The Falola/Adepoju Mandala of the Spiritual/Physical Cosmos: A Universal Cosmogram Developed from Toyin Falola's Yoruba Metaphysics by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
This paper presents the Falola/Adepoju Mandala, a visual cosmogram that synthesizes Toyin Falola's three-point summation of endogenous Yoruba metaphysics into a geometric representation of cosmic structure.
I argue that Falola's distillation of classical Yoruba cosmological thought—articulated in Yoruba Metaphysics: Spirituality and Supernaturality (2025)—transcends its cultural origins to articulate a universal framework present across diverse religious and philosophical traditions.
The mandala employs concentric circles to represent: (1) the ultimate incomprehensibility of the cosmos to human understanding (2) the interpenetration of spiritual and material realms, and (3) humanity's composite nature as beings capable of navigating both dimensions (4) the possibility of interaction between all forms of existence, human and non-human, represented by the empty centre of the sequence of concentric circles.
Through comparative analysis with various cosmological systems-Hindu (Sri Yantra), Buddhist (Nirvana/Samsara unity), Judaic (Kabbalistic Tree of Life), Edo (igha ede) and Christian ( Jesus' divine/human synthesis), I demonstrate that this structural pattern—the unity of matter and spirit within an ultimately ineffable totality—constitutes a cross-cultural epistemological constant.
The mandala thus serves not only as a diagrammatic representation of these unified cosmic principles but as a cognitive tool, leveraging geometric hamony to facilitate deeper comprehension and retention of these metaphysical principles, highlighting the inherent limitations of human understanding and the universal human drive to navigate the complex unity of the cosmos.
The mandala is therefore a symbolic map of metaphysical unity, an epistemological meditation, and an artistic bridge between indigenous African, Asian, and Western spiritual philosophies.
Introduction: From Yoruba Thought to Universal Metaphysics
The diagram above is a visual depiction of the structure of the cosmos as a unity of material and spiritual worlds, in relation to the human being, a totality that is not fully comprehensible by the human mind.
It is an adaptation by myself of Toyin Falola's three point summation of endogenous Yoruba metaphysics, the view of the universe and humanity's place within it, that significantly has its roots in Yorubaland, in his Yoruba Metaphysics: Spirituality and Supernaturality ( 2025).
I understand Falola's summation, however, as inadvertently going beyond Yoruba thought to represent all descriptions of the cosmos as a unity of matter and spirit, partly perceptible to the human being but constituting a totality that is beyond full human comprehension, that being the essence of Falola's summation.
Cross-Cultural Parallels: The Universality of the Unity Principle
The Falola–Adepoju Mandala interprets Falola’s summation as a universal cosmological principle, finding corollaries in various spiritual traditions:
The Buddhist cosmological statement "Nirvana ( the zone or possibility of ultimate understanding, the source of existence) is in Sangsara ( the material cosmos)" , indicating the unity of ultimate and conditioned reality, the temporal and the timeless, ultimate understanding and the perception of the contingent universe, an orientation correlative with Falola's own summation of classical Yoruba cosmology.
The Jewish Kabbalistic declaration "Kether ( the ultimate source of existence) is in Malkuth ( the material universe)" expresses the same interpenetration between divine origin and material manifestation.
These perspectives are convergent with Falola's summation of endogenousYoruba metaphysics:
1. We exist in a universe that is not fully comprehensible to us. Some forces and beings possess significant spiritual power over humans.
2. Humans can engage with these spiritual forces and exert some influence over them. However, we are ultimately responsible for shaping the course of our own lives.
3. These forces exist in an unseen or invisible realm, known as Ọ́run, distinct from our physical world. This unseen realm is often described as fantastical, magicical and challenging to grasp.
Yet it is closely intertwined with the physical world, with its inhabitants, including the Supreme Being, playing a vital role in it.
Conversely, while residing primarily in the physical world, humans possess certain unique qualities that make them semispiritual and capable of interacting with the invisible realm under specific circumstances.
Ọ́run is also the dwelling place of deceased ancestors and the origin of human existence before birth."(xii)
This triadic vision encapsulates a profound metaphysical architecture—one that transcends its Yoruba origins to resonate with a global metaphysical current:that the cosmos is a unified whole of diverse dimensions, the full nature of which transcends complete human comprehension.
Correlative Cosmologies in Visualizing the Cosmos: Global Echoes of a Unified Reality
African Symbolic Precedents: the Igha Ede
One of the most fundamental symbols for expressing a similar insight is an example of the igha ede directly above, used in the worship of the deity Olokun in Benin-City. as decribed by Norma Rosen in " Chalk Iconogrsphy in Olokun Worship"( African Arts, Vol. 22, 3, 1989), in which the intersecting horizontal and vertical lines are described as representing the conjunction of the spiritual and material universes:
Igha-ede is concerned with the division of foods in both erinmwin[ the spiritual world] and agbon [ the physical universe], the transmission of messages between the two realms, the sharing of foods among various deities who are being saluted in a ceremony, the allocation of time in ceremonies, the strengthening of medicinal bath preparations, the detection of physical problems, and the protection from negative forces through the creation of an intangible block or gate.
When drawn simply, igha-ede is composed of two intersecting lines that form a cross. The cross may be circled at the end points and at the intersection that divides the design into four sections.
This image is called ada nene, "four junctions". In Benin, four is an important number. The space between earth and heaven is said to be divided by four pillars: Ikadele enene (ene) no da agbon yi (The four cardinal points that hold the world).
The igha-ede design represents a crossroads or junction, duality in nature, and the balance between positive and negative elements in the face of constant change.
It is believed that spirits congregate at junctions to either bless humans or tempt them into wrongdoing or misfortune. The Edo say, "Uhien, avbe ada mwen aro" (Even the junctions have eyes).
A simple cross configuration may symbolize the intersection of the earthly and otherworldly realms.
A person who stands in the center of the image can "cross over" and speak in erinmwin[ the spirit world]. Through igha-ede, one can send the spirits messages as well as gifts of food and drink. Those suffering from illness may be treated with special bathing preparations while standing at the inter]section of the design and requesting aid.
Igha-ede can also deliver a message from Olokun[ deity of all waters] to the ohen [ Olokun priest]who owns the shrine in which the design operates
( 48-49).
The Sri Yantra: A Detailed Map of Cosmic/Human Unity
A supreme example, in its complex harmony, of a symbol evoking the unity of matter and spirit is the Hindu symbol the Sri Yantra, directly above.
Each element of the structure represents an aspect of the spiritual and material cosmos and an aspect of the physical, psychological and spiritual character of the human being as a microcosm, a miniature form of the cosmos existing within the larger totality.
That totality is subsumed as the Goddess Tripurasundari, the Most Beautiful Embodiment of the Cosmos, of whom each aspect of the yantra is a manifestationn.
Sri Yantra spirituality is particularly well developed in the school of Sri Vidya, itself an aspect of Tantra, one of the world's richest bodies of thought and practice centred in the idea of the unity of matter and spirit, whence comes Tantra's development of the spiritual significance of sexuality.
Sri Yantra embodies this unity through the intersection of Shiva’s upward triangles (pure consciousness) and Shakti’s downward triangles (creative energy), symbolizing the cosmic interplay of the masculine and feminine, spirit and matter
In that scheme, in which the upward facing triangles of the Sri Yantra represent the God Shiva and the downward facing triangles stand for the feminine divine presence Shakti, that interpenetrative intersection of triangles may be visualized as abstracted depictions of the deities in sexual congress, with Shakti sitting on the phallus of the supine Shiva, evoking the love making between the couple that brought the universe into being and sustains it in existence, a cosmic motif ubiquitous in Tantric art, the earliest occurence of which may be traced to Shiva rushing onto the battlefield to impale the Goddess Kali, a manifestation of Shakti, as all Hindu goddesses are, on his phallus as he lay on his back under her in order to subdue through the shock of sexual pleasure her battle lust which had gone bersek.
A superb guide to the Sri Yantra, among other sources, is the Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram ritual translated by the Shakti Saddhana school and freely available online.
In that ritual, the aspirant navigates the cosmos and its conjunctions with the human form by navigating the yantra through a combination of visualization and prayers, a process culminating in the dot, the bindu, at the centre of the yantra, the source of the cosmos, described by one account as the ultimate zone of sexual congress between Shiva and Shakti.
The Kabbalistic Tree of Life: Cosmology Mapped to the Human Form
Image from Joy Vernon, " The Middle Pillar Exercise: Beginning Meditations, ( https://joyvernon.com/middle-pillar-exercise/)
The Judaic origin Kabbalistic Tree of Tree of Life depicts the cosmos in the form of a tree, stylized in geometric terms, as in the image above, and mapped onto the human body, indicating the section of the human form associated with each section of the cosmos symbolized by each point on the tree.
As in the Sri Yantra, the aspirant navigates the cosmos by navigating the conjunctions between the human being and the tree through visualization, invocation and prayer, as described in Israel Regardie's The Tree of Life: A Study in Magic and in his edited The Rituals, Rites and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, those two being among the source texts for the proliferation of information on that Kabbalistic cosmological scheme.
Jesus Christ as Model of Divine/Human Unity
In Christian theology Jesus Christ embodies the humanization of the divine, its complete flowering in human form, "wholly man and wholly God", as is stated in Catholic doctrine, a perspective expressed in different ways by various Christian orientations.
Jesus is thus a distinctive expression of the spirit\matter unity foregrounded by various spiritualities. He is understood as God in human form but the Christian is also encouraged to pursue the complete blossoming of his own self as expressing the unity of divinity and humanity by emulating Jesus.
These systems, across continents and epochs, converge in a shared cosmological intuition of the world and the human being as a living synthesis of visible and invisible dimensions.
The Falola/Adepoju Mandala: Synthesis and Innovation, Visualization and Interpretation
We have travelled from Toyin Falola's account of the three central ideas structuring the cosmos of classical Yoruba thought, which I am arguing is actually a universally valid depiction of a good number of religious cosmologies and possibly some philosophical systems, substantiating my argument with references to Hinduism, Buddhism, Benin Olokun spirituality, Christianity and Kabbalah.
These analyses emerge from what I describe as the Falola/Adepoju Mandala of the Spiritual/Physical Cosmos, a cosmogram, a visual image of the cosmos developed by myself from Falola's verbal summation of endogenous Yoruba cosmology, a distillation I argue incidentally goes beyond Yoruba thought to encapsulate a global strain of thought, evident across space and time- the unity of matter and spirit, an idea actualized in different ways by various bodies of knowledge.
The Falola/Adepoju Mandala is a proposed visual synthesis of these universal principles.
The Falola–Adepoju Mandala is situated within a long tradition of cosmograms—visual schemata that map spiritual principles through geometry.
The Mandala as a Cognitive and Aesthetic Instrument
The diagram is called a mandala beceause that is a famous name for a Budhhist visual depiction of the cosmos.
It is actually closer to a yantra, a Hindu cosmogram, a visualization of the cosmos that is likely to be the inspiration for the mandala, but which is purely abstract, purely geometric, while the mandala may be grounded in a geometric structure while containing non-abstract forms, such as humanoid structures and other figures.
Such diagrammatizations of ideas facilitate better appreciation of the ideas by visualizing them. Their sensorial force, stimulating the sense of sight, facilitate their carrying the ideas they represent into the mind of the viewer with a power unreplicated by purely verbal expression.
Thus, the mandala is not merely an illustration; it is a thinking diagram, a meditation device, and a poetic cosmology.
In each case, cosmograms serve as meditative instruments, enabling aspirants to traverse the cosmos inwardly through visualization, prayer, and disciplined contemplation.
Cosmographic forms, such as the mandala discussed here, are also used as vehicles in aspirations of going beyond intellectual and imaginative perception into mystical vision, expanding awareness into perception or experience of the cosmos mediated through the cosmosgram.
The goal in such a strategy is using the mental stimulation of the cosmogram in enhancing one's perceptual capacities in such a manner that the contemplative perceives or experiences cosmic unity and dynamism within cosmic mystery rather than simply thinking about those concepts.
Three circles occupying one space, the unity of the ultimate creator, his self expression and the spirit driving the cosmos, the unity of all forms of existence, their individual qualities and the relationships between them, all this I beheld as one simple flame, fusing the past, present and future, the living, the departed and the unborn, the physical and the non-physical, emerging as the rounded calabash of cosmic power-precision mind, cosmic mind conjoined-something far superior to the personality which I was, some deeper, divine being rising into consciousness as me, in an ocean that stretches into untellable, infinite space, incredibly alive, within Nothingness, a blaze so intense it is darkness, cosmic unity annihilated in the Unknowable.
The summation directly above illustrates a possible mystical aspiration inspired by the cosmogram by conjoining ideas fron Dante's Christian/Greco-Roman philosophy synthesis in the Divine Comedy, Paul Brunton's A Search in Secret India, inspired by Hindu thought, Mazizi Kunene's summation of Zulu philosophy in Anthem of the Decades, Aleister Crowley's description of the Indian discipline of Yoga in Magick: Book Four, St. John of the Cross' Christian "Verses Written after an Ecatacy of High Exaltation" and memories of the Judaic Kabbalistic concept En Sof as described by Dion Fortune in The Mystical Qabalah and William Gray's The Office of the Holy Tree of Life.
Within such a visionary encounter as understood through accounts of mystical experience, various elements of the cosmos represented by the cosmogram may be experienced as a matrix that is not distinguishable from the self of the person contemplating it, as the contemplative percieves the cosmos or realizes themself as the cosmos, unifying its diversities within the self of the contemplative, reaching a consummation of his cognitive journey to realize the unity of self and that which is sought.
The Circle as Sacred Geometry
The circle, the geometric structure used in creating the mandala, is chosen for its lyrical force, a force amplified by the sequence of concentric circles, a visual concentration evocative of harmony and celestial rhythm, embodying unity and perfection, its concentric organization suggesting harmony and unfolding awareness, a balance of shapes pleasing to the eye, conducive to understanding the ideas the mandala represents, retaining them in the mind and possibly triggering further associations beyond those immediate symbolic values, qualities that make the circle recurrent in yantra and mandala structure, as evident in Maddhu Khana's Yantra: The Tantric Synbol of Cosmic Unity and possibly in Guiseppe Tucci's Theory and Practice of the Mandala.
Structural Symbolism
The outermost circle, subsuming all the others in the mandala developed from Falola's ideas, represents the universe as ultimately beyond full grasp by the human mind, a vital contribution to accounts of endogenous Yoruba metaphysics on account of the challenges of distinguishing between human creativity, human cultural forms and claims of divine inspiration, as in the belief that the Ifa knowledge system embodies, encodes or is a key to all knowledge, a view which one may recurrently encounter in interacting with asociates of that system, particularly in my Facebook encounters.
The centralization of the limitations of human understanding in relation to the cosmos promotes a realistic humility in the face of the profound ignorance that defines the human condition, a vital counterpoint to claims of totalizing knowledge in any system. This perspective fosters a sensitive wonder in the face of existence.
This orientation resonates powerfullly with various spirirtualities, philosophies and visual and verbal art, efforts of the human creature finding himself in existence, the complete contexts of that existence unknown.
The final referent in the mandala is the empty space in the centre of the concentric circles. It represents the potential for interaction between the various elements in the cosmogram. This interactive field includes all forms in existence, human and non-human.
Creativity, Cosmos, Narrative
What exactly is the character of existence in general, and human existence in particular?
It may be accurately stated that the cosmos is an unfolding story, adapting Falola's description of human existence as narrative, as understood in endogenous Yoruba metaphysics.
What are the foundational propellants of this story?
To what degree is the human being bound by the contexts of the story as defined by his own enviromental and interpersonal frameworks?
If the universe is a story unfolding in infinite dimensions, as Falola suggests through the Yoruba conception of existence as narrative, then is the human being both author and participant?
These are questions of universal resonance explored in various contexts, in diverse cultures, across history, in myth, in later literature, in films, in art, in religion, in philosophy, further demonstrations of the universal resonance of Falola's grappling with classical Yoruba metaphysics, inadvertently penetrating from the individual, a particular body of thought, to the universal.
In depicting the human being as the microcosm of the macrocosm, a living intersection of visible and invisible forces, the Falola–Adepoju Mandala suggests the idea of human lives as acts within the vast cosmic drama whose full script we can never wholly read.
This recognition fosters humility and creative aspiration—a dual awareness that is itself spiritual wisdom.
Conclusion
The Falola/Adepoju Mandala represents both a specific interpretive tool for understanding Yoruba metaphysics and a universal framework for comprehending the structural convergences across diverse cosmological systems.
By translating verbal articulation into visual form, this cosmogram activates multiple modes of understanding, facilitating not only intellectual comprehension but also intuitive and aesthetic engagement with fundamental metaphysical principles.
From the sacred chalk diagrams of Olokun to the Śrī Yantra’s geometric grace, from Ọ̀run to Nirvana, from the Tree of Life to the concentric cosmos of the mandala and the Jesus embodiment, the same metaphysical perspective reverberates:
matter and spirit are one continuum of being.
Toyin Falola’s philosophical triad, interpreted through this lens, transcends ethnographic particularity. It becomes a universal metaphysical grammar—what this essay names The Falola–Adepoju Mandala of the Spiritual–Physical Cosmos—a symbolic synthesis of indigenous African insight and global metaphysical vision.
Falola’s description of human existence as a narrative finds its setting within this cosmic framework. The human story is propelled by the foundational tension and interplay between the spiritual and the physical. The universal resonance of this model—evident from Yoruba metaphysics to Tantra, from Kabbalah to Buddhism, Benin thought to Christianity —demonstrates how a rigorous engagement with a particular tradition can illuminate a universal pattern. The Falola/Adepoju Mandala serves as both a testament to this insight and a tool for contemplating the enduring human quest to understand our place within the spiritual-physical whole.
In identifying the pattern of matter-spirit unity within incomprehensible totality as a cross-cultural constant, this work contributes to comparative metaphysics while honoring the depth and sophistication of African philosophical traditions as generative sources for universal insight.