institutional contexts.
The left side of the image evokes this process through the emergence of these graphic crystallizations from the dynamism of waves in space, their nutritionally rich cognitive flow evoked by their luminous blue, as the gold of creative fire runs through them in delicate threads assuming condensation and explosion in a sunburst shaping itself into a spherical unity as insights cohere into a unified yet dynamic whole from diverse creative streams.
This configuration of knowledge takes shape in terms of specific ideational and institutionally assimilated structures of knowledge, suggested by the buildings and the statue on the right, possibly of a person representing great cognitive achievement, sculpture of a kind common in academic institutions. The architecture depicts the kind of symmetry represented by ancient Greek architecture, itself correlative with ideas of cognitive and cosmic harmony, resonating with similar values evoked by the geometric structures shaping the space, a visual and evocational synergy evoking the ancient Greek resonance in Foucault's work as a representative of the Western intellectual tradition.
The abstract forms vivifying the woman's mental space, on the other hand, are not recognisably those associated with Western culture, but in cases where they may be correlated with known knowledge systems, share some similarities with Ghanaian Akan and Gyaman Adinkra, thereby suggesting Falola's grounding in and projection of classical African cognitive systems, the entire image therefore suggesting his bringing African and Western cognitive universes into dialogue and at times unity.
This image of inspirational dynamism cohering in terms of ideational and institutional forms incidentally evokes Falola's private descriptions of his creative processes, as I describe in "From Wizard to Cyborg:The Journey of Toyin Falola 2 : Trance, Intellect, and the Polymathic Mind".
The image also evokes for me Falola's oscillation between creative unpredictability, unbridled inspiration and spiritual guidance, on one hand, and systematic organisation of the fruits of this inspiration in terms of book publications and publishing networks, outcomes feeding the development of African Studies in academic institutions across the world, as well as sustaining his self created institutional framework unifying all his intellectual activities, the Toyin Falola Network.
The image thus conjuncts Foucault's work on relationships between ideas and institutions, particularly in the West, and Falola's exploration of relationships between institutions and ideas, particularly academic institutions, in relation to Africa and its Western influences.
The person whose mental space, as the image may be interpreted, is being shaped by the inspirational flows, is a Black woman.
Examples of Black women as shapers of knowledge systems, particularly in relation to the conjunction of inspiration, abstraction and institutional codification include the woman described by John Umeh in After God is Dibia:
Igbo Cosmology, Healing, Divination & Sacred Science in Nigeria as the originator of the Igbo Afa knowledge system:
An unnamed, brilliant Igbo woman of immense wisdom. An ancient, wise Igbo woman who possessed the ability to read the minds of God, spirits, ancestors, humans, and planetary movements with precision.
She received the deep
inspiration and insight for the Afa system while seated under a tree,
connecting her contemplative experience with nature to the mathematical and
cosmic permutations of the oracle. ( Google AI)
She is referenced across
several distinct spheres of Igbo oral history, mythology, and modern academic
scholarship ( Google AI).
A great artist and thinker in Igbo spirituality and its artistic possibilities is another woman, Chiagoziem Orji, as I argue in "Onye Kwe, Chi Ya Ekwe'', ''My God Affirms, When I Agree": Chi, Creativity, and Cosmic Nexus in the Art and Thought of Chiagoziem Nneamaka Orji: The Way of the Calabash 5" and ''From 'Anya' to 'Anyawu': The Epistemology and Metaphysics of Perception in Igbo Thought in a Comparative Context as Demonstrated by the Art and Thought of Chiagoziem Orji, Part 2 of Onye Kwe, Chi Ya Ekwe, 'My God Affirms, When I Agree' ''.
Orji draws centrally for Uli art and thought in its classical sense as spearheaded by Igbo women ( Robin Sanders. The Legendary Uli Women of Nigeria: Their Life Stories in Signs, Symbols, and Motifs). Beyond the Igbo context, Black women have played and play strategic roles in the development of African and African inspired systems of thought.
Defining Ancestors: Conceptual and Cultural Dimensions
Ancestors are simply predecessors in relation to a subject. At its broadest, ancestry describes relationships with those who came before us and helped constitute the worlds we inhabit.They could be family ancestors, community ancestors, lineage ancestors, guild ancestors or ancestors in terms of particular activities. An artist may recognize artistic ancestors; a scholar, intellectual ancestors; a spiritual practitioner, predecessors whose teachings and achievements illuminate a path of development.
The possibility of ancestry arises from the fact that humans live within a temporal continuum in which the past precedes the present and the present the future, implying that the existence and activities of some people will come before those of others.Yet ancestry goes beyond this temporal imperative, acquiring its greater significance through relationships of transmission, formation and indebtedness. Those who preceded us become ancestors in an even more meaningful sense because something of their lives enters into ours.The term also carries associations with traditions in which predecessors remain enduring moral and spiritual presences.
Image and Text: World Tree of Knowledge: The Falola Knowledge Cultures Mandala
An image created by ChatGPT representing the intercontinental, interdisciplinary and multi-genre scope of Falola's work, suggesting how an individual intellectual life can become a meeting place for many cultures and ways of knowing.
I interpret it here more personally, as a gathering of figures and traditions that inspire me across time and space. The composition becomes a visual meditation on relationships among scholarship, spiritual aspiration, artistic creation and cultural inheritance.
At its centre stands a scholar within a great tree. Around him, roots, branches, books, human encounters and luminous pathways compose a world in which knowledge is alive: rooted in particular histories, nourished by relationships and continually opening towards possibilities beyond itself.
The Lotus
The lotus of Hindu and Buddhist inspiration, a flower on one of the tree's branches, evokes awakening, purity and transformation. It symbolises the unfolding of the human mind and of the cosmos as a dynamic yet cohesive network of possibilities. This association emerges from the symmetry of the flower as a sequence of concentric petals rising in radiant colour from the waters of a pool.
The radiance of the lotus makes it appear as a concentrated flowering of the energies circulating through the tree. Its imaginative incorporation into the larger organism makes it an image of cultural encounter: a symbol with its own inherited meanings developing further possibilities in entering a new arrangement. It thereby gathers associations of contemplative practice, expanded consciousness and the unfolding of human potential.
The cosmic and human unfolding the lotus evokes is represented for me in the Hindu and Buddhist contexts particularly by the Buddha, Ramana Maharshi, Paul Brunton, Milarepa, Abhinavagupta, the Hindu Sri Vidya and Trika schools and the Buddhist Kagyu school,luminaries of contemplative quest seeking the farthest possibilities of the mind through inward exploration, resonating with the crimson radiance of the lotus. These are reverberations of possibility forever calling to me to emulate their examples demonstrating the unfolding of humanity's ultimate possibilities at the intersection of self and cosmos.
The Axe, the Drum and the Beads: Power in Relationship
At the lower left, a double headed axe is held aloft as a drum stands nearby, surrounded by a stream of multi-coloured beads constituting part of the roots of the tree. The axe recalls the ọ̀ṣé Ṣàngó, whose double-axe motif is associated with the deity Ṣàngó’s thunderbolts in Yoruba art, evoking concentrated power and transformative force.
Power, sound, music, far reaching reverberations, emerge from the proximity of axe and drum as the drum brings sound into this field of meaning. Together, axe and drum suggest power expressed through rhythm, movement and reverberation. Their position beside the roots gives embodied and performative knowledge a foundational role.
These possibilities are crystallized in the multifarious resonance of beads, each bead retaining a separate colour and shape, while the string creates continuity among them, their curving strands resonating with the roots and luminous pathways, joining adornment, organic growth and communication through a shared visual rhythm, their colours evoking values reaching into cosmic resonances as they weave unity between aspects of existence. The tree and the soil in which it is rooted are mobilized as cultural expressions and cognitive flowerings drinking from richly complex soil.
The Roots: Vitality, Memory and Inheritance
Roots of radiant crimson, flowing with the vitality of blood, of nurturing blue, subsuming myriad activities of people in dynamic action, dancing to the rhythms of life force flowing through the sinuous roots and in spirals shaping the landscape.
A multitude of faces and people dance around a totem pole, as if activated by the bounteous force of life. Positioned above the gyrating people are others differentiated into groups of different races and ages engaged in intellectual activities across the globe, connected by threads of light running across continents, as the tree's branches hold even more of these interconnected groups of knowledge workers.
The roots contain another community. Carved heads, masklike forms, patterned surfaces and objects resembling books or ritual implements are embedded in the tree’s substance, possibly evoking predecessors whose achievements continue to nourish the present. The tree becomes an archive that is still alive. Memory operates through forms, materials, gestures and inherited practices as well as through written records.
The Global Network: Knowledge as Encounter
The smaller circular scenes make this activity collective. They show solitary study, conversation, shared reading and encounters among people of different races, ages and appearances. Their placement among the branches makes them resemble fruits or living cells: each encounter has its own small world, while participating in the larger organism. Knowledge emerges through sustained attention and through relationships.The luminous connections among these scenes suggest exchange across geographical distance. The tree’s growth becomes inseparable from the circulation of ideas, images and human experience.
Landscape, Scholar and Tree: A Meeting Place of Worlds
The upper-left landscape adds a different atmosphere. Steep mountains, curling waves and sweeping black, ink-like forms evoke East Asian landscape imagery. These elements give nature an active presence within the intellectual world. Mountains and waters become companions to study, suggesting that understanding develops through encounters with environments as well as with texts and people.
Diverse colour rhythms coalesce through the unifying image of the tree, mobilising an ancient picture of cosmic unity, the vertical majesty of the tree linking the elevation of the sky and the groundedness of Earth. This unifying visualisation is amplified through the centralising of an elegantly dressed, elderly but virile man, in Nigerian traditional wear and Western shoes, standing in the centre of the tree. He is positioned on an exquisitely inscribed map of the world, his presence radiating as well as integrating the diverse cultural and cognitive activities alive around him.
The world map in the centre of the image extends this movement geographically. Its luminous nodes and connecting lines emphasize routes of exchange. The circular map beneath the central figure gives those exchanges a place to converge: the scholar stands upon the world while participating in its circulating relationships.
The image thus holds together rootedness and mobility. Cultural location supplies the ground from which wider engagement becomes possible.
A productive tension thereby emerges through the portrait. The central figure is monumental, yet the surrounding scenes suggest that intellectual achievement depends on numerous exchanges.
Within the Falola Studies context, that arrangement can express the relationship between a prominent scholar and the communities of conversation, mentorship and collaboration through which intellectual work develops.
The trunk forms a luminous doorway as the central figure occupies a threshold within the tree, suggesting passage between inherited knowledge and new understanding, between inward reflection and public engagement, and between particular cultural foundations and a wider world, an interpretation reinforced by the open book he is holding.
It is held securely, while the figure’s gaze extends outward. Visually, this connects reading with engagement: the book gathers attention, but the surrounding world continually enlarges its significance. The figure’s stillness also contrasts with the immense movement around him. Spirals, roots, branches, waves and travelling light suggest intellectual activity sustained by an inward centre of composure.
Visual Unities
Colour gives the relationships constituted by the tree emotional force. The blues, whites and blue-greens on the left suggest depth, water, distance and contemplation; the golds, oranges and reds on the right suggest heat, animation and emergence.
These are interpretive associations rather than fixed codes.
Both sides contain study, dialogue and movement, and the continuous branching prevents the colour contrast from becoming an absolute division.
Circles provide a quieter form of unity. They recur in the human vignettes, beads, lotus radiance, network nodes and mapped platform. Repetition links the intimate scale of an encounter to the immense scale of the globe. A conversation, a flower and a world become comparable centres of activity within a larger field.
Tree of Life, Tree of Knowledge
The tree provides the composition’s governing structure. Its roots spread through the foreground, its divided trunk frames the scholar , and its branches extend beyond the picture’s boundaries.
A vision of knowledge as a living, interconnected world emerges. Knowledge acquires historical depth and continuing growth: what has already been lived, made and discovered nourishes possibilities still unfolding.The monumental figure and the radiant doorway within which he stands in the tree's trunk give intellectual life an almost sacred dignity. Scholarship, spiritual aspiration, artistic creation, cultural inheritance and human relationships grow through participating in the same immense organism.
This is a celebratory and idealising vision. Its harmony of diversities expresses an aspiration towards fruitful coexistence among traditions, leaving their disagreements and historical conflicts largely outside the frame. Likewise, its patterned marks and carved forms evoke cultural depth without necessarily identifying particular scripts, peoples or doctrines.
In relation to Falola’s work, it suggests how an individual intellectual life can become a meeting place for many cultures and ways of knowing.
The richness of the image comes from the relationships among its details: roots become streams, branches carry human encounters, carved faces inhabit the trunk, and luminous pathways connect the tree to the world.
Echoes resonate of mythic engagement with trees by figures recalling the biological constitution of the human being, though more than human- Odin hanging on Yggdrasil, the Norse cosmic tree, in order to gain insight into cosmic mysteries; Orunmila discovered by his disciples under the tree with sixteen branches, big as houses, upon which discovery he taught them about the odu ifa, the sixteen primary permutations of existence for exploring relationships between present, future and past, as described about Ifa, the Yoruba knowledge system, in a story in Wande Abimbola's An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus.
Trees have long mesmerized humanity. In such narratives, the tree becomes a setting for encounters with the structures and mysteries of existence. In this case the tree’s fecundity and the scholar’s intellectual vitality illuminate one another. The central human figure and the tree constitute a unified image in which the fecundity of vegetative nature and human creativity intertwine as dramatizing creative possibilities of existence.
Abiola Irele, Wole Soyinka, Toyin Falola, Susan Wenger, Nimi Wariboko, Mark Dyzkowski and more, across the landscape of African Studies and beyond, a constellation of creatives in the African knowledge space operating within and beyond Africa, come alive for me through the figure in this image inspired by Falola's multifarious achievements.
Evoking a comparative intellectual practice, this image offers a compelling visual proposition: a person becomes a meeting place through the relationships they cultivate. The doorway remains open behind the reader, the branches continue beyond the frame, and the roots carry presences older than the individual standing among them.Understanding appears as an ongoing participation in a world whose possibilities exceed any single lifetime.
In this image, ChatGPT has created in effect what is known in Buddhism as a mandala, a cosmographic form constituted by concrete images, at times complemented by abstract structures, often organised round a central figure or diagram.
This mandala, however, is centred in evoking terrestrially grounded activities, their cosmographic possibilities emerging as a subtle but powerful undercurrent. Hence I call it the Falola Knowledge Cultures Mandala.
Ancestry as Inheritance and Continuing Presence
The term ''ancestors'', however, is more often focused in a style of thinking which some may describe as predating the global influence of Western modernity. Thus, Asian and African religions reference the idea of ancestors but I am yet to encounter the term in Christianity as it was made popular by Europe or in relation to Western philosophy, even though the Catholic Communion of Saints is a robust doctrine of ancestor veneration which understands the living and the departed as joined in spiritual fellowship, with the saints in heaven continuing to intercede for those on Earth. I see in this a fruitful analogy with ancestral spirituality generally: predecessors remain participants in the lives of those who follow them, within a distinct theological framework.
The concept of ancestors across the world, in Africa and Asia, in particular about which I am better informed, is also associated with the idea of life after death, the ancestor being, not simply a person who once lived on Earth and has passed away, but a person who is now alive and active in the world of spirit on behalf of his or her Earthly descendants.
Invoking ancestors as a foundation for knowledge therefore brings particular thought worlds into view—worlds in which inheritance may be understood through continuing relationships among the living, the departed and the sacred. These understandings have histories extending beyond Western modernity and remain available for contemporary interpretation and practice.
For me, this continuing spiritual relationship is a starting point. I find the idea of ancestors inspiring across its historical, intellectual and religious dimensions, an inspiration first ignited by reading and subsequently reinforced by experience.
Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
History Department, Central Connecticut State University
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