New Book on Toyin Falola: Imaginative Matrices and the Multifarious Universe of Knowledge: The Toyin Falola Cosmos and the Inspiration of Iya Lekuleja, the Magical Herbalist
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Collage by myself of a picture of an old woman smoking, juxtaposed with the Ghanaian Adinkra symbol Adinkrahene.
The old woman stands for Iya Lekuleja and the concentric circles for the scope of immediate and associative meanings of her store of herbal and magical implements. It represents the vast interpretive potential of the massively loaded store, in correlation with their enigmatically intriguing owner, often seen inside the store, smoking a pipe, as Toyin Falola describes her in his autobiographies A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth: An African Teenager's Story.
The Adinkra symbol is used here in suggesting exploratory range, evoked by Lekuleja's vast pharmacological and spiritual resources, itself echoed by Toyin Falola's multidisciplinary scholarly and writerly prolificity, as these creativities resonate with ideas of infinity, projected by the expanding and contracting structure of the concentric circles.
This suggestion of vast creative rhythms is further grounded in the associations of the colour black in the Ghanaian Akan culture from which Adinkra comes. In the symbolism of Kente cloth, the symbolic range of black is interpretable as suggesting depths of inscrutability represented by puzzling but enduring aspects of existence, the human exploration of these numinous zones and the power and wisdom emerging from such cognitive journeying.
This Adinkra symbol, therefore, projects here the idea of infinitely expanding and contracting rhythms, moving beyond the individual creative generating the expressive values they represent to touch others across space and time, and contracting again into their creator only to expand outward once more, a process of recurrent internalisation and expression.
The symbol conjoins the dramatization of the idea of ceaseless centrifugal and centripetal motion, motion away from and towards a centre, with relationships between the evocative and the inscrutable, the expressive and the inexhaustible, the enigmatic and the compelling, paradoxical qualities Falola's account of Iya Lekuleja shares with Adinkra, adapting Sylvester James Gates and Michael Faux's description of this philosophical artistic form in naming their mathematical language after the older visual system-
''The use of symbols to connote ideas and conceptions which defy simple verbalization is perhaps one of the oldest of human traditions. The Asante people of West Africa have long been accustomed to using simple yet elegant motifs known as adinkra symbols, to serve just this purpose.’’
(''Adinkras: A Graphical Technology for Supersymmetric
Representation Theory'', Physical Review D 71, 065002; 1-21;1, 2005)
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
Abstract
This book presents the image of Iya Lekuleja, the childhood and early teenage years mentor of writer and scholar Toyin Falola, from his autobiographical A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth, exploring the implications of the image for unifying Falola's multidisciplinary creativity and for configuring further interdisciplinary synthesis.
Contents
Image and Text: Iya Lekuleja and the Infinity Constellations
Essay Motivation and Structure
An Inspiring but Enigmatic Figure
Image and Text: Ascetic Dedicates
Text/Image Dialogue
The Exile and the River
The Storyteller
Between Episodic Construction and System Building
Seeking Unifying Logics in Diverse Creativities
Image Creation and Contemplative Visualization as Cognitive Tools
Image, Information, the Infinite
Image and Text: The Pleasure of Existence
Mapping the Falola Cosmos
Forms of Imagination
The Unifying Image of Iya Lekuleja
A Surprising Encounter
Mysteries of the Known
Image and Text: Ogboni Arcana
A Great Knowledge System and its Mysterious Practitioner
Image and Text: Nature Arcana
The Self Transcendence of the Adept
Enquiries into Strange Knowledges
Image and Text: Endless Depth and Infinite Circumference
The Transformative Encounter
Image and Text: Transformations through Feminine Spaces
Further Adventures with the Magical Herbalist
Image and Text: Journey's Beginning
Mistress of Ancient Communication Systems
Image and Text: Between Symbols and Expression
The Final Departure of the Adept and the Consummating Initiation of the Acolyte
Image and Text: To Leave and to Remain
A Magnificent Contribution to Accounts of Masters in Classical African Spiritualities
Reverberations of Possibility in the Acolyte after the Departure of the Adept
Mapping Cognitive Networks
Metaphoric Matrices
Leku's Room and Store as Metaphoric of Falola's Hermeneutic Universe
From Herbalogy and Magic to Prolific Intellectual and Artistic Multidisciplinarity
Image and Text: Hunger
Pluriversal and Transdisciplinary Windows in Falola Scholarship
Between Pluriversality and Transdisciplinarity
Image and Text: Integration, Dispersion, Integration
Transdisciplinary Navigations
Defining Transdisciplinarity
Transdisciplinarity and the Mystical
Pluriversalist and Transdisciplinary Paradigms
Nimi Wariboko's Void
Toyin Falola's Ritual Archives
The Dihlīz Threshold of Al-Ghazali and Ebrahim Moosa
Laura Marks' Enfolding-Unfolding Aesthetics
Bavine Nasser on Islamic Architecture
Image and Text: Structures of Knowledge and Cognitive Networks
The Multi-Cognitive Fascinations of Toyin Falola's Image of Leku
Knowledge and Self Transcendence
Between Knowing and Sharing
Image and Text: Synthesizing Rhythms
An Image Both Individual and Cosmic
Between Organic and Inorganic Knowledge Systems
Image and Text : Speculative Progression
From Cognitive History to Intersections of Medicine and Philosophy
Positioning in Relation to Diverse Forms of Healing
Exploring Intersections Between Philosophies of Healing and Philosophies of Healers
Image and Text: The Silence at Forest Core
Further Metaphysical Possibilities of the Image of the Adept
Mutualities of Inner and Outer Space, of Inner and Outer Shrines, between the Finite and the Infinite
Leku's Store and Room as Symbolic Forms
Image and Text: Intersections and Reconfigurations
Inspiration by Fictional and Historical Exemplary Figures
Image and Text: Synthesis of Inner and Outer Universes
Logic and Examples of Guru Yoga
Image and Text: Communications Networks
Image and Deification of the Adept, the Acolyte and their Divine Progenitor
Image and Text: Spaces of Emergence
''Áwo'', ''Èèwọ̀'', the Spiritually Mysterious and that Which May Not be Spoken, Yoruba Esotericism and its Broader Correlates Demonstrated by the Relationship Between the Adept and the Acolyte
Image and Text: Leku and the Circles of Infinity
Smoking as Sacred Activity
Navigation of Cognitive Zones
The Arrow and the Spiral
Historical Figure and Metaphoric Matrix
Image and Text: Spiral of Possibilities
From Leku to African and Global Cognitive History
Summative, Inspirational Text
The Tree of Knowledge
Essay Motivation and Structure
Falola's text on Leku might not be more than thirty thousands words across both books, but their evocative power continually calls to me, their blend of the youth's awareness and the assessment of the adult looking back in time bringing alive a remarkable personality at the intersection of classical Yoruba spirituality and medicine and the Yoruba politics of her time, a figure correlative for me with great spiritual figures from various parts of the world who deeply inspire me.
Self preservation is the first law of nature, it is said. What if giving up one's life is equal to preserving it, as Jesus put it? What value could be so great as to inspire one to give up one's life and how could giving it up preserve it?
Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār, a 6th century devotee of the Hindu God Shiva in Tamil Nadu, like Machig Labdron, the Tibetan Buddhist devotee presented later on in this essay, exemplifies, par excellence, the spirit of surrender of self exemplified in a related, though different manner by Iya Lekuleja, a fellow female devotee of higher powers.
Ammaiyār's emaciation, shown in a sculpture of her imaged above, suggests her self abnegation through extreme asceticism, even as she spent her life in celebrating Shiva through music and poetry, suggested by her playing cymbals in the image.
Image source: Google Arts and Culture, courtesy of the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art.
Main Information sources: Elaine Craddock, Siva's Demon Devotee: Karaikkal Ammaiyar;
Elaine Craddock, "Karaikkal Ammaiyar’’, Oxford Bibliographies.
The Exile and the River
An exile in spaces of meaning, I am adrift on a boat in turbulent seas, wondering where I am coming from, where I am going to and why. Adrift like many others on an ocean whose source and destination is unknown. Claims of an ultimate design in the constitution of possibilities that enables us exist are not universally convincing.
In the midst of this chaos one seeks direction with the help of other travellers also trying to make sense of different degrees of wandering on a sea journeying from a place unknown to a zone unknown.
The Storyteller
One of such people is the great storyteller Toyin Falola, who has organized a broad scope of investigations around his central vocation of story telling, narrating and analyzing the significance of his experiences and those of others in various aspects of human existence in the African context and its diaspora. ''...narratives'', Falola states,'' are our understanding of the universe, how we make coherence of its chaos, how we negotiate the graspable and the improbable and understand the past and present'' (Decolonizing African Knowledge, 2022, 79).
I am inspired by seeking to understand the work of such a broad ranging explorer of the human condition, trying to piece together my own perspectives from this kaleidoscope of insights, shaping my own collage of meanings, of ultimate values, like the Lurianic Kabbalists who see the unity underlying the manifested cosmos as shattered to pieces by a primal explosion resulting in the moral disjunctions of the world, fragments they reconstitute through methods of insight and of creative living, as Yaffa Eliach describes in Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, stories of how Jews were able to find inspiring values in the hell of that historic nightmare through the narrative strategies of Nahman of Bratslav, for whom storytelling was both a creative joy and a symbolic exploration of the puzzles of the universe.
Between Episodic Construction and System Building
Falola is a systematic thinker, but more an episodic constructor than a system builder, a person who works with ideas as they inspire him rather than a person primarily eager to forge explicit, detailed connections between the diverse conceptions and subjects he works on across each book and essay, building islands of structured knowledge within the tumultuous rush of creative force, rather than creating bridges linking these cognitive configurations, perhaps sensitive to the impermanence of such bridges, his creativity more suited to restless shaping of newness than to forging aspirations to schemes of overarching order, an approach similar to mine as one flies within and above the river of existence, responding to particularly striking gleams of light within the flowing blaze, the turbulent streaming alive with the luminosity of awareness.
Seeking Unifying Logics in Diverse Creativities
But one may eventually step back and ask what’s it all about, what is the source and direction of this fountain's rushing flow in the depths of night, the darkness of meaning in which scattered lights gleam, adapting St. John of the Cross's ''Song of the Soul that is Glad to Know God by Faith.''
To some degree that is what Falola does in his autobiographies A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth, complemented by the scholarly text Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies and the summative reflections concluding In Praise of Greatness: The Poetics of African Adulation, the latter generating verbal images of African creatives and of students of Africa, culminating in reflections on intersections between mortality and immortality.
For myself, looking in from outside into the Falola universe, I want to understand it in my own way and see what light it can throw on the quest for immediate and ultimate meaning resonating with such great creatives as the Italian poet Dante Alighieri and the German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel.
I seek inspiration in relation to constructing journeys in the quest for understanding the dynamism of being through the progression of oneself as a construct at the intersection of inner and outer worlds, of self and society, like Dante's projection of himself in the Divine Comedy as an imagined character navigating imagined spaces symbolizing the cosmos.
I also seek projective force, energising ideas, in such initiatives as trying to comprehend the movement of existence as a collective and transcendent intelligence, as in Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind and Spirit, a title partly created by myself to foreground the two major English renditions, ''mind'' and ''spirit'', of Hegel's German term ''Geist'', only one of which translations is usually employed in the title of English translations of his book Phänomenologie des Geistes.
''Everyone and his own'', Chinua Achebe invokes an Igbo greeting in ''The Igbo World and its Art'' suggesting the correlative distinctiveness of self and community, of the individual and the social world dramatizing the flow of the great river as Olabiyi Yai references the Yoruba understanding of life as a river in his review of Henry Drewal et al's Yoruba Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, the river of being and becoming in terms of which classical Chinese thought sees the progression of existence, as described in Sarah Allan's The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue."
Image Creation and Contemplative Visualization as Cognitive Tools
The essay is significantly fed through cultivating a relationship between reading Falola's autobiographies and creating collages representing Leku and her store and room, collages interspersing the main text of this essay, and daily visualizing thesecollage, speaking mentally to Leku as imaged in the visual conjunction, in the belief that thoughts may be communicated across physical and spiritual space, between those in the flesh and those beyond it, in the spirit of Tibetan Buddhist poet and hermit Jetsun Milarepa's cry to his gurus on Earth and those beyond time and space, ''vouchsafe your grace waves, O gurus!'' (Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa, trans. Dama Kazi Samdup, ed. W.Y. Evans Wentz), an idea resonant with African ancestor veneration, the Catholic Christian Communion of Saints and the Western esoteric Masters of Wisdom concept.
That visualization stimulates reflection on the content of the autobiographies in relation to Falola's work as a whole as I understand it. It also inspires reflection on the broader ideational reverberations of the collages as suggesting vistas of knowledge represented by the circle framing Leku's form in those collages. The circle's symmetry evokes the complex harmony of the vast collection of many varied items in her store, organized in terms of an order enabling her swiftly access those items, combining them in terms of the value of particular combinations for specific goals.
This correlation of visualization and contemplation, of image and reflection, of aspiration to communication across ontological divides, unifying them in the human person, is suggestive of a similar cognitive technique dramatized by Falola in ''Ritual Archives'' in terms of his meditation on an image of the Yoruba origin Orisha tradition deity Eshu, demonstrating his argument on the need to marshal a diverse but ultimately complementary range of cognitive methods in the quest for knowledge, particularly in efforts to understand the mythic and spiritual systems of African peoples, systems, I would add, sharing deep similarities with others in diverse points of space and time, such as Western esotericism and Hindu and Buddhist Tantra, my own zones of entry into those practices.
Image, Information, the Infinite
What is my ultimate aspiration in developing these visual cognitive models? I am pursuing what Laura Marks, adapting ideas from Islamic aesthetics, describes as image as an interface to information and information as an interface to the infinite (Enfoldment and Infinity).
The infinite, in this context, is represented by endlessly unfolding interpretive possibilities, possibilities groping towards the source of existence.
My ultimate purpose is therefore a metaphysical and spiritual quest pursued through an imaginative and intellectual method. It translates ideas into visual images and uses these visual images as a means of stimulating ideational conjunctions.
These permutations are executed ultimately in the name of penetrating to the ultimate ground enabling thinker and thought, ideas and the frameworks of possibility that configure them.
Image and Text: The Pleasure of Existence
A river of pleasure runs through the universe. Symmetry is a fundamental principle of the cosmos. Symmetry is beautiful. Beauty gives pleasure. Spatial proportions. Colour rhythms. Sensitivities of touch. Exquisite smells. Since we were created with a shout of laughter, let spiritual happiness and holiness be truly one.
Flaring beauty of cheekbones flowing into the exquisitely curved lips as delicious smoke emerges in lyrical densities. Lines converge at the centre of a circle as the human world shimmers in the background.
An image of a woman smoking in a spirit of intense pleasure against a background formed by a serene neighbourhood and a rendition of the Kamakala Yantra, an evocation of the bliss of erotic union as dramatizing kama, Sanskrit for pleasure, as being at the heart of the universe. In this Hindu conception, the converging lines form triangles suggesting the external structure of female genitalia, and therefore, the womb and the vagina as yoni, female erotic and procreative space as a cosmic matrix.
The lines converge at the apex of an upward rising form suggesting an erect penis, the lingam, the complement to the yoni. Both forms, lingam and yoni, are associated, respectively, with the God Shiva and the feminine Shakti, their erotic congress, symbolized by the converging forms, generating the cosmos.
This biological image is conjoined with an understanding of consciousness as the foundation of existence, consciousness represented by the dot, the bindu, where the lines converge, a foundational and integrative consciousness the human being may expand into, such an expansion enabled by such methods as meditation on the yantra and erotic ritual dramatizing the cosmic union of Shiva and Shakti.
Image of woman smoking from iStock (8/29/2023). Picture of Kamakala Yantra by Frank Mahood on the cover of Tantra in Practice, ed. David Gordon White. Collage by myself.
Info on Kamakala Yantra from ''Secret Yantras and Erotic Displays for Hindu Temples'' by Michael Rabe in Tantra in Practice, ed. David Gordon White, complemented by the precise and comprehensive essay on kama in Wikipedia, accessed 6/27/2023 and Gurcharan Das’ Kama: The Riddle of Desire, which brings the idea of kama alive as an experiential reality through a rich autobiographical matrix in dialogue with a philosophical, historical and literary context. Erotic ritual embodying the congress of Shiva and Shakti is powerfully described in book nine of Abhinavagupta's Tantraloka.
''Since we were created with a shout of laughter, let spiritual happiness and holiness be truly one'' is from William G. Gray's The Office of the Holy Tree of Life.
Falola's work, unique transdisciplinary creativity across the humanities and social sciences, is defined by an oscillation between scholarship, creative writing and institutional organisation.
Beyond these external expressions, however, is it possible to discern within this ceaselessly unfolding creativity an internal cognitive configuration, of unifying shapes of discourse, of engagement with reality across various disciplines, perhaps unconscious even to the creative intelligence working out these expressive forms?
Exploring the ultimate unity of knowledge is a primary human endeavour, facilitating cross-fertilization between the perspectives and methods of various disciplines, generating insights that would not otherwise have emerged, and Falola's work is particularly strategic for such exploration.
Every piece of writing, particularly one of some length, is a world of its own, a diamond connecting directly and indirectly to other jewels within the matrix of the textualised and the untextualised, of writing, of unwritten verbalisation, of the referenced and the unreferenced.
How does one begin mapping the universe of meanings generated by Falola's scholarly and literary productivity spanning hundreds of texts in different disciplines?
One can start from anywhere since each text leads directly and indirectly to all the others.
A particularly helpful place to start from, however, seems to be his autobiography of his childhood, A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and that of his teenage years, Counting the Tiger's Teeth: An African Teenager's Story, magnificently written works reverberating with the cultural immersions critical to generating the scholar reaching from his foundations in Yoruba culture and history into the cosmos of African history, society and thought, employing a thorough grounding in the Western scholarly techniques in which he was trained, having been born when this imported system achieved dominance in Yorubaland, even as he is currently exploring how to merge the Western system and the classical Yoruba knowledge systems, as demonstrated, among the texts I am acquainted with, in ''Ritual Archives'', from The Toyin Falola Reader and Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies.
Forms of Imagination
The ability of [ bodying ] forth the forms of things unknown, [giving] to airy nothing a local habitation and a name"? as English writer William Shakespeare puts it so beautifully in A Midsummer Night's Dream?
The skill to make the common look uncommon as English Romantic poet and theorist William Wordsworth perhaps indicates in his preface to Lyrical Ballads?
The capacity to see beyond the obvious, perceiving otherwise concealed depths of phenomena, as Babatunde Lawal indicates in his description of the oju theory of perception from Yoruba thought in " Aworan: Representing the Self and its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art"?
May such inward perception enable the perceiver appreciate relationships between the phenomenon in question and other phenomena in the network of existence, in relation to the infinite, as Nimi Wariboko's interpretation, building upon Kalabari thought, may be summed up?
Is it the ability to give life to something through words or other expressive forms, making both the non-existent and the existent vivid for an audience?
May all these possibilities be unified in a theory of imagination?
At the centre of the multifarious universe represented by the omnivorous writings of Falola, covering various genres and disciplines, may be observed an imaginative creativity, demonstrating various understandings of imagination.
The endowment to tell a story in a manner that powerfully vivifies it for the reader, as demonstrated in his autobiographies A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth.
The creativity to project emotion in a way that makes it concrete for an audience, as in his poem ''Remembrance: Clara Adeyemi.''
The prowess to energise the abstract, bringing it alive, making it almost an immediate reality of the reader, as in ''Ritual Archives.''
The expertise to sum up a complex of ideas in a compelling manner, projecting forcefully their intellectual force, even in a very brief summary, as in his call for papers on Akinwumi Ogundiran's The Yoruba:A New History and for an edited volume on the philosopher, theologian and economist Nimi Wariboko.
The power to sum up a vast scope of individual intellectual journeying in a manner that lights up its inward dynamisms, conjuring the flesh and blood individuality, the living vitality, of the union of thought and life making up a thinker and writer, as in his ''Professor Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi : 1929-2014: Our Foundation, Our Mainframe, and Our Roof".
The Unifying Image of Iya Lekuleja
One demonstration of the capacity to bring past history into living reality is his account of his relationship with the herbalist Iyalekuleja, popularly known as Leku, from chapter seven, ''Herbs and Charms'' in A Mouth Sweeter than Salt: An African Memoir, his autobiography of his childhood, and Counting The Tiger's Teeth: An African Teenager's Story,
Correlative with Leku's image as an intersection of various interpretive possibilities is that of her store and her room, images of space as archive of multifarious interpretive possibilities, evocative of Falola's ''Ritual Archives'' and, in turn, with the continuously proliferating universe of his work.
I hereby quote extensive sections of his text on Leku with his permission and explore the implications of the image he constructs in those passages.
Apologies to the writer for breaking up longer paragraphs in the quotes and the concluding poem for easier reading on social media and for rearranging the sequence in which some paragraphs follow each other, even integrating text from one book into a sequence of text from another book, in order to assist the reader in following the observations I try to make, and doing this without indicating that these texts are from different books.
I also commit the perhaps sacrilegious act of introducing full stops and removing commas in the conclusions of some of the stanza divisions I create to indicate shifts in the cluster of references through which the poem cascades.
A Surprising Encounter
I was terribly scared when I first saw her in the early hours of the first morning at Ode Aje. She was short, about my height at over four feet but less than five. She had tied a wrapper around her waist, exposing her upper body. Her breasts were flat and so unnoticeable.
The smell from her tobacco pipe was very strong, stronger than the cigarette smoke that I associated with the big boys who smoked in hideouts, afraid of being caught by parents or other adults.
I greeted her, half prostrated, but she returned a casual greeting and went to the backyard where the bathroom and toilet were located.
She was different from any woman I had ever seen. Right away I told myself that I had seen an iwin, a spirit in human skin. She fit perfectly well into the many descriptions of an iwin that I had heard or read about.
The school books were full of stories of spirits and ghosts. Not only did I know many of the stories, but I was living among those who believed that the stories were true. Adults presented iwin as living beings with powers greater than theirs. Iwin could appear all of a sudden, from nowhere. The woman walked in my direction on that morning, but I had no idea where she had come from. She was definitely not a ghost. I had had an encounter with a ghost some four years earlier. That was also in the early hours of the day. I saw a man wearing a white gown. I told Mama One and others that I had seen my father, since that’s who I thought the man was.
I was bombarded with many questions, each person urging me to describe what I had seen and heard. I must have told them what they themselves had told me about my father. I was probably using the photograph in my head to answer the questions they posed. As I spoke, they all concluded that I must have seen the ghost of my father.
It was not I who reached this conclusion, but adults said that the man I saw was a ghost and I accepted it as true. I confirmed the story of Mama One that she, too, had seen the ghost a few times, in the same spot. It was another confirmation that the dead man was not far from the house and could appear at any time to those he loved. They wanted to be sure that the ghost had not given me a message to relay to them or even an instruction they must obey.
But what I saw on that morning at Ode Aje was no ghost. All moonlight stories portrayed an iwin as smallish and pipe smoking. I had seen one. An iwin could look ragged, naked, half-dressed. This woman was scantily dressed, with just a small wrapper tied around her body. There was not enough light for me to see her fully, to describe all her features.
An iwin revealed only small parts of itself and only in a short appearance so that no one would be able to capture the full picture. The woman spoke little; actually, she mumbled her response, as spirits did in their world. As she had appeared from nowhere, and the main door had been locked (I checked the door twice), I told myself that the woman was one of those iwin that came from the underworld. In moonlight stories and school books, spirits inhabit the forest, caves, tree hollows, the sky, and the underworld. I was fascinated by spirit stories, and the narrators, whether school teachers or adults, always made them sound believable.
In Ode Aje and many other parts of the city, many people, including the educated ones, did not see spirit stories as fantasies, the imaginative creations of fertile minds, but as events, episodes, histories, and reality.
Adults and children used objects to seal oaths, asking ghosts, spirits, and the underworld to punish them if they betrayed anyone. Iwin were among those unseen forces that overwhelmed the living, but they were not included in the list of beings and spirits to be worshiped.
Iwin were not like ghosts who could be venerated or the dead who appeared once a year as masquerades. Iwin were not part of the invisible essence of self, unlike the spirit that dominated the emere or abiku. No one worshiped an iwin, as one did a god or goddess, but they were dreaded beings. An iwin could be so evil that to see it could mean the end of one’s life. One iwin in a popular storybook was after one’s blood, the food she relied upon for survival.
Not all iwin were evil: many actually led one onto the path of success and wealth; others simply gave advice or wisdom. The one I saw did nothing; she simply walked away, not even removing the pipe from her mouth.
I chose to keep the discovery of the iwin to myself. When I had seen a ghost, I had been bombarded with too many questions, many of which I could not answer. I could only describe what I saw. I did not know whether this iwin was evil or good, and she did nothing to me.
In the stories, while many iwin walked away as this one had done, others engaged in a short conversation, even giving instructions. What I saw was big; what I had to say was small. Then again, I was new; I was yet to meet my new friends at school. I knew only a few folk in the household, and my friendship with Kola, my age mate, was only beginning.
The discovery of an iwin was my second research project in life, the first being the pursuit of rail lines and trains. The search for the train ended in my insertion into a mythical worldview, with the train turning me into an emere. The search for an iwin moved me far deeper into cosmology, the internalization of ideas bigger than the self, and an eye-opener to the world beyond. My wings began to grow, but my legs were too big to allow me to fly.
The next day I woke up early. I cannot say that I woke up at the same time since I was not using a clock to determine when to go to bed and wake up. No iwin showed up. Another two days passed, and nothing showed up. I was right: what I had seen was an iwin. This was true to type; like ghosts, iwin revealed themselves in their own time, without notice.
Then I told Kola, with whom I had developed a close friendship in less than a week. Kola said that I had made a big mistake in not asking the iwin for a wish. As far as he was concerned, he needed only a one minute encounter with an iwin.
We began to draw up a request list. Kola wanted the gift of invisibility, to be able to move around without being seen. With this power, he would turn into thin air to fight, take the best clothes from the Indian stores in the new city, watch the movies that I had told him about for free, and even perch on people’s heads and release his faeces on those who had offended him.
He would become a hawk and use his beak to pluck an eye or two from his enemies. When I told Kola about my wish, which was for the iwin to return me to Agbokojo, he heaped a series of insults on me, saying that the iwin already knew that I had nothing tangible to say, which was why she refused to speak to me.
He himself could deliver me to Agbokojo, he assured me, adding that if I paid him a small fee he would carry me on his shoulders so that the whole world could see me. I was convinced, and I revised my wish list: I needed the ability to fly, like birds and airplanes. Airplanes fascinated me, and no one had been able to explain the science of planes to me.
My father’s first son, Adewale, had become a hero due to his decision to travel to the United Kingdom and become a pilot. Kola was not convinced that the ability to fly was enough. “What would happen if you were trapped in a net?” he asked. I was preoccupied with revising my wish list, as I did other things at home and school.
She appeared again, like before, with the pipe and the smoke following her in the morning. Rather than even tying her wrapper around her waist she had simply thrown it over her shoulders, covering only half of her body. This time around, she did not even speak to me or reply to my customary greetings.
She walked away, toward the backyard. I was curious, and I hid behind a door waiting for her to walk back. As she did, still smoking her pipe, she entered a room. From the inside courtyard, facing the front entrance, the room was to the right.
I felt sorry for the occupant of the room, receiving a guest from the underworld so suddenly. Perhaps there was trouble. I hurried to wake up Kola and told him what I had seen. Half awake, he followed me so that I could show him the room. Kola hissed, pushing me so hard that I hit a wall, and said, “You did not see an iwin; you saw Leku, Iya Lekuleja.”
I had seen a human being, not a spirit! It was the word Iya (elderly woman) in his sentence that gave me an instant clue. I must have confused the knowledge in the books and stories with the reality of life, moving too fast between the realm of the underworld and the living, confusing the shells of peanuts with coffins.
Even then, I had no immediate idea what he meant by Leku. As Kola and I went about our ways and chores, I had to wait till after school to talk more. Had I jumped into a river without knowing how to swim? As far as Kola was concerned, everyone knew that the woman was mysterious, but I was the first to associate her with the underworld. I had not noticed her room, the first to the left on entering the house, as it was always locked.
Her room was well located, with windows opening onto the front veranda and the side yard. I never saw the windows open, and until the woman entered the room that morning I never saw the room open either.
Mysteries of the Known
The full discovery of Leku led me to the mysterious world of herbs and magic, secrecy and healing. She actually was an iwin [''a spirit in human skin''] but not of the kind described in the literature. Indeed, no literature, then or now, has been able to record, capture, and analyze the women in Leku’s category. And half of what I later found out I cannot reveal.
By the time I could seek her permission to reveal her essence and quote her, she was long dead. And each time I feel like revealing the full essence I am tormented by an overpowering feeling of awe and danger.
The first time I mentioned a small part of her secret at a seminar at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ibadan, I had a nightmare in which I was pursued by a tiger that would have killed me if I had not awakened in time. Most of my misfortunes, all my negative feelings, and my anticipation of troubles I attribute to a part of me that desires to unlock what I know about Leku. Perhaps I will, but not today, not even tomorrow. Nobody tells all he knows.
Who is writing this?
One of the most prolific writers in the world, in command of multiple expressive forms, registers and styles of expression, from poetry to prose, from narrative to exposition and analysis, a master of proverb discourse, a scholar deeply grounded in the imperatives of self expression as fundamental to the illumination and transmission of civilization, a historian dedicated to deep exploration of the past to clarify the present and shape the future, a consummate writer on Yorba spirituality and philosophy in its arcane palpitations and ideational configurations, unable to articulate understanding of one person, describing himself as locked into silence by a sense of something beyond his full comprehension, something awesome, something numinous, ''inspiring both dread and fascination [constituting] the non-rational element of vital religion'', as Rudolph Otto's term from The Idea of the Holy is clarified in Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, the esoteric, áwo, as understood in Yoruba thought, as these values are embodied for him by the herbalist Leku.
The best visual projection known to me of such correlations of the numinous and the feminine as Falola develops in his account of Leku is in the metal art of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order, centred on veneration of Ile, Earth, uniquely striking even within the global constellation of images of feminine potency. Ogboni art combines stillness and power, the arcane and the human, the masculine, the feminine and the strange.
The female figure in the edan ogboni image below holds her breasts in acknowledgement of their biological and spiritual implications, their nurturing quality an expression of the nurturant role of Ile, Earth, in relation to humanity represented by the couple.
Measure silence as equal to speech, nurturing powers no less potent than the milk of a woman's breasts but as potentially destructive as poison fed to a child from diseased mammaries. Austere dignity, grandly contemplative, regal, aloof, almost transcendental in bearing, ascetic gravitas, evocative of knowledge and power embodied through great sensitivity to creative and destructive possibilities of arcane knowledge, the hidden byways and pathways of knowing into which I travel.
The delicate beauty of zones of generation, humanity's most intimate participation in the creativity of nature, from the stars to insects.
The female figure's genitals are sculpted in delicate beauty like that of the man's, prominently but delicately portrayed to suggest their creative power. Adeyinka Bello's salutation, from within Yoruba ideations, to the evocative power of such visual expressions, complements this art:
'' Iba oko t'o d'ori kodo ti o ro!
Iba obo t'o dori kodo ti o s'eje!
Paying homage to my ancestors
I pay homage to the penis that is hung without bringing sperm;
I pay homage to the vagina that has stopped menstruating.
Paying homage to our elders who have used these organs to bring life and are old now or who are gone but whose contributions can never be forgotten."
Adeyinka Bello from ''Classical Yoruba Aesthetics and Philosophy of the Erotic'' in Cosmos of World Art and Correlative Cultural Forms on Facebook.
Image above: Edan Ogboni couple from the Brune website. All sites accessed 5.5.2023.
She had a successful store on a streetcorner about six miles from the house. This was the most famous store for herbs, ingredients for all diseases and ailments, and mixtures and materials for all kinds of charms, both for good and for evil. Kola took me to the store, and we did not have to disguise ourselves. We walked in and sat down, and she continued to smoke her pipe and attend to customers.
I would visit this store many times in seven years, in part because I became fascinated with her and also because of the knowledge offered by Leku and her store. I doubt if Leku herself could have known the number of items in the store.
Arranged in a way known only to her, they comprised an assortment of all known herbs, dried leaves, roots of many kinds of trees and shrubs, fresh and dead plants, bones of various animals (including tigers, leopards, and hyenas), skulls of various animals, dried rats, rodents, other animals, dry and living insects such as millipedes and centipedes, reptiles (including parts of snakes, lizards, and alligators), rocks and soils, and ritual lamps and pots. Tortoises, snails, and small cats walked around, and they, too, were for sale.
Dangerous scorpions in bottles, as well as snakes in cages, were waiting for food and ready to bite. It was from these various objects, as I came to learn from Kola and others, that she got her name of Iya Lekuleja ( the seller of assorted charms and medicine ). Leku was just an abbreviation, used mainly behind her back; it is shorter, but it cuts off the dignified word, Iya (elderly mother).
Leku was an iya, but she had no children, so this was not a motherhood label. She was superior to all of us, men and women alike. Leku was a man, as they often referred to her as “Kabiyesi,” a title that can be rendered as “Excellency” and is reserved for male kings, or as “Baba Nla,” the great father. Still in the same skin, she was a woman to others, but not as an obinrin (the Yoruba name for women), but as an iya, a superior elder. When men wanted something from her, they would lie down flat on the floor until she gestured to them to stand up. There were women like her, with knowledge and skills that gave them prestige and definitions beyond the association of women with motherhood.
Some among the women had the skill to combine herbal knowledge with incantations to make their charms and medicines work, as in the apetebi. They were the powerful members of the “Club of Sixteen” [ ''since they referred to themselves as Eerindinlogun, which in Yoruba means sixteen...They were female diviners who used sixteen cowries as their main device on the divination tray'' and] who engaged in rituals. Leku knew how to perform rituals, and many could be caught whispering that Leku could kill anyone, but by what means I did not know.
Leku was never home during the day—she left at dawn and returned at dusk. She cooked no food, hardly spoke to anybody in the house, smoked her pipe in silence, and kept to herself in her overcrowded room full of dead plants and insects.
The plants and insects were not objects of dirt, but clusters of valuable materials and knowledge, which required research to reveal their meanings. There was electricity, but she never touched the knob to switch it on. Rather, she used her lamp, multi-eyed with cotton wicks and palm oil.
As Leku poured more oil into the lamp, she would also put in seeds, uttering strange words only she could understand. The words empowered the lamp and fire, providing more than just light.
Leku kept no friends, had no children, and had relatives who revered her but only spoke to her about their diseases or good health. She listened to them, told them what to do, and stopped talking. They thanked her, women kneeling down, men prostrating, both moving on, knowing full well that Leku would not engage in redundant conversations.
She must return to her pipe, to inhale the nicotine that gave her limitless energy, to puff out the smoke that would ward off evil spirits. Wandering spirits, we all believed, hated nothing more than the smell of tobacco and would keep their distance, as far as three miles away. The smell provoked them to flight, but also to insulting human beings, not because smoking was a vice, but because humans were a nuisance to the spirits, not leaving them alone to roam the streets and do their damage.
There were times when, on reaching the house, she would stop and say some words to herself, as if uttering powerful prayers, before entering. Even mysterious were the days when she would enter the house backward, as if she must not see certain people or objects.
[ On being sent on an errand to see Leku and take a message from her ] When I reached Ojagbo, the city ward where Leku’s store was located, she was not to be found. Her store was closed, but not locked.
Leku never locked her store; she would only close it to indicate to her customers and visitors that she had gone for the day. Even the rascally would not dare enter Leku’s store with all the myths surrounding it and its owner.
To threaten to push a boy into Leku’s store was enough to frighten him, as boys all believed that it was full of live scorpions and snakes, sorcerers and witches, and other agents of death.
Leku’s store was her life. Yet women in adjacent and opposite stores said that she had not been seen for days.There were no traces of her. In the case of most other women traders, emissaries would have been sent to their houses to find out why they were absent from work, usually due to an illness that had befallen them, their husbands, or their children, or some emergency, all calling for the expression of sympathy.
However, Leku was not in their league, she did not relate to them, and none would even nurse a desire to find out why she was not at her store. At best, they would say “a a ri iya” (we did not see the elderly woman) and return to their businesses, gesturing to indicate that they were not supposed to know her movements or even bother to find out about her.
Leku was not the kind of woman who could be declared missing. Who would steal a burden, carrying a woman who could become a dangerous scorpion, bite you, and then escape?
The talk about Leku was always closer to truth than fiction [closer to fiction than truth?]—when everyone was complaining of cold, she was hot; and when they were hot, she was cold; when they were hungry, she was full; and when they were full, she was hungry. She reversed the order of existence, a master of her own rules.
When city officials were asking the women around her to buy licenses for their small stores and checking their husbands’ tax receipts in front of their wives, they ran past Leku’s store. Men who had paid no taxes could just sit around her, and the most powerful tax collectors became powerless, as they were so afraid to come near her, lest their fingers should wither away.
Image and Text: Nature Arcana
My spirit roams across various zones of space and time, though grounded in earth, as I go from home to work, work to home, a person who has seen the designs of the universe and whose self has become nothing within that immensity, peering into the womb of time to understand the flowering of its seeds before their maturation, multifarious forms emerging from darkness taking shape from a cosmogonic zone, a cosmic synthesis from dinosaurs to birds, fish to humans, plants to abstract symbols, vast temporal and naturalistic breadth in relation to forms of human creativity, the spiral and the solar luminary, the continuity of existence across all forms of being, the sun, journey and eternity.
Living in the world, but not of it, active in the body of flesh and blood, but attuned to the unity of body with earth while walking the earth and after giving it back to earth, journeying from birth to the beyond even as I exist within infinity.
How did my journey begin? It began through my hearing the voice in the grass, the whisper of power rippling through nature, a sound the source of which I sought through many years, a path leading from my doorstep to horizons unknown, gradually moving from the world as known by everyone to the world as known to few, ablaze with light both radiant and dark, the joyous and the grave, the sombre and the uplifting, darkness empowering, light illuminating.
Image above: Joseph Eze's What an Adult Sees, a Child Cannot See
Image source:Pinterest
Even more wondrous, the amazing cosmos of organic and inorganic forms evident in her store is internalised by Leku, not only in terms of its contents, but also as regarding their uses individually and in combination, a creative power all the more astonishing on account of the spirit of self denying, abstemious service in which it is employed, an image of self sacrificing power:
Leku knew three things, two of which were public knowledge and the third a secret known to only a few.
To start with what was obvious, she was knowledgeable about all items used to cure diseases, that is, she was a trader in herbs and all ingredients for charms and medicine. Her knowledge of traditional pharmacology was deep.
She had not gone to school and had memorized all the items. Even the smaller items, the visible dried leaves, and the wrapped ground leaves ran to over a thousand types. The bone pieces ran to another thousand. Even the various types of clay lamps were many. Leku could produce an object in a split second, pointing to where a customer should go and get it when she was not in the mood to get up.
Leku’s second strength was a source of mystery: she knew the combinations of plants and other objects needed to cure all common diseases, and she could provide advice for the more complicated ailments.
Leku operated in a less than commercial manner. If the babalawo [diviners from the Ifa knowledge system] and herbalists charged for consultations, Leku did not, charging only token fees for her herbs and charms. If the babalawo and herbalists explained the illnesses and diseases and how they wanted to cure them, Leku offered no explanation.
She was recirculating her profits to buy more items for the store rather than for herself. Her only passion was the store, not as a space in which to make money but one in which to make herbs and medicine available to whoever wanted them. She was certainly not counting on riches.
I witnessed her method many times. A woman would walk in complaining that her son was suffering from prolonged stomach pain. Leku would listen to the story. As she picked one herb from one part of the store, she would pose a question, and the answer would prompt her to drop one leaf and take another. When she was done, she would simply instruct, “Grind them together, cook in a boiling pot, and give to your son for two days.”
No more questions, no more explanation. She mentioned her price; the woman paid and left. Leku would not even check the money or touch it, only pointing the client in the direction of a bowl in which to drop it and from which to take the change, which she also never checked. If the woman had no money, Leku would still give her the medicine and refused to reply or respond to the long statement of gratitude. It was not that the gratitude was wasted or the beneficiary should not thank her; it was as if she were saying that her help was rendered on behalf of some higher forces.
When Leku had no answer to a medical problem, she referred the client to another herbalist or babalawo. One day when she saw a very deep wound on my right leg, which left a scar that remains noticeable even today, she advised me to go to Adeoyo, which was a facility for Western medicine. She gave no explanation, just a single sentence.
This combination of inexplicable scope of knowledge and profound asceticism provokes questions as to its source, with a wonderful story emerging about how such an unusual personage came to be:
[ Her ] knowledge impressed even the most talented person. My headmaster once used her in a school sermon, saying that what the teachers wanted us to learn was nothing compared to what Leku knew. This was true, although we were dealing with different kinds of knowledge. Because she knew so much, she became an object of discussions on knowledge.
As the story goes, a powerful tornado had occurred many years before, and she was a victim of it. Carried by the tornado to a distant land, she was suspended in air for over seven years. It was there that she was able to observe the earth and all of its contents, knowing not just the name but the purpose of each item. Suspended without food or water, she could endure hardship, and her body was tiny so she would not need much food to survive. Other than her nonstop smoking, not many saw Leku when she cooked or ate. Even when I saw her cooking pot, it was so small that I could have eaten the entire contents as an appetizer.
The lessons on what to do with all plants, insects, animals, and other objects were given to Leku by heavenly bodies. As the story goes, she signed a pact with the heavenly bodies not to reveal the sources of her knowledge but to constantly renew her vow. As Leku did not transmit this knowledge directly to others, people believed the story. She had no apprentice, no one interested in inheriting the store or learning the herbs. Indeed, when she died her death meant the end of the store and her knowledge, the loss of an entire laboratory and library.
Image and Text: Endless Depth and Infinite Circumference
All knowledge is about relationships. Relationships between the knower and the known. Knowledge aspiring to be as the calabash in its depth and circumference, its depth unfathomable, its circumference endless.
I have dedicated my life to understanding animal, plant and human life and the life of the inert, which most do not see, the essences and relationships of growing things and with other existents, revealing the secrets of the universe.
Hence the knowledge I relate with is of the particulars, the depths and networks of things, each dynamic in its own way, each fulfilling its purpose in a scheme bottomless in its unknowable fullness, perceiving them from as broad a range of angles as possible, a many sided diamond continually revealing new sides of itself, hence I don’t talk much because what is commonplace speech beside the constellations of knowing constantly unfolding before my eyes?
Image above: Joseph Eze's Embodiment Of
Image source: Pinterest
A climatic point of Falola's relationship with the enigmatic yet darkly illuminating figure of Leku is described:
It was Leku’s third type of knowledge that bound us in secrecy and actually made me the most informed about her. A simple act led to some bonding, which in turn led to greater interaction. It started casually, without any thought on my part.
[ He narrates how he helped Leku carry her luggage, leading to friendship between them, but the secrecy and knowledge referenced above are not elaborated on, only stated in general but tantalizing terms, without mapping their contents]
I walked into a deadly trap, like the restless feet walking into a snake pit. Nothing had prepared my mind for it. No warning came in a dream. No clue was visible.
Saturday came quickly, and all the boys gathered at school. We had decided to ignore Leku’s instruction that not all of us should come to the store. We all decided to go, but the rest would stay out of Leku’s reach and sight. One boy said that Leku could not see beyond five feet, which was why people did not move closer to her, so that she could not put them on her list of whom to kill or roast for medication.
...everybody was afraid of Leku for various reasons. Sali told me that he had heard a rumor that Leku could turn a client into a snake and that the skulls in the store were not those of animals but of human beings. According to Sali, several small boys had gone there to buy herbs and never returned, as Leku had converted them into ingredients to make powerful charms. According to Sali, Leku only ate one meal a year, usually around June, and she needed only small snacks for the next twelve months.
[ Sali insisted to Falola that ] “You are alive because Iya Lekuleja’s stomach is full.” [ He] explained that her annual big meal comprised human flesh and blood. In any case, I needed to help him [ since Falola was close to Leku ] .
I was to grab the medication and rush out. In contrast to visiting other places and people, one did not have to rehearse what to say, what words and sentences to avoid, and how long to speak. Leku would not speak anyway.
I had nothing to fear. She had always welcomed me to her store, gesturing for me to sit down, and removing her pipe to signal “bye bye” when I decided to leave. I even took fruits from the store without seeking permission to do so. I would peel bananas and oranges and leave the skins on the ground. Leku would pick them up, sun dry them, and store them for reasons that I did not know. She had in store dried skins of many nuts and fruits, including those that did not even grow in Western Nigeria where the Yoruba are located.
Sali and the rest of his advisory board [ those schoolboys helping Sali with his plans to gain Risi's friendship ] walked jubilantly toward the store [ expecting success for Sali's mission ]. As we approached the site, the boys stopped, leaving me to cross the street while they looked on from a distance.
As I walked in, I was grabbed by two fierce-looking adults and pushed to the back of the store. Two women quickly held up a long piece of blue cloth to create a curtain so that no one could see the inside of the store. Without the curtain, the entire store could be seen from the roadside by onlookers.
Then I saw my mother, my mother’s mother, my mother’s father, and some other faces, about twelve or so. I could not count.
Events were moving too fast for me. They must have been hiding and suddenly appeared when I showed up. I was held on the ground, so firmly that I could hardly breathe. Within two minutes, my entire head was shaved with a sharp knife. I protested once, but when I saw blood I gave up.
Then Leku came with a new blade and made over a hundred incisions on my head. She opened a small container and rubbed a dark-looking powder on the small cuts, speaking in tongues as she did. The words and lines were archaic, too fast for me to grasp. I know the chorus, which was a prayer to cast evil out of my brain.
Then a more frightening part followed, too much for me to bear then and even now as I write. Leku took a dried rat, mixed it with some ingredients in a bowl and stirred it many times. As she prepared my mind for the fact that I would drink the mixture, she removed her cloth, and stood naked for all to see.
She moved in circles many times, uttering archaic words in rapid succession. Then she knelt over the bowl and washed her breasts and vagina into its contents. I very much doubt that anyone paid attention to her nakedness, only to her performance. No one but me was shocked about the short and dirty bath that I witnessed. When she said something they would reply “ase” (amen). Only Leku could ever repeat what she said. For someone who was always quiet, the rapidity of her speech and its esotericism were astounding. One line was repeated many times: “May he not die at the hands of a woman.”
When she finished, she lifted the bowl and asked me to drink. I refused. I was probably telling myself that this could not have been intended for a human being; even if thrown to the ground as a waste product, one should take care not to step in it. I was hit by the two men who had originally grabbed me, ordering me to drink. I did, remembering the saying that we had used in reference to the schoolteachers several times: an oppressor that one cannot stand up to should be committed to God.
I became like an accused man who proclaimed his guilt quickly in order to avoid staying too long on his knees. As I drank the medication slowly, I wanted to throw up. “If you vomit, you will lick all of it with your tongue,” said Leku. I looked around for sympathy, but I realized that I was a cockroach in a court of fowls. It was only my will that kept the dangerous liquid inside me.
The experience stayed with me for a long time; I had to close my eyes before I could swallow any medication. The ceremony was over within a few minutes. Leku returned to her chair; now dressed, she lit her pipe, ordered that the temporary screen be removed, and pretended nothing had happened.
She was so calm that no one would ever associate her with the leadership of the ritual that had just occurred. I was asked to sit down. Everybody departed, saying nothing other than thanking Leku for “removing evil from his head” and “saving his life.” No one was ready to challenge Leku, but they probably knew what they were doing—even one who is feebleminded knows the location of his house.
I stayed in the store for the rest of the day, speechless. I did not even think of the boys who had followed me. I am sure they took to their heels when they saw the screen held up. When the store closed, as darkness came, Leku closed the door.
I noticed that she did not lock it, only putting an assortment of charms in three pots outside it. Neither did she bother to take the money from the bowl. Kola had told me that even if Leku’s money fell on the ground, no one would pick it up for fear of contracting smallpox.
On that evening, everybody I knew was bad. I had committed no offense to deserve their punishment. Even if I had, I told myself that there must be guilt in innocence, just as there is innocence in guilt. I did not understand their willingness to collaborate with Leku if they departed so quickly. To me, all the adults were like the cane that was used to kill a snake but was not invited to share the meal when the animal was roasted.
I carried Leku’s loads, walking side by side for the entire journey. She walked too slowly for me, like the moon that travels slowly as he crosses the city. I could not push her, shout, or walk faster, as I would have done with Sali and my other friends. I was the termite in Leku’s rock: a termite can do nothing to a rock but lick it. I had already licked too much. If the heart is sad, tears will flow like a stream, but I knew that Leku had no eyes to see, and if she did she would say that my eyes smelled. I could do nothing, not even talk or yawn: for the mouse to laugh in the presence of a cat, there must be a hole close by.
I dropped her loads without even caring to look at her room. I went into my own room, without even asking for food. I noticed that no one wanted to speak with me, including Kola, who had gone into hiding: well, he who derided the unfortunate person should carry no blame; it was the fate of the ridiculed that was at fault.
Friends and relatives had become detractors, so I believed, and I had to make sure that they did not damage my destiny. I had become a broken chain that could not regain its wholeness.
I told myself that they were all talking about me, reminding myself of many famous lines in which the disreputable person thinks that people are speaking of him; the wicked are full of suspicion.
As I lay down, I was plotting revenge in my head, thinking of how I would obtain the power to make them eat cow dung. I agreed with what I had heard, that it is better to spend the night in anger than in repentance. I fell asleep, but my sleep must have been short.
Early the next morning, Baba Olopa instructed me to wake up. Since he only woke me up when I was in trouble, I immediately knew that he was calling a dog with a whip in his hand. Leku was ready for me.
On Sunday and Monday, I repeated the journey with Leku, staying with her for three days in her store, and eating only minimally, notably fruits and bean cake. I missed school on Monday and was disconnected from all my friends. I was not allowed to bathe or clean my head or face so that the concoction would not be washed off. I ate and drank little so that the medicine would stay in my body for some time.
I understood Leku a little bit more. When she was not smoking her pipe, she was talking to unseen strangers, appealing to gods, cursing witches, praising herbs, and begging the gods. Too strange for me to understand, she was obsessed with appealing to the gods and all universal forces not to make impotent the plants, roots, bones, and other items in her store. The Yoruba she used to communicate, to talk to herself, and to say all these strange things was not the language we used at home or school.
Leku was so strange that I began to believe Sali, who claimed that the woman had twenty-four eyes. When I thought she was dozing off, she was quick to welcome a customer to her store. I paid attention to what the customers wanted, much of which sounded curious and strange. Some needed medicine to ward off bad dreams, and Leku would give them powders to apply to their eyelashes or to drink dissolved in water. The regular customers said nothing, just collecting their routine medication. A few men came for mixtures to treat sexually transmitted diseases, and Leku asked one of them to show her his penis, using a short stick to examine it.
I did not understand the purpose of the magic involved in incising my head and forcing a powerful concoction down my throat. I could not have understood it. I knew that they had performed elaborate magic on me, casting out some spell but returning some forces to create a balance. They believed that I was evil, based on only one piece of evidence: I wanted to procure the medicine to help a friend.
Could they have had other evidence unknown to me? I was not the one who was after Risi. It had never occurred to me to have a girlfriend. I had had a wife or even several in dramas in which I acted the role of a successful man or a chief, but I did not turn these dramas into dreams.
No one had ever discussed sex with me. It was not one of those topics that came up in any discussions among us: talking about soccer and bicycle rides had greater priority. The big boys used to talk of girls, but not of sex. Sali wanted Risi, but he never fully explained to us what he wanted her for. I was further confused about their fear that I would be destroyed by a woman, necessitating the use of magic to prevent it. I could not understand Leku’s intent since I was not Sali.
Were they saying that I should stay away from all women or some women? Was the magic about overcoming the power of the naked body, fully revealed in the aging nakedness of Leku? Could it be that the love of a woman would not undermine [ would undermine?] my masculinity, sap my energy, damage my brain?
Would I be saved from the influence of men like Sali and the members of his advisory board? Could it be that evil and women were associated and had to be disconnected? Did I drink enough of the hidden contents of breast and vagina that I would no longer desire them? Did I drink the breast and vagina juice to make me scared of their excesses? Or was the medication to assert manliness over femininity or to prevent a possible perpetual subordination to a woman? To one who is ignorant, a small garden is a forest.
By the time I could seriously demand answers, Leku had completely overwhelmed me, showing me her other side, which was more secretive, more frightening, more threatening, and more powerful. I became like a person who, because he is bored to death at a meeting with the king and his chiefs, decides to put a lot of salt in his mouth: it is impossible to spit out the salt and also impossible to swallow the saliva. I couldn’t [ could?] learn but not talk, see but not admit.
As I learned more about Leku, without all the details of what she did, I worried no more about my own rituals and experience. Eventually, I was able to claim, and even then only privately, that I fully understood her essence, her representation in the realm of the living and the underworld. I never said that I understood her power or its sources. I could only know bits and pieces: but for the reality of death, even diviners and herbalists could claim to be God.
Whenever I read the literature or listen to speeches claiming that African women lack power, I repeat quietly “Leku, Leku, Leku,” to remind myself that the picture has never been fully revealed. A mouth that turns into a knife will cut its own lips. The full picture will not be revealed until many more people discover an iwin who will either grant their requests or torment them. Even then, the experience of the last person to die will be hard to imagine.
Image and Text: Transformations through Feminine Spaces
Through the waters of my breast and secret place, I blessed him with the empowerments of nurturing and regeneration. We are at times forced to encounter the sacred mystery, stumbling into knowing through paths unanticipated, as my apprentice came to me on that fateful day where we met as I moved to perform my morning rituals of cleaning the body.
What Falola underwent at the hands of Leku may be seen as a version of rituals in various spiritual cultures in which female entities, their powers focused through their breasts and vagina, are invoked as enablers of spiritual cleansing, empowerment and transformation, possibilities also foregrounded by the scope of ideas associated with feminine personalities in classical Yoruba thought, as I describe in Developing Universal Ogboni Philosophy and Spirituality: My Journey, using various sources, in relation to Ogboni symbolism, where female breast and vagina visibility is central.
A more explicitly actualized form of the kind of ritual to which Falola was subjected is the story from Tibetan Buddhism of Guru Rinpoche's encounter with a dakini, a female spirit entity who guides seekers of spiritual wisdom. The dakini Sangwa Yeshe is a spiritually potent female figure, as Leku is, humanly embodied, like Leku, but non-human, unlike her, although resonant with the uncanny associations evoked in people by Leku's overwhelming spirituality.
In the story of Rinpoche's meeting with Sangwa Yeshe, powers associated with the female form, in general, and the vagina, in particular, of a spiritually potent female figure, are invoked as a means of spiritual regeneration of a male personage, a willing supplicant, unlike Falola, painfully forced into the situation.
Rinpoche's encounter with Sangwa Yeshe is surreal and transformative, an experience that would be evocative of terror in an unprepared mind, a recreative process in which external and inward processes of the kind Falola undergoes are experienced with the totalistic force of inwardness.
Falola's own experience moves from the external to the internal. He is first exposed to Leku's nakedness, seeing her naked form. The externality represented by the physical form which that nakedness projects stamps his mind through the psychological impact of being forcefully and suddenly exposed to that taboo sight.
That inward, psychological reconfiguration is reinforced by his being forced to drink a concoction into which Leku's breasts and vagina have been washed, a fantastic situation the phantasmagoric character of which is amplified by the physically and auditorily dynamic atmosphere she generates, moving rapidly in circles round the child as she speedily chants words from Yoruba, the language she shares with the unwilling initiate, but the sounds of which are alien to him, an esoteric dialect.
Along similar, but much more intense lines, Rinpoche invites Sangwa Yeshe to bless him, upon which she responds with a combination of physical and verbal reconfigurations of Rinpoche, sacred sound and human form conjoining in remaking the human being as he passess through immersion within the utmost penetralia of that female figure, remade within the waters of her uniquely feminine physicality:
''When Guru [ title of a spiritual teacher] Rinpoche entered the palace of the Queen Dakini [ a female spirit entity who guides seekers of spiritual wisdom], Sangwa Yeshe…she was seated on a throne of sun and moon discs [ symbols of power as traversing the celestial range evoked by the two primary expressions of day and night, the sun and the moon], dressed in charnel ground ornaments [ ceremonial objects worn on the body for use in rituals at cremation grounds and therefore evoking transcendence of earthly life] and holding a skull-cup [ a skull may symbolize physical embodiment and its enabling of knowledge of the unity of spirit and matter as well as the transcendence of focus on the material world as self sufficient unto itself. Drinking from a skull could therefore indicate identification with this vision of reality] and wooden drum [ the drum may suggest processes initiated through sacred sound].
Guru Rinpoche approached her with the appropriate offerings, prostrations, and circumambulations, requesting the outer, inner, and secret empowerments [various, interwoven aspects of spiritual enablement and enlightenment].
She responded by transforming him into the seed syllable HUM [ a mantra, a particularly concentrated form of sacred speech which may embody the essence of a divine personality] and conferring on him these three empowerments with her body: first, she took the HUM on her lips; then she swallowed him and he received abhiseka [immersive consecration represented by bathing] in her stomach; next she empowered him in her secret place [ most likely, her vagina, a central image of the unity of consciousness and generation of life in Tantric Hinduism and Buddhism, an orientation in those religions emphasizing the unity of spirt and matter, of ultimate reality and its material expressions, a context in which the vagina's enabling of sexual pleasure and generation of life are understood in relation to consciousness, as expressed through the senses, and to the generation of life as cosmic processes, these two possibilities conjoined in the idea of the vagina as enabling or representing processes and sites of cosmic birth and of the spiritual rebirth of the initiate].
Finally, she passed him through her secret lotus [ the lotus, the radiant beauty of the careful structuring of its petals rising above muddy water, is a central symbol of spiritual unfolding in Buddhism and Hinduism] her vagina [ the vagina, in its enablement of pleasure and new life, associated therefore with sensation as an aspect of consciousness and generation of life as a cosmic quality ( The Yoni Tantra, trans. Mike Magee, shivashakti.com) is a crucial form in Tantra, a strain in Hinduism and Buddhism emphasizing the mutuality of the material and spiritual worlds (David Gordon White, ''Introduction'', Tantra in Practice, ed. David Gordon White, 2000) ] , and with these blessings his body, speech, and mind were purified of defilements.
These constituted the outer, inner, and secret empowerments he sought, purifying the three obscurations [ obstacles to spiritual enlightenment and power constituted by the limitations of human nature].
Through this blessing and others, he came to be known as Thotreng Tsal, or "strength of the rosary of skulls'' [ a rosary of skulls, like the circlet of severed human heads images of her show as worn by the female Hindu deity Kali (The Sword and the Flute:Kali and Krsna: Dark Visions of the Terrible and the Sublime in Hindu Mythology-David Kinsley) may suggest embodiment of transcendence of the limitations of material existence represented by the human physical body, particularly as symbolized by the human head].
From Dakini's Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism, Judith Simmer Brown, 2002, 254. Similar symbolism, carefully interpreted, emerges in the account of Padma Sambhava's encounter with a dakini in Sardar Laden et al (trans) and Evans-Wentz' edited The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1968, 132-133.
Poro society initiates of the Senufo of Côte d'Ivoire and neighbouring countries crawl through a hole in the body of a sculpture symbolizing the Ancient Mother, the female aspect of the supreme deity, a space representing the vagina and the womb as generative spaces, in this instance as zones of rebirth in a cognitive sense, images of the Ancient Mother also showing her as feeding a child from her breast, giving both biological nourishment and the milk of knowledge.
( Stiched together from Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, ''Senufo Arts and Poro Initiation in Northern Côte d’Ivoire", Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Kathy Curnow, The Bright Continent: African Art History}
''A statue of Ancient Mother is shown to novices during the Poro learning process, in part as an indication that beyond the obvious lies the hidden, an idea also exemplified by the secret language learned by novices.
Initiation begins with boys being taken from their biological mothers to enter a period of dislocation in the compound of Ancient Mother and under her care. Ancient Mother absorbs the young novices, who are not yet seen as human.
She will symbolically give birth to them many years later, after their initiation is complete. New initiates undergo a symbolic death through such rituals as crawling through a muddy tunnel. They are reduced to a kind of emptiness, a liminal or in-between status.
Over the long course of their initiation, they confess their breaches of acceptable behavior, and undergo intensive instruction in the male arts of living and in the Poro language and other lore. They submit to numerous ordeals and tests, including small cuts inflicted by Ancient Mother's "leopard."
At one point, they pass through a narrow opening called "the old woman's vagina" to enter a symbolic womb. At the end of the process, tutors lead graduating initiates out through an actual door, signaling their rebirth as issues of Ancient Mother.
Now fully socialized men and complete human beings, they have been nourished by the "milk of knowledge" at their Mother's breast, as is keyed in the carving's iconography. Only superficially a biological nursing mother, then, an image of Ancient Mother is a veiled and rather abstract sign of the systematic body of knowledge acquired by Poro initiates''.
From ''African Maternity Figures'' at Rand African Art, as distilled from Roy Sieber and Roslyn Adele Walker's African Art in the Cycle of Life and The National Museum of African Art. Accessed 5th May 2023.
Image above: Yoruba Ogboni sculpture, most likely depicting Onile, Owner of Earth and Owner of Home, the latter as represented by the Ogboni meeting house, a microcosm of society and ritual dramatizer of humanity's existence as children of Earth.
The female figure is naked, triumphantly poised as she holds her breasts, as well as displaying her vulva, strategeic markers in Ogboni symbolism of human biological generation and nurturing.
Further Adventures with the Magical Herbalist
Falola's experience with Leku continues with his interaction with her in the context of her hidden involvement in South-Western Nigerian politics as a consultant and a spiritual specialist, as described in Counting the Tiger's Teeth. His errand to find her and take a message from her leads to his discovering her role in the South-West Nigerian peasant rebellion known as the Agbekoya Revolt, prosecuted by the rebels through both material and spiritual weapons:
...after a long walk, we reached the village of Kusela, which had been deserted as people were talking about an impending war. I knew the village, and I was surprised that we were coming here. We passed by the empty houses and reached the farms. There she was! I could now collect whatever message I had to take from Leku and head back to Akanran which I missed so much.
Leku had been at work, perhaps overworked for a person of her age and smallish stature. She was frailer than the last time I had seen her, and she looked tired as well. She could no longer stand fully erect. She was moving more slowly than before, and her words came too slowly.
She was at center stage, directing a large number of people to grind various herbs and mix them with other ingredients. These were for medicine, charms, and rituals. The wet ground plants and seeds were the visible components, but the most potent were the words, the incantations she chanted over those items which transformed ordinary leaves to something else. Memorize and repeat what Leku said to those plants, you would not be able to produce the effects that she was able to produce with her own incantations! Hers were the ogidi ogede, “concentrated incantations” with potency.
Those incantations, which I heard at different times in various forms, when written down sometimes looked like biblical psalms. The words communicated magical meanings, capable of turning ordinary-looking pouches of leather into power. These pouches were all over the place, in hundreds, ranging from small ones that could hold a few cowries to larger ones that could take more objects. The smaller pouches were put in pockets or sewn on shirts; the bigger ones could be worn around the neck or waist, or tied to the arms. There were no leather workers around, so I figured that the pouches had been brought to this hidden farm.
Leku had left the city to become part of a large team of herbal and charm makers, working together at a secret location. Only those behind closed doors knew what went on inside. She must have left the city days before to come to Kusela. No one could come to the farm without secret codes, without being led there by the gate keeper, a man believed to be capable of seeing the “very inside” of human beings, to know their contents and what they were actually thinking—their intentions and level of wickedness and goodness.
The gathering at Kusela [ was] mainly [ of ] herbalists and diviners (babalawo) and their apprentices. They spoke various Yoruba dialects, and they were from all over the land—from Ijebu-Igbo in the south, Owo in the east, Ikare in the north, Ilaro in the west. I did not know what to call them: a diocesan council of eminences or a conclave of priests? They called themselves “Awo Osan,” that is, the “cult of daylight,” which might mean that there could be an awo oru (cult of the night) or an awo asale/awo irole (cult of the evening). Or does awo osan refer to the good and awo oru refer to the evil?
They were working together like a team: The fingers may look different, one short, the other long, and a thumb may look sideways, but all must cooperate to get any work done.
In that long-gone past, the babalawo had a role in selecting a king for them, interpreting the course of life, changing a bad destiny to good, performing midwifery, telling people what to do, and even more so what not to do.
Leku was more of a healer than a diviner. She knew about the power of herbs and dead bones, roots and tree bark, seeds and skins, and all their various limitless combinations needed to treat a host of diseases. She was not a babalawo, but, on October 19 and on the days thereafter, she was among them, directing them on what to grind, and the ingredients to combine. To me, she was like a resource person but to them, a superhuman whose words carried divine weight.
She was so quick to anger, and making a mistake near her was a mistake in itself: Her body language would communicate displeasure, especially her eyes, which would turn wicked. She was a commanding presence, as if even those who divined already knew from their divination trays that Leku was untouchable and could harm them.
The apprentices were always terrified, trembling when they moved closer to her, treading carefully, bowing almost to the point of never even seeing her face to take her instructions. As I stood erect observing her, panic-stricken men signaled to me to bend, not to look at her; I would stand, disobedient, rude, untamable, rotten, and raw, as far as they were concerned.
The space was active, with one task or another performed with little communication. People prepared herbal concoctions, half explained as preventive charms; the other half were stuffed in pouches without any explanation. People came to bring plants, corn, beans, powder, and pouches. People left to take with them concoctions and bags of herbs and leather pouches.
I was now an active observer of a complicated knowledge assembly, moving from one babalawo to another—listening, hearing, and looking. I could report what I saw, but the meanings were never clear to me. Both their process and its outcome were vague, appearing disconnected. They divided themselves into groups undertaking different tasks and missions. Some were preparing fortification medicine and rituals, preparing ingredients of wholeness and health that people could take in anticipation of health problems, to prevent a host of diseases, and to cure fatigue and fever.
The herbal concoctions for diseases were made for many purposes. They expected malaria attacks, and they put many herbal liquids in bottles. I was asked to prepare labels, writing iba (fever) on pieces of paper, each glued to a bottle with liquefied cassava starch. The bottles were available to anyone for free.
Men collected as many as they wanted for their wives and children to drink, whether they had fever or not. The preparation of the herbal medicine was also dependent on a large number of children and women who kept visiting with baskets of plants on their heads. I did not know where they were coming from, or who was organizing them. They dropped the baskets and were ordered to leave, which they did without questions. Once in a while, a few were asked to stay behind to work with pestles and mortars to pound the herbs to pulp.
I saw the workers combining the plants in various ways, changing them according to the diseases they were intended to cure, but the most common medicines were for dysentery and malaria. The use of the preparations varied: Some were put into caps and hats, and many rags were soaked in herbal preparations. Those on caps and hats were expected to blend with the fabric and then be worn. I did not know what diseases they would cure or how; and they appeared too dirty to me to put on my head or to be good for human consumption.
Image and Text: Journey's Beginning
I began the journey in quest of the mysteries of plants, animals and humans as a child, learning from my mother and later venturing into the forest to cultivate relationships with nature, the plants, animals and presences there becoming my teachers through the beauty of silence, knowledge gained through nakedness of spirit, as I opened myself to their sublime influences while being also sensitive to the sinister even within those spaces.
Nature speaks in her own language if one is ready to hear, projects deep meaning to eyes opended to see, hearing and seeing that the natural world herself enables through companionship with her.
The miniscule and the expressive conjoin forcefully in concentration of form enhanced by nakedness as the elegant face is composed, concentrated, holding a bowl in a votive act, the pointed chin leading from the inverted triangle constituted by the face, and the rest of the bodily structure, seeming to converge at the body’s center, the chest, evoking a sense of totalistic focus.
Beauty dramatized by the exquisite face, elegant coiffure and carefully proportioned total body. Power evoked by ascetic concentration, in the combination of nakedness and votive activity.
Image above: Sculpture from the Baoule of Côte d'Ivoire
African Arts Gallery
Accessed May 2023
Mistress of Ancient Communication Systems
The message Falola takes back from Leku demonstrates her mastery of aroko, another aspect of the classical Yoruba knowledge system:
In the very middle of the night on October 29, Leku woke me up. [ She ] walked me through the hallway and led me to the front of the house. I was confused as to what she was up to. As quiet as she was, she was full of tricks and surprises.
She did not know that I had made up my mind to leave. For me to announce my exit or now ask her where she was leading me was to open the mouth of a cobra to see its teeth. Did Leku know my mind, and was she now leading me to the beehive to disturb the nest and release the bees in hundreds to sting me?
My mind was instantly clouded. As she walked too slowly, I clenched my teeth and tried to walk like a snail behind her. Both of us were now engaged in an affair without a nose.
When we reached the front of the house, the women who had been keeping vigil outside came forward. When they saw Leku, they dispersed. She crossed the road to the other side. It was dark, and the light from her lamp was not strong.
There was probably now a message to give to others, but certainly not a careless one: Her tongue had now arrived to sew things together, although Leku’s tongue would never spread beyond her mouth. Leku did not have a yellow mouth, as those with yellow mouths communicate unreliable words, and they must be ignored.
Since she did not greet me or ask how I had endured for so long [ while waiting for this message], how the pinch from the shoe tormented my foot, surely Leku must have been ready to give me a package for Pasitor. But Leku had no package, did not tie any to her wrapper, and the only thing she had on her was the lamp.
Where then was the package that I had been waiting for all along? Blood rushed to my veins, but Leku could not see it. Divining cowries were fighting one another: The crisis was so great that the matter could no longer be resolved by the gods. I kept quiet, not aiming at walking about town with my belly, a foolish kind of behavior.
Then came the very low voice with which Leku spoke, asking me to deliver a package of words, not of objects. I must tell Pasitor the following:
1.) The moon and the sun do not hold a meeting; one is not available during the day and the other must
work at night;
2.) The cat, the tiger, and the lion are family members; all cherish raw meat; and
3.) In the rivulet of blood, a spoonful collected cannot tell us whose blood it is; in the house of Death, fresh and dry skulls litter the ground for Death to walk over.
Leku then placed her right hand on my head, said some meaningless words and phrases, and concluded that the message was forever sealed in my memory. Indeed, it has been sealed there, word for word.
We crossed the road back to the house; she handed over the lamp to me and asked me to leave immediately. I wanted to leave anyway, but now my departure was official, sanctioned, and the mission, although it had taken many more days than expected, was successful. Patience had now given birth to a baby: success.
When I wanted to move to the left of the house, she asked me to go to the right and told me never to make any left turn unless that was the only option open to me. When I asked how I would avoid a left turn, she said to make a right turn in a circle, and then walk backwards to the left, then turn. I did not understand the reasons behind any of her words or her instruction to avoid left turns.
The message reaches those it is meant for:
When the joy of seeing me subsided, Pasitor took me out of the church to the very compound where my journey had begun. I was eager to deliver the message, but Pasitor asked me not to, saying that the message required more than two eyes and ears to receive it. If I was an elephant capable of carrying its load, Pasitor was not big enough to receive it from me. All my rivulets had now become a large river that many wanted to swim in. Pasitor and the others had been waiting for the rain with the big drops. I saw myself as a star, competing with the moon in importance. Leku’s words had turned me into a rich boy, a live reed stuck in the mud.
Unlike before, I was allowed to enter the house, where Pasitor joined many other men in a crowded room. Their “chairman,” wearing an agbada (a large, free-flowing garment), thanked me for assisting them and asked me to deliver the message, telling me neither to add nor subtract, change the order, or forget anything. This was quite easy since I had memorized the strange words and recited them to myself times without number. Whether it was Leku’s hand placed on my head or my ability to remember things learned by rote, I delivered the words as they were originally rendered. Line by line; not a word more, not a word less.
Panic struck all the faces. Elephant hunters are mobilized with only one word: unite! They were now united in sorrow as they looked at me, the elephant with the big message. Raised heads were lowered as if someone just died, jaws were widely opened, and flies would have an easy passage all the way to the throat.
All eyes stared at me. A messenger has no malice; malice is the one who sent him. The king has excreted in public; you want to run away from the smell, but doing so without permission will bring trouble. Someone has to clean up and collect the feces. My job was done, turning my riches into a mist that evaporated in the twinkle of an eye.
The man who broke the silence added to my confusion with his explanation: “Iru aroko buruku wo leyi?” (What kind of bad aroko is this?). Aroko was a coded message. As Pasitor later told me, it was a way of communicating in code between two parties. Code words included names of people, animals, food items, and the like. They could be given in combination with objects to express messages of peace, war, reconciliation, and much more. A few among those present who understood the words began to interpret the messages:
1) Many of us would die;
2) The death could not be prevented and would include both the young and old;
3) Enemies would never be reconciled; and
4) Friends would betray one another; trust would be broken.
The mood was gloomy. They had been expecting a message of comfort or a solution to their problem. What they got did not make them happy. The house of a rich man is always beautiful from the outside to strangers who do not know about the strife within. The powerful were inside, as those outside would be thinking, but it was a house of sorrow.
I understood what an aroko was, how coded words could be decoded by those who understood. I became fascinated by aroko and requested Pasitor to introduce me to those men who explained Leku’s message in ways that others accepted. No one had ever mentioned aroko to me in school; perhaps the schoolteachers did not know about it either. As I came to understand aroko, I realized that objects and words opened a library of meaning.
Perhaps Leku had sent an object preceding my words so that the objects were then combined with the words to reach the gloomy conclusion. Aroko delivered communications, and replies were offered also in a symbolic manner so that if you sent words and embers of fire to me to indicate trouble and war, I could send a calabash full of water to you to indicate that I had the means to quench your fire; or I could send you additional firewood to say that we should keep fighting.
To receive a string of six cowries was being asked to visit the sender; ten in a string meant that this visitation was urgent. If your reply was to send a string of two cowries, you were rejecting the offer of visitation and announcing that you were no longer on good terms. If two were sent to you without prior conversation, you would expect bad news: Your father or mother was probably dead. When other objects were added to those strings of cowries, the contents of the message changed: Add the red tail feather of a parrot to a string of six cowries, and you would be telling the person that he had outstayed his welcome; change the feather to that of a guinea fowl, and the message would change to one of goodwill.
“Baba Chairman,” as the head of this gathering was called, adjourned the meeting with a very sad face and in a dejected voice. When someone asked him to make an effort to call a babalawo to make sacrifices, he dismissed him as an ignorant man who did not know that Leku did not talk lightly and knew more than any babalawo in the land. “Awon aye lo ran an si wa”; Leku sent them a message she had received from powerful forces that no sacrifices could change. He told everyone to double all their energies, to commission more charms, and to watch out for evil forces.
Image and Text: Between Symbols and Expression
At the core of communication is understanding, the understanding of the communicator directed at developing understanding in the person being communicated with.
Can the scope of the ability to communicate ever match the range of understanding one has?
How may I share the awareness reached through my relationship with nature, in which, in looking at a leaf, I see its networked beauty, patterns of veins amidst green splendour taking my mind to the branch on which it has grown, the branch to the tree, the tree to the roots, the roots to the soil they draw nourishment from, the soil to the water that feeds it, those roots nurturing the tree as its draws in sunlight to mix with water in feeding that leaf, water which is part of the liquiditiess of ocean and river, rain and clouds, under the earth and in human and animal forms, sunlight taking my mind to the solar luminary, from that to other stars and celestial bodies?
Understanding a leaf in its fullness implies understanding its physical nature, the ultimate source of that nature in the source of the universe and the relationships generated by those identities, relationships involving an expanding network of associations covering all possibilities perceptible from one's own standpoint, possiblities grasped in a partially unique way by oneself, leaving aside the vantange points of other humans or even of animals, who may also perceive the leaf, other vantage points only partially accessible or totally inaccessible.
If understanding the universe implies perceiving it from various perspectives, is a totalistic grasp of all possible perspectives possible? The ability to reach beyond what is naturally possible to conceive what is perhaps even impossible, a central quality of the creature who is not defined by what is immediately possible.
In the midst of such sensitivities, I therefore prefer silence to speech, the most abbreviated symbolic forms to words, conciseness to efforts to unfold in sounds what cannot be fully unfurled.
When I do speak, I prefer Ọ̀rọ̀ to ọ̀rọ̀, primal sound to everyday speech, the naked potency of the rhythms encapsulating the creativity at the heart of everything that exists, rather than their diminished forms expressed as the sounds made in everyday conversation, as I try to traverse the space between these possibilities, the primal and the everyday, the in-between space of careful articulation, since one cannot exist at the highest levels at all times, except in solitude, instead making each expression a dialogue between the fleeting and the permanent, between the names underlying all possibilities of existence and their expressions in human life, between odù and ayé.
Image Above
As a young woman seeking arcane knowledge and power, I had myself tattooed with symbols of the understanding and potencies I sought, the better to assimilate their meanings by contemplating them on my own form.
"How will you get any man to marry you with all these strange images on your body?" my mother would scream when she saw my tatoos. I could not see why the concerns of a prospective husband should define how I pursued my ultimate goals, so I kept my peace and continued as I wanted.
The men came and went, seeking the flame of the nubile young woman, but my mind was elsewhere, though I did drink of the sweet waters.
Eventually, the allure of youth and the mature beauty enabled by time faded, and I became to others both woman and man, woman by gender, man by prestige.
I embody, however, all the women I have always been. The child fascinated by the unknown. The youth, hungry for the the curative and the arcane. The mature woman, in hot pursuit of healing powers and mysterious knowdge and skill. The old woman steeped in the creative and the occult.
Image Sources
Left-7 Chakra tatoo from Bodhi Tree Tatoo Studio on Pinterest; middle- Chakra Alignment from I Am JoeInk; right-Tattoos by Lord Yatta at ‘’Linguist Staff Symbols: Their Meaning and Use Among Akan Speaking People’’ from Earth Metropolis African Art. All accessed May 2023.
The Final Departure of the Adept and the Consummating Initiation of the Acolyte
Falola's concluding encounter with Leku is climatic in its mysterious drama:
I lived with Leku [ “ my ‘godmother’] at Ode Aje from 1963 to 1965, for most days of the year … I cannot thank her enough, and our relationship requires a separate book.
....
On Friday, December 12, 1969, Leku sent for me. Her first statement was a blow: “My time is up: I want to go home!”
People of her age, according to a strong belief, actually knew when to die. They would begin to communicate it as a premonition. Sometimes, they would be conversing with their dead relatives. Or, we would accuse them of losing their coherence and memory. The phrase “eating the tongue” could be used to describe their meaningless statements.
When you gave them food, they would eat little and say they were saving the rest for the journey they were embarking upon. They would ask you whether you saw the woman who died three years ago. When the elderly began to “eat the tongue,” you needed to look at your savings and start to make funeral arrangements. If you needed blessings, this was the time to collect them. If you needed to stake a claim on a piece of land, this was the time to let the elderly transfer it to you, as there were no written wills.
Then Leku told me that I was the only one she wanted to tell. For a woman who did not like to talk, she gave a long speech, almost an hour nonstop—telling an incredible autobiography; the time is not yet ripe enough to retell it. She punctuated her speech by puffing and putting more tobacco in her pipe. She gave me the pipe and asked me to inhale it three times. I did. She held on firmly to my head, asking me to swallow the smoke instead of releasing it. I did. She said certain things that I will always remember. She told me what to do with her stuff and stores.
She asked me to take some soap and go to the stream with flowing water to wash with it, in the early hours of the morning. I must do so within twenty-four hours of her death. She told me the reason for this, a reason I will share in later years.
Finally, she licked an agbalumo seed, asked me to open my mouth, put it in my mouth as if it were a kiss, but not the kiss of two lips touching in a romance, and asked me to lick it. The agbalumo is a seed that grows inside a pod, much smaller than a cocoa pod. In looking for an English word for it, I found that agbalumo is called the “white star apple.” The tree on which it grows carries the Latin name of Chrysophyllum albidum, which has several varieties that do well in tropical weather.
Like cocoa, the seed has a creamy taste, and when licked, it is revealed as a very beautiful, hard seed that one can play with. Schoolchildren used it to practice counting numbers, among other things. After seven days, I was instructed, I must go and bury the seed at a location she specified. I still know the location and what I should not do with the site.
Then she recited incantations that would allow me always to overcome all adversities, so that no matter how hard the struggle, the other person would lose. She gave me a long list of instructions about key aspects of life.
Then, she brought out three bowls whose contents I did not recognize. She asked me to choose one. I did, and she said that my fate was sealed, irrevocable. She did not tell me the details of the fate, but she told me the ultimate punishment for attempting to deviate from it. There is a dreadful component, tormenting even to remember. She warned that what I would later call mistakes and accidents would be part of the journey, as those mistakes and accidents were built into the fate, in part to ward off negative forces and people.
She asked me to look away from her and told me I must never see her again, must never attend her funeral, and must never see her grave. And she uttered her last words, slowly as a command:
Ohun ti o ba se di asegbe
Any act that you execute is sealed, unassailable
This concluded her speech and rituals, ending with those powerful words telling me that whatever I do, which she never specified, is unquestionable, permanently irreversible. I could even wear a grass robe and move new fire.
The next day, Leku died at dawn. Farewell, Iya Leku. I await Leku’s permission to say more. The time will come.
The Iya-hun of many mysteries
Odor of smoke and of the numinous fire
Enclosed in a closet of snakes and scorpions
Dark leather belts on minuscule buttocks.
Closed eyes that see far beyond common sight
Weak limbs that run faster than a hunted hare
Feeble fingers that cut like knives
The wisdom of the deep jungle and of the township
The tempting grain that even a fowl must not dare to swallow.
A tall tree once attempted to fall and crush Iya-hun
Ka-ka, it cracked, and crashed almost, then . . . it stopped mid-way
Iya-hun, the crafty smith, turned the tree into an umbrella
That protects and secures the eye of the earth.
Where the three knuckles of time meet
The solo sun that beats cowardly men and their manhoods!
The mindboggling moon, daughter of the wild spirit
The restless One that shuttles between
The crypts of heaven and earth.
When Iya-hun arrived on earth,
She had ten heads, twenty starry eyes
And with them, she sees the four corners of the earth, at once
Holds dialogue with heaven and earth at once
Eats with one mouth, drinks with another,
And vomits all she had in her womb with the tenth mouth.
Her small body is resting in a corner,
But her heads sleep in a dozen other places:
Today at the foot of a mighty rock
Tomorrow at the ocean’s deep
Ten big heads balanced on the frail body
Of a chameleon that leaps and never sleeps.
Iya-hun carries the bag of the world’s wisdom with her left hand
With her right hand she holds the calabash of life.
The only being that inhabits the sky in company of birds;
In the waters she makes her abode with crocodiles and whales;
A tether that enters the ground not once, and not twice, but at will!
In the sky, Iya-hun is fed by the birds; in the waters by the whales;
And underneath [in] the ground by half-human, half-animal gnomes.
That I no longer can see Leku does not mean that she cannot see me.
My tears are invisible, like the cries and tears of the fish hidden by the water in which it lives.
I should stop crying in the rain and wait for a drier season.
I was now a few days short of turning seventeen—on January 1, 1970.
Image and Text: To Leave and to Remain
When the sun dies, it leaves the stars behind, bearing fruit in the lives of people one will never know. I am not able to leave the details of my knowledge behind, but a seed, the nucleus of that knowledge, has been planted in the child who is so fascinated by me, the hunger for knowledge and for service, the same hunger that drives me.
Will he be able to penetrate into the arcane realms I inhabit, the zone around which all knowledge constellates, the bottomless potentiality that enables existence? Will he be able to travel from the outskirts, the circumference, of those possibilities, to its centre?
Image Above
The circumference and centre of the calabash, empty centre and structured form, space and concreteness fusing, empowered by freedom from space and time, transmutation by fire into a centre of force between the manifest and the unmanifest, drawing upward sparks of aspiration and inspiring fires of desire for the ultimate.
A fruit is ripended by the sun-fire. The body is ripended by the blood-fire. The mind is ripended by the life-fire. The self is transmusted by the transition-fire. Fire matures things, changes them, translates them to a higher order which is the capacity to nourish phenomena other than themselves. Ripeness, an outcome of a slow burning process. The highest cosmic idea, the interdependedence within all living phenomena.
(Second paragraph-Mazisi Kunene on fire, inspired by Zulu thought, in Anthem of the Decades. ''The self is transmuted by the transition-fire'' is an addition to Kunene's lines).
Image source: The Rosicrucian Heritage, No.2. 2011, from AMORC, The Ancient Mystical Order of
the Rosy Cross
A Magnificent Contribution to Accounts of Masters in Classical African Spiritualities
On reading Falola's account of Leku quoted above, I was struck speechless, my mind filled by a profound silence in which thought was eliminated, yet leaving my mental space alive with a deep sense of meaning, suggesting I had been changed in a visceral but subtle manner, on reading Falola's magnificent contribution to what I understand as a severely underdeveloped field in African non-fiction, first and second hand accounts of spiritual masters in African classical traditions, those predating Christianity and Islam and often surviving the later dominance of those two religions.
There is an urgent need for texts that image the personalities of these figures, their ways of life, philosophies and life journeys, dramatizing their evolving embodiment of ancient spiritualities that need to be more often spoken for by their practitioners, participants in the effort to engage with fundamental values at the intersection of the arcane and the everyday, the numinous and the mundane.
Reverberations of Possibility in the Acolyte after the Departure of the Adept
What eventually happened with Toyin Falola, Leku's semi-apprentice? Semi, because he was initiated into a bond with the adept but not trained in her profession, combining the herbal and the magical.
Why was he not so tutored, given how fascinated he was by her occult and yet motherly personage, the mysterious majesties of her arcane and yet very practical knowledge?
The adept and her acolyte met at the great parting of ways between ancient African knowledge systems and the future of the continent represented by the eventually dominant knowledge systems imported into Africa by Western colonizers and Christian and earlier Islamic proselytizers.
The agents of the now dominant systems, with some exceptions, negated the values of the endogenous African systems, seeing them as incompatible with what they introduced into a continent they saw themselves as illuminating with superior knowledge, hence taking part in both systems, the classical African and the Western or Islamic, particularly the Western, was often seen as incompatible, a view with many exceptions, but a dominant one.
Hence, Falola's guardians, and perhaps even Falola himself and Iya Lekuleja, so powerful was the pervasive force of this orientation, might not have considered or even if they did, taken forward the idea of the youth being trained in that magnificent cornucopia of knowledge, a unique cosmos invaluable in a world in which various tried and tested medical systems may be understood as more complementary than exclusive, in which classical African bone healers may supplement the work of Western orthopaedics, Islamic and classical African obstetrics may balance the Western, complementarities recognized even by Leku herself in referring Falola to a Western style hospital for treatment of a serious wound on one occasion.
Leku's world also involved the intense convergence of the material and the spiritual, herbalogy and spirituality. Could this arcane orientation, both unsettling and fascinating, have been understood as beyond what was safe for the youth to enter into, so much so that Falola or his guardians did not suggest his being initiated into and groomed in its practice? Perhaps Leku was not keen on bringing him in depth into that world?
Falola eventually became a scholar in the Western tradition in its African and American expressions, his intellectual capacities enhanced, as he states in Decolonizing African Knowledge:Autoethnography and African Epistemologies (2022) by a magical process of memory enhancement he describes Leku in A Mouth Sweeter than Salt as enabling him with just before he started secondary school.
At the pinnacle of a decades long and uniquely successful career in scholarship, having moved from Nigeria and established himself in the ultra-competitive US academic pool, Falola looks around him, at the tools and orientations of his work, and looks behind him, at the more complex universe from which he emerged as a youth, at the different knowledge systems he has been intimate with, and tries to reach a balance, particularly in the name of testimonies of those like Leku, whose cognitive universe is inadequately represented by the globally dominant knowledge system in which Falola has himself become a master, Western scholarship as originating in Europe and centred on the intellectual and the ratiocinative, and yet increasingly projecting varieties of styles of thought in its vision as the storehouse of the world's knowledge, integrator of various possibilities into a recreative matrix from which anyone may draw.
Hence, among other texts written by himself in this process of reckoning between diverse epistemic universes, various ways of developing, assessing, organizing, storing and applying knowledge, Falola wrote Decolonizing African Knowledge, published by a flagship publisher of the Western intellectual tradition, Cambridge University Press, in the footnotes of which I read Falola's references to his experience with Leku, leading me to seek out, in his autobiographies, the sources of those accounts.
Mapping Cognitive Networks
How may one map the omnivorous writings of the particularly dramatic demonstration of the human being as thinker and expresser of thought, Falola’s penetration into broad zones of exploration and creation in African thought, a journey of which perhaps no complete public account exists?
Using a textual centre or centres is one approach. One of such textual forms could be autobiographical. The autobiographical involves employing an incident, a personage, an idea, a body of ideas, an image or other possibilities from Falola's autobiographies as an interpretive or generative centre of his productivity.
A particularly helpful place to start from seems to be his autobiography of his childhood, A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and that of his teenage years, Counting the Tiger's Teeth: An African Teenager's Story, magnificently written works reverberating with the cultural immersions critical to generating the scholar reaching from his foundations in Yoruba culture and history into the cosmos of African history, society and thought.
His work demonstrates a thorough grounding in the Western scholarly techniques in which he was trained, having been born when this imported system achieved dominance in Yorubaland, even as he is currently exploring how to merge the Western system and the classical Yoruba knowledge systems, as demonstrated, among the texts I am acquainted with, in the essay ''Ritual Archives'', from The Toyin Falola Reader and the book Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies.
Another unificatory or generative approach for exploring relationships between the individual units of Falola's vast oeuvre is the employment of an ideational centre. Such an ideational centre could be epistemic, a mode of developing insight, such as imagination. Falola's best work I am familiar with across genres may be described as defined by imaginative creativity, in terms of various ways in which such creativity may be understood, imaginative creativity at times vivifying or shaped by intellectual creativity demonstrated by conceptualisation, ratiocinative expression or poetic and imagistic writing, or all of these.
Metaphoric Matrices
Another possible unifying and generative centre is the imagistic. The imagistic involves using an image or cluster of images, from the autobiographies or other texts, studying Falolas vast corpus.
The most powerful image I have encountered so far in my admittedly quite limited reading of Falola's works so far, given its scope, though I have some sensitivity to its disciplinary range and variety of genres, is the image of the magical herbalist Leku, presented in A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth.
Leku's Room and Store as Metaphoric of Falola's Hermeneutic Universe
Correlative with the image of Leku as an intersection of various interpretive possibilities is that of her store and her room, images of space as archive of multifarious interpretive possibilities, evocative of Falola's particularly strategic theoritical and methodological essay ''Ritual Archives'', and, in turn, with the continuously proliferating universe of his work, an image unifying the imaginative, the autobiographical and the imagistic, a generative structure for understanding the dynamism and unifying logic/s of Falola's work.
From Herbalogy and Magic to Prolific Intellectual and Artistic Multidisciplinarity
With Falola, the semiotic networks of Leku's ecological cosmos, the immediate and associative significance of her wondrous collection of living and non-living animate and inanimate organic forms and other objects, itself a microcosm of the material, particularly natural universe, latent with creative, destructive and transformative possibilities open to use by the informed person, as understood in Yoruba herbal and magical disciplines, is transformed into the restless search for the interpretive possibilities of phenomena across a wide spectrum in the African cosmos, seeking an understanding of how historical processes and conglomerations of people, activities, ideas and objects converge to generate meaning, his multifarious publications in many disciplines correlative with Leku's vast pharmacological universe and her applicatory powers.
Image and Text: Hunger
Hunger....the hunger represented by the multifarious universe of my store, with plants, animals, animal parts and other objects for the practice of herbal and spiritual arts.The hunger suggested by the meticulous mental cataloguing of this vastness in terms of location within the store, and their uses, individually and in combination. The hunger demonstrated by the yearning to move from the collection and organization of this universe of materials to reflecting on the configurations of nature from which these healing and spiritual forms are drawn, to the larger universe of humanity served by this assemblage, and beyond, to the constellation of possibilities of which this terrestrial cosmos is an expression.
Yes, I am hungry. A consuming hunger, a hunger that removes me from the daily cares of other humans-food, clothing, shelter, companionship. A hunger that will not let me rest. ''O beauty, so ancient and so new, too late have I loved you.''
Image Above
The flames of the all consuming hunger within which I dance, free of attachment to self as I am consumed by my mission.
Image of radical Tibetan Buddhist ascetic Machig Labdrön, an ultimate example of being subsumed by a transcendental mission, giving herself through lifestyle and in meditation to the dismemberment of self to the Ultimate, living on the edge of society and in charnel grounds and other non-social environments, creating the Chöd ritual, in which the practitioner imaginatively offers themself, part by part, to all beings conceivable, in the name of pursuing enlightenment into ultimate reality for oneself and to help all beings reach this goal.
''Machig Labdrön: Mystic Woman, Teacher Unsurpassed'' by Satya Chaitanya at Inner Traditions.
Women of Wisdom by Tsultrim Allione.
Machig Labdron and The Foundations Of Chod by Jerome Edou.
Image from Tematree: Himalayan Buddhist Treasures.
All sources accessed 5/31/2023.
I am trying to develop a structure of ideas which I would use in mapping the polymathic scholarship and writing of Falola and construct it into a matrix for the study of various subjects across all disciplines, an inspirational structure, a unifying body of ideas, a portal through which various disciplines engage in dialogue, a dialogue ideally integrating Falola's own efforts at such myriad disciplined discourse but also useful for me as a structure of ideas I can use in my own efforts along similar lines.
I am working on building such cognitive matrices from Falola's images of the magical herbalist Leku and her store of herbal items, objects and animals for use in healing and magical procedures.
transcends the cognitive categories he was subsequently introduced to through a lifetime of learning in the dominant streams of the globally pervasive Western knowledge system.
In this context, how is he as a scholar to adequately articulate his own understanding of African world views and their experiential values ? How best may he engage them critically within intercultural cognitive history? These are challenges which are both explicit and implicit in his work at various degrees of awareness of them by the writer at the time of writing. These challenges also point to questions about the stage of development of critical engagement at the nexus of subjectivity and intellect, of the experiential and the rhetorical in African thought.
This is a disjunctive experience related to Falola's efforts in seeking what he describes as pluriversalistic forms of knowledge ( "Pluriversalism'' and "Ritual Archives'' in The Toyin Falola Reader; Decolonizing African Studies and Decolonizing African Knowledge) a plurality of approaches to knowing that would make sense of the kinds of knowledge represented by people like Leku, a knowledge both intricate and numinous, socially empowering and vast in scope, yet unrecorded in writing, resisting encapsulation in terms of the circumscriptions of textual sequences.
The following summation of orientations to transdisciplinarity from the Wikipedia essay on transdisciplinarity (accessed mid 2023) reinforces the urgency of pluriversality:
Currently, transdisciplinarity is a consolidated academic field that is giving rise to new applied researches, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean.
In this sense, the transdisciplinary and biomimetics research of Javier Collado on Big History represents an ecology of knowledge between scientific knowledge and the ancestral wisdom of native peoples, such as Indigenous peoples in Ecuador.
According to Collado, the transdisciplinary methodology applied in the field of Big History seeks to understand the interconnections of the human race with the different levels of reality that co-exist in nature and in the cosmos, and this includes mystical and spiritual experiences, very present in the rituals of shamanism with ayahuasca and other sacred plants.
In abstract, the teaching of Big History in universities of Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, and Argentina implies a transdisciplinary vision that integrates and unifies diverse epistemes that are in, between, and beyond the scientific disciplines, that is, including ancestral wisdom, spirituality, art, emotions, mystical experiences and other dimensions forgotten in the history of science, specially by the positivist approach.
John Trevanian's Shibumi depicts a character who periodically enters into a state both different from his immediate reality and united with it in a heightened manner. In a similar way, those lines from Wikipedia on transdisciplinarity in Latin American scholarship and education suggest directions in my efforts to conjunct diverse knowledge systems from different parts of the world.
This vision aspires to a pluriveralistic synthesis such as that of Falola's resolve in exploring dialogue between contrastive knowledge systems represented by such examples as Leku's pharmacological and magical orientations, on one hand, and the fundamentally intellectual knowledge systems of the Western academy, on the other.
Image and Text: Integration, Dispersion, Integration
The picture above shows Nigerian sculptor Fidelis Odogwu Eze's Generation, its coagulating and cascading bricks evoking for me processes of synthesis, of disassembly and restructuring, of falling away and integration, as these emerge in the construction of ideas, particularly as suggested by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant on the architectonic in Critique of Pure Reason, as that conception of cognitive order resonates with my efforts at correlating various aspects of Falola's work, understanding them as possibly demonstrating the working out of originating inspirations rooted in his childhood and teenage years, inspirations integrated in the figure of Leku.
''After we have long collected relevant ideas haphazardly, like building materials, and worked through them without an understanding of their deep unity, with only a hint, a sense of their harmony, from an idea lying hidden within us, they become clearer through long investigation of those ideas, then slowly, like worms emerging from soil through a process invisible to the eyes, like minute organisms coming to light through a process unseen, this understanding begins to surface, garbled at first but becoming complete with time, at first imperfect, but only gradually attaining to perfection, although it was already contained in the primary idea, the original seed from which the tree of understanding grows, the fire around which life develops.''
What is the significance of Falola's work in relation to other constellations of knowledge?
''Hence not only is each system of knowledge structured according to an idea, but all systems may be purposively combined with one another, as members of one whole, in a system of human knowledge, and so admit of an architectonic of all human understanding, reason impelled by a propensity of its nature to venture outward, beyond the limits of experience, by means of ideas, to the utmost bounds of all cognition, and to find rest for the first time in the completion of its sphere, in a self-subsistent systematic whole.''
The two blocks of quotes directly above are renditions of German philosopher Immanuel Kant on the architectonic, the art of creating systems of knowledge, from his Critique of Pure Reason, in a reworking derived from various English translations, as presented by myself in ''The Value of Organized Knowledge: Immanuel Kant on the Architectonic in Human Knowledge: A Rendition and Reworking in Everyday English''.
Image source: MutualArt. Accessed 6/29/2023.
What is transdisciplinarity?
The Wikipedia essay on the subject presents bold central ideas and strategic formulators of transdisciplinarity. The following summation comes from ''Multidisciplinarity, Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity in Health Research, Services, Education and Policy'' by Bernard Choi and Anita Pak in the definitions of multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, and, on transdisciplinarity, from their essay and the Wikipedia essay on the subject :
Multidisciplinarity draws on knowledge from different disciplines but stays within their boundaries. Interdisciplinarity analyzes, synthesizes and harmonizes links between disciplines into a coordinated and coherent whole. Transdisciplinarity integrates disciplines, such as the humanities, social sciences and sciences, transcending their traditional boundaries in a unity of knowledge beyond disciplines.
I find this utterly exciting on account of my orientation as a cognitive, aesthetic, devotional and practical mystic, a person who seeks direct perception of or union of self with ultimate reality through the use of that range of approaches, categories adapted from the Indian Bhagavad Gita and Platonic thought.
My approach to mysticism is inspired by the idea of a quest to grasp the unity of existence and the transcendence of that unity in a source beyond being and non-being, a paradoxical Buddhist formulation striving to project the idea of the limitations of conceptualization when dealing with the ultimate.
Hence all means of categorising aspects of the universe and their interrelationships may be seen as provisional upon the development of more understanding, as open to revision as knowledge expands, ultimately open ended as the horizon of knowledge grows. A growth emerging against the backdrop of infinity, representing the ultimately unfulfillable totality that humanity pursues but may never reach, except provisionally.
Hence this ultimacy is seen as void, an absence emerging from the inability of the human mind to capture its nature in thought or even imagination, yet that ''nothingness'' is the ultimate source that thinkers like Wariboko, along with other sources of that idea for him, orient themselves towards, an idea he develops at length in The Principle of Excellence, using it as a means of dramatising approaches to human creativity.
''How can I use such an idea in interpreting Leku's evocative significance?'', I wonder.
Her store, in Falola's description, suggests an endless proliferation of myriad objects, organised in terms of a structure known only to her and intimately internalised by herself.
What is the cognitive foundation and implications of that cornucopia of plants, animals and other objects used for various healing and magical purposes?
The image of the void, for Wariboko, suggests both creative potential and the unfixity of creativity, its unlimitedness by its own achievements, its capacity for recurrent recreation, going beyond former patterns and insights it has constructed, from my basic acquaintance with his use of this image in The Principle of Excellence, a perpetual self reworking evident in the multivalent creativity of scholars and writers such as himself and Falola.
By ritual archives, I mean the conglomeration of words as well as texts, ideas, symbols, shrines, images, performances, and indeed objects that document as well as speak to those religious experiences and practices that allow us to understand the African world through various bodies of philosophies, literatures, languages, histories and much more.
By implication, ritual archives are huge, unbounded in scale and scope, storing tremendous amounts of data on both natural and supernatural agents, ancestors, gods, good and bad witches, life, death, festivals, and the interactions between the spiritual realms and earth-based human beings.
To a large extent, ritual archives constitute and shape knowledge about the visible and invisible world (or what I refer to as the “non-world”), coupled with forces that breathe and are breathless, as well as secular and non-secular, with destinies, and within cities, kingships, medicine, environment, sciences and technologies.
Above all, they contain shelves on sacrifices and shrines, names, places, incantations, invocations, and the entire cosmos of all the deities and their living subjects among human and nonhuman species.
In varied ways, a countless number of sages, priests, devotees and practitioners created oral and visual libraries, which are linked to ritual complexes and secular palaces.
Subsequently, cultural knowledge has extended from the deep past to our present day. It is through their knowledge that histories and traditions were constituted, while identities were formed, and philosophy as we know it emerged.
…components of the archives can be isolated, but they can also be combined into a body of interlocking ideas and philosophy in the context of the broad terrain of ancestral knowledge. … Ritual
archives lead us into the re-invention of the cosmos that we inhabit, different from but not useless to what modern science does.
Do I not see in those lines echoes of Leku's awesome collection of objects and animals from various orders of nature, a collection subsumed in terms of her arcane personage for whom those items constitute worlds of knowledge, both material and spiritual, perhaps integrated in terms of a cosmographic whole, a metaphysical and spiritual dynamism which the dazzled and puzzled child that Falola was when he frequented her shop may have sensed in observing her engaged in streams of verbal discourse directed at the powers she associated with the items in her shop as he describes in A Mouth Sweeter than Salt?
She had a successful store on a streetcorner about six miles from the house. This was the most famous store for herbs, ingredients for all diseases and ailments, and mixtures and materials for all kinds of charms, both for good and for evil.
I would visit this store many times in seven years, in part because I became fascinated with her and also because of the knowledge offered by Leku and her store. I doubt if Leku herself could have known the number of items in the store.
Arranged in a way known only to her, they comprised an assortment of all known herbs, dried leaves, roots of many kinds of trees and shrubs, fresh and dead plants, bones of various animals (including tigers, leopards, and hyenas), skulls of various animals, dried rats, rodents, other animals, dry and living insects such as millipedes and centipedes, reptiles (including parts of snakes, lizards, and alligators), rocks and soils, and ritual lamps and pots. Tortoises, snails, and small cats walked around, and they, too, were for sale.
...she was knowledgeable about all items used to cure diseases, that is, she was a trader in herbs and all ingredients for charms and medicine. Her knowledge of traditional pharmacology was deep.
She had not gone to school and had memorized all the items. Even the smaller items, the visible dried leaves, and the wrapped ground leaves ran to over a thousand types. The bone pieces ran to another thousand. Even the various types of clay lamps were many. Leku could produce an object in a split second, pointing to where a customer should go and get it when she was not in the mood to get up.
...she knew the combinations of plants and other objects needed to cure all common diseases, and she could provide advice for the more complicated ailments.
When she was not smoking her pipe, she was talking to unseen strangers, appealing to gods, cursing witches, praising herbs, and begging the gods. Too strange for me to understand, she was obsessed with appealing to the gods and all universal forces not to make impotent the plants, roots, bones, and other items in her store. The Yoruba she used to communicate, to talk to herself, and to say all these strange things was not the language we used at home or school.
I argue that Ghazālī’s legacy is an imaginative work of tradition. In his own complex space, or the dihlīz, the intermediate space or the threshold space that Ghazālī identified—one with intersecting boundaries and heterogeneous notions of practices and time—he forged different narratives of religion. These narratives were the outcome of his encounter with both inherited and contemporary forms of knowledge.
Indispensable to Ghazālī’s project was the notion of a dialogical imagination: a sense that all meaning is part of a greater whole and that the different parts of meaning constantly interact with each other irrespective of whether those meanings are held by believer or unbeliever, agnostic or mystic, male or female, friend or foe.
In fact, it would not be incorrect to say that to a large extent Ghazālī partially resisted Parmenides’ insistence on the unity of thought and being, or the unity of knowledge and identity. In so doing, he dented the Platonic link between ontology and epistemology. But he was also, in my view, a courageous bricoleur [adapter of ideas from varied contexts in creating new wholes], one who creatively managed to put to work different ideas in a coherent framework for himself, for his society, and for the community that he served.
The Spaces In-Between: Dihliz (pronounced deh-leez in Persian and Urdu and dih-leez in Arabic) is the single word that describes the space between the house proper and the street.
This in-between space also describes my own existential position between several antinomies. Welcome to ebrahimmoosa.com, where I share about Islamic law, Muslim ethics and other related topics.
As scholar, writer and public intellectual my priority is to provoke critical thinking and questioning in matters of religion, politics, philosophy and society.
While tradition is important, I think of myself as a critical traditionalist. My work is animated by our quest to find meaning in our planetary existence, our dilemmas in our encounter with science and technology yet I am deeply indebted to the ancient wisdom of religion, philosophy, the humanities and the insights of the social sciences.
May Leku, her shop and the room she lived in not also represent such a dialogical space where various possibilities converge?
Laura Marks' Enfolding-Unfolding Aesthetics
Other frameworks come to mind from engagements with Islamic thought, art and architecture. These include Laura Marks' enfolding-unfolding aesthetics, an account of image as an interface to information and information as an interface to the infinite, in Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art and various essays, such as ''Infinity and Accident: Strategies of Enfoldment in Islamic Art and Computer Art'', ''Enfolding-Unfolding Aesthetics, or the Unthought at the Heart of Wood'' and ''Thinking Like a Carpet: Embodied Perception and Individuation in Algorithmic Media''.
In this context, Leku's vast collection of multifarious objects and animals may be understood as a network of images, of sensorially apprehended forms, forms accessible through sight, forms representing a cognitive network, a structure of understanding configured from a potentially infinite range of interpretive possibilities from which Leku has distilled the hermeneutic universe represented by her store.
Her store may thus be seen as a structure suggesting a limitless scope of interpretive and combinatory forms which may be likened to efforts to organise knowledge, interpretive possibilities of the world, in terms of a potentially infinite networks of interrelations.
Moving beyond these networks, adapting an understanding of transdisciplinarity, the structure demonstrated by Leku's store may suggest questions about relationships between these combinatory capacities and the combinatory structures represented by the cosmos, and by implication, questions of what enables the seemingly fortuitous symmetry constituting existence as a harmonious order of the disparate.
Bavine Nasser on Islamic Architecture
Leku's use of the space of her store and room imply a design consciousness, constructing relationships between space and its contents, maximising finite space in a manner that suggests infinity of presence of objects on account of their sheer volume and scale.
Falola's account of the store and its owner suggests its role for her as a sacred space, one that, adapting Bavine Nasser on Islamic architecture, prioritises ''unseen dimensions (bātin), which enfold visible dimensions (zāhir)'', visible dimensions represented by physical ''forms...perceived as conduits between the physical and spiritual realms and space as a symbol of presence (wujūd) [generating a situation in which] Seen and unseen (zāhir wa bātin) converge into one continuum, potentiating an experience of Oneness (Tawhīd) [ through a space unifying the ] designers’ creative and spiritual practices...'' (''Beyond the Veil of Form: Developing a Transformative Approach toward Islamic Sacred Architecture through Designing a Contemporary Sufi Centre'')
Image and Text: Structures of Knowledge and Cognitive Networks
Looking into myself, looking around me, I perceive constellations of consciousness in dialogue with other circles of awareness and the geometric networks structuring the world.
Knowing myself as a point of awareness around which perceptions shaping my personality grow, the matrix through which I see the universe, the cosmos itself organized in terms of structures of order, order in nature being the primary inspiration for the order of the vast network of items constituting my store, a collection of plants, animals and objects for shaping the nature of reality, a universe of its own.
Image Above
Abstract Islamic art, as in this magnificent example from pixels.com, is one of the best means of visualizing cognitive networks.
The Multi-Cognitive Fascinations of Toyin Falola's Image of Leku
The figure of Leku f is very rich, evoking various possibilities at the intersection of diverse disciplines and subjects, from herbalogy to spirituality and magic, history to philosophy, explorations of memory and the organization of knowledge, among others.
I find Leku's image endlessly fascinating, first beceause it's a dream come true for me as a person who is inspired by spiritually centred figures from Asia, the Middle East and the West, from Hinduism and Buddhism to Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Western esotericism and the new Western religion Eckankar, but who has had much less exposure to similar figures from classical African spiritualities.
The depiction of Leku also appeals to my hunger for knowledge and fascination with different kinds of knowledge, the means of developing them and the personalities who construct them. Her picture inflames my love of exploring knowledge both conventional and arcane, knowledge at the intersection of the world as open to conventional perception enabled by the senses, intellect and emotions, and the universe as accessible to complementary forms of knowing, such as extra-sensory perception, imagination, vision, dreams and inspiration. Her image also fires my sensitivity to the inspirational force of the compassionate use of knowledge, employing it in a way that transcends the limitations of self interest.
Leku's persona integrates those orientations with another central to me, biophilia, the love of nature. Her identity also embodies another strategic value of mine, the understanding of nature in terms of creative power extending from it's material properties to it's integration within a cosmos alive with spiritual potencies, as demonstrated by her extraordinarily dedicated collecting of plants and animals and their parts as means of healing and of spiritual activity.
Knowledge and Self Transcendence
Within these sensitivities, she is described as demonstrating a self abnegating dedication to her work as healer and spiritual consultant, seeking little for herself, content with small or no remuneration for her extensively sought services, and living a life of the utmost frugality, committing herself to service to others and to nothing else, never known to abuse the awe in which she was held or the power she had.
Various inspiring accounts of African philosophies of nature, the world of the healer Densu, in Ayi Kwei Armah's fictional novel The Healers, described by him in a personal communication as derived from Akan thought, Yoruba, Igbo, Kalabari, Fulani, Bambara and other African engagements with nature as a cosmological matrix, a constellation of material and spiritual empowerment, distillations from which are critical to their cultures' symbol systems, and similar orientations in factual and fictional yet deeply illuminating accounts from modern Western Paganism or nature spirituality and related arts, converge for me in the figure of Leku, her naturalistic sensitivities further amplified by its consonance with figures embodying ultimate possibilities of self abnegation in service to humanity, the Buddha and such disciples of his as Jetsun Milarepa, Jesus Christ and such followers of his as the embodiment of identification with nature and humanity, St. Francis of Assisi.
Like all the figures I have mentioned, except perhaps Milarepa, Leku wrote nothing. Her expressive skills were represented by verbal mastery of a conventional Yoruba dialect she employed and an arcane form of Yoruba, unknown to most people, a language she used when engaging in spiritual activity, and her expertise in aroko, a form of Yoruba object symbolism, which enabled the communication of a broad range of meanings through various selections and combinations of items.
Her personal vision comes alive, however, through Falola's impassioned and yet crystal clear depiction of her, the pulsating force of her persona and it's impact on her acolyte Falola powerfully dramatizing, even if not stating in verbal terms, the character of her vision and motivations.
An aspect of her personality, her self transcendence in the use of knowledge, is incidentally vivified in Albert Einstein's account of a person living by the highest moral values:
… instead of asking what religion is I should prefer to ask what characterizes the aspirations of a person who gives me the impression of being religious: a person who is religiously enlightened appears to me to be one who has, to the best of his ability, liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings, and aspirations to which he clings because of their superpersonal value.
It seems to me that what is important is the force of this superpersonal content and the depth of the conviction concerning its overpowering meaningfulness, regardless of whether any attempt is made to unite this content with a divine Being…
Accordingly, a religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt of the significance and loftiness of those superpersonal objects and goals [which] exist with the same necessity and matter-of-factness as he himself.
( From Science, Philosophy and Religion, A Symposium, published by the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., New York, 1941. Published online as ''Religion and Science'' at sacredtexts.com. Accessed 7/17/2023)
Leku's moral culture, suggested, incidentally, by those lines, is one aspect of her essence, as described by Falola. Another is the numinous, as evoked by Leku's persona, a sense of mystery inspiring fascination, awe and even fear, in its remoteness from humanity as conventionally understood.
A relatable sense of the numinous, possibly inspiring the sense of self transcendence earlier referenced, is also suggested by Einstein in the same compilation in a manner correlative with Leku's vocation and personality:
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.
A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.
… a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.
Although it is true that it is the goal of science to discover rules which permit the association and foretelling of facts, this is not its only aim. It also seeks to reduce the connections discovered to the smallest possible number of mutually independent conceptual elements.
It is in this striving after the rational unification of the manifold that it encounters its greatest successes, even though it is precisely this attempt which causes it to run the greatest risk of falling a prey to illusions.
But whoever has undergone the intense experience of successful advances made in this domain is moved by profound reverence for the rationality made manifest in existence. By way of the understanding he achieves a far-reaching emancipation from the shackles of personal hopes and desires, and thereby attains that humble attitude of mind toward the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence, and which, in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to man. This attitude, however, appears to me to be religious, in the highest sense of the word.
One has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists. Possibly we shall know a little more than we do now. But the real nature of things, that we shall never know, never.
Leku was not a scientist in the sense described by Einstein, if she was a scientist in any sense. Her means of understanding the universe went beyond Einstein's emphasis on intellectualy perceptible rationality shaping the universe. However, she did embody immense knowledge of various healing strategies, particularly as derived from plants, and a vast knowledge of the plant world, in the various combinations in which they could be employed for various purposes, the efficacy of her knowledge attested by her fame. She was also an adept in spiritual activity, in the construction of magical objects through material construction and infusion with what is understood in the culture in which she lived as the activating power of magical speech.
Why then, with all those resources at her disposal, was she so self effacing, so distant from the world of desires that often shapes people, deeply removed from indulgence in pride, in the quest for material satisfactions, of lust for power, inclinations that have many times, in various places, been associated with the kind of social power she had as a person believed to embody the creative and destructive possibilities represented by the arcana of nature, the transformative power of magical speech and skills of construction of magical objects?
Such an orientation is not likely to be possible unless under the intense fusion of the emotions and intellect with a scope of understanding making such a self emptying, kenotic stance imperative. What was this knowledge? How had it been acquired? How was it related to her vocation as herbalist and magical practitioner?
There are no answers to these questions since Falola is still carefully managing his knowledge of his erstwhile mentor, trying to carefully curate what to share and what not to share beyond what he has already written in his autobiographies, and therefore remaining silent beyond those earlier depictions.
Is the knowledge that shaped Leku's personality a spiritual and philosophical version of Einstein's understanding of science as presented in the compilation earlier referenced, "the century-old endeavor to bring together by means of systematic thought the perceptible phenomena of this world into as thoroughgoing an association as possible [ a ] striving after the rational unification of the manifold''?
This is a goal and method different from but correlative with Wole Soyinka's description, in Myth, Literature and the African World, of Ijala poetry as expressing a perspective on Yoruba nature philosophy, the cultural world Leku lived in. He depicts this poetry as celebrating the divine personage, Ogun, deity of hunters, in a world in which hunting involves both reverence for animals as well as taking advantage of the opportunity to use them as food for humans, a poetry also ''celebrating animal and plant life, the essences and relationships of growing things and the insights of man into the secrets of the universe''.
Was Leku a kind of mystic, in which self and knowledge are unified, spiritual depth and individuality are fused, cosmological radiance and self consciousness seared into a radiant flame?
Had she encountered numinosities of the forest, sublime and awesome spaces which she had come to embody or which she existed in resonance with through regular immersion, ''an invisible but majestic presence that inspires dread and fascination and constitutes the non-rational element of vital religion'', as Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language defines Rudolph Otto's concept of the numinous from his The Idea of the Holy?
Had she experienced something akin to ''the futility of human desires and aims [ in contrast with] the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought" motivating a perception of ''individual existence ... as a sort of prison [ from which one wishes to expand into experiencing] ''the universe as a single significant whole'', as Einstein states in the compilation ''Religion and Science'' ?
In such a context, Jorge Luis Borges' fictional story, ''The God's Script'' becomes a parable for such a sense of imprisonment, in terms of a man who, while imprisoned for many years, comes to a revelatory understanding of the structure and dynamism of the cosmos through a pattern embodied by the spots of a jaguar's skin. Using the divine speech emerging at the beginning of time which he has thereby gained, he can escape from prison, but
I know that I shall never speak those words, because I no longer remember Tzinacán [ his name].
Let the mystery writ upon the jaguars die with me. He who has glimpsed the universe, he who has glimpsed the burning designs of the universe, can have no thought for a man, for a man's trivial joys or calamities, though he himself be that man. He was that man, who no longer matters to him. What does he care about the fate of that other man, what does he care about the other man's nation, when now he is no one? That is why I do not speak the formula, that is why, lying in darkness, I allow the days to forget me.
''A man who runs from the persecution of his fellows to the grove of an alusi [a spirit venerated by an Igbo community] and cries 'save me O sprit I will be your osu' [ a person dedicated to the spirit, but, who, therefore, is secluded from a good part of the community's life] is free of men but bonded to a god,'' a character states in Chinua Achebe's ''The Madman''.
What accounts for Leku's paradoxical sharing in such metaphors of constriction and freedom, a person living in society but distant from it, embodied in flesh and blood but withdrawn from its satisfactions, a person subsisting on what may be inward freedoms and cognitive empowerments far from conventional life?
Between Knowing and Sharing
May an account of Leku's history and an expansive description of her ideas and knowledge be expected from Falola, whom she impacted so deeply in his earliest formative years, the way the disciples of the Buddha, of Jesus and Milarepa have passed down knowledge from their teachers which would otherwise have been lost?
The fact that the question cannot be answered either affirmatively or otherwise, even though Falola is a most prolific writer, is part of the enigmatic force of Leku.
Falola states in A Mouth Sweeter than Salt that revealing what he knows about her once gave him a terrible dream and that trying or even aspiring, if I recall correctly, to share what he knows of her leads to dread for him and possibly to some of the misfortunes he has experienced.
A pact of some sort is suggested, a bond fenced by esoteric barriers beyond which one may not trespass without danger, a guarded knowledge protected, not by lack of access or external punitive forms, but by inward gates of entry and egress.
You may enter but you may not leave, if leaving implies sharing what you know, a classic description of the structures of a secret society or esoteric order, a picture amplified by the ritual of bonding with her Falola described her as taking him through on the night before her death.
Could Falola be making up all or part of this story, I ask myself?
Yet, I've encountered strange things in exploring nature in the context of African spiritualities, though inspired by Western nature spirituality, possibilities which, if I had been able to develop, could have taken me deeper into the kind of arcane universe represented by Leku.
I have also heard firsthand and secondhand accounts of African adepts in nature healing and nature spirituality like Leku, characters embodying knowledge, and, at times, elevated personal cultures, that would be wondrous and inspiring at any point in space and time.
The time has not come to tell Leku's story, if at all, Falola declares in Counting the Tiger's Teeth: An African Teenager's Story, after recounting her telling him her life's story on the night before she died.
No one tells all he knows, Falola concludes.
Leku sees me even though I can't see her, he states.
Perhaps acolyte and teacher, mentee and mentor, could come to an understanding about sharing this knowledge, in the realization of so much that has been lost through the absence of written records of classical African spiritual masters, making it difficult to distinguish between the spiritual and ethical heights of the field and the current negativization of disciplines which much of society, as in Nigeria, relies on, often in secret or without foregrounding this reliance, content to relate with these bodies of knowledge as marginalized systems out of place in a world defined by what many understand as the enlightenment and modernities represented by Christianity, Islam and Western introduced bio-medicine.
Image and Text: Synthesizing Rhythms
In darkness, in silence, at rest, I reflect on the configurations, the convergences constituting the cosmos.
What is time?
A progression in which tomorrow does not exist until tomorrow arrives or a river whose flow is perceptible from a stone rising from the waves such that tomorrow can be seen today?
Are the laws that define the universe, enabling its regularity and transformations, fixed, or do they undergo change?
Tendrils of smoke rising into towers of speculation.
Image Above
Evocations of humanity/cosmos symmetry as dramatized by the Hindu school of Sri Vidya, a supreme celebration of the feminine as epitomizing the quintessence of the human, a value projected through the visualization of symmetry between the human being and the cosmos through correlations between human body and consciousness and the structure and dynamism of the universe as embodied by the Sri Yantra, a geometric structure understood as the visual expression of the underlying, metaphysical structure and dynamism of existence, its rhythms of ultimate value, direction and organization, a visual form expressing an abstract character of Tripurasundari, the beauty who is the cosmos, embodying its ultimate possibilities, yet transcending that totality.
Into the space between her jarlike breasts, the blue sky seems to descend, to meet the tendrils of hair rising from her navel, rephrasing a line from the Soundaryalahari, Billowing Waves of the Ocean of Beauty, a poem in praise of the Goddess.
Picture of woman smoking from Shutterstock. Sri Yantra by Maria Strutz from Phil Hine's enfolding.org. Collage by myself.
An Image Both Individual and Cosmic
The figure of Leku sitting in her store, smoking a pipe, as a veritable cosmos of thousands of plants, animal parts, ritual objects and live animals are arranged within the space in terms of an order known only to her and so thoroughly internalized by her that she could speedily fetch any item in the collection or direct a customer to do so, as Falola states, enchants me in it's demonstration of the powers of the human mind, powers that may be enhanced, perhaps, through what Falola recounts as a magical process of memory empowerment she put him through, the power of his memory evident in his autobiographies, the image of Leku and the scope of knowledge represented by her store also recalling for me memory's amplificability through mnemonic systems and other means of strengthening the mind.
Between Organic and Inorganic Knowledge Systems
The picture of Leku and her store also evokes for me the development of techniques of knowledge management, from Leku's unknown organizational structure and memory techniques to the Yoruba origin Ifa system's use of spatial patterns and their graphic and verbal correlates, the odu ifa, in organizing a vast scope of literary forms, the ese ifa, embodying realms of multi-disciplinary knowledge, an oral system comparable with European memory palaces in which mentally constructed architectural structures are peopled with symbols representing a terrestrial and cosmic scope of knowledge.
The evocative force of the image of Leku and her store also takes me beyond what may be understood as those organic knowledge systems earlier mentioned, embodied by the use of the human mind.
I am led by those associations to other organic cognitive possibilities represented by nature, as one may adapt Falola's concept of the organic library, understandable as possibilities of knowledge embodied by the natural and larger human worlds, enabling a dialectic between nature, as embodying cognitive potential, and the human being as actualizing those possibilities through exploring nature.
I am taken further into efforts to learn from non-human nature, adapting nature's methods in organizing and applying knowledge, as in Natural Computing.
I thereby travel from computing's efforts, adapting the workings of the human brain, amplifying these workings within electronic devices, to adapting non-human nature's knowledge systems, such as "computational processes observed in nature, and human-designed computing inspired by nature", as Natural Computing is defined by a journal of that name.
Nigerian-American computer scientist Philip Emeagwali expands these ideas in terms of animism, animism, incidentally, being a world view correlative with Leku's magical culture likely embedded within the animistic cosmology of classical Yoruba thought.
Emeagwali's correlation of animism and his practice as a scientist suggests broad implications about knowledge systems. His perspective on organic knowledge structures in the context of animism remains valid in spite of the often controversial character of his claims to scientific achievement, as I describe in an essay where I quote the following passages from his Guardian, Nigeria, interview with Reuben Abati:
Since animism attributes conscious life to nature or natural objects, scientists that have animist beliefs tend to have enormous respect for nature and Mother Earth and are therefore more likely to borrow from it.
There are parallels between animist worship of trees, stones, and rivers and my design of the first computer networks that mimic the branching patterns of trees; my formulation of the new theory of tessellation which was inspired by the structure of crystal stones; and my mathematics thesis on river flows. Therefore, the animist religion of my Igbo tribe subconsciously influenced my scientific discoveries.
I boost my creativity by observing how nature has solved problems similar to the ones that I am attempting to solve.
The new problem-solving approach of designing computer networks by observing and emulating patterns in nature is one that I pioneered. Being born and raised in a low-tech African environment enabled me to have a greater appreciation of the usefulness of drawing design inspirations and ideas from natural analogies. Other scientists use a rational and mechanistic approach to problem solving but I use a logistic[ al ] and inspirational one.
I believe that Mother Nature is a wizard problem-solver which has used trial-and-error approaches, over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, to derive the most optimal solutions.
Furthermore, the trial-and-error approach of nature yields more solutions than the logical approach used by humans. As a result, drawing inspirations from nature has enabled me to discover several computer networks. However, after designing from nature, I use advanced mathematical methods to analyze my inventions.
I observe and use the spatial interactions from other cultures to change my perspective and frame of reference for designing supercomputers. For example, I examine the weaving of baskets and textiles; the construction of bridges, terraces and houses; and the layout of fields and gardens.
My discoveries and inventions are made largely by geometrical intuition and visualization. Discoveries made by intuition are a mystery to others and half understood by the discoverer.
A progression emerges from these references to organic and inorganic cognitive systems. It moves from nature embodied cognitive structures to humanly created, electronically powered and machine enabled knowledge configurations.
The broader frame of this progression in relation to the history of knowledge systems and their interrelationships is from organic cognitive structures represented by human memory to inorganic methods of classification, such as Leku's store arrangement, to the library card catalogue to the electronic library and back to the idea of organic knowledge systems in terms of the idea of discrete and cosmic animism, an ancient perspective which sees all individual forms as animated by sentience or life force.
This is a pervasive capacity demonstrating the cosmos as embodying a knowledge structure integrating and going beyond the visible universe, a vast consciousness expressed in terms of consciousness in all phenomena, myriad individualities subsumed and transcended in terms of an awareness of such scope, that beside it, the most exalted possibilities of human understanding are no more than a child crying in the most childish sounds coming from that new entrant into the world, as Dante Alighieri sums up in a different context in the Divine Comedy, the most advanced cognitive formulations no more than the crudest gropings in darkness, as Einstein's view of the relationship between human thought and cosmic intelligence in ''Science and Society'' may be adapted, a darkness emerging from a blaze so profound it is like the light of the sun rendering meaningless the light of a candle, all the suns of the cosmos merging in a cataclysm that renders the light of a single sun as akin to darkness, as Aleister Crowley states in Magick: Book Four, a progression "transcending knowledge with my thought", as John of the Cross describes in "Song of the Soul that is Glad to Know God by Faith", a void into which one enters never to emerge in the sense of emergence as being able to tell adequately what one has learnt, the butterfly incinerated by the flame experiencing the nature of the flame but unable to return to describe that experience beceause it is no more a butterfly but has become the flame, as the conclusion of Farid ud Din Attar's "Parable of the Moth and the Flame" may be adapted from his The Conference of the Birds.
"The cosmic mind does not contain the particulars of human knowledge and experience but is an exalted level of evaluation" states Harvey Spencer Lewis in an edition of The Rosicrucian Manual.
Can such a mind actually exist? A mind analogous, at a cosmic level, to the relationship between Leku and her store, a structure of awesome scope, the details and ultimate significance of which, if we may expand Lewis' definition, are embodied by the constructor?
"We must be still and still moving, into another intensity, for a further union, a deeper communion", T. S. Eliot observes, in Four Quartets, about life as ideally a spiritual and philosophical journeying.
A perennial search is ongoing for inspirational models in the quest for ultimate knowledge, a goal that may be conceived by the human mind but which is beyond actualization by that mind, a goal which yet fructifies in insights into structures microcosmic and macrocosmic, as efforts across disciplines to understand how the universe operates at various levels inspires perception into the subatomic, atomic, terrestrial and celestial worlds, into human and animal beings and societies, into nature in all it's forms and to possibilities beyond nature.
Image and Text : Speculative Progression
An imaginative depiction of Okeckukwu Ayorinde, director of the Leku/Falola/Adepoju School of Transdisciplinary Knowledge Systems inspired by Falola's picture of the magical herbalist Leku and Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju's explorations of the implications of that image.
This artistically reworked picture tries to visualize her description of the manner in which her research ignites creative power in her spanning various cognitive zones and spaces.
Ayorinde is a researcher and practitioner in bio-medicine, transdisciplinary computation, indigenous health systems, herbalogy and shamanism.
Her particular interests are at the intersection of human and plant biology, medicine, computation, philosophy and spirituality, studying consciousness in relation to plants, humans, animals and natural and humanly created inanimate forms, in correlation with ideas of consciousness as a general terrestrial and cosmic quality.
Image Source
The Templeton Foundation project site on Collaboration on First and Higher Order Theories of Consciousness with LFASTKS( Leku/Falola/Adepoju School of Transdisciplinary Knowledge Systems) part of Templeton's Accelerating Research on Consciousness Project.
Information Source: Speculātiōnibus
How did such a person as Leku think? What could have been her understanding of life and how did she come to that awareness? Since Falola seems suspended between the urge to share what he knows and the restraining grip of that knowledge, a reader observing this balance may be motivated to reflect on those questions, speculating about the answers, constructing a picture mapping conjectures catalyzed by those queries.
What place would her style of thinking have in accounts of African and non-African forms of medicine and philosophies of healing? How did she see the conjunction of herbalogy and spirituality in her work? Did she address the healing of body, mind and spirit? How did she understand her practice in relation to that of Western introduced bio-medicine, which she once recommended to Falola, rather than treating him herself on that occasion?
Exploring Intersections Between Philosophies of Healing and Philosophies of Healers
What points of convergence would her perceptions have with Ayi Kwei Armah's depiction of healing of body, mind, and spirit through the agency of vegetative nature and inspirational relationships in his novel The Healers, a practice Armah describes himself in a personal communication as distilled from traditional Akan thought and practices?
Would she have shared with multi-cultural Muslim thinker Ibn Sina the healing of mind and spirit enabled by the curing of ignorance through philosophy and spirituality and the healing of the body through direct action on it using intimate knowledge of its functions, as is demonstrated by his philosophical and medical practice, evident in The Book of Healing and The Canon of Medicine?
To what degree would her conceptions as healer, spiritual expert and political agent, her understanding of those matrices of reality integrated in her person, have intersected with those of fellow healer, English bio-medical doctor Raymond Tallis, neuroscientist, philosopher and cultural critic, his scientific and humanistic cultures converging in terms of a sensitivity to the irreducible uniqueness of the human, as demonstrated by his self description on his website and texts displayed there, orientations broadly resonating with Leku's practices which address the human being as materially and spiritually constituted?
What are the implications of her sharing with Atanda the closer affinities represented by the immersion of Atanda and herself in the Yoruba knowledge cosmos, in his role as babalawo, adept in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa, itself a spiritual, philosophical and healing system which Atanda integrates in himself with his training and practice as a bio-medical doctor, convergences of diverse healing cultures Leku could have appreciated, as indicated by her referring Falola to a bio-medical hospital for treatment on one occasion rather than treating him herself?
What ideational routes could one take towards responding to these questions?
Directions suggested by German philosopher Hans George Gadamer, in The Enigma of Heath: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age, on the practice of bio-medicine in relation to the human experience in general?
Approaches inspired by Kwasi Konadu, scholar in the Western tradition and healer in the classical Akan tradition, his Akan cognitive affiliations likely sharing significant similarities with those of Leku in her Yoruba contexts, his training through Western scholarship guiding his further understanding and expression of that endogenous knowledge, as in his book Indigenous Medicine and Knowledge in an African Society and his essays ''Healing Works: Nana Kofi Donko and the Business of Indigenous Therapeutics", ''Medicine and Anthropology in Twentieth Century Africa: Akan Medicine and Encounters with (Medical) Anthropology'', his identity as scholar and traditional healer powerfully dramatized by the design and contents of his website?
What conjunctions could Leku's knowledge and practice as healer and spiritual agent have with explorations of the significance of shamanic and other forms of complementary healing, as in Jean Achterberg's Imagery in Healing: Shamanism and Modern Medicine, and the wealth of investigations in scholarly and more general contexts emerging from the study of diverse forms of healing, such as Jeff Levin's ''Esoteric Healing Traditions: A Complementary Overview'', M. Money's ''Shamanism and Complementary Therapy'', and Magnus Zethelius and Michael J. Balick's ''Modern Medicine and Shamanistic Ritual: A Case of Positive Synergistic Response in the Treatment of a Snakebite'', the latter in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology?
These are creativities represented by books, articles and creative platforms, indicating some of the range of cognitive possibilities generated by Leku's activities, circles of exploration radiating outward from and converging in the figure of Leku.
Image and Text: The Silence at Forest Core
''The spouse of Aule is Yavanna, the Giver of Fruits. She is the lover of all things that grow in the earth, and all their countless forms she holds in her mind, from the trees like towers in forests long ago to the moss upon stones or the small and secret things in the mould.''
J. R. Tolkien, The Silmarilion.
A deep silence at the heart of the forest, a wordless depth resounding with infinite possibilities. I carry this silence within me after countless hours within that space. I cannot be fully human without the companionship of the immobile ones, from the ''trees like towers in forests along ago'' to Fonio, ''the smallest seed, embodiment of the creative spirit, the giver of life, the gentleness of being, the entwined fragility of life and death, a weak, easily broken plant, yet strong enough to bend in the wind without breaking”. ( Owen Burnham , African Wisdom).
I take each patient of mine in spirit into that silence, so the healing darkness may flow through them as I work on the person. Healing may be half human action and half mysterious activity, ''...From the world of cells and life force animating our being to the world of matter and immaterial forces, humans are mobile ecosystems, connected to other kinds of ecologies... ... [as] there are billions of microorganisms we cannot see that we walk past or around each day; our inability to see them makes them no less real and no less an integral part of our interconnected world...an interconnected web of human intuition and action, organic compounds, and inorganic or immaterial forces [generating] the world [beyond] the physical world we call planet Earth [into] the “real” world consisting of all sorts and forms of matter, energy, force, and what might be incomprehensible to our “normal” physical senses......the intimate and sometimes-volatile interactions between matter, energies, and forces...to the ends of the universe, beyond...more stars, and beyond them more stars, and beyond and beyond...to depths beyond depths, where the great galaxies float like clouds or scatter like [crowds]...scattering out from one common point to the ultimate edges of time and distance...
is it chance or purpose that makes a path for all life in all time and space?''
(Kwasi Konadu, ‘’Healing Works:Nana Kofi Dɔnkɔ and the Business of Indigenous Therapeutics’’, Entrepreneurship in Africa A Historical Approach, ed. Moses E. Ochonu; Gordon Dickson, ''Twig'', The Best Science Fiction of Gordon Dickson)
Image sources: Woman's picture:iStock
Collage by myself.
Further Metaphysical Possibilities of the Image of the Adept
Mutualities of Inner and Outer Space, of Inner and Outer Shrines, between the Finite and the Infinite
A seated old woman, smoking a pipe in front of a store loaded with a magnificent constellation of herbs, animal parts, live animals and other instruments for herbal and spiritual work in Yoruba culture, a store representing her selfless commitment to service to humanity within the matrix of spiritual powers of which she is an agent, is how I visualize Leku, adapting Falola's spellbinding picture of that figure.
Leku's shop and the room where she lives, its role as a storehouse making it an extension of the shop, may readily be understood in further symbolic terms, along the lines of Buddhist and Hindu symbolism of relationships between circumscribed space and possibilities of endlessly unfolding scope, such as the Ālaya-vijñāna of Buddhism, a room containing precious things representing a person's creative potential, adapting Ernest Wood's imagistic rendering of this concept of ''storehouse consciousness'' as it is called, in his Zen Dictionary, and the small room within the heart in the Hindu Upanishads which yet constitutes a cosmos, opening into the totality of possibilities shaping existence.
''Alaya'', as Wood defines it, is ''a house or rather a home, which is in turn a place where all the valued things for use by us are kept and among which we dwell. It came to mean also the spiritual storehouse of all the potentialities of life, which is to be regarded as our true home, and also as our ultimate destination.''
Wood thereby presents, in terms of imagistic clarity and evocative force, a pithy summation of this complex idea, developed in various but convergent ways by diverse Buddhist schools.
Along similar lines as the Alaya concept, Falola develops a correlation between the character of Leku's room and the character of her mind, between her inward spatial configuration, constituted by the complex of values, thought, emotion and vocation, ''the orientation of a person's life and work in terms of their ultimate sense of mission'' ( Webster's ) , and the physical identity of her room and store, their internal patterns an expression of her values, of her perception of the meaning of her life:
The clue to her strategy might have been in her room. It contained no objects other than those that could be found in her store. Her room looked exactly like her store, only with a space to spread a sleeping mat.
She acquired no property, bought few clothes and shoes. In other words, there was no evidence that she was channeling profits from her trade into other forms of investment or savings.
…
She was recirculating her profits to buy more items for the store rather than for herself. Her only passion was the store, not as a space in which to make money but one in which to make herbs and medicine available to whoever wanted them. She was certainly not counting on riches.
W. B. Yeats' and Purohit Swami's translation of the ''Chhandogya Upanishad'' in The Ten Principal Upanishads takes further a related conjunction between inner and outer space, projecting this image in terms of ideas of ultimate reality :
In this body, in this town of Spirit, there is a little house shaped like a lotus, and in that house there is a little space.
One should know what is there.
What is there? Why is it so important?
There is as much in that little space within the heart, as there is in the whole world outside. Heaven, earth, fire, wind, sun, moon, lightning, stars; whatever is and whatever is not, everything is there.
What lies in that space, does not decay when the body decays, nor does it fall when the body falls. That space is the home of Spirit. Every desire is there. Self is there, beyond decay and death; sin and sorrow; hunger and thirst ; His aim truth, His will truth.
...
Earthly pleasures exhaust themselves ; heavenly pleasures exhaust themselves. Wherever men go without attaining Self or knowing truth, they cannot move at their pleasure; but after attaining Self and knowing truth, wherever they go, they move at their pleasure.
The Upanishadic vision resonates with the self abnegation, the focus on inward rather than external fulfillment, the identification with the unseen and yet potent, rather than the immediaces represented by materially derived satisfactions, of Leku's lifestyle, even in business, a traditionally financially centred activity, focused on profit and accumulation rather than on charity and self sacrifice:
If the woman [ a hypothetical customer] had no money, Leku would still give her the medicine and refused to reply or respond to the long statement of gratitude. It was not that the gratitude was wasted or the beneficiary should not thank her; it was as if she were saying that her help was rendered on behalf of some higher forces.
I had travelled up to Keswick for a short holiday alone. I was sitting eating dinner in my small boarding house. The dining room was filled with a lively group of students, but I sat alone, looking out over Lake Derwentwater. I was thinking at the time about the problem of the existence of God, and was trying purposely to direct, even to force, my thoughts along certain tracks, instead of allowing them to come to mind haphazardly as usual...
[ I asked myself] ‘Why, if there is no God, should anything exist in the first place? Indeed, how could anything exist? Why not just nothing?’
At this moment in my reasoning it was as if suddenly a door had been opened in the mind….I glimpsed what I can only call the Kingdom of Heaven. For a moment all time seemed to stand still. It was as if I was looking down into a great hall, but unlike an earthly hall it defies description. It was like an intuition of infinity and pure reason. I had caught sight of Truth, which the human faculties in their frailty are unable to grasp. There were the answers to the mysteries of human life and of the existence of the universe. And if I could not understand those mysteries, at least I could know that there is something beyond…
Then the door was closed quietly and the vision slipped away like a dream. It took me a moment to catch my breath and to remember where I was. I had no doubts about the significance of what I had experienced and felt elated. My interest in the material world was not noticeably diminished, and I continued with my meal and my cabbage, boiled as only the English know how.
(RERU 1153, Religious Research Unit testimony no 1153, quoted in The Common Experience by J.M. Cohen and J-F. Phipps, Rider, 1979, 21)
Leku's room and store demonstrate her ultimate values, values which go beyond her individuality to embrace a self denying humanism suggesting dedication to possiblities beyond the limiting immediacies of human existence.
Leku's room and store thereby lend themselves to adaptation as contemplative images, an inspirational picture a person may call upon in meditation, visualizing a space defined by objects suggesting one's ultimate values, a space at the intersection of ultimate possibility and personal actualization of this limitless matrix.
One may visualize Leku at the entrance to the convergent zone represented by that store, a store defined in terms of space but transcending space and time, an adaptation of the picture of Leku's store in terms of Western esotericist Harvey Spencer Lewis' image, the Celestial Sanctum, as described in various editions of Liber 777, the Celestial Sanctum.
Image and Text: Intersections and Reconfigurations
The threshold, between the house and the street, where myriad influences may coalesce, the void, infinite depth yielding inexhaustible possibilities, the store, the zone of multifarious configurations, matrices of the structuring of the diverse, of sameness and difference in vastness.
I am the threshold and the void, the space of infinite possibility, of limitless generation and combinations, the matrix where the unformed becomes the formed, having discovered these possibilities within myself.
Image Above
Mother Minaret by Italian Senegalese artist Maïmouna Guerresi
''Commonly placed in her work [ inspired by Senegalese Islam is ] an emphasis on contrast and depiction of the body as 'no longer a prison of the soul, but… a temple to house and augment the Divine'.''
Image and descrtiption of Guerresi's work from ''Italian-Senegalese Artist Maïmouna Guerresi Blends Sculpture and Photography in her Explorations of the Female Condition, Spirituality and Identity'' in le crayon khôl. Accessed 6/4/2023.
Those are among various images I call upon for inspiration, for refreshment, for recentring on the ultimate goals of my life, on my vocation, the ''orientation of a person's life and work in terms of their ultimate sense of mission'' ( Webster's).
Within the complex of various spiritual and philosophical masters who so inspire me they occupy a permanent place in my imaginative universe are also such African figures as Wole Soyinka and Nimi Wariboko, but none has before now assumed the constellation of imaginative power and lofty ideas as that of such personas in Asian and Western thought and literature as demonstrated for me by Milarepa and Kant, representative of other inspirational individuals in Asian and Western thought and imaginative literature as the Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi, dramatising the necessity of knowing that which knows itself as myself, the fictional magicians Doctor Strange and Gandalf, adepts in arcane knowledge yet dedicated to selfless service to all beings, and the Buddha, reading about whose abandonment of social existence for solitary pursuit of ultimate truth was foundational for my cultivating a similar vision.
In this collage, I use the Baule sculptural figure in representing Leku, in her younger days, and the yantra in symbolizing relationships between Leku as a cognitive entity and the environment represented by her store of herbs and magical resources as a cognitive object. A cognitive object as this store is understood by Leku and as perceived by others.
The sculptural figure is interpreted in this context as poised in a votive stance, naked in total openness to the sacred forces she seeks to commune with, holding a bowl suggesting a receptacle of offerings, its emptiness indicating the openness of the self to receive the resulting influx of the sacred.
The youthful picturing of Leku also imaginatively embodies her characterization by Falola as an old woman, in the spirit of the visualization of three cycles of female biological development, maiden, mother and crone, in Neopaganism, modern adaptations of ancient, nature centred spiritualities.
This characterization of Leku thus also penetrates into Yoruba spirituality in suggesting '' the young woman of compelling erotic force as well as the old woman steeped in magic'' as depicted by Uli Beier of the Yoruba goddess Oshun, erotically radiant and yet embodying occult knowledge and power relating to the spiritual structure and dynamism of the cosmos (The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger, Uli Beier; Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, Rowland Abiodun; The Yoruba: A New History, Akinwumi Ogundiran).
This conjunction of feminine beauty with metaphysical knowledge and spiritual power, in relation to the sequence of female biological development, is further unified, through the Sri Yantra, with the image of feminine beauty as expressing cosmic harmony and potency in the person of Tripurasundari, the Most Beautiful Embodiment of the Cosmos, a cosmic identity yet constituting the essence of the human being, as depicted in the Shakti Sadhana group rendition of the Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram ritual, the Goddess whose abstract form is the Sri Yantra, as described there and in such texts as Madhhu Khanna's Yantra: The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity and Douglas Renfrew Brooks' Auspicious Wisdom: The Texts and Traditions of Śrividyā Śākta Tantrism in South India, her biological and abstract forms resonating with the biological and abstract characterizations of the sequence of sixteen Goddesses, youthful and older, the Mahavidyas, embodying all possibilities of existence, their sonic forms, their identities as sacred sounds embodying cosmic totality, complementing their biological and geometric characterizations, sonic identities, as described in such texts as David Kinsley's Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas, correlative with Leku's mastery of magical sacred speech, as the latter is depicted by Falola in A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth.
The collage, combining the Baule figure, representing Leku, with the unification of the human being and the cosmos embodied by the Sri Yantra, indicates Leku's personal subjective and objective cosmos and the relationship between that and the larger cosmos. The larger cosmos is the cosmos as existing irrespective of how it is understood and the cosmos as understood by those perceiving it.
The dot at the centre of the yantra stands for Leku's consciousness. The geometric structures surrounding the dot evoke her store as an expression of her mind, its relationship between order and complexity understood only by her. The enclosing square denotes the intersection between her consciousness, the store and the universe.
The universe, in this context, consists of the material and spiritual spaces in terms of which Leku perceived the cosmos. It also involves her relationships with fellow human beings and with the various spiritual powers she understood herself as dialoguing with in relation to the store, as this effort at communication with invisible beings on Leku's part is described by Falola.
This visualization of Leku's universe is correlative with Falola's ''Ritual Archives'' on material and abstract sacred structures and their cognitive implications, the visualization of such structures in terms of two dimensional geometric constructs such as yantras, as three dimensional architectural forms, as in St. Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle, visualizing the self as a diamond composed of several rooms at the centre of which is the creator of the universe, the European memory palace, in which a structure of knowledge is encoded in symbolic terms culminating in a cosmic synthesis, visualised as a complexly constructed house, as discussed in such works as Frances Yates' The Art of Memory and novelistically adapted by Natasha Mostert in Season of the Witch, imaginative depictions of houses as receptacles of wonder leading into other dimensions, as depicted in Annabelle Hawthorne's Home for Horny Monsters/ Radley's Home for Horny Monsters, the Rosicrucian Celestial Sanctum visualization by Harvey Spencer Lewis in Liber 777: The Celestial Sanctum and Raymond Bernard's adaptation of this idea in Messages from the Celestial Sanctum, in which the convergence of lofty individual aspiration and that of others is visualised as a cathedral.
These associations exemplifying the deployment of concrete imagery in visualizing ultimate creative possibilities at the intersection of self and cosmos arise for me from Falola's depiction of Leku's relationship with her store as an expression of her vocation, ''the orientation of her life and work in terms of her ultimate sense of mission'', adapting Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language on ''vocation''.
Image Sources
Baule figure: Galerie Art Africain
Sri Yantra: Wikimedia
Collage by myself
''… translating those deities that had regional appeal into a system of filial relationships…and using them as parallel mirrors for viewing and reflecting on...everyday social lives.
The light bouncing from these everyday lives, to borrow the lingo of optical physics, created the infinity effect on these parallel mirrors—the orisa pantheon. The orisa offered...multiple angles to view everyday lives in a series of reflections that receded into an infinite distance.
It would take deep learning, knowledge, and expertise to observe, read, and interpret these reflections. And, inasmuch as...everyday life is not static, the pantheon could not be static. New deities (new parallel mirrors) were therefore created from time to time to capture and account for these new everyday experiences.''
(The Yoruba: A New History, 2020, 129)
Like the Buddhas of Buddhism, personages some of whom are historical while others are known to the world purely within the cosmologies of the expanding Buddhist cosmos, Leku has become a member of my spiritual universe, a vibrant presence as my mind employs the image of herself and her store and minimalist room where she lived in barest simplicity, as matrices at the intersection of mind and cosmos, windows into the dynamism that is the universe, the cosmos as both knowable and beyond full encapsulation by knowledge, like Leku was for Falola, a short, nondescript old woman, yet embodying both awesome mystery and power.
I see her in my mind's eye seated in front of her shop, smoking a pipe, the paraphernalia of her craft and her trade spread out behind her, expanding into infinity in terms of concentric circles radiating from her form and converging in that centre in a continuous rhythm.
Is she alive somewhere beyond space and time? Can she experience my longing, my identification with her in terms of what she means to me? Compassionate healer, selfless giver, seer into the future, congregate of magical power, ascetic master, consummately knowing one in her own disciplinary cosmos?
''Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen'', Paul's paradoxical declaration in the particularly luminous Biblical Hebrews 11, moving from an invocation of the foundations of existence in the unseen but potent to an invocation of pioneers in the quest for realities unseen but palpably sensed, ''since we are sorrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us run the race set before us'', seeking ''a city not made with hands, a city made by God'', ultimate possibílities of which he urges his readers to recall their aspirers as one runs that race ''looking unto ...the author and finisher of our faith'', a call to lofty aspiration and dedicated action resonating with spiritual cultures everywhere.
Mind to mind, spirit to spirit, I call upon Leku from my place on Earth, reaching to her beyond space and time, free of the limitations of mind and body.
Do I seek healing for anyone?
Do I seek guidance in vocation, to emulate her own absolute embodiment of her calling?
I speak to her through the waves of thought, mind to mind in a universe where there is no distance, except that of consciousness.
Do other issues come to mind, which I offer to this representative of infinite power, love and understanding, to help address?
The mind is perhaps freed for a time to contemplate its richer possibilities, to recall the beauties of living, freed of the grip of the limitations of existence, even if purely within the space of the mind, the ultimate matrix of all creative possibility.
''The willing suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic faith'', the English thinker S.T. Coleridge on a central principle of participation in imaginative creativity.
Can such suspension lead to encountering or constructing realities not perceptible otherwise?
Whether or not Leku lives on, unseen but alert to my desire to relate with her and draw from her power, I am mentally and emotionally empowered, my imagination invigorated, in constructing an image of a figure exemplifying the most exalted of values and trying to reach out to the person represented by that imaginative construct, a flame in the temple of my soul.
One could go even further and visualise onself as merging with her inspirational figure, absorbed into the essence of existence, her store transformed into the generative source of being, the multifarious contents of that store symbolising the unceasing proliferation of possibilities constituting cosmic being and becoming.
Pursued in that way, the imaginative exercise becomes a form of Guru Yoga, a Hindu and Buddhist technique of relating with the guru, the wise director of spiritual development, as a means of union with the essence of being, hence a form of Yoga, since Yoga is described as an approach to union with ultimate reality.
Classical African spiritualities also cultivate related conceptions, in terms of a continuum between ancestors in general and exemplary figures in particular disciplines, at times expressed in the deification of those exemplary figures. Ogundiran's summation of a defining moment in the growth of the Yoruba Orisa tradition, quoted above, resonates significantly with this process of exemplification across cultures.
This approach is also very creatively cultivated by Eckankar, following Paul Twitchell's development of the concept of Eck Masters, as described particularly well in his Spiritual Notebooks, figures visualised in the early Eck text Darwin Gross' Your Right to Know and further developed in later Eckankar art, images drawing from various ethnicities and spiritualities around the world as well as figures unique to Eckankar.
I am inspired by Falola's image of Leku, a figure combining, in a unique way, two of the most compelling qualities associated with spiritual masters-absolute devotion to a cause beyond oneself in the name of service to other human beings, a vocation demonstrated through her application of vast and mysterious knowledge.
The transmission of ideas through space that was once possible only through links between mind and mind, between spirit and spirit, is now enabled through electronic waves moving through space, transmitted through stations on Earth communicating with satellites in the zone where the planets move, a network of information reaching people through stationary and handheld mobile devices, possibilities barely imaginable only a few centuries back, a journey of knowledge traversed through understanding the rules of nature unifying earth and cosmos, gravity and electromagnetism and more, insights unlocked through centuries of dedication, mountains of aspiration, caves of incubation, remote regions of empowering, undisturbed focus on aspiration and transformation, retreats receiving and sending forth extremely high forces into the atmosphere of the earth, waves of aspiration fertilizing other minds.
Reverberations of chains of aspiration and goodwill resonating across the globe from each commitment to human uplifting, waves of power moving outward in broadening circles from each act of aspiration and care, as long as space abides, as long as the world abides, so long shall I abide, destroying the sufferings of the world, mentally praying and wishing for blessings on others so earnestly that one’s mental processes transcend thought, humanity’s conceiving fathomless, community rising beyond the present reaches of the mind, the distant sound of the footsteps of coming generations.
Image source: Nigerian Communications Commision advertisement on itedgenews.africa (8/9/2023)
Deification of the Adept, the Acolyte and their Divine Progenitor
In an earlier era of Yoruba culture, such a figure as Leku could have been deified by a community, as Falola has done for her in his concluding, poetic salutation in reference to her in Counting the Tiger's Teeth, a process of deification various spiritualities employ to canonize those they understand as demonstrating qualities exceptional within the matrix of values at the intersection of ultimate reality and the spatio-temporal universe of Earth, the saints of Catholicism, the Buddhas of Buddhism, the gurus of Hinduism, the Mahatmas of Theosophy and the Masters of Wisdom of Western esotericism.
Like the list of gurus, spiritual teachers, whose names are invoked at the beginning of the Hindu Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram ritual, for example, Leku becomes, in the poetic summation by her acolyte, not simply the enigmatically powerful woman he once knew at Ibadan, but a cosmic personage, both individualized and elemental.
He thereby distills in grand and phantasmagoric images the overwhelming majesty of the persona dramatized by the small bodied woman, not taller than himself even as a boy, ''she was short, about my height at over four feet but less than five. She had tied a wrapper around her waist, exposing her upper body. Her breasts were flat and so unnoticeable'' as he visualizes his first encounter with her as a relative living in the same house as himself in A Mouth Sweeter than Salt.
Osanyin, as I discuss in Opa Osanyin Philosophy, Mysticism and Magic, is the Yoruba Orisa tradition deity of herbalogy and its intersection with spirituality. After Osanyin, within the structure of personalities related to his calling, may be located such dedicates as Iya Lekuleja. After her, in the system of inspiration represented by the values the figure of Osanyin embodies, come those inspired by such people as Leku, people such as Falola, and after Falola come those moved by his account of her and their relationship, such as myself.
This is a structure of inspiration adapted from the lineage trees of Hinduism and Buddhism but also evident in other spiritualities, used as a means of correlating the inspirational value of figures in a spiritual tradition and drawing from this inspiration.
One could employ such a strategy in taking advantage of this marvellous narrative by Falola, depicting a great personality comparable with the greatest figures from other spiritualities, a figure particularly significant at a time in which classical Nigerian spiritualities and healing practices have not retained much of their old prestige in their native land, disciplines which people nevertheless take advantage of, but the significance of which is not publicly emphasised, disciplines which are too often referenced in terms of their negative possibilities.
Leku embodies, for me, the qualities summed up in the Buddhist context by Chogyam Trungpa in his Born in Tibet, wisdom, ''the stable essence of the universe'' and compassion, ''wisdom in operation throughout countless world systems'' ( 1985, 270) the cosmologizing description of those qualities indicating their suggestion of something larger than the self of the person expressing them, a quality associated in some cosmologies with the essence and dynamism of the cosmos, a scope of reference Falola invokes indirectly in his poem celebrating this short and otherwise nondescript but incredibly informed and amazingly spiritually powerful and totally self transcending woman.
Image and Text: Spaces of Emergence
Undulating sheets of metal stream out like waves of fire from a circular emptiness in Fidelis Odogwu Eze's The Source.
The name and design of the work, and the quality of its execution, as demonstrated by the limpid beauty and lyrcism of the metallic forms, enhanced by the abstract inscriptions amplifying the motion the waves of undulating metal evokes, suggest ideas of relationships between emptiness and fullness, voidness and creativity, essence and expression, as in this collage of quotations from the Kabbalistic cosmology of William Gray and the philosophy of Nimi Wariboko:
Void, yet breathing forth vitality and being, uncreated, yet cause of all creation, motionless, yet every moving nebula proclaims your power made manifest through nature.
No-thing-ness, silence, the source, the place beyond mere knowing, the place of ontological knowing, the divine spot where the person gets out of the self, where the artist, the painter, the scholar, the dancer, the musician, the priest, the “I,” momentarily gets into the spirit that grounds existence and lets the pulsating flow of primal energy in him or her crackle the silence.
First paragraph of quote from The Office of the Holy Tree of Life by William G. Gray. Second paragraph from Nimi Wariboko, The Principle of Excellence.
In their multifarious cognitive range, Leku and her acolyte Falola converge in the empty yet fecund space evoked by the centre of this work.
I see all disciplines as rooted in one abyss of knowledge and wisdom. The abyss is the void within the order of knowedge where order itself ( systems of knowledge) breaks down.
Ideas come to me, I do not work to create them; I only strive to discover them in the universe or receive them from All-that-is-beyond-us, the Ungrund, the bottomless depth, the undifferentiated groundless ground of existence, the ungraspable abyss, the incomprehensible abyss, the impossible possibility, forever seeking a voluptuous, rapturous embrace with the mystery (spirit) of wisdom that inhabits the street corners of the universe.
Quote from ''Creativity Within and Beyond Thought: Philosopher,Theologian and Economist Nimi Wariboko on his Thought, Vision and Creative Strategies In ''I Am Transdisciplinary'' compiled by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju.
Image source: SMO Contemporary (8/9/2023)
''Áwo'', ''Èèwọ̀'', the Spiritually Mysterious and that Which May Not be Spoken, Yoruba Esotericism and its Broader Correlates Demonstrated by the Relationship Between the Adept and the Acolyte
What Falola achieves in his account of the magical herbalist Leku in his two autobiographies is a powerful contribution to the severely underdeveloped field of accounts of masters in classical African spiritualities. His story and his interpretation of it suggests a depth of encounter with the knowledge systems these spiritualities represent, an encounter mediated through his relationship with Leku and synthesized with his immersion in Western education and projected through Western origin literacies domesticated in terms of Yoruba language.
This contribution is also positioned at the axis of the relationship between the esoteric and the exoteric in the context of the metaphysics, epistemology and sociology of discourse, known as ''ọ̀rọ̀ '' in Yoruba, as discussed in Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, particularly in chapter one. It thereby provides material for the study of Yoruba and African esotericisms, in particular, and global esotericisms in general.
The entire complex is navigated through a convergence of Yoruba spiritualities and Western cognitive forms in Falola's own person, an integration through which he testifies to the distance between his experience and understanding, on one hand, and the need for verbalization of this understanding, on the other.
Such verbalization is at the core of the relative democratization of knowledge defining the dominant Western episteme as a social construct. This is an openness inadequate for accounts of reality as demonstrating an esoteric dimension, correlative with the concept of "áwo " in Yoruba, the spiritually and metaphysically mysterious.
''Áwo'' is also relatable to "èèwọ̀", the forbidden, taboo, an aspect of which is that which may not be spoken, not be divulged. Demonstrating this distance between cognitive embodiment and expressive limitation, Falola retreats into hints rather than describe the content of his claim of insight into the mysterious universe represented by Leku.
''Áwo''' and its relationship with ''èèwọ̀" constitute a unified metaphysical and social category relatable to the disciplines of Western and Jewish esotericism in their various interpretations, relatively recently emerging but very rich fields of study, while what may be called African esotericism is only slowly achieving visibility and correlation.
Various schools of thought in diverse cultures recognize aspects of existence that are beyond circumscription by human understanding and that inspire awe, dread, a combined sense of compelling attraction and sense of remoteness, the categories of Rudolph Otto's concept of the numinous in his The Idea of the Holy, qualities evident in Falola's description of his own relationship with Leku and his memory of her.
Such qualities are usually associated with non-human forms of existence, forms of deity, not humans. Hinduism and Buddhism, however, as in Tibetan Buddhism, at times associate particular spiritual teachers with deity, seeing them as expressions of the creator of the universe or as expressions of deities understood as manifestations of ultimate reality.
These identifications are at times dramatized in relation to unusual qualities demonstrated by these adepts but a lot of the time they do not go beyond being theoretical schemes adopted in spiritual practice. Falola's account of Leku belongs in this universe of the numinous, its power deriving from its raw effusion, outside any religious or philosophical scheme, simply a person giving vent to an extraordinary reality he has experienced through the person of another human being.
Image and Text: Leku and the Circles of Infinity
Smoking as Sacred Activity
The woman smoking represents Leku, though as a young woman, well before Falola met her, perpetually smoking, although she is depicted in Falola's book as smoking a pipe. Her smoking was for more than pleasure. It was also a means of concentrating spiritual power, as suggested by her final ritual with Falola in which she asked him to inhale and swallow the smoke from her pipe, one of a sequence of rituals of spiritual bonding and activation of power that she took him through in those final rites described in Counting the Tiger's Teeth.
Her smoking is evoked in connection with this collage as akin to Native American sacred smoking rituals, at times involving sacred pipe smoking ceremonies, and the ingestion of the famous consciousness amplifying herb Ayahuasca, a means of cognitive expansion, of amplification of awareness across diverse cognitive zones.
Navigation of Cognitive Zones
These zones are represented, in this context, by the various aspects of the interdisciplinary model symbolized by the concentric circles behind the woman's image, the circles of the Ghanaian Adinkra symbol Adinkrahene. The insights depicted as gained thereby are expressed in the words in italics directly below:
I ride on the rhythms of the smoke, centre to circumference, circumference to centre, from figures integrating all possibilities within themselves to the unfolding of those potentialities, from forms of knowledge to history as the constructions of people making sense of their existence in shaping their lives within the arrow of time, spirals of actualization converging within limitless possibilities of ultimacy.
The Arrow and the Spiral
The verbal sequence culminates in an image of time and a picture of the interpretation of experience as it unfolds within time. The image of time visualizes it as an arrow moving from the past to the present and the future. The picture of the interpretation of experience depicts it as a spiral.
In this spiral, the constants of human experience are understood in terms of new possibilities emerging from those constants. This spiral image is further depicted in terms of a potentially limitless scope of interpretation of the meaning of experience. A constantly unfolding horizon is suggested, in which ultimate possibilities of understanding can be conceived but never conclusively reached.
''The spiral is an Nsibidi symbol meaning 'journey' but may also mean the sun and eternity'', a most scintillating convergence of evocations, the explanation of a painting of a spiral by Victor Ekpuk at the site of the Smithsonian Inscribing Meaning exhibition, building on the Nsibidi symbolism of Nigeria's Cross-River region, an explanation from which my own interpretation is derived.
Image of woman smoking from iStock.
Collage by myself.
Leku functions for me, therefore, as both a historical figure and an imaginative personage, the force of her depiction inspiring sensitivity to and integration of diverse bodies of knowledge. Like T.C. McCaskie's account of the enduring, multiple significations of the Akan historical and cultural figure Komfo Anokye, in ''Komfo Anokye of Asante: Meaning, History and Philosophy in an African Society'', the factual depiction of Leku's persona, activities and environment, in relation to the picture of the attitudes she inspired in Falola and others, structures her for me into a metaphoric matrix, a nucleus of open ended semiotic codes facilitating the generation and conjunction of diverse philosophical meanings.
Further quoting and adapting McCaskie's expressions as I have done above in reference to semiotic codes, Leku may be described as becoming for me a matrix or force field drawing together and configuring various bodies of knowledge, a matrix the borders of which demonstrate a high degree of flux, an elasticity located both within the temporal fixity of Falola's account of her as a woman he knew in 60s and 70s Ibadan and a personage existing in all time and no time as a philosophical construct.
She thus functions for me as a synergy of intersecting meanings, a jigsaw enabling one construct an ideational and multi-disciplinary topography through philosophic intentionality and categorization. She is for me a person of actual and metaphorical existence integrating the breadth of the knowable as well as suggesting the boundaries between the exoteric and the esoteric, the knowable and the unknowable.
In exploring the associative possibilities of her image, I move from contemplating a historical actor to correlating ideas through the resonant complexities of evocation and of metaphor, generating fluid densities of symbolic constructs constructed through both manifest and implicit representations, between the historical past and the evolution of ideas, generating a dense convergence of trees within which I map the topography of a forest of ideas.
McCaskie's summations in the Anokeye essay and in "'Death and the Asantehene: A Historical Meditation'', quoted and adapted in the concepts and sentences constituting the sequence of paragraphs directly above, incidentally sum up my own experience with the image of Leku. This incidental convergence achieves this in a manner both precise and evocative of the imaginative power of my encounter with this figure.
McCaskie's words incidentally suggest how this image catalyzes correlations of ideas and figures I have encountered in diverse contexts, such as those I have referenced in this essay, personages I came across by chance in my wanderings in search of knowledge, figures that the image of Leku is helping me integrate as I move further in harmonizing the diverse components of my own cognitive universe in a manner that could prove helpful for others in pursuing their own cognitive unifications.
Image and Text: Spiral of Possibilities
I seek the centre from where the spiral of my life unfolds, the same centre into which my life enfolds.
The inward voice propelling me, the same flame into which I wish to be absorbed.
''No matter how far your journey may lead, there is none more loyal, more committed to serving you.''
My sense of self-awareness said to have its roots in that awareness that embraces and transcends the cosmos.
In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.
Image source: iBand Magazine.
From Leku to African and Global Cognitive History
Where do I go from here?
This essay, growing through various editions, is the central platform of the Leku Project. It is complemented by other essays representing explorations inspired by and complementing the Leku Project, essays larely integrated into this one.
The latest of these essays is that on T. C. McCaskie's work in Asante history, ''African Cognitive History: Intrinsic and Extrinsic Configurations of the Achievement of T. C. McCaskie : An Appreciative Note and Brief Selections from McCaskie's Work Complemented by the Art of Kofi and Nyornuwofia Agorsor''.
What follows from my exploration of Leku's image shall be a comprehensive study of McCaskie's work in Asante cognitive history, as well as of the field of cognitive history generally, beginning with such strategic sources as David Dunér and Christer Ahlberger's edited Cognitive History: Mind, Space, and Time, The Journal of Cognitive Historiography and Subrata Dasgupta's A Cognitive-Historical Approach to Creativity.
The convergence of McCaskie's work on the cognitive history of the Asante, as well as studies in cognitive history generally and in other specific contexts, will assist my work in better understanding and perhaps taking forward what I understand is Akinwumi Ogundiran's efforts in Yoruba cognitive history, but which I know him as referring to as cultural history.
This is an ongoing study of mine, predating my interest in McCaskie's work. The correlation of McCaskie's and Ogundiran's work on Asante and Yoruba cognitive histories, respectively, will hopefully guide me to a better appreciation of African cognitive history, as I seek to find my place in the cosmos as an African, and from that point, better appreciate the development of humanity as a cognitive process, a goal I have long aspired to, in relation to which I have been gradually developing the relevant tools of enquiry.
Therefore, from exploring implications of Falola's image of Leku, I move into further probing of associations of that image, associations relating to systems of knowledge, from the complex demonstrated by Falola's multidisciplinary productions to cognitive history, a thread unfolding from its concentrated core, the associative force of the image of Leku, a woman in 1960s and 1970s Ibadan, projected through her influence on Falola, the youth both fascinated and awed by her in a relationship both tender and magical.
Summative, Inspirational Text
The Tree of Knowledge
At the centre of the universe is a tree and at its foot a little old woman. The tree is her mind, the branches her thoughts, their leaves her words.
How may one map the branches of this tree, large as houses, spreading in various directions, their leaves innumerable?
An image of the human being as thinker and expresser of thought, her consciousness the standpoint from which she perceives the cosmos, therefore in a sense, the centre of the cosmos, since cosmic vastness and its individualities only exists for her to the degree that she perceives it.
An image adapted from Wande Abimbola’s An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus.