Female Erotic Intelligence and Arcane Power in the Art of the Yoruba Origin Ogboni Esoteric Order : An Intercultural Dialogue : Part 5 [ With Erotic Images ]

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

               

                                                                                                      

                                                                          Female Erotic Intelligence and Arcane Power

                                                                                                             in the

                                                                    Art  of the Yoruba Origin Ogboni Esoteric Order

                                                                                         An Intercultural Dialogue

                                                                                                             Part 5

                                                                                            Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                                             Compcros

                                                                             Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

                                                            "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

                                                                                                                 and                                                                                                                  

                                                                             

                                                                       

                                                                                           The Greater Ogboni Fraternity

                                                                                                 Earth, Humanity, Cosmos

                                                                                            Abstract

An exploration of the implications of the engagement with  female  sexuality, the clitoris particularly,   in the  artistic symbolism  of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order, in the context of Yoruba nature philosophy. The essay concludes with a  sequence of image collages crafted by myself using pictures from various sources,  accompanied by poetic text, creating a contemplative and ritualistic rhythm, an effort which is part of my initiative in demonstrating an individualistic adaptation of Ogboni, distilling contemplative and ritual practice from critical and integrative scholarship. 

 Ogboni thought and art project related possibilities, enriching possibilities   I try to make explicit in this essay. The  visual and verbal poetic sequence below  is a further  effort in that direction.

Imagistic and Verbal Poetry

Reveal yourself clearly and may the vision of your beauty be my remaking.

The clitoris of the Goddess is her radiant presence thrown as a net around those special places on earth where the scent and warmth of her inwardness are more clearly revealed than in other locations.

As the blazing tip rises to prominence when excited, so is her presence when experienced in its naked force.

As the myriad sensitivities of the pulsing point converge in the brain with exquisitely cataclysmic power, so exposure to this radiance can take one into zones unforeseen, into the orgasmic convergence of worlds of knowledge.

                  

    

    

                                            

                                                                                            

Clitoral hood, clitoris, vaginal entranceway  and womb evoked by the architecture of the school of Susanne Wenger in their artistic mapping of Yoruba Orisa cosmology at  the Osun forest in Osogbo Nigeria. The explicit development of erotic motifs, in terms of phallic and vaginal  evocations and their intersections as well as  her  ideational interpretations 

of the work of her school locates it within the nexus of masculine/feminine sexuality, and  female sexuality in particular, in the context of  earth centred sensitivities defined by Ogboni, of which she is likely to have been a member, as suggested by  a picture of her with members of the group in what looks like a ritual context as well as the  work of her school in building a magnificent Ogboni iledi, sacred meeting house, in the Osun forest.                                                                                                             

                                                                                                                       

                               

The many petaled lotus that is vaginal form as cosmic core, colour rhythms unfolding in harmony with the clitoral splendour of the seated majestas, wild Goddess to wild Earth, Hindu Kali to Ile, Earth, both forces channeled through creative reconfigurations,  the unfurling radiance of the colored flame in the flower evocations of secret feminine beauty in the art of Georgia O'Keeffe.

                                                                                                               

                               

Proximities of spaces erotic and procreative,  navel, vagina, womb. Erotic artist Tiara Kristine, Ile, Earth, power wild and beautiful, quiescent but dynamic, placid yet potent.

                                                                                                               

                                         

 The bearded maternality and the unfolding geometrisation of a fierce beauty, Ile,Earth,  Kali, Georgia O'Keeffe,  the  

 flower within.

                                                                              

                                              

                        

Tendrils of power at the lower cavity in rhythm with  oscillating sphericalities, tender in their consonance with the mammaries of the clitoral mother. We salute she who is powerfully positioned at a spot yet whose radiation crosses space.We are grateful to Rafael Navarro whose sensitivity and skill give us the picture of the tender wisps peeping from the lower cave.

  

                                          

                                                             

                                

O lower mouth of the red interior and the forested entry, the triangle of desire, will and action, the excitation and heightening of consciousness, the renewal of life in energetic transport. We salute the unknown artists of the delicately black flow and flexible red covering  and of the structurally minimalist yet evocatively monumental  Ogboni edan image, along with Victor Ekpuk for his iconic engagement with the triangle  of the crimson penetralia, evoking its character as discursive nexus,  meeting point of various significations  and wrestlings with meaning and value, as his impenetrably eloquent script constitutes the folic density of the pubic space.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

                                                                                                                   

                                       

 

On a dark and secret night

starving for love and deep in flame

I [ entered your cavern]  guided by nothing but the fire, the fire inside

O lamps of fire

Come into my cavern

shake the mildew from your hair

let your ear listen

my mouth calls from a cavern.

The same voice, importunate, aglow with the goddess

 in the orangery of immense corridors, I wash my feet in your pure head, O maid

 and walk your feverish, solitary shores

 I have fed out of the drum

 I have drunk out of the cymbal 

I have entered your bridal chamber; and lo, I was the sole witness to my homecoming... 

Poetic collage from Christian mystic St.John of the Cross' "Living Flame of Love"and "Dark Night of the Soul" , lines 1-5,  with modifying interjection in square brackets,  and selections from classical Igbo spirituality animistic mystic Christopher Okigbo's Labyrinths, lines 6-14.

"...the geometric shapes of his final passageway, as the prodigal, weary of travel, is welcomed at last by the goddess into her cavern"- Chinua Achebe on Christopher Okigbo's  Labyrinths in his introduction to Don't Let Him Die: An Anthology of Memorial Poems for Christopher Okigbo.

Exquisite One, Lady Superior

we come before  you with bended knee

and phallus erect

ready to perform the ritual of rejuvenation

empowered by the wild force of your double horns

the velvet skinned beauty whose silken essence is open to all

the ancient woman steeped in magic

[ Last two lines adapted from Susanne Wenger on the Yoruba Goddess Osun, from Ulli Beier's The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger.]

                                                                                                 

                                                                 

The significatory density of the triangle interior, Victor Ekpuk to Ogboni to Sohan Qadri, transformations of Nigerian Nsibidi semiotics and projections of Ogboni iconography to reworkings of Indian Tantra.

                                                                                                                                                                                   

                                   

O sinuous one, powers inhabiting the earth before humanity, already charged with magical forces, forces potent in flesh of earth and flesh of body, particularly in the powers associated with the  inverted triangular  configuration, the lower mouth of birth and pleasure  of the  female of homo sapiens, the cave of Magna Mater, the natural, organic process including soil and sun that created humanity and all other  forms on earth, inspiring reflection on life and cosmos, on meaning and significance transcending  the culturally relative categories of human existence, the  cave from which is born the supreme energy which  comes forth out of  the lower triangle, the cosmographic form whose angles  are will, cognition, and action, subject, object , and means of knowing, the triadic heart of the Goddess, the womb of consciousness, the pulsating essence, quivering and fully conscious, from which emerged the bindu, a dot of dazzling light, a subtle fire flashing forth as flame, breaking forth as the pulsating stream of supreme light from which emanated the ocean of the cosmos.

Lying coiled and dormant in earth and in body,you are as a snake, the wild beast of truth in the jungle  where it must be sought, your depths the nourishing darkness of soil, the realm of ocean and the void of the Black Hole formed by the imploding star, the life enriching atmosphere with its clouds and mists, the depths of earth and other planetary locations from which surge beneficent sources, mysterious serpent of the abyss,  the upright axis at the innermost centre of person and universe, concentrations of cosmic force in terrestrial space,  enveloping the universe with your encircling presence, potencies indicating the filial relationship shared by all beings that have ever dwelt on  Earth, above and below ground, in the sea and in the air, in the past and in the present, resonant with the unknown ones in all planes of existence, potencies which humankind tries to filter and use in its rituals to Ile, Earth as consciousness.

Salutations to those  whose expressions and images have been invoked here, Ulli Beier of the glorious The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger, on the primordial chtonic forces evoked by  the Ogboni iledi, sacred meeting house,  built in the Osun forest by Wenger's school , Lilian Silburn, on the Hindu concept of the serpent power in the magical Kundalini: Energy of the Depths, Sohan Kadri, whose Tantric visualizations of the serpent majestic and the triangle glorious inspire us,  the serpent circling the yoni, combining the ouroboros, the image of eternity and cosmic unity, with the triangle evoking female erotic and procreative force, the conjuncting triadic lines projecting cosmological configuration in geometric form enabled by flows of power,  Jeffrey Lidke, whose  The Goddess Within and Beyond the Three Cities: Shakta Tantra and the Paradox of Power in Nepala Mandala, along with his quoting of the incandescent lines of Andre Padoux, has given us the luminosity of the cosmic creativity of the lower triangle also known as the lower mouth, Mike Magee, from whose translations from the Yogini Hridaya, Heart of the Yogini, at his great Tantric website Shivashakti Mandalam, comes the image of the emanation of the cosmos from the pulsating essence, Wole Soyinka, from whose "Idanre" we have borrowed the image of flesh of earth and of body, Max Oelschlaeger, whose The Idea of Wilderness:From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology yielded Ortega y Gasset's image of the beast of truth in its jungle lair and the cave of Magna Mater, in its inspiration of cosmological contemplation, the unknown master who created the sublime Onile sculpture that inspires these configurations and the skilled photographer  capturing the majesty of the Onile artistic creation, the gallery officials whose website the  inspiration inducing image comes from.

 May your inspirations never desert us, graciously transmit your grace waves , O gurus....

an invocation to the gurus as declared  by my root guru, Jetsun Milarepa,Buddhist hermit and poet,  from Evans Wentz' edited Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa.

This essay takes forward the scholarly consensus on Ogboni iconography of the feminine through a study of an aspect  of the feminine principle in  this school of thought and  develops an imaginative, visual and verbal engagement with this projection, thereby creating a contemplative and spiritual practice from the scholarly synthesis that precedes the poetic sequence.

The literature on Ogboni is alone among  Gelede, Ogboni, Ifa and the Institution of Royalty,  the four major classical Yoruba institutions to which, to the best of my knowledge,   a conception of the feminine in relation to human women is centred,  

in  avoiding the correlative valoristic and denigrative interpretation of the feminine   Taiwo Makinde has rightly observed in "Motherhood and the Empowerment of Women in Yoruba Culture" ( Nordic Journal of African Studies,13 (2) 164-174, 2004) and as I outline in "The Wisdom Of Painting One's Nose While Cutting it Off : Shortsightedness in Relation to Yoruba Conceptions of the Feminine".  The feminine in the literature on Ogboni is not referred to in terms of any negativities, her spiritual power is depicted as balanced in a controlled manner within her frame, potent but creatively channeled, forming with the male potency a unified force, critical to social well being. 

Beyond that, Ogboni sculpture of the feminine is striking in the global history of art, from the pre-historic  rock art of Africa and Europe, to all the major periods in art history, from Asia to the Americas to Europe to Africa and other continents, up to the present, in its sensitivity to female sexuality, amplifying this sensitivity through a conjunction between the erotic and arcane, as mediated through a correlation between the feminine and nature in its wild, animalistic state, this range of reference subsumed within the seamless beauty of the aesthetic order of the human form,  evocative of a steady equanimity of mind.

How does Ogboni sculpture achieve this?

Through a discreet but prominent depiction of the clitoris in naked female figures, thereby evoking the erotic. By placing horns on the heads of these naked figures, thereby suggesting the combination of wild, animalistic power and female sexuality in the self referential character dramatised by the clitoris which has nothing directly to do with procreation but everything to do with female sexual arousal and orgasm, a potential that, through masturbation, can be activated without reference to a man, "though having [ a male partner who is ]   interested in exploring and cultivating her sexual landscape, can embellish her experience and augment the array of sensory stimulation that she can associate with orgasm", as  Pfaus et al sum this up in "The Whole Versus the Sum of Some of the Parts: Toward Resolving the Apparent Controversy of Clitoral Versus Vaginal Orgasms" ( Socioaffective Neuroscience and Psychology, Oct. 25, 2015). By  evoking the convergence of these erotic and wild potencies in terms of the modelling of a calmly centered female form as suggested by the figure's features and the expression they project, her stance, her bodily contours and the evocative value realized through the relationship between all aspects of her form.

I am not aware of any artistic form that achieves this scope of convergence of evocative valuations in relation  to the feminine, from the art of the  Hindu Mahavidya, in which the combination of female sexuality with a range of spiritual potencies and metaphysical significance has been taken to great conceptual and imaginative heights, enabling their conceptions embody all possibilities of existence, from the most mundane to the cosmic, to the plethora of evocations of Sakti, the super-ordinate female principle in Hinduism, and such primary expressions of Sakti as Parvarti, to  Buddhist Tantra, where the feminine is  prominent in the form of the dakini, the "traveller in [metaphysical] space" and as Prajna-Paramita, the feminine as mother of ultimate wisdom embodied by the concept of Buddhahood,  as beautifully described by Tyler Yahn et al,  to the feminine valorisations of modern Western Paganism and modern Western witchcraft, these being the central spiritualities known to me where a similar range of conceptions of the feminine as that evident in Ogboni   have been developed to a high level in writing and so demonstrate information that can travel easily across cultural borders  so that people like me who are geographically distant from those cultural environments can be informed about them.

Africa has developed powerful conceptions of  feminine spirituality. While the existing literature has been richly demonstrative of what has been achieved in the oral cultures where these expressions were developed, the transmission from  orality  to the later dominance of literacy in those cultures  has been challenged by the difficulties inherent to the process, in the context of the marginalization of classical African thought by colonialism and imported religions,   as well as by the esotericism of such schools as Ogboni, so that  the scope of the ideas in question is rich but tantalizingly fundamental rather than robustly elaborated.

This is the gap I am trying to fill.