Extracting Light from a Vast Cosmos: Admiration, Frustration, and Discovery in Studying and Reworking Toyin Falola's Yoruba Metaphysics: Spirituality and Supernaturality in Relation to Art and Thought: On Chapter 2, "Yoruba Metaphysics"
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Abstract
This essay explores a deeply ambivalent yet ultimately appreciative engagement with Toyin Falola's Yoruba Metaphysics: Spirituality and Supernaturality and his companion essay, "Why I Write On Metaphysics." The work examines the peculiar experience of encountering a book that is simultaneously indispensable and frustrating: a text of immense intellectual ambition whose insights are at times obscured by issues of presentation, conceptual inconsistency, and unresolved tensions between description and justification, rationality and spirituality, the West and Africa.
Rather than abandoning the text, the author develops a method of "aggressive reading," systematically identifying passages that appear especially original, illuminating, or conceptually productive while marking areas that raise questions or invite further refinement. This approach treats the book not merely as an object of evaluation but as a site of dialogue, extracting from it those conceptual formulations most useful to the author's own comparative investigations of African cosmology and philosophy.
The essay focuses particularly on the ways Falola's work stimulates reflection on the organization and communication of metaphysical knowledge. Drawing upon selected passages from the text and placing them in conversation with diverse artistic works and complementary texts, the discussion amplifies the significance of Falola's book as a culture specific expression of universal human drives.The evocative force of the images chosen by the writer of this essay inspires commentary exploring metaphysics as a totalistic exploration of reality, within and beyond the intellect. The result is neither a comprehensive review nor a conventional scholarly critique but a personal intellectual cartography of a rich and provocative work whose strengths, limitations, and aspirations continue to inspire sustained reflection.
Love and Torture in the World of Knowledge
Selections from Chapter Two of Toyin Falola's Yoruba Metaphysics, With Complementary Art and Commentary
What is Metaphysics?
Image and Text: The Thinker
Indigenous Yoruba Philosophy
Image and Text: The Fragmented Human
The Unity of Spiritual and Material Worlds
Image and Text: The Line of Division and Unity
Image and Text: Roots of Origin, Roots of Knowledge
Communication Between Worlds
Image and Text: Vision Beyond Seeing
The Chain from Ọ̀run to Aye: Symbolism of Motion Between Spirit and Matter
Image and Text: The Heartbeat
Further Commentary by Myself
On Ogun and Inspiration
On the Chain of Creation ( Ẹ̀wọ̀n)
Image and Text: Journey through Cosmos as Symbol
Image and Text: Journey of Initiation
Conclusion: Between Describing Indigenous Yoruba Metaphysics and Justifying its Truth Value
Image and Text: Man and Mask, Face and Spirit
Thinking Beyond the Text
The Writer's Struggle With the Confines of Thought and Expression in Pursuing Description and Justification
Conceptual and Mythic Systems in Classical Yoruba MetaphysicsCognitive Intersections Across Cultures
Reading Falola Beyond Falola
Love and Torture in the World of Knowledge
I have been experiencing delicious torture for some time at the hands of Toyin Falola's full scale engagement with Yoruba metaphysics, represented by his book Yoruba Metaphysics: Spirituality and Supernaturality and his follow up essay ''Why I Write on Metaphysics''.
What is the source of this torment?
Its like developing a relationship with a long desired woman. The opportunity for emotional, physical and intellectual consummation arrives at last, when that deliciously rolling bottom, the scintillating intelligence, the mango-a delicious tropical fruit with a firm yet syrupy interior and sweet skin- breasts, the glorious legs and the enchanting face are yours to enjoy in perpetuity- but there is a problem.
While intimately engaged with this beauty one had long aspired to draw close to oneself, one observes faults that are inalienable from the much desired one. But to enjoy her company one must cope with those faults.
A story that is perhaps the image of most or all amorous relationships.
That is my relationship with Falola's Yoruba Metaphysics, a situation exacerbated by the magnetic force of his short essay ''Why I Write On Metaphysics'' which achieves a level of structural and expressive polish and logical consistency I wish the book had more of.
Yet, the book is powerful and indispensable. Priceless for what it does well and valuable for what leaves more or less to be desired in it but which sparks questions of how those ambitious leaps that do not reach their destinations may be better managed. The scholar succeeds at times in reaching the sun, but when he reaches only the moon, even that vantage point inspires questions on how the sun, the original goal, may be gained.
I have previously read up to chapter 1 and have been particularly fascinated by the ''Author's Notes'' which I understand as a strikingly original and memorable contribution to accounts of Yoruba cosmology.
Proceeding further, I have struggled to sustain engagement with the work, not because of difficulty with understanding its ideas but beceause of problems of polish in its style of presentation and its thought processes-issues of logical coherence; of confusion between describing Yoruba metaphysics and justifying it; of self contradictory distinctions between rationality and spirituality, along with at times replacing ''spiritual'' with ''metaphysics''.
Yet, I need to complete the book, hence I have embarked on what I describe as aggressive reading of the text. This aggressive reading involves ploughing through the work even as I recurrently encounter positions or expressions I believe do not match the level of ambition of the book, contexts I note with a question mark. Those areas I consider particularly effective and which represent a novel or striking way of addressing its subject I asterisk and among the asterisked sections I number those I find particularly helpful to appreciating the strength of the chapter and which I intend to isolate and arrange in a sequence as representing the essential force of that chapter for me.
I am responding to the chapters in terms of my own distinctive cognitive geography. The second chapter, which this essay is centred in, has rich sections on the strategic Yoruba concepts ori and Olodumare but I did not number them as sections I would later analyze because I find them informative without their stimulating my understanding of the subject in relation to my engagement with other texts in the field.
The chapter as a whole is rich and will prove very informative to people seeking to understand Yoruba metaphysics. My focus, however, is on what I found most illuminating given my own peculiar needs.
So, the selection and commentary that follows is not a comprehensive engagement with the chapter but my own individualistic reworking of a rich piece of writing I find illuminating though uneven in its presentation and from which I am extracting what speaks strongest to what I know and what I want to be better informed about, not necessarily in terms of specific ideas but how to organize knowledge about the subject in question.
I hereby take the liberty of reorganizing the selections I have made from the work, at times briefly edited, with my own sub-headings, and with complementary artistic images and accompanying text.
I shall do the same with each chapter. This effort is facilitated by the author gifting me a print copy of the book and the publishers providing me with a PDF of the book, if I recall correctly how I got it.
What is Metaphysics?
Stephen Makin and other scholars have argued that having a clear-cut definition of metaphysics is an elusive project because the concept has some nuanced presuppositions and generalizations that can be difficult to describe.
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that explores physical or visible phenomena to provide an analytical justification for their existence. Metaphysical knowledge [also] interrogates the ethereal concept of being. It explains things and the reasons why they are as they are.
The
fact that being [ and the reality of ] existing sparks intellectual conversations is something
we must observe with keen interest. Many scholars have tried to elucidate the
reasons for human existence. Philosophers from ancient times expressed
contradictory opinions when interrogating the world and attempting to make
sense of their situation.
Our awareness of human existence naturally ignites some form of curiosity in us, which directs our thoughts to questions such as “From where did we come and to what purpose?” and “Are all activities that happen in our physical world controllable by us, and if not, what possibly could be their source(s)?”
Image and Text: The Thinker
He thought long and hard, deep and wide, within and beyond, till he could sense the long slow groan of overburdened stone, his
You have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression "being". We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.
Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word 'being' ? Not at all. So it is fitting that we should raise anew the question of the meaning of Being.
But are we nowadays even perplexed at our inability to understand the expression 'Being'?
Not at all.
So first of all we must reawaken an understanding for the meaning of this question.
We should work out the
question of the meaning of Being and do so concretely.
Our provisional aim should be the interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being.
But I need to explain the
reasons for making this my aim, the
investigations which such a purpose requires, and the path to its achievement.
Auguste Rodin's The Thinker contemplates the mystery of existence, his muscles concentrated in a paroxysm of epistemic desire, of cognitive hunger, like the Buddha who fled into the forest to meditate in search of the meaning of existence. From the French sculptor's sculptural poem on the challenges and the imperatives of thought, emerge Martin Heidegger's anguished lines on the need to explore the mystery of existence.
''Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?'' one question asks, the foundation of the perplexity of Heidegger's Being and Time as translated by
John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, coming after a description of the Thinker's state combining my own words and those of J.R.R. Tolkien from The Lord of the Rings and of Dion Fortune from The Training and Work of an Initiate.
Image source: Photograph by Dario Lopez in Joe Tuckman's ''Mexican Billionaire's New Museum Gives The Thinker Much to Ponder''.
Indigenous Yoruba Philosophy
Despite some assertions that Yorùbá
people are unable to make philosophical projections, that is, that their mental
evolution does not allow them to engage in philosophical reflections or deep
thought, subsequent scholars have focused on understanding the epistemic and
ontological basis of the Yorùbá culture.
Once we reject the argument that the things of the world arise from an
unconscious beginning, we can begin to understand why it is necessary to
interrogate why the things of the world are what they are or appear the way
they do.
When
we do this, we can align ourselves with the ontological understanding of the
Yorùbá about the metaphysical world. This will inevitably lead us to the
unraveling of some Yorùbá metaphysical concepts, which I will explore in this
book.
Image and Text: The Fragmented Human
I know that I am
incomplete. How will I not be? I am happy to exist but my time of existence is
limited by factors I don't fully understand. Where I am coming from, if
any, and where I am going to, if any, I don't know.
Am I a character in a story written and directed by another person? Akin
to the view of the writer of Yoruba Metaphysics?
A colony of rabbits sees one of their number disappear from time to time with
no idea as to where their companions have vanished to, having no clue to the
fact that the farmer in whose farm they have been placed picks one of them from
time to time for his table. Facing this tragic state, they turn to artists and
philosophers among them to help them cope with their puzzling and terrible situation. Does Richard Adams' Watership Down not describe our situation well?
Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its efforts that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.
The battlefield of these endless controversies is called metaphysics.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.
Image: Study for The Thinker, 1881 by Auguste Rodin. Photograph: Musée
Rodin. From Laura Cumming, "The Making of Rodin Review – The Sculptor in a Ghostly New Light", Guardian UK
The Unity of Spiritual and Material Worlds
One of the foundations of Yorùbá metaphysics is that there are beings that do not exist in a physical form, especially within the orbit of human sight. The existence of multiple planes is widely recognized, and while humans are the dominant beings on the physical plane, we are not the only entities occupying space.
…the existence of an external world [external to and different from the physical universe?] [ is thereby asserted], though in such a way that humans cannot be said to have absolute assurance of it.
Can we, therefore, rely on the limited knowledge of humans in the description of [such] a world that has been expansively explained, yet without concrete evidence of its existence?
Or can we depend on the sensual interactions, or sense organs, in our quest to understand what transpires in an external world (if such a thing exists)?
Although the debates that are possible because of this conversation will always complicate the standing of those who take [such] external world activities as an inalienable fact, they cannot eliminate from the discussion the idea that material beings and existence are preceded and also complemented by immaterial foundations.
Some scholars have attempted to differentiate the two worlds, Ayé [the physical universe] and Ọ̀run [ the spiritual universe from where the cosmos emanates], as
something geospatially separate, that is, different planets. Adeyinka Olaiya provides remarkable insight into the connectivity of the metaphysical existence to the physical world. He argues that the material world is not detachable from the unseen.The potency in the metaphysical domain underpins the legitimacy of the physical world.
''I see the line at the center of the face as the thin boundary between the physical and the spiritual, a reminder that we exist and operate from both realms. In the same way, I see the line that appears on a pregnant belly [as] a sacred mark of transition, creation, and connection between worlds''
-Chiagoziem Orji, self portrait with explanatory text, X, May 27, 2026, inspired by classical Igbo thought but conjunctive with Yoruba and other schools of thought which emphasize the unity of the material and spiritual worlds.
...the common understanding among the Yorùbá is that occupants of the immaterial world are instead differentiated by the status of their matter, not necessarily their composition.
According to Esther Adekanye, the earth can accommodate both material and immaterial beings, whose distinction is determined by their inability to perceive one another.
Between the sphere of the earth and Ọ̀run, creatures in immaterial form roam freely from one place to another. Whether or not we can determine where they are in terms of spatial boundaries, what remains constant is that they are invoked, referenced, and invited by material beings to perform activities beyond human capacity. The term beings does not mean humans alone.
Contrary to the perception by many scholars that Ọ̀run has a physical manifestation elsewhere that humans are not knowledgeable about, Ọ̀run is a place where the foundation of every human and nonhuman journey is rooted.
The word comes from orírun/orísun, meaning the beginning, which is suggestive of a homeland, the base, or a foundation from where all the activities taking place on the physical plane take their flight. In other words, the orírun (Orí + Ọ̀run) is the place of one’s origin.
Image and Text: Roots of Origin, Roots of Knowledge
Mgborogwu in
Igbo means ''roots'' in the literal and metaphorical sense. Izuogu Chinyere Izadora and Chiagoziem Nneamaka Orji develop this into a quest
for cultural and metaphysical roots.
The metaphysician is a seeker for roots, the roots of what is and what may be.
''I enjoy being able to see the diversity of the world'' the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle may be
paraphrased as saying, ''but I'm eager to know-what is the foundation of it
all, the root of all this variety we can see?'', a question resonating from
spirituality to philosophy to physics and other foundational sciences, from
before and beyond the composition of the lines of Aristotle's Metaphysics modified above to
the scientific theory of the emergence of the universe from the Quantum Nothing to the myth
that the universe rests on a giant turtle.
Communication Between Worlds
The initial concession that the universe exists in the physical
dimension and that the human body is a manifestation of the trimorphous
existence of the body, soul, and destiny opens a conversation around the
possibility of communication between the living and the unseen through the
agency of the body.
Within the physical human head, for example, numerous discussions are triggered, and in some situations humans are involved in an internal conversational exchange or intrapersonal communication.
Although scientific arguments explain that such communication reflects sensuous interactions of the brain, the reality among the Yorùbá is that such conversation gives credence to understanding the unseen forces that link themselves with the human world in immaterial manifestations.
Without challenging the position of science that such mental engagement happens in the domain of physical or material existence, the fact remains that revelations and conversations occur at that (cognitive) point that gives direction to humans and physical activity.
Lágbájá ti lọ nínú ẹ̀mí (Mr. X has been transported into the realm of the spiritual) is a common expression that underscores the Yorùbá belief in the capacity of an individual to be transported from the physical realm to the spiritual plane through mere thought processes or the subconscious.
Within Yorùbá metaphysics, there is a belief that humans have
elements of spirituality that allow them to communicate with external spiritual
beings or transport themselves to the spiritual world.
Eyes mean a lot in both physical and spiritual space. They stand for wisdom gained through experience. They also represent the ability to see beyond the physical.
-Chiagoziem Orji, X, June 15, 2026. Image:
Chiagoziem Orji self portrait, photograph with digital inscriptions.
Amamihe na Ahumahu
The eyes (whether one eye or three) represent knowledge and experience drawn from both the physical state and experiences beyond the body.
When Igbo people say “Ahula m ọtutu ihe na ndu a,” they are not speaking of what they have merely seen with their eyes, but of what they have lived through, understood, and perceived as spirit beings existing in a physical body.
These experiences cultivate the ability to understand what is invisible to others.
-Orji, X, May 4, 2026. Image: Chiagoziem Orji self portrait, photograph with digital inscriptions.
Oju Lasan and Oju Inu
Since the face is the seat of the eyes (oju), no discussion of aworan (representation),
especially portraiture, would be complete without relating it to iworan,
the act of looking and being looked at, otherwise known as the gaze.
To begin with, the Yoruba call the eyeball eyin oju, a refractive
"egg" empowered by ase[ cosmic life force] (mediated by [ the deity] Esu), enabling an individual to
see (riran). As with other aspects of Yoruba culture, the eyeball is
thought to have two aspects, an outer layer called oju ode (literally,
external eye) or oju lasan (literally, naked eye), which has to do with
normal, quotidian vision, and an inner one called ojui inu (literally,
internal eye) or oju okan (literally, mind's eye).
The latter is
associated with memory, intention, intuition, insight, thinking, imagination,
critical analysis, visual cognition, dreams, trances, prophecy, hypnotism, empathy,
telepathy, divination, healing, benevolence, malevolence, extrasensory
perception, and witchcraft, among others. For the Yoruba, these
two layers of the eye combine to determine iworan, the specular gaze of
an individual.
(Babatunde Lawal, ''Aworan: Representing the Self and its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art")
The Chain from
Ọ̀run to Aye: Symbolism of Motion Between Spirit and Matter
The chain (ẹ̀wọ̀n) [ which the orisa or deities used in climbing down from Ọ̀run to create the Earth] is a significant symbol in the transfer of creation (ideas, knowledge, values, mores, concrete results) from the metaphysical world to the unformed planet. Represented by [ the pathfinder deity ] Ògún in the Yorùbá cosmological understanding, the assignment of bringing ideas to manifestation resides exclusively with the deity. The fact that ẹ̀wọ̀n is used for the transportation of these divinities to the planet Earth underscores the scientific discoveries mentioned earlier. This chain can be seen as a perception of, or as representative of, the DNA chain in modern science.
Image and Text: The Heartbeat
.
Reflecting on my encounters in the silence of my darkened room, I began to better understand the strange experiences I had been undergoing.
The human eyes can see more than what is conventionally visible.Through intense gazing at trees, trying to pierce to their mystical essence, to where they are rooted in the ultimate soil of existence, I began to perceive that trees are not simply the living wood one ordinarly sees, that the tree may radiate a presence suggesting something more, even suggesting an intelligence.
I hid myself within myself. Communed with no one. Who would understand that even though I was not a Yoruba babalawo, an Igbo dibia or a Benin ohen, the insights highly prized by those priestly groups had been opening up to me?
Spirit is democratic. It opens when the factors are right, whether or not one is one of the personalities traditionally associated with such insight.
Will I ever get there...the promised land?
Will I get to experience the universe from the vantage point of its centre, from the top of the tree where time and space are absorbed in infinity?
The Infinite, the Absolute, God, the Oversoul, or whatever you may prefer to call it, is always present, but veiled or masked by the thoughts of the mind, just as one cannot hear a heartbeat in a noisy city. [ To hear this heartbeat, all other sounds must be muted or silenced. Along similar lines, the mind needs to be muted or its activities silenced so that the cosmic heartbeat may be heard. The fruits of the stages of that silencing as understood in the Indian origin discipline Yoga are described metaphorically below].
The normal mind is a candle in a darkened room. Throw open the shutters, and the sunlight makes the flame invisible. [ Beyond that ] the rushing together of all the hosts of heaven would similarly blot out the sunlight. [Beyond even that ] we must imagine ourselves as suddenly recognizing that this universal blaze is darkness; not a light extremely dim compared with some other light, but darkness itself.
( Aleister Crowley, with Leila Waddell, Magick, Liber ABA, Book 4 )
He who reaches this realm
loses himself,
for all he once knew
now is beneath his notice,
and his mind so expands
that he remains unknowing,
all knowledge transcending.
And the higher he rises
the less he knows:
That is the dark cloud
that illumines the night.
The one who knows this
always remains unknowing,
all knowledge transcending
( Selections from St. John of the Cross, ''I Entered the Unknown").
Image: Chiagoziem Orji self portrait, photograph with digital inscriptions. Black background added by myself to enhance the
contemplative resonance of the image.
Further Commentary by Myself
On Ogun and Inspiration
The capacity to inspire is also associated with all deities in Yoruba cosmology. An accurate formulation of Falola's orientation on Ogun in the last paragraph above of quotes from Yoruba Metaphysics may be stated as ''Ogun, described in one myth as having cleared the way to Earth for the deities, is understood as a pathfinder, a role associated with bringing ideas to manifestation''. The touchstone of this style of interpreting Ogun is Wole Soyinka's works, particularly Myth, Literature and the African World.
Wole Soyinka's Seven Signposts also dramatizes the inspirational possibilities associated with Orunmila, the orisa or deity of wisdom, founder of the Ifa knowledge system, and with the Earth, understood as a constellation of forces:
Seek understanding of the signposts of existence. Is knowledge not within and around us? If the Supreme Fount of Thought [Olodumare, creator of the universe] sought counsel of Orunmila in the hour of crisis, why will you by-pass the seer of signposts, O seeker of knowledge? Wisdom may slumber on the gums of infants; lucky that man who patiently awaits the loosening of infant tongues. Ifa maps the course through shrouded horizons.
Honour to the Ancestors. If blood flows in you, tears run, bile courses, if the soft planet of brain pulses with thought and sensing, and earth consumes you in the end, then you, with your ancestors, are one with the fluid elements. If the beast knows what herbs of the forest are his friends, what plea shall man make that boasts superior knowledge, yet knows no empathy with moisture of the air he breathes, the juice of leaves, the sap in his roots to earth, or the waters that nourish his being? Man may speak Oya, Osun, Orisa-Oko…yet mind and spirit encompass more than a mere litany of names. Knowledge is Orisa.
On the Chain of Creation (
Ẹ̀wọ̀n)
I think a more helpful formulation of the orientation stated by Falola on relationships between classical Yoruba mythology and science would go along these lines- ''This chain can be seen as imaginatively correlative with the DNA chain in modern science. This does not imply that the formulators of the myth had a concept of DNA in a scientific sense, talk less having an insight into the helical structure of DNA which may be evoked by the image of a chain, but that the ancient, mythic insight and the modern, scientific one can be imaginatively correlated.''
Such distinctions between forms of knowledge, between myth and science, between epistemic geographies, between classical Yoruba civilization and modern Europe where the helical structure of DNA was discovered, are crucial for clarity, for a grasp of the distinctive and possibly complementary significance of these diverse epistemic contexts.
Image and Text: Journey through Cosmos as Symbol
Owusu-Ankomah's Microcron Begins No. 19 ( 2013, acrylic on canvas, 180 x 280 cm,8 / 44)
The universe as a forest of symbols both original to nature and created by the human being, constitutive of the human person and constituted by the human being.
''The world Brother Kwesi
Owusu-Ankomah inhabited, the world he transfigured and transformed, was never
singular. He knew this. He moved between spaces, between continents, between
the seen and the unseen, rendering the infinite in strokes of pigment, form,
and light. From Sekondi to Bremen and back and forth, from the earthly to the
cosmic and beyond, he bore witness to a universe forever in motion, a universe
of multiverses and a multiverse of universes. A restless unfolding, a becoming
that refused stasis. He named it the “Microcron” and it appears as a dot of
dots [ more precisely a circle composed of other circles] on his canvases—a fractal dot. In our limited view, we envision it as a
“great circle with boundaries nowhere but centers everywhere.”
That Brother Owusu-Ankomah's vision was vast is needless to say—his hands, steady in their articulation of what could not be contained. His work summons ancient grammars, but revises the present and invokes futures too—the glyphs of the Adinkra graphic canon and its companion “goldweight” casting traditions, the residual murmurs of rock paintings, the masks that have seen centuries, the ideograms and archetypes that inscribe another way of knowing. A reduced palette mediates; a spectral figure, adult male, either floats, gestures, repeats gesture, or contemplates. Brother Owusu-Ankomah has assembled and layered these. They are sometimes emptied, too, and it is just their aura that remains. He has made of them a fugue of signs and prompts.''
''Brother Kwesi Owusu-Ankomah (1956-2025)'', Tribute by Blaxtarlines, Faculty of Art, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi.
"Kaidara" is a story on initiation from the Fulani rendered into French by Ahmadou Hampate Ba. Ba's version was translated into English by Daniel Whitman as Kaidara: A Fulani Cosmological Epic from Mali and by Priye Iyalla and Elechi Amadi as Kaydara: The Mysterious Journey. Hyacinthe Vulliez and Gwen Marsh as authors with Etienne Souppart as illustrator produced another version in English as The Secrets of Kaidara.
The story can be read as a
Fulani counterpart to the great African initiatory texts: a ritual archive in
narrative form, a living structure through which knowledge is preserved,
transmitted, embodied, and renewed, projecting a vision of the universe in
which every visible thing is a sign of an invisible reality, and in which
wisdom consists in learning how to read those signs.
Hammadi's meeting with the odd old man in Kaidara, as illustrated by Etienne Souppart in Hyacinthe Vulliez and Gwen Marsh's The Secrets of Kaidara.
''An old man was sitting
on the bough of a huge bread-fruit tree, staring at the sky and the stars. His
clothes were in rags and he was covered in lice.
Hamtudo and Demburu [ Hammadi's travelling companions] burst out
laughing.
“That fellow’s a mad-man!” they cried. Hammadi on the other hand
greeted him politely, asking after his health and his family, as is the custom
in Africa.
Then he picked the lice off him, helped him to tidy up a bit and
gave him a gentle massage.
“Would you do something that would give me great
pleasure?” he asked, and then went on: “Accept this gold. You will be able to
buy food for yourself and clothes to wear.”
The old man replied at once: “A thousand thanks, you are
kind, but I can’t accept. Besides, you know, I can spend days and nights
without eating or drinking. Any moment now the star will appear and I’ll have
to leave you and go to Kaidara who is far away and close at hand.”
Hammadi could not have known that the ragged clothed and lice infested old man he was being nice to was Kaidara, the god of gold and knowledge, a beam from the hearth of Gueno, creator of the universe, as described by Ba.
Years later, after Hammadi has returned home a rich man after his long journeys, an old beggar arrives at his palace. Hammadi comes to understand him as the same old man he had met earlier. In spite of the man's unlikely appearance, Hammadi's shocked awareness reveals that this is Kaidara, the god of gold and knowledge he had searched fruitlessly for across years. Kaidara likes to appear as a decrepit old man, in order to assess who was ready for the knowledge he had to offer.
What makes Kaidara remarkable is that it may be read not simply as a story about initiation but as an initiation enacted through storytelling. The reader undergoes a process analogous to that of the protagonists. We encounter enigmatic figures, puzzling objects, and seemingly arbitrary events whose significance remains obscure. Like the travellers, we are compelled to dwell in uncertainty until a deeper pattern gradually emerges.
This is one reason the concept of the ritual archive, developed by Toyin Falola, illuminates the text so well. A ritual archive is not merely a repository of information. It is a living structure through which knowledge is preserved, transmitted, embodied, and renewed. In Kaidara, the archive is the narrative itself. The story stores wisdom not in the form of abstract propositions but through images, encounters, symbols, and dramatic episodes. Meaning is hidden within the tale much as spiritual insight is hidden within existence itself.
From this perspective, the book suggests a profound epistemological principle: reality is not immediately transparent. The visible world is a surface beneath which deeper orders of significance reside. Wisdom therefore consists not simply in acquiring information but in cultivating the capacity for interpretation.
This insight places Kaidara in a distinguished company of initiatory texts. One might think of the divinatory verses of the Yoruba Ifa, where ordinary events become signs of cosmic processes; of Igbo reflections on chi, where personal destiny is disclosed through life's unfolding patterns; of the symbolic journeys of [ Islamic ]Sufi literature; of the hexagrams of the Chinese I Ching; or of the visionary landscapes of the Italian poet Dante's Divine Comedy. In each case, the world appears as a text awaiting interpretation.
What is distinctive about Kaidara is the specifically Fulani inflection it gives to this vision. The text repeatedly emphasizes patience, restraint, humility, and attentiveness. The initiate is not primarily a conqueror of mysteries but a listener to them. Knowledge emerges not from domination but from disciplined receptivity. This resonates strongly with the Fulani ideal of Pulaaku, where self-mastery and dignity are conditions for genuine understanding.
Kaidara can be read as a
Fulani counterpart to great initiatory texts across the world, a version of the Western Golden Dawn esoteric school injunction-''treat every experience as a dialogue of God with your soul''
One might therefore describe Kaidara as a hermeneutics of existence. It teaches that every object, event, creature, and encounter possesses layers of significance. The universe is a network of signs, and human beings are called to become skilled readers of that symbolic landscape. The spiritual journey is thus not an escape from the world but a deeper penetration into its meanings.
Viewed in this way, Kaidara offers a powerful complement to investigations of Yoruba, Igbo, Urhobo, Benin, other African cosmologies and their resonance with correlative bodies of thought across the world. It suggests that beneath their differences lies a shared intuition: the cosmos is alive with significance, and wisdom consists in learning how to perceive the invisible dimensions disclosed through visible forms. The forest, the shrine, the divination tray, the sacred river, the work of art, the proverb, the dream, and the story all become media through which reality reveals itself.
Kaidara is therefore not only a Fulani tale. It is a meditation on the human condition. Its deepest question is not, "How does one find treasure?" but "How does one learn to see?" And its answer is that true wealth lies in the transformation of perception itself—the awakening of the capacity to recognize the extraordinary depths concealed within the ordinary world.
( Main text on Kaidara by ChaGPT Plus, as shown at link to the original exposition by the AI. Images selected by myself. Text accompanying images are also by myself)
Conclusion: Between Describing Indigenous Yoruba Metaphysics and Justifying its Truth Value
Thinking Beyond the Text
Allen Wood states of the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, ''The
true measure of Kant's value as an object of study by philosophers is the
richness of the thoughts we have when we make the attempt to understand and
also critically evaluate what he wrote and thought, and to relate those
thoughts and our critical reflections on them to the philosophical problems
that still occupy us.'' ( Kant, 2005, xii)
That is similar to my experience with studying Falola's work across various texts.
The Writer's Struggle With the Confines of Thought and Expression in Pursuing Description and Justification
The Kant of his ''critical period'', of this greatest works and the Falola of Yoruba Metaphysics are struggling with insights and sensitivities the fullness of which are beyond their intellectual powers, overflowing from the intellectual grappling of the writer, shining between the lines rather than through them.
Underneath Yoruba Metaphysics and Falola's Decolonising African Knowledge might be books or essays yet to be written. Fragments of such a text in Yoruba metaphysics are being written in fragments Falola shares with private groups of email correspondents, fragments that could collectively be titled ''My Spiritual Adventures: Between Spirit and Intellect''. In those reflections, he speaks primarily from personal experience, possibly in relation to relevant bodies of knowledge.
Part of the challenge of logical coherence represented by parts of Yoruba Metaphysics might be that Falola is trying to do two things simultaneously- to describe Yoruba metaphysics as well as justify it as a valid picture of reality.
Conceptual and Mythic Systems in Classical Yoruba Metaphysics
The scope of the challenge he thereby sets himself is expanded by his effort at emphasizing a novel approach to presenting this metaphysics instead of simply adopting older models.
The two major models are the conceptual and the mythic/narrative. Other approaches combine both approaches. Falola's approach is largely conceptual because he focuses on a structure of ideas shaping the metaphysics. From what I have seen so far, he de- emphasizes but integrates myth and narrative, subsuming them within his conceptual emphasis.
The most expansive mythic/narrative study of indigenous Yoruba cosmology known to me is Bolaji Idowu's Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief. Falola's Yoruba Metaphysics is steadily gaining momentum as the most extensive conceptual study of the metaphysics known to me.In these assessments I am limiting myself to texts in English, excluding Yoruba, French, Portuguese and other languages with rich literature on Yoruba thought since I can't read those languages.
Image and Text: Man and Mask, Face and Spirit
.jpg?part=0.11&view=1)
Man and mask, flesh and
spirit, ori lasan and ori inu, the biological face and head, the spiritual face
and head, as understood in indigenous Yoruba cosmology, are evoked by this
painting on the cover of Falola's Yoruba Metaphysics.
In using his own face as the second half of the mask/human image, does the author suggest his commitment to the world view the cosmology describes?
I have explored this dimension of his thought in another essay, ''From Wizard to Cyborg:The Journey of Toyin Falola 2 : Trance, Intellect, and the Polymathic Mind'':
''... let us first go to Falola's accounts of his creative processes:
It is the spirit that directs me on what to write at a particular time. Without the spirit, I don’t write anything. I cannot explain this, but this is how it works for me, a spiritual “journey” precedes anything I write. And as the spirit commands, words pour like rain, intellectual drenches that become a flood.
Falola's description of his creative processes in relation to another project complements the previous account :
The call came while I was in Japan on August 28. Without checking my calendar, my city people appointed me as the speaker for the First Olubadan Coronation Lecture.
I had other commitments; I needed to introduce my classes, and God blessed us with a new grandchild that I had to hurry to see in New York.
I really never organize on what to write. I had previously given two Adelabu Lectures, [a] Spam FM lecture and several others, written two books on Ibadan, and numerous essays. I don’t repeat myself.
I accepted the lecture, with an imposed topic by two long standing associates, Tunji Oladejo and Amidu Sanni, who chairs one of the Committees. I had to cancel events. By September 2nd, what existed was an imposed topic. Although I don’t like the topic, I told myself not to fight the topic but to work with it.
A trance took over as the spirit moved through me. I couldn't sleep at all from the moment I began until I finished the last sentence. Now, a book of over 400 pages in print has been created [ Ibadan in History: Issues in Tradition and Modernity, 2025].
( Email communication of 20th September 2025 to a private group. Quoted by permission of the author ).
In an effort to
demonstrate the truth value of classical Yoruba metaphysics, would such
autobiographical accounts not be priceless? How can scholarship, as represented
by Yoruba Metaphysics, and autobiography, as demonstrated in the
first hand account directly above, cohere?
One approach to that is autoethnography-the self and its experiences as
ethnographic subjects. Falola's Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography
and African Epistemology, however, seems to do little, though tantalizing
autobiographical analysis-as when the author describes his memory as being
empowered by magic from his childhood mentor Leku, as depicted in his memoirs A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting
the Tiger's Teeth.
Even though Yoruba Metaphysics has no chapter on ase, and which is little discussed in the book as evident from the index, in spite of the centrality of ase to Yoruba metaphysics as a life force suffusing the cosmos, unifying its dynamism through enablement of each existent with unique creative power ( Abiodun, Drewal, Pemberton, Yoruba: Nine Centuries; Abiodun, Yoruba Art and Language, and more from various authors) Yoruba Metaphysics may still enjoy the distinction I am ascribing to it, like Wole Soyinka's seven stanza poem The Seven Stanzas is the best short summary of Yoruba cosmology in terms of deities known to me, though it does not mention Eshu, a pivot of the system from the vantage point of its deities.
Between the Ratiocinative and the Spiritual
Pursuing the goal of an unprecedented concept focused mapping classical Yoruba metaphysics, Falola also seems to also aspire to justify the truth value of this metaphysics. This justification is itself a large task that may be responsible for some of the stumblings in the book.
These begin from the hugely problematic bracketing, on the first page of the Author's Notes, of logic, rationality, science and Western thought on one side and spirituality and Yoruba thought on the other.
This is an approach unjustifiable by empirical observation of Yoruba and Western thought, and a perspective that jettisons generations of scholarship in Yoruba, African and Western thought and the globally actualized studies in the history and philosophy of thought in various forms of rationality and cognition, particularly at the intersection of intellect, religion/spirituality and science.
It is also a spectacular own goal for a book written to demonstrate the rationality, the logical conjunctions, the ideational consistency, the systemic lucidity, the coherence, the architectonic balance and structural unity of classical Yoruba metaphysics as a conceptual whole addressing existence in its foundations, structure and dynamism.
Cognitive Intersections Across Cultures
Falola aspires to achieve this goal in relation to the various forms of rationality the system demonstrates- the intellectual and the spiritual, but stumbles from page one in not being able to adequately address the questions-
''What is rationality?'',
''What is spirituality?''
''Can there be any relationships between them?''
Questions that have ignited cognitive cultures across time and space, such as the tensions between mythic and ratiocinative thought in ancient Greece and the spiritual/ intellectual resolutions achieved by such thinkers as Parmenides, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, a struggle resonant also in Islamic thought, characterized by the titles of two competing books in that tradition, Al Ghazali's The Incoherence of the Philosophers and Ibn Rushd's The Incoherence of the Incoherence, a struggle spilling over into the tension between ancient Greek ratiocination and Christian spirituality in early Western theology represented by Augustine of Hippo, in the medieval period by Thomas Aquinas, in later periods by various strains of Christian theology and Western philosophy, some of the most influential philosophers in that tradition, such as Hegel, Kant and Heidegger not being adequately comprehensible outside their Christian backgrounds.
In Hinduism, Buddhism and various other strains of Asian thought, the same tension also recurs-how to reconcile two fundamental strains of human cognition- the spiritual and the intellectual?
Forms of Knowing in Various African Metaphysics
The opening page of Yoruba Metaphysics recognizes this tension but tries to escape from it, an impossible task for such a book, hence recurrent contradictions emerge, beginning with giving ammunition to the now discredited decoupling of classical African thought from rationality.
In that opening page Yoruba Metaphysics falls into a self-created trap that may be linked with the description of Negritude thinkers as equating emotion with Africans and reason with the West. Such an essay as Abiola Irele's ''What is Negritude?'' ( The African Experience in Literature and Ideology) however, works hard to explain that a founder of Negritude such as Lepold Senghor, for example, is referring to a holistic form of perception in which identification with phenomena, sharing in their being, a state describable in terms of emotional identification rather than ratiocinative analysis, is more fruitful for understanding the character of reality. That is a delicate, rich argument, as presented by Irele, one that needs to be carefully contextualised if it is not to be oversimplified and unhelpfully used.
Falola seems to demonstrate such sensitivity to carefully mediating between various cognitive approaches in chapter 14 of Yoruba Metaphysics, on ''Discursive Metaphysics''.
It seems, though, that the problematically developed task of justifying the truth value of indigenous Yoruba metaphysics is being carried out more effectively by Falola outside his book mapping that metaphysics. He is doing it in his private email communications on his unification of the spiritual and the ratiocinative in his inward scholarly identity. I hope those writings will eventually be organised and published as strategic to Falola Studies, complementing similar orientations in Falola's memoirs and brief references in his Decolonizing African Knowledge.
Reading Falola Beyond Falola
Falola is like a person climbing a ladder. The manner in which he climbs each rung might not be equally elegant, but he is climbing them anyway. From history to economics, from the visual arts to literature, from the essay to the book, from poetry writing to composing epigrams, the restless creative rockets on.
The deepest significance of Yoruba Metaphysics may lie not only in what it achieves but also in what it provokes.
It might not be as rigorously argued as such a work as Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, but the productive tensions within the creative mind are also evident in Falola's book, stimulating thought beyond its own conclusions. It invites readers to continue inquiries that it begins but does not complete. Its value lies not solely in its arguments but in its at times incomplete struggles to expand intellectual and spiritual horizons. The unfinished conversations within the book complement the finished ones.