From Wizard to Cyborg:The Journey of Toyin Falola, Part 3 and the Mystical Progression of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju : Architectures of Cosmic Creativity in Relation to Ideas About Witchcraft and Wizardry as Archetypes of Creativity Between Yoruba and Western Cultures
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
From Wizard to Cyborg
The Journey of Toyin Falola
Part 3
and the
Mystical Progression of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Architectures of Cosmic Creativity in Relation to Ideas About
Witchcraft and Wizardry as Archetypes of Creativity Between Yoruba and Western Cultures
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Cosmic Vision
The vitality of roots
The evocative symmetry of the circle
The unity of forest and cosmos
Strands of hair come together to occupy the head
The clumping of trees becomes the forest
The gathering of eruwa grasses becomes the savannah
Bees always cluster together
Eeran leaves grow in a bunch
The broom exists as a bundle.
All things continue-in-being as communities,
throughout the realms of nature, from ants to elephants,
from algae
to whales, from plants to giant forest trees;
from dyads
to congregations, from families to nations.
Otete, you are Alasuwada, the Author of all things,
the Great Being Who Creates All Existences in Groups for a Purpose.
The creator of togetherness, I invoke you
Let myriads of togetherness come to me.
( Lines
1-3 are inspired by the image above of a Tree of
Life pottery sculpture
by Ato Arinze. All other lines are
from the Yoruba Ifa poem ''Ayajo Asuwada",
translated by Akinsola Akiwowo in ''Towards a
Sociology of Knowledge
from an African Oral Poetry)
Abstract
This essay is inspired by the confluence between my visit to the scholar and writer Toyin Falola in his Lagos home on 29 November 2025 and my earlier studies of his life and work, leading to what began as a call to discuss an academic project becoming a confrontation with questions of human possibility.
It takes off from reflections on forms of creativity to exploring relationships between creativity and spirituality in Falola's Yoruba native culture and in Western cultural contexts which he brings into dialogue with African thought.
In this third part of the essay in progress, I explain the literal and metaphorical interpretations of the Yoruba terms àjẹ́ and oṣó , heuristically translated as witch and wizard, which I use in engaging Falola's ceaseless, multifaceted creativity, relating these terms to questions of human possibility at the intersection of Falola's writings and my own explorations, conjunctions subsumed in a dialogue between Western and African cultures.
This section of the essay begins with a meditation on an image from the British television series A Discovery of Witches, which dramatizes the historical intertwining of science and the esoteric in the West. Drawing on my own trance-like experiences associated with forests and sacred trees in Benin City, Nigeria, the essay examines African beliefs about witches’ spiritual mobility, forest congregations, and non-ordinary modes of consciousness.
These reflections are placed in conversation with Falola’s account of his being guided by spiritual influences and his scholarly advocacy for the critical study of witchcraft and magic in Africa as well as with my further experiences with what may be described as ''magical consciousness'', unusually expansive mental states demonstrating awareness of reality beyond the conventional. These autobiographical accounts are paired with images that catalyzed the experiences described or which act as visual complements to the accounts of those experiences, visual forms complementing and amplifying the semantic force of the essay's verbal text.
By juxtaposing African experiential narratives with Western developments—from Renaissance magic and the Scientific Revolution to modern Wicca—the essay argues for a sensitive, comparative, and critically rigorous framework for studying magic and witchcraft. Such a framework must attend to the dynamic interplay between intellectual and non-intellectual forms of knowing, and remain attentive to the ethical, epistemological, and cosmological stakes involved in expanding our understanding of what it means to be human, developing a sensitive, critical dialogue between the developmental trajectories of Western and African thought on human possibility, rationality, and the cosmos. The goal is to move beyond simplistic categorizations and instead explore ideas, and where existent, practices, of witchcraft and magic as contested sites of cognitive exploration, where intellectual and non-intellectual forms of knowing intersect.
The complete essay moves between lived observation, Falola’s own accounts of his creative processes, spiritual and technological practices, and broader reflections on genius, indigenous epistemologies, and the emerging post-human condition. It concludes with a theory and practice of creativity developed in relation to the ideas the essay discusses.
Falola is presented not only as one of the most accomplished of scholars and writers but as a living experiment in a trans-cultural metaphysics and epistemology, an approach to learning and the outcomes of this approach, integrating relentless labour and intellectual work, trance-like creativity, and twenty-first-century medical technology.
The first, analytical and expository part of the essay, to which this section belongs, examines Falola’s creative processes and their significance in relation to diverse cognitive cultures. The second part distills the insights of the first, preceding section in developing a theory and practice of creativity in relation to an exploration of the self.
This piece of writing is therefore part biography, part auto-biography, part philosophical meditation, and part provocation: what becomes possible when a person refuses to choose between the library, the shrine, the laboratory, and the machine implanted in his own body, when the self becomes a ritual archive, a dynamic arcanum constituted by the convergence of such sites of knowledge?
To help me organize the range of ideas through which the essay is composed, I'm breaking it up into multiple parts for publishing on social media. On completing that, I'll publish the complete essay in a unified document.
Keywords: Toyin Falola; African spirituality; Yoruba cosmology; àjẹ́; oṣó; àṣẹ; Western esotericism; witchcraft studies; magic and science; Isaac Newton; Hermeticism; creative genius; cognitive architecture; tree mysticism; sacred ecology; Ifa; phenomenology of consciousness; spiritosapientia
Previous Essays in this Series
''The Wizard Paradigm : Aṣẹ and the Metaphysics of Creativity: Mapping the Cognitive Cosmos of Toyin Falola'' (USAAfrica Dialogues Series; Facebook )
"From Wizard to Cyborg:The Journey of Toyin Falola: Part 1: An Encounter and its Significance".
"From Wizard to Cyborg:The Journey of Toyin Falola 2 : Trance, Intellect, and the Polymathic Mind".
Contents
Image and Text: Cosmic Vision
Abstract
Image and Text: The Cosmos of Creatures
Between Critique and Experience
Image and Text: Encounters with Magical Realities: The Presence in the Enchanted Forest
Falola and the Esoteric
Exploring Questions of Human Possibility in Relation to
Beliefs about Magic in African and Western Contexts
Image and Text: Encounters with Magical Realities: The Enigmatic Painting
Witchcraft and Wizardry as Archetypes of Creativity Between Yoruba and Western Cultures
Wizardry as More of an Inward Identity than an Outward Expression
Image and Text:Encounters with Magical Realities: Epiphanic Geometry
Àjẹ́ and Oṣó: Witch and Wizard in Classical Yoruba Thought
Spiritual, Literal and Secular, Metaphorical Interpretations and their Unification
Àṣẹ as a Unifying Concept
Image and Text: Encounters with Magical Realities: The Inward Hunger
From
Pre-Modern to Modern Western Witchcraft Beliefs
Representative Texts
Between Witch and Wizard Images in Pre-Modern Western Thought
Image and Text:The Sphere Within the Sphere
On Form and Process
Thematic Resonance
The Wizard in Western Fiction
The Scholar as Magus: The Case of Isaac Newton
The Climate of Thought in Which Newton Was Active and its Later Developments
Image and Text: Encounters with Magical Realities: The Transformative Book
The Contemporary Image of the Magician as
Transgressive Cognitive Explorer in Western Non-Fiction and Fiction
Image and Text: Encounters with Magical Realities: The Crowned Tree
African Examples of Magical Cognitive Cultures
Epilogue
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The Cosmos of Creatures
The picture above is an arresting image from the spellbinding opening sequence of the British television series A Discovery of Witches, a work of fiction based on relationships between science and spirituality in fiction as well as in the facts of Western history. This screenshot evokes the sense of compelling mystery that opening sequence projects, a sequence suggesting the question of the scope of what it means to be human, evoked by the reflections of the figure on the bridge, the central character Mathew Clairmont musing on the various kinds of beings living on Earth, witches being one of such kinds of creatures in the imaginative universe of the film, an imaginative cosmos made more forceful by its partial grounding in objective history.
The film foregrounds questions about conjunctions between magic, in general, and witchcraft, in particular, in relation to science in Western history, concerns emerging from the orientations of Deborah Harkness, the writer of the All Souls Trilogy, the novels the films dramatise.
Harkness is a scholar of European history and of the history of science who has written books on the role of esoteric disciplines in European history, as well as on the Scientific Revolution, where the esoteric and the scientific interacted fruitfully, this interaction being a subject that Falola also explores in African Spirituality, Politics and Knowledge Systems: Sacred Words and Holy Realms, in arguing for the influence of African magic on science, generally, and particularly on what he refers to as African science.
Between Critique and Experience
As a person deeply invested, through study and practice, in both the mainstream and occult dimensions of African and Western spiritualities, I see much, if not most of African witchcraft thought known to me as superstition, being largely uncritical, but acknowledge some valuable cosmological ideas among them, ideas that could be developed into theories and practices of witchcraft, akin to what has been achieved in Europe and North America since Gerald Gardner's 1954 founding of Wicca in England.
I am also curious about the implications of the relationships between my own experiences and those claimed for witches in the African context, though I am a solitary spiritual practitioner while witches in Africa are often described as operating in groups or covens.
These experiences involve twice entering into trance states in which I seemed to penetrate into a different dimension through relationships with a particular tree and a particular forest, through visualizing them or thinking about them, mental experiences complementing intense physical interaction with the tree and forest in admiring their beauty, trying to use them as mystical portals, as contemplative gateways to the source of existence, in which all that exists is rooted.
Closing my eyes in my study, visualizing Benin-City's Ogba forest as I reflected on the compellingly mysterious atmosphere of the place, I opened them to find myself somewhere else, in a strange place, in dialogue with a woman who welcomed me.
Reflecting, in the privacy of my bedroom, on the striking beauty of an iroko tree in Benin, as I imagined the tree in its woodland location, the atmosphere around me seemed to change as I seemed to move in consciousness from the warmth of my room to the night coldness of the area around the iroko as the tree's image seemed to increasingly become sharper.
What is the significance of the similarity of those experiences to the belief in my native Nigeria that witches meet in trees? That they can leave their bodies and congregate there in spirit the way my mind seemed to project itself beyond my body into a strange space or a familiar space, both reached without physical movement?
Could people exist who can deliberately do those things I did inadvertently? If they do, could they organize themselves into groups? May such people or groups be necessarily evil, as is often claimed for witches in Africa?
The forest was a most mentally elevating space to spend time in, on account of its awesomely beautiful and mysteriously suffused atmosphere, pervaded by an uncanny presence, the space seeming to vibrate with elevated force, the sublime emanation of a divine identity, described by those familiar with the place as the palpable though invisible atmosphere generated by the goddess of the river that emerged above ground in the forest after a long underground journey, an example of an impression registered across cultures, from the Latin genius loci, the ''spirit of place'', to the numinous of Rudolph Otto "an invisible but majestic presence that inspires both dread and fascination and constitutes the non-rational element of vital religion" ( The Idea of the Holy).
Image and Text: Encounters with Magical Realities: The Presence in the Enchanted Forest
Benin-City.
My eyes closed, I
imagined the Ogba forest canopy some distance from my house, intrigued by its uncanny,
yet sublime atmosphere, as if some eldritch energy was coruscated within the
dense assemblage of trees.
“What does that energy, that unique atmosphere represent?’’ I wondered. It was
described by people living in the vicinity as the presence of the goddess of
the Ogba river which broke ground in the forest after a long underground journey.
Observing that sublime radiance and immersing myself within it by spending time
in the forest, has been one of my life's most glorious experiences, a
penetration into the empowering bliss of heaven on Earth, a presence of
angelic elevation and potency, testifying to nature as the first and yet
unsurpassed temple of humanity.
I had stumbled on the
place one day as I walked home, seeing a light pouring out of a cluster of
trees in the distance. I saw it, not with the vision that enables everyday
sights of physical reality, but a deeper kind of sight, an extension of my
physical sight, a form of extra-sensory perception, known as ‘’oji inu’’ in
Yoruba, an inward vision penetrating to the reality of things at a level beyond
the conventional.
This was a capacity unexpectedly emerging from my practice of tree mysticism,
contemplating the beauty of trees in order to arrive at their metaphysical
essence, their "rootedness" in the source of being, like all aspects of
existence are understood in some schools of thought as ultimately grounded in
and nourished by the essence of existence.
I had not yet
penetrated to that metaphysical centre, the ‘’soil’’ in which all possibilities
of existence are rooted, but my awareness had expanded to perceive an aura
around some trees, an aura that always turned out to signify a tree or
collection of trees understood as sacred, as the forest canopy from which I had
perceived light pouring out of turned out to be.
Immersed in my memory of that location, fed by its wondrous atmosphere so vivid
to my mind’s eye as I sat in my study, I suddenly found I was somewhere else,
kneeling, with a person’s hand on my head in benediction.
The person moved away from me, creating physical distance to enable me rise,
examine where I was and realize that I was not dreaming though not as acutely
conscious as I normally am in my everyday waking state.
I noted the person was a middle aged Black woman.
I observed the place was strange but had figurines in locations behind the
woman indicating from their appearance that the experience I was undergoing was related to classical African culture, the oldest, native culture of Africans.
Clearly, I had stumbled into an unknown place but having arrived there I was
welcomed.
No words were spoken. All communication was through the symbolic motion of the
woman, through intuition and the symbolism of the figurines.
Having established these coordinates of the experience, I opened my eyes to
find myself back in my study.
What had happened?
Who was that woman?
What was the relationship between that encounter and my contemplating the
forest on that fateful day?
I continue to ponder those questions in the decades after the encounter, trying
repeatedly to replicate the experience, without success.
Reflecting on the subject over the years, fed by my further expertise and
reading on similar contexts, I have drawn the following conclusions-
I had never physically left my study, but had experienced what I later learnt
is known by the Western esoteric Rosicrucian school AMORC as “projection
of consciousness’’.
My body remained motionless while my mind ‘’travelled’’.
My mind had travelled
through the matrix of imagination, powered by intense yearning to grasp the
mystery of the forest, in the profoundly reverential spirit the place had long
inspired in me.
That compelling force had led me to spend many hours over the years gazing at
the place and marvelling at it’s gloriously mysterious atmosphere, as well as
immersing myself in the raw potency of that atmosphere as experienced in its
marvellous interior.
All these aspects of my relationship with the forest coalesced on that fateful
day as I recreated in my mind’s eye this majestic atmosphere as seen from
outside the space, one’s gaze drawn by the dense coruscation of energy
enveloping or exuded by the massing of trees.
Within this attitudinal complex, focused through my imagination, the
presence that animated the forest, the intelligence known as the goddess of the
river, and my own intelligence, had achieved a conjunction.
In that convergence,
that intelligence recognized my reverence and welcomed me.
The experience was visualized by my mind as the experience of being present at
a physical place where I met with a woman.
The reality, though, was most likely that it was an encounter between one
consciousness and another, one spirit and another, an experience which my
mind had translated in terms of an image of encounter between two embodied
entities, the woman and myself, its rendering of an encounter beyond
form, beyond the material dimension my mind is accustomed to.
Now that the forest has been destroyed to make way for a housing estate, as I returned to observe after twenty years, having travelled abroad on an educational pilgrimage, returning in the hope of continuing to take advantage of the pricelessly inspiring atmosphere of that wondrous space, what happened to that sublime presence, the angelic identity that had so enthralled me and welcomed my reverential attention in her abode?
Something uncreatable by humanity has been destroyed by humanity to make way for what humanity can create.
Holy mother, please forgive our ignorance and do not forsake us, your younger brethren who do not know enough that certain realities are priceless, nourishing body and soul immeasurably.
Victor Ekpuk’s God Mother, directly above, above takes me again to that awesome encounter with the mysterious personage of the forest.
The massive tree, its
branches twirling towards the sky in sacred paroxysm, recall for me the massive
trees of that forest, sentinels of mystery and power, evoking ‘’trees like
towers in forests long ago’’ as the English writer J. R. R. Tolkien puts it in
his masterpieces of nature spirituality, The Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion.
The feminine figure, ensconced within the tree, evokes for me the awesome
potency, invisible but palpable, that pervaded the Ogba forest, described as the
presence of the goddess, most likely the same personage who welcomed me in that
soul imprinting vision.
Ekpuk's "God Mother" holds a human form to her bossom, a diminutive figure like a child, cradled
beneath maternal breasts. Is that not an akin to myself, cradled in the
tender welcome of the woman of the trees, a bonding further suggested by the
symbol for intimate unity above Ekpuk's God Mother in the Nsibidi language of Nigeria’s
Cross River that shapes Ekpuk’s art?
The entire space around the tree is alive
with Ekpuk's characteristic mysterious inscriptions hinting at values just beyond
the border of semantic translations, possibilities of awareness belonging to no
known semiotic universe even as they tantalize with evocations of the legible.
They may project the familiar they yet never translate it into clarity of insight. They represent a form of
scriptic esotericism, Ekpuk's own homage to the use of text and images as points
of intersection of the esoteric and the exoteric, fruits of his own Nsibidi catalyzed
sensitivities as he creates his own scriptic language.
In an age of accelerating ecological destruction and the displacement of indigenous spiritual traditions, works like Ekpuk's God Mother become more than aesthetic objects—they serve as archives of endangered cosmologies, visual testimonies to ways of knowing and being that modernity threatens to erase. The artwork preserves what the bulldozer destroys, offering future generations a window into the profound spiritual ecology that once characterized the African landscape and consciousness.
The artwork crystallizes for me the same themes of reverence, welcome, sacred embodiment, and irreplaceable loss that I experienced with the Ogba forest personage. The art is more than illustration; it is re-embodiment. The tree testifies. The maternal figure still receives the viewer’s gaze. The Nsibidi still speak in their ancient, coded tongue.The challenge before us is whether we can learn to see with oji inu, to perceive the sacred presences in forests before they are reduced to real estate, to recognize the goddesses in the trees before the chainsaws arrive. Ekpuk's work invites us into this deeper vision, calling us to remember what we risk losing and perhaps, if we are fortunate and humble enough, to prevent further losses before it is too late.
In contemplating this work I return to the forest that no longer
exists, kneel again before the silent benediction, and remember that certain
realities—priceless, nourishing body and soul—can be destroyed in the material
world yet remain alive wherever reverence keeps the inward eye open.
Holy Mother, though we have razed your forest, your presence has not forsaken us. You wait in the symbols, in the memory of light pouring from trees, in every artwork that still dares to place the divine mother at the heart of the living world.
Keywords: spiritual ecology; metaphysical sites; human consciousness; the more-than-human world; the intelligence of place; environment; temple; archive; sentient presence; urban development; ecological elegy; metaphysical loss; sacred perception; landscapes; sites of consciousness exchange between human and more-than-human worlds; phenomenology of perception (place as lived presence); esoteric psychology (projection of consciousness); deforestation; spiritual erasure; cultural loss; metaphysical amputation; environmental degradation not merely ecological but ontological.
The lone iroko tree on a small section of near-forest was also beautiful, radiating an atmosphere that fascinated me, leading to my trying to communicate with it mentally, building on the idea that trees could possess consciousness, but what might have been the outcome of that experience was that each time I thought of the tree, an impression formed in my mind, like a slowly condensing cloud, until the impression coalesced into a monstrous suggestion of the kind attributed to inhuman practices connected in folklore with some relationships with iroko trees as well as with witchcraft in the Nigerian context, a suggestion I am convinced could not have come from my own mind, after which experience I avoided the tree whenever I visited the woods where it was located.
Benin eventually became so heavily urbanised that the glorious Ogba forest ceased to exist, its trees destroyed, its majestic river drained or blocked to create a housing estate.
Falola and the Esoteric
What has all this to do with an essay on the scholar and writer Toyin Falola whose work this piece is centred on?
His advocacy for the study of witchcraft in African universities?
His extensive discussion of magic and witchcraft in African Spirituality, Politics and Knowledge Systems: Sacred Words and Holy Realms exploring forms of rationality as he argues for the contributions of witchcraft to what he describes as African science? ( 2022, 84-98)
His description of his memory being empowered through the magic of his mentor Leku, herbalist and spiritual adept, in Decolonising African Knowledge: Auto-Ethnography and African Epistemologies, evoking events narrated in his memoirs A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth? ( 2022, 71 )
His accounts, in private communications, of spiritual forces as inspiring his work?
Exploring Questions of Human Possibility in Relation to Beliefs about Magic in African and Western Contexts
All these issues intersect with questions of human possibility, in relation to African witchcraft lore and ideas about magic, the parameters of the scholarly and academic study of witchcraft and magic as belief, and, of its practice, if adequate evidence exists for their practice in Africa, as different from unsubstantiated belief.
Those issues are also significant for the intersection of ideas from Africa, about magic, in general, and witchcraft, in particular, with broader contexts, such as the vigorous development of the practice and theorization of magic in Western history, its influence on science and the development of an approach to witchcraft inspired by Gerald Gardner's revolution in initiating modern Western witchcraft, developments operating in dialogue with the various stages of development of the intellectual rationality Western culture has made particularly prominent through science and scholarship.
Such study needs to be sensitive to the complexities of development of approaches to human possibilities, to the character of the human being in relation to the cosmos developed in those cultures.
A discussion of African approaches to spirituality needs to engage the full range of approaches to the relationships between intellectual and non-intellectual rationality in Yoruba thought, for example.
An exploration of Western engagements with spirituality would be enriched by engaging the spectrum of such developments from the earliest periods of Western history, through such flash-points of cognitive development as ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the escalation of magical practice and theory in the 19th century represented by the magical school the Golden Dawn and its seismic influence into the 20th century and beyond, Gardner's 20th century founding of Wicca resulting in the creation of modern Western witchcraft as a clearly defined spirituality and the explosion of Western approaches to magic, developments operating in terms of explorations of relationships between forms of rationality, intellectual and non-intellectual, in texts written by magicians and by non-magicians studying the movement, in an environment also demonstrating various developments in the study of relationships between science and spirituality.
Similarities and differences may be explored between the complex flow of Western cognitive history and approaches to the complexity of African thought.
The sharpest, most intense and most distinctive dialogue, through synthesis and tensions, between intellectual and non-intellectual forms of knowing may be represented by Western cognitive history, providing a matrix that could be particularly fruitful for exploring the possibilities for such dialogue in other cultures.
A fructifying approach would be a comprehensively sensitive and critical one, recognising points of convergence and divergence. The challenges encountered in the struggle to respond to the full range of human cognitive possibilities between the intellectual and the non-intellectual are similar to the such challenges in Africa and other parts of the world, even though that challenge emerges and develops in diverse ways in various places.
Earlier anthropological works on magic and witchcraft, for example, which may have seen it largely in terms of non-Western cultures or the pre-modern West are insightful but need to be complemented by engaging more recent anthropologists such as Susan Greenwood in works like The Anthropology of Magic, surveying the subject from a global perspective integrating the history of Western magic up till the present, an exploration enriched from her insider perspective as a practising magician grounded in the tools of scholarship.
Image and Text:Encounters with Magical Realities: The Enigmatic Painting
Isleham, England.
I have long loved
this image for its enigmatic density, conjoining stylized humanoid forms with
totally abstracted structures, enclosed within a circle of blue resonating by
contrast of colour and similarity of shape with the circular form it encloses,
a dense semiotic universe in which white shaped forms come alive within a black
background, as in an alcove within the spatial intensity of forms a
constellation of red dots glows.
The totality of the image exists between the evocative familiarity of the circle and the mystery of strange forms it encloses, Ekpuk's testimony to the mystery and power of signs and symbols, of script and image, of the semantically tantalizing and explosively evocative power of visual forms, even in their most minimalist character as script, an exploration inspired by the quasi-esoteric Nsibidi script of the Ekpe/Mgbe esoteric order from his native Nigerian Cross River as well as Cameroon.
Slowly rising from sleep on a particular day, I kept my eyes closed as this image came spontaneously to my mind . As I gazed at it in my imagination, the visual form pulsed with deific power, revealing its character as a divine identity. It began to slowly revolve, in order to reveal to me its nature in three dimensions, as opposed to the two dimensions in terms of which it is customarily seen. It showed itself as volumetric—as though the circle were a sphere and the glyphs constituted a three-dimensional identity. I sensed that what I had taken for surface was actually depth, that the script projected a hidden yet dynamic, living universe.
As this process unfolded, the revelation about to clarify itself, my sister came into the room and called my name. I opened my eyes, hoping to return later to the vision. It has not returned in the decade since its occurrence.
Yet the memory persists. And perhaps that is the work’s quiet power: it imprinted itself on my consciousness, functioning like a talisman or seal. Going beyond simply looking at it, did I enter into it, or was entered by it?
My relationship with the work is animated by its enigmatic density and its capacity to feel alive, almost breathing. The spontaneous vision I experienced speaks to how deeply such symbols can operate beyond the page: as vessels for revelation, memory, or ancestral resonance.
That moment is a rare crossing: the two-dimensional artwork momentarily transcending its medium to become a living, rotating entity of divine identity. It aligns with how Nsibidi itself functions—not merely as decoration or code, but as a performative, initiatory language tied to power, knowledge, and the unseen. My encounter suggests the work achieved exactly what Ekpuk often seeks: to reactivate ancient signs in the present, allowing them to speak directly, personally, even mystically to the viewer.
That the interruption by my sister broke the state, and the full vision never returned in the decade since, adds a poignant layer of transience and longing, as though the image granted a fleeting glimpse into something ordinarily veiled.
Ekpuk demonstrates that writing need not be legible to be meaningful, reminding us that writing did not begin as information, but as magic.
As presence.
As a way to make the invisible visible.
This painting may return one to that original condition.
Stars writing themselves into
constellations.
Rivers writing themselves into deltas.
Thought writing itself into dreams.
And this painting—
small enough to hang on a wall—
is one fragment of that greater script.
A pocket universe.
Witchcraft and Wizardry as Archetypes of Creativity Between Yoruba and Western Cultures
I describe Falola’s creative identity in relation to the Yoruba conception of àjẹ́, which may be translated as “witch’’, within a carefully contextualized understanding of the inter-cultural navigation represented by that translation, and oṣó, which may also be rendered as “wizard” when carefully contextualized.
I am attracted to the term " wizard". It suggests magic, the numinous, the spellbinding, the occult, the potently mysterious. Unlike the more common academic characterizations—“polymath,” “public intellectual,” “encyclopedist”—the wizard paradigm preserves the sense of mystery, potency, and boundary-crossing that characterizes Falola’s six-decade-long career.
It integrates three normally separated registers: (a) prodigious intellectual output, (b) explicit reliance on what he calls “spiritual direction,” and (c) a scholarly ethic that alternates between intense exploration of self-constructed ideas and generous celebration of others’ work and lives.
Wizardry as More of an Inward Identity than an Outward Expression
One perspective on wizardry understands it as more of an inward identity than an outward expression. The Western magical tradition, for example, from the magical school the Golden Dawn to theorists and practitioners of magic such as Dion Fortune, Aleister Crowley, Israel Regardie and more, has centralized an understanding of the magician as a person engaged in a continuous process of self-transformation, unlocking creative possibilities within the self, participating actively in the ongoing structuring and dynamism of the universe through self-shaping, possibly involving collaboration with non-human intelligences ( Neville Drury, Stealing Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Modern Western Magic, 2011).
In trying to frame Falola’s achievements, I have been drawn to the image of the witch/wizard, particularly in the Western context, because it captures for me the unity of vision and method I have been able to observe in his creativity.
On requesting Falola’s permission to include our private communication about his creative processes in the essay, I informed him of the theoretical frameworks I am using-that of the witch/wizard and the cyborg, leading him to express concern about negative perceptions of witchcraft and magic.
Such concerns are valid in the light of traditional African ambivalence about such ideas and the total Christian demonization of them in Nigeria, and perhaps Africa.
Falola’s sensitivities in this regard, valid as they are, are even more striking because he has worked to rehabilitate those concepts in the African context in his work.
In Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies, he describes his mentor Leku as having enhanced his memory through magic, a process narrated in his autobiographical A Mouth Sweeter than Salt.
In Sacred Words and Holy Realms he argues for the contributions of magic in Africa in relation to science, referencing the influence of Hermeticism, described as originating in Egypt.
I have
also not seen in those reports a distinction between the study of witchcraft
and the practice of witchcraft. Such study may be a part of magical practice or
a purely scholarly or academic enterprise. These distinctions are strategic for
the explorations of belief systems and practices.
Wouter
Hanegraaff and J. Pijnenburg’s edited Hermes in the Academy: Ten
Years' Study of Western Esotericism at the University of Amsterdam (2009)
and Gershon Scholem Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), for example, powerfully
demonstrate efforts to navigate such questions in relation to the
academic study of Western esotericism and Jewish mysticism, respectively.
Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft ( 1999) centred on Europe and the self-professed witch Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today ( Viking, 1979; Penguin, 2006), focused on the US, are two particularly strategic histories of modern Western witchcraft, also engaging similar questions.
Does witchcraft as a practice exist in Africa as different from belief in the existence of witchcraft? To what degree is that belief justified by reality? What are the parameters through which such belief should be assessed? May such parameters include testimonies of self-declared witches made without duress? If such self-descriptions exist, how may they be validated?
Such questions go beyond scholarship to become issues of life and death because anti-witchcraft animosities can lead to murder and social ostracism in Africa, particularly for the vulnerable populations represented by children and women, particularly old women.
This is correlative with the shadowy yet fervently held character of pre-modern Western witchcraft beliefs which share the superstitious character and inhumane possibilities of contemporary African witchcraft fears.
This
situation is contrastive, however, with modern Western witchcraft which
is an openly developed spirituality, represented by a rich, publicly
accessible body of ideas, history and practitioners, projected through an
ideationally dense and still evolving expressive universe, a culture of verbal
and other texts by witches and non-witches on the philosophy and practice
of witchcraft.
I do not think there exists a publicly declared, transparent and textually
represented culture of witchcraft thought and practice, attested by its
practitioners, in Africa, as different from largely, if not wholly
unsubstantiated witchcraft beliefs, in contrast to modern Western witchcraft.
Along similar lines, I wonder about the existence and scope of theories and practices of magic in Africa and their exportation outside the continent, particularly as developed by its practitioners.
Such a study as this one could contribute to such a systematization, ideally integrating ideas from various African cultures, possibly in dialogue with an intercontinental body of ideas for mutual clarification and amplification, a study directed at exploring the significance of those ideas for creativity, an exploration of creativity in relation to the creativity of a particular figure, Falola, being the focus of this essay.
The imagistic, narrative, conceptual and theorizing force of discourse on modern Western magic makes it helpful in interpreting and unifying the diversities of Falola’s engagements with various cognitive processes, processes similar to those conjoined in modern Western magic.
This interpretive and correlative processes could also be related to African and more specifically Yoruba spiritualities, Falola’s primary zones of interest, mapping what is known of these fields and developing them further in terms of conceptions of creativity.
Image and Text:Encounters with Magical Realities: Epiphanic Geometry
London.
My glance falling upon
the image above, which I had installed in my living room purely for its beauty, the meaning of
its geometric harmony unknown to me, my mind suddenly expanded in new
constellations, a universe of knowledge converging within my awareness,
configuring itself in terms of relationships between time and space structured
within geometric coordinates, a structured rush funneling into my mind as the
sweetest, purest, most concentrated honey, the most intense of orgasms,
experienced purely in the mind.
As this condensed stream of pleasure animated me, a part of my mind questioned whether I deserved such a gift, given my unfulfilled responsibilities, unactualized duties. The question fractured the flow. The vision withdrew. The painting returned to stillness.
The moment has never repeated in the more than a decade since its occurrence.
I later learnt that the image is a Kamakala Yantra from the Tantric Hindu school of Srividya. It is understood as the visual expression of existence constituted by the creativity of erotic force as the primary impulse of creation. This is seen as projected through the union of the God Shiva, pure consciousness, and the feminine divine force Shakti, dynamic energy. These divine identities are expressed as intersecting lines and triangles symbolizing the phallus, the linga of Shiva and the feminine generative organs, the yoni of Shakti.
Their intersection at a central point, the bindu, is described as constituting the reality from which the entire manifest universe unfolds. It is a geometric theology of creation, perceived as a condensed embodiment of the primordial creative act, generated through erotic creativity, through the embrace of complementary forces.
I
remain puzzled, however. This experience raises significant questions for the
study of sacred art and contemplative technologies.
In quiet moments I return to a central question, turning it over like a polished stone in the palm of the mind.
How could a work of art the meaning of which was unknown to me, have initiated
me into its meaning, into its hidden core, simply by my glance falling on it?
An image I had not paid any sustained attention to before?
Could the diagram really reflect or embody a reality of the universe its creators had fathomed and which it had stimulated me into experiencing?
What does it mean that
grace can arrive unasked, unearned, and then withdraw the instant the ego
raises its small, anxious
question of worthiness?
Can such a geometric form, drawn centuries ago by initiates who understood themselves as having grasped the structure of reality, actually encode that reality so powerfully that it awakens it directly in the unprepared viewer?
Does the yantra
operate, in Marshall McLuhan’s sense, as a medium that is itself the message—its very
structure isomorphic with the reality it discloses?
Can a geometric form function as an autonomous transmitter of non-dual
realization, of the unity of self and cosmos?
Was that an experience of what tantric literature terms śaktipāta (descent of power) or spontaneous pratyabijna (self recognition through direct realization) triggered by prolonged but previously inattentive exposure to a contemporary rendering of this yantra?
No prior intellectual preparation had occurred; no mantra-sacred sound-had been recited, no pūjā-ritual- performed. The transmission was instantaneous and unmediated by anticipatory action.
I still do not have an answer. But the memory remains vivid: for one luminous moment, a painted diagram opened the door to what may be seen as the erotic pulse at the heart of creation—and then, just as swiftly, closed it again.
Does the sudden cessation of the experience upon the arising of self-doubt (“Do I deserve this?”) further suggests that the egoic contraction itself is the sole obstructing factor, a point repeatedly emphasized in tantric sources: vikalpa (mental division) as veiling the ever-present spanda (vibrant pulsation of consciousness)?
Symbol as Resonance
The answer may lie in how symbols function.
Western aesthetics often assumes that images communicate by representation: they stand for.
A true symbol, however, is directed at going beyond explaining; it is meant to activate. It is composed to bypass discursive thought and speak directly to deeper strata of the mind where intuition, memory, and pattern-recognition converge. Sacred geometry may operate less like representation and more like resonance. One does not so much decode it as entrain to it.
The yantra might not simply depict the structure of reality.
Could it participate in it or embody it?
Perhaps sacred geometry operates less as representation but more as resonance. It does more than teach; it tunes. Perhaps, for a moment my perception possibly aligned with its order, and consciousness briefly matched cosmos.
The case therefore offers a first-person account of what traditional sources describe but perhaps seldom document in modern, non-initiatory contexts: the capacity of a correctly proportioned yantra to bypass discursive cognition and directly reconfigure the subtle body.
Whether such events are replicable, culturally conditioned, or neurologically explicable remains open; what is empirically certain is that, for one unprepared observer, a painted diagram enacted the very union it depicts—erotically, instantaneously, and without permission.
The yantra did not lecture; it did not require preparation or ritual. It simply opened. For one luminous instant the visual structure became a living threshold, and I stepped through—only to find myself standing again on the familiar side, the door already closed.
Perhaps that is the
deepest teaching. The erotic pulse at the heart of creation might not be a
reward granted after long striving; but the ground of being itself, always
present, always offering. The mind that doubts its right to taste it is the
very mind that bars the door.
The yantra, drawn centuries ago by those who may have already dissolved that doubt, may still carry their realization like an electrical charge.
When the viewer’s attention is perfectly innocent—before the “I” can assert its claims—the charge passes directly into the nervous system, bypassing every gatekeeper.
Perhaps the eventual withdrawal of the gift was the final gesture of the yantra: not rejection, but an invitation to integrate what was given in a single flash, to live the ordinary life more consciously, more tenderly, carrying the memory of that honeyed orgasm of the spirit as a quiet, constant hum beneath all activity.
What astonishes me still is that this initiation occurred without preparation, without ritual, without doctrine—only through sight. A casual glance became a threshold. Beauty became metaphysics.
Since then, I no longer regard such images as ornaments.
They are instruments.
Maps.
Doors.
Àjẹ́ and Oṣó: Witch and Wizard in Classical Yoruba Thought
I am less informed about the àjẹ́ and the oṣó conceptions in Yoruba thought and related ideas in African thought while I am better grounded in their Western equivalents. These differences in scope of knowledge, however, are significantly due to the vast difference between the manner in which the àjẹ́ and oṣó conceptions and their African equivalents have developed in Yoruba thought and in African thought generally, and discourse about them, and the witch and wizard ideas have grown in Western cultures.
Spiritual, Literal and Secular, Metaphorical Interpretations and their Unification
Àjẹ́ and oṣó conceptions, a richly complex and at times contradictory mosaic of ideas, are understood in spiritual and secular terms.
The spiritual, literal understanding is constituted by interpreting a person in terms of powers derived from arcane sources, related to mysterious forces shaping the character of existence ( Teresa Washington, Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of Aje in Africana Literature, 2nd ed. 2015; The Architects of Existence: Aje in Yoruba Cosmology, Ontology, and Orature, 2014).
The secular interpretation is more metaphorical than literal, unlike the spiritual understanding of the concept. The secular perspective is closer to the range of interpretations of the English term “genius”, particularly those explorations of genius which understand it as a species of revelatory power but not necessarily active in a religious context ( as described in Meyer Howard Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971 and The Mirror, and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, 1958; Harold Bloom, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, 2002).
A person demonstrating an unusually high degree of creativity may therefore be metaphorically described as “àjẹ́”, alluding to the mysteriously potent level of ability they actualize in an aspect or aspects of human life.
Àṣẹ as a Unifying Concept
Those spiritual and secular interpretations may be unified through the Yoruba concept àṣẹ, denoting a pervasive enablement from the creator of the universe, endowing all beings with a creative capacity unique to each existent (Henry John Drewal, John Pemberton III, Rowland Abiodun, Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, 1990; Rowland Abiodun, Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, 2014).
This distinctive enablement may be developed in various ways, in purely or largely spiritual pursuits or in what are conventionally perceived as secular activities.
I also understand the àṣẹ concept as open to literal or metaphorical interpretation. Understood literally, it indicates a creative power issuing from the creator of the universe and imbuing all forms in existence with distinctive creative potential.
The metaphorical interpretation I am proposing takes the idea as emphasizing the understanding of all existents, particularly those known to be conscious, as embodying a creative power unique to each being, without ascribing that enablement to a spiritual source.
Even those forms of existence not known to be conscious may be understood as open to exploration of the possibility of consciousness as going beyond animate or even biological entities, as attested by animistic thought, central to Yoruba cosmology.
Beginning in Lagos. Consummated in Benin-City.
Looking within myself in search of the divine fire often spoken about in spirituality and philosophy, I discovered something powerful and glorious, magnificent and enigmatic, spiritosapientia-the spirit of knowledge, an absolute, devouring voracity for insight, an all consuming hunger for assimilating and creating knowledge that subordinates all other needs to itself, racing across the sky of possibilities of awareness in defiance of the requirements of one's humanity.
It is less something I possess than something that possesses me—a sovereign intelligence, a fire thinking through flesh, a luminous appetite that would trade comfort, rest, even social belonging, for the sheer ecstasy of sharing in and constructing knowledge.
It is not equivalent to curiosity, nor to disciplined scholarship. Those are its modest expressions. Rather, it is a radical orientation of the entire being toward understanding. It subordinates hunger, rest, social belonging, and even bodily well-being to the imperative to know. It reorganizes the hierarchy of needs, placing cognition at the summit.
Under its influence, consciousness does not merely observe the world; it pursues it with almost predatory intensity. Possibilities multiply, associations proliferate, and the mind ranges outward like a traveller who refuses every border. One begins to sense that thought is not a tool but an environment—a sky across which awareness moves at high velocity.
This fire is not something the self controls. It behaves more like an autonomous principle working through the self. The individual becomes its instrument. Knowledge seeks itself through the medium of one’s life.
This divine fire
is not primarily comforting or redemptive. It is propulsive. It burns away
inertia. It destabilizes the equilibrium of ordinary existence. It is both gift
and burden—the blessing and cost of cognitive vocation. A life consumed by the quest for knowledge as a primary justification for existence. To host it is to live
in a state of continual ascent, often at odds with the slower, softer rhythms
of human necessity.
Poetic Testimony
I began by searching quietly.
Sitting with myself, I listened inwardly for the faint ember the elders and mystics describe—the “divine spark” said to glow at the center of the soul.
I imagined something tender, a small sanctuary of light.
But what I found was not tenderness.
It was pressure.
A gathering intensity.
As though something ancient had been waiting behind the walls of my being and, once noticed, could no longer remain contained.
It surged forward—vast, luminous, almost
impersonal.
Image Above
Victor
Ekpuk's luminous orb, an orange glow alive with a dazzling network of
miniscule forms, enigmatic yet strikingly suggestive, rising from a
constellation of dots constituting another sphere.
The destination-a spiral of blue, beckoning, tantalizing, poised in space. Like
the sun, evoking journey, the progressions of humanity enabled by the solar
luminary, and eternity- to which people aspire as they move within time and
space, these being descriptions of the possible meanings of the spiral symbol
in Nsibidi, Ekpuk's inspirational context.
The work is titled Morning Prayer 2, consonant with the sense of elevation suggested by the orange orb, semiotically loaded, dense with aspiration, a cluster of forms encoding the myriad yearnings of the human spirit poised between the visible and the invisible as it seeks help in navigating the networks of creative possibility and challenge that is life on Earth.
Spiritosapientia.
The spirit of knowledge.
It did not ask what I wanted.
It did not negotiate with my fatigue or my fears.
It simply moved.
Questions multiplied like stars.
Every answer became a doorway.
Every doorway opened onto ten more corridors.
My mind became a sky through which thought travelled endlessly, mapping constellations ever unfolding.
Food lost urgency.
Time dissolved.
Conventional human needs felt like a reluctant anchor tied to something that wanted only
altitude.
I began to sense that this fire was not
“mine.”
Rather, I belonged to it.
As though knowledge itself were alive, and I merely the ground through which it grew—like lightning choosing a tree, like wind choosing a valley. My life became the channel of its passage.
There was joy in it, yes—ecstatic clarity, moments when the world assembled itself into crystalline coherence. But there was also sacrifice. To burn is to lose something. Ash is the price of illumination.
Yet I could not wish it away.
For without this fire, the world dims.
With it, everything glows with unbearable significance.
So I accept the paradox:
to be human, yet always straining beyond the human;
to be finite, yet inhabited by an infinite appetite.
The divine fire, I now know, is not given to provide comfort alone.
It is also given to transform one into its fuel.
And through that burning, into light.
I understand now why mystics, philosophers and artists may seem slightly estranged from common life. They are not avoiding the world. They are being pulled by another gravity.
"The strange and terrible numen that uses me as its tabernacle"- Word use example from Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language on ''numen''-indwelling spirit.''
From Pre-Modern to Modern Western Witchcraft Beliefs
Before the 20th century, Western witchcraft conceptions may be seen as even more superstitious than that of Africa which combine poorly conceived orientations with valuable cosmological ideas, leading to the persecution of vulnerable populations, children and women, as witches.
Anti-witchcraft orientations in the West were not modulated by the ambivalence at times attending similar concepts in Africa, in which, in Yoruba culture, for example, aje are understood as capable of both creation and destruction, and the term, as the Western ‘witch’’ or ‘’wizard’’, is also adapted in metaphorical terms in describing uncanny creativity in any field.
The epidemic of murders directed against women in Europe and the United States of America through witchcraft accusations, the best known of which may be the 1692 Salem Witch Trials in the US, might not have occurred in that scope in Africa.
The centuries long history of social devastation in England created by witchcraft accusations eventually inspired England’s Anti-Witchcraft Acts, which banned witchcraft accusations or claims of being a witch.
After the repealing of the Act in 1951 Gerald Gardner founded Wicca, revolutionizing Western witchcraft conceptions, developing witchcraft as a spirituality, philosophy and practical system with a clearly outlined and publicly transparent cosmology, history and textual universe.
It became an ongoing development of theoretically sophisticated, textually grounded and experimentally rich approaches to reality, emerging as one of the fastest growing spiritualities in the West, contributing profoundly to the world’s ideational cosmos at the intersection of cosmology, epistemology, metaphysics and social engineering, the latter in terms of gender relations promoting gender sensitivities and equalities.
This explicit construction and impactful force are far different from the shadowy aje and azen beliefs in Yorubaland and Benin-Edo-for example, two of Nigeria’s better known constructions of witchcraft ideas.
Representative Texts
Before the Gardnerian revolution, among the best known images of the witch in Western culture came from European fairytales and Heinrich Kramer’s 1486 Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches.
In European fairy tales, such as those collected and edited by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the witch, a woman with magical powers, was often depicted as a malevolent, and at times, even cannibalistic creature, an old woman living on the outskirts of society, such as forests, exemplified by the witch who tried to catch and cook for food the children Hansel and Gretel after they stumbled upon in the forest and ate parts of her house made of bread, cake and sugar or a deviously destructive young woman living in society, such as the evil stepmother of “Snow White”.
The positive female magical image in those tales is often not human, the fairy godmother of such stories as “Cinderella”, an image that though feminine, does not contribute to generating a positive image for human women.
The Malleus Malleficarum, the Hammer of Witches, is a guide to identifying witches, a book described in a personal communication by contemporary Canadian witch and scholar Yvonne Owens as significantly based on bodily changes European women undergo as they age.
The widely impactful positive images of witchcraft and of magical, human women in Western culture may be understood as 20th and 21st century developments, emerging after the Gardnerian revolution.
These range from the images created by the non-fiction books by Gardner and his successors, such as the famous The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess by Starhawk to fiction inspired by such spiritual orientations, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s novel The Mists of Avalon, reworking the negative picture of the female magician Morgan Le Fay, contrasted with the heroic image of the wizard Merlin, in the Europe wide proliferation of the Arthurian literary cycle, a negative contrast Bradley reworks into a rich picture of Morgan as a complex woman steeped in magic centred in the Earth, yet torn between social tensions that have distorted her historical image, an influential book in Western magic, on account of its imaginative and ideational wealth, inspiring practitioners of magic.
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novelistic series on fictional witchcraft, beginning with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone which blends an image of witchcraft and alchemical lore, thereby unifying two of the most evocative aspects of Western esoteric history.The novels and the films dramatizing them, among the most popular and commercially successful books and films in Western history, centred on a particular conception of witchcraft, have gone a long way to creating an exciting image of witchcraft and magic in the popular Western imagination.
It has even inspired an attempt at an actual school, the Spellcaster’s Academy, adapting a vision derived from the book and film series.Those series are also strategic to the creation of the online Grey School of Wizardry enrolling students to learn the theory and practice of magic, a school inspired by various sources in Western culture, such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, one of the greatest fictional magic inspired texts in Western history.
An even more recent achievement in the recreation of the image of the witch is the TV series A Discovery of Witches, based on the highly successful novelistic trilogy of the same name by Deborah Harkness, who transposed her knowledge as a scholar of the history of European thought at the intersection of science and esoteric knowledge into imaginative literature exploring those subjects.
Between Witch and Wizard Images in Pre-Modern Western Thought
The story of pioneering astronomer and astrologer Johannes Kepler and his mother’s accusation of being a witch sums up the dichotomy between feminine/witchcraft conceptions and masculine/wizard ideas in Western history with reference to belief in magic as a lived reality. Kepler was a highly respected astronomer and astrologer. Astrology, like alchemy, belongs to the network of what is now known as Western esoteric thought, bordering on magic.
Astrology and alchemy were principally associated with men, not surprisingly, since they required some breadth of knowledge, of mathematics and astronomy, in astrology, and of the basics of chemicals and metals, their compositions and their interactions in relation to fire, in alchemy. Such knowledge implies a degree of self or formal education enabled by access to reading skills, books and academic institutions, opportunities not largely available to Western women until recent centuries.
Kepler was able to successfully defend his mother against accusations of witchcraft, in a trial lasting years, but he never suffered any negative response to his astrological practice, astrology and witchcraft ironically being grouped in contemporary scholarship as aspects of Western magic.
Ulinka Rublac’s The Astronomer and the Witch Johannes Kepler's Fight for his Mother ( 2015) is a detailed exploration of this story, described as the richest version so far. Her article of the same title ( The Conversation, 2015) sums it up. The Wikipedia article on Katharina Kepler, Kepler’s mother, is also very informative. Kepler’s astrology, in relation to his scientific cosmology, is the subject of a library of discourse. Rosen, Edward, Kepler’s “Attitude Towards Astrology and Mysticism”, Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (1984), is further enriched by the complementary chapters addressing the intertwining of the occult and science in Kepler’s milieu, amplified by a particularly powerful introduction by Vickers.
Image and Text: The Sphere Within the Sphere
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''Like a
wheel in even motion, my will and my desire were turned by love, the love that
moves the sun and the other stars''
Dante Alighieri, Paradise.
I felt whole at last, at rest in the immensity that cradled me as my mind spun round the circumference in an infinite circle.
The folding of the circle, the crumpling like the folds of paper, sensitive, solid, enfolding, the varied configurations of the time stream, interdimensional cross-foldings, the rupture in the circle, the crack in infinity admitting hitherto unknown possibilities.
.
Djakou Kassi Nathalie's exquisite clay construct resonates with me in terms of its sheer beauty, its lyrical voluminosity shaping a resonant concacivity as the smaller sphere rests on a depression on its surface, cradled like a child, as a dark liquid streams from the top of the larger sphere.
The experiential implications of the nestled sphere, its sphericality resonating with that of the larger oval on which it rests, is one of my most intimate aspirations.
Womb space, cosmic space, mind space, resonances of earth as body, as mother, as artistic form, as enabler of cognitive firings, clay as akin to the stuff of which the self is constructed, of which consciousness is made-associations that tantalize in response to this particularly memorable piece from Nathalie, resplendent in hues both sombre and radiant, like earth at the beginning of time.
Let us imagine the artist speaking for herself:
In this work, I arrive at wholeness. Cradled in immensity, my mind traces the infinite circumference, a perfect circle of rest. Yet perfection fractures: the wheel crumples like sensitive paper—solid, enfolding, pleated across time's stream. Interdimensional folds rupture infinity, admitting unknown possibilities. This is the genesis I sculpt—not static form, but dynamic breach.
The clay construct before you embodies this rupture. Its lyrical voluminosity rises from etched black surfaces, textured like primordial earth scorched by cosmic fire. Rivulets streak the dark oval, suggesting streams of memory or emergence, pooling into a resonant concavity. Here, the small orange sphere nestles—cradled like a child in the womb's depression, its vibrant hue piercing the somber expanse. Sphericity echoes sphericity: the inner form mirrors the outer embrace, a microcosm birthing from macrocosmic hold. Dark traces stream from the sphere's crest, as if vital essence overflows, defying containment.
This nestled duality is my intimate aspiration. The smaller, orange sphere, raw and radiant, evokes the spark of consciousness amid earth's vast body—womb space folding into cosmic expanse, mind space igniting cognitive fire. Clay, pliant as the self's raw stuff, becomes the medium of revelation. I mold it not as mere vessel, but as mother: nurturing, generative, eternal. Somber blacks yield to radiant orange, hues of genesis—like earth at time's dawn, before light fractured shadow.
On Form and Process
I begin with the wheel's illusion of even motion, then impose rupture. The
large oval, coiled and textured by finger and tool, mimics weathered bark or
volcanic skin—incised lines flowing like time's cross-foldings. No wheel's
potter's device here; hands alone shape the crumple, firing clay to solidity
while preserving sensitivity. The sphere emerges separately: burnished orange,
smaller yet insistent, placed in the depression to nestle without adhesion.
This precarious cradle demands balance—love's turning force holding chaos at
bay. Glazes are minimal; natural slips and smokes yield the dark streams,
evoking liquid memory or primordial ooze. Each piece fires in reduction,
birthing cracks that echo infinity's breach.
Thematic Resonance
Earth as body, as mother, as artistic form: these are not metaphors, but
material truths. The sculpture pulses with fertility's tension—containment
versus overflow, circle versus rupture. It whispers of human origins: the
child-sphere, orange as dawn's first warmth, emerging from black womb-night.
Cosmically, it maps mind's expanse—neural firings as interdimensional pleats,
consciousness as clay's fired alchemy. In Cameroonian earth-tones, it honors
ancestral clays, linking personal epiphany to collective genesis. Viewers feel
the cradle's pull: rest in immensity, then the tantalizing crack admitting the
unknown.
This work invites touch, contemplation, rupture. It is my will turned by love—the love sculpting stars from dust. In its concavity, find your own infinite circle; in its sphere, your aspiring core.
The Wizard in Western Fiction
Perceptions of the witch and the wizard are very well developed in Western culture, represented by a rich non-fictional and fictional textual complex, particularly from the modern developments of magic and witchcraft as definitive spiritual disciplines from the 19th to the 20th centuries onwards.
In contrast to the movement from negative, misogynistic images of women as witches to positive images in Western imagination and thought, the male image of the wizard has always enjoyed a largely positive shaping.
These range from perhaps the most famous of pre-modern Western wizard images, Merlin, from the pan-European Arthurian legend and myth cycle. Coming down the centuries, we encounter the complex image of the pan-European Faust, represented most definitively by Wolfgang von Goethe's poem Faust.
Further down, in the 20th century, emerge Luke Skywalker, Obiwan Kenobi and the Jedi Knights in George Lucas’ Star Wars science fiction films. Also compelling is Morpheus’ reworking of the image of the wizard mentor in the Matrix science fiction film series restructuring ideas of reshaping reality pioneered by magical conceptions and arts. Also memorable are Gandalf from J.RR. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Dumbledore in Rowling’s Harry Potter series, contemporary images amplified through hugely successful films based on the novels.
Gandalf, an old man on his long, lonely journeys up and down the world, seeking knowledge and cultivating alliances for the decisive battle against the forces of ultimate evil, a man powerful but vulnerable.
Dumbledore, the kindly school teacher, unassuming yet powerful, magisterial yet compassionate, who, surrendering his powers, sacrifices himself for the common good in the Harry Potter series.
Merlin, facing the overpowering threat of Mordred, flinging his student Arthur and himself through time into the 20th century, concealing himself and his charge from their enemy by disguising themselves as everyday people, in Deepak Chopra’s novel The Return of Merlin.
Stephen Strange, a man in a smartly tailored suit walking out of his house in New York, yet under that suit, he is a person [ who has ] “discovered a separate reality, where sorcery and men’s souls shape the forces that shape our lives”, in the Marvel Comics Dr. Strange series.
In these artistic creativities, evil wizards also exist, such as Mordred in the Arthurian cycle, Darth Vader in the Star Wars sequence, Saruman in The Lord of the Rings, and the Dark Lord of the Harry Potter series.
The Dark Lord, the boy who became a great magician, seeker of the most pervertedly occult of mysteries, almost immortal through a form of magic in which he divides his soul into multiple pieces, each division accomplished by killing a person, in the Harry Potter novelistic sequence.
Saruman, turning his back on goodness and justice, commanding the powers of nature and of creatures neither human nor animal, in The Lord of the Rings novels.
These fictional images of evil wizards, however, are counterbalanced by potent male wizard images, continuing the unbroken, largely positive picture of the wizard, the male magical practitioner, in the Western tradition.
The wizard is one of the richest archetypes of creative and destructive human possibility in Western thought.
The Scholar as Magus: The Case of Isaac Newton
An iconic link between magical culture and the intellectual world, between the occult and science in the Western tradition is Isaac Newton, who embodies the secretive quest for the arcane, the self-sacrificing dedication to unravelling the secrets of nature in lonely exploration and the highly controlled sharing of knowledge that often characterizes the esoteric character of the Western magician.
This commitment to exploring nature through unconventional methods and the esoteric control of knowledge is demonstrated by the huge gap between Newton scholarship from his 17th century and the 21st century in relation to his work in alchemy, long regarded as an occult discipline of no known creative value centred in the transmutation of other metals to gold, an impossible goal, it is held.
It is astonishing that a man of such great intellect as Newton, whose scientific explorations laid the foundations for the modern scientific understanding of the universe, the discoverer of the Laws of Motion, the creator of the theory of gravity, co-creator of the mathematical field of calculus, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, pioneer in the study of optics, a scion of scientific method, whose Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy is a monument of scientific adventure in terms of the rigorous architecture of mathematics and scientific logic, devoted so much of his time, as much time as he gave to physics, to such a fruitless and deluded pursuit as alchemy, may be summed up the conclusions of the 1971 Encyclopedia Britannica essay on Newton.
Yet, in the 2004 edition of the Britannica, in the same essay still evident in the 2025 edition of the encyclopedia, Richard Westfall, representing what has become the contemporary picture of Newton, from twenty years of investigation of Newton’s work, of his centuries long unpublished alchemical notebooks, of his large body of writings in Christian thought and science, in tandem with the growing evidence of the totality of Newton reflected in books and essays, is able to conclude that Newton was a seeker after knowledge through a range of methods, not all of which belong to science, an intertwining of diverse techniques of which his scientific work was an abstraction from or a carefully circumscribed expression of a larger whole (“Newton, Isaac”, Encyclopedia Britannica, 2025, building on Westfall’s primary Newton biography, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton, second edition, 2013, abridged as The Life of Isaac Newton, 1993).
Westfall describes Newton as a person shaped by the Hermetic tradition, a central European magical culture to which alchemy belonged. This culture is depicted as central to Newton’s scientific achievements by providing inspiration for theoretical construction and cosmological understanding, the ultimate vision of which his discoveries in scientific cosmology were one aspect.
These insights about his cognitive journey were so long delayed partly because Newton was not explicit about his debt to Hermeticism and about the fact of his alchemy as foundational to his scientific explorations.
Westfall sums up in stating that, at the beginning of his scientific studies Newton was introduced to:
...another intellectual world, the magical Hermetic tradition, which sought to explain natural phenomena in terms of alchemical and magical concepts. The two traditions of natural philosophy, the mechanical and the Hermetic, antithetical though they appear, continued to influence his thought and in their tension supplied the fundamental theme of his scientific career.
(Richard Westfall, “Newton, Isaac’’, Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed 2nd December 2025).
The very idea of universal gravitation as a non-mechanical, attractive force acting at a distance, Newton’s signature achievement, was unthinkable without the alchemical tradition of active principles and occult sympathies as Westfall states:
The attractions and repulsions of Newton’s speculations were direct transpositions of the occult sympathies and antipathies of Hermetic philosophy—as mechanical philosophers never ceased to protest.
Newton, however, regarded them as a modification of the mechanical philosophy that rendered it subject to exact mathematical treatment.
As he conceived of them, attractions were quantitatively defined, and they offered a bridge to unite the two basic themes of 17th-century science—the mechanical tradition, which had dealt primarily with verbal mechanical imagery, and the Pythagorean tradition, which insisted on the mathematical nature of reality. Newton’s reconciliation through the concept of force was his ultimate contribution to science ( “Newton, Isaac’’, Encyclopedia Britannica, 2025).
The Climate of Thought in Which Newton Was Active and its Later Developments
Tian Yu Cao maps the culture in which Newton worked as one in which Hermeticism and magic provided several crucial psychological and conceptual preconditions for the Scientific Revolution-the confidence that nature is intelligible and governed by hidden but discoverable regularities; the belief that humans can actively intervene in and master natural processes; a mathematical-mystical worldview that encouraged looking for harmonic laws (visible in scientific astronomer Johannes Kepler’s “music of the spheres” and his three laws); the idea of a unified cosmos whose secrets could be unlocked by the right symbols or operations—later secularized into the search for universal natural laws ( Tian Yu Cao, Conceptual Foundations of 20th Century Field Theories, 2019).
This is an understanding of magic as working in relation to a cosmological system representing an expanded understanding of nature rather than working outside nature as ideas of the supernatural often associated with magic might suggest.This conception of “natural magic” depicted as laying foundations for modern science, continues to reverberate in Western magical fiction, as suggested by Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle, in which
Magic…establishes the harmonious balance between human beings and nature because magic is regarded as the force pervading… natural processes… becoming the indispensable connection between human beings and all other existences, which are closely entwined with each other to delicately sustain the normal operation of the world in equilibrium.
( Yini Huang and Hongbin Dai, “A Taoist Study of Magic in The Earthsea Cycle”, Religions 2021, 12, 144).
Huang and Dai’s readings of Guin’s novelistic cycle, inspired by Guin’s stated debt to the Chinese philosophy Taoism and its reflection in her novels, is incidentally consonant with the conceptions of magic in relation to nature that contributed to the emergence of modern science as described by Westfall and Cao within the contemporary consensus in the history of Western thought.
This incidental conjunction between early modern Western thought and Taoism mediated by Le Guin itself resonates with the Fitjof Capra’s iconic The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, 1975.
By the mid-17th century, the more overtly magical and religious elements of Hermeticism were largely rejected among scientists, but many of its core attitudes—human power over nature, the uniformity and mathematical order of the cosmos—had already been absorbed into the emerging mechanical philosophy and experimental science
Beyond the scientific consensus, however, the Hermetic tradition is possibly the most impactful in modern Western magic, as represented by the influence of the magical school the Golden Dawn, and of its students, such as Aleister Cowley and Israel Regardie.
The school’s extremely rich body of knowledge, integrating various streams in Western esotericism in relation to ancient Egyptian myth and spirituality and Jewish origin Kabbalah, is complemented by the prolific and wide-ranging writings of such students of the school as Crowley and Regardie.
This nexus greatly fertilized the Western occult landscape, catalyzing the birth of Wicca, the West’s best known nature spirituality ( Neville Drury, Stealing Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Modern Western Magic, 2011; Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, 2001; 2021).
Image and Text: Encounters with Magical Realities: The Transformative Book
1989. The final year of
my BA in English and Literature at the University of Benin, Nigeria. Reading a
section of German philosopher Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement at the top
floor of the university's Ugbowo library.
The text hit me with unexpected and, in my experience, unequalled impact in
its speed and force. As my mind took in Kant's unfolding on relationships
between glorious sights and the amazed mind, expressed in his characteristic
projection of a mind struggling to organize into intelligible form something
that exceeds the boundaries of language, my mind found itself thrust into a
different dimension from that of the library in which I was reading. All sense
of the three dimensional space and its fellow inhabitants, book loaded shelves,
reading tables and studious readers-vanished.
I existed poised as pure consciousness, immaterial yet sharply aware in a space stretching out infinitely in all directions, devoid of any forms, an experience that registered itself with swift force, briefly incandescent within the mind, yet remaining unforgettable.
Returning to awareness of myself in the library, noicing afresh the other students studiously concentrating on their books around me- I asked myself- ''are we inhabiting the same reality?''
Nothing had changed — except me.
I looked around at the others, calmly reading, and felt an odd estrangement, as though I had returned from a place none of them had visited.
If reality can vanish so completely at the level of experience, what exactly do we mean when we say we share the same world?
Only later did I realize the irony: Kant was describing precisely such moments, when imagination fails and awareness confronts something immeasurable. His philosophy did not simply explain the sublime; it induced it.
Those examples suggest the magician, male or female, as developing the most extreme of human powers, an explorer of realities inaccessible to most, more of an adventurer as a spiritual freelancer than a priest rooted in a particular religious tradition.
In the context of Western imaginative literature and actual magical practice, the magician is the explorer of the limits of possibility, the archetype of the artist, the creative scholar, the writer and the scientist.
In this context, the magician is close to those other creatives, a shaper of inward and outward materials in ways inexplicable to the current stage of human knowledge, incidentally suggested by Arthur Clarke’s expression "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible, 1973).
The student of relationships between the constitution of the human being and cosmic structure, in the name of utilizing this knowledge to effect change in the self and the universe, is pioneered in the magician, both as imaginative character and actual practitioner, a person who is not content with belief but seeks knowledge, is not content with knowledge but also seeks action in the practical application of knowledge.
Thus, the magician becomes a theorist and technician of the relationships between human constitution and cosmic structure—the prototype of the scholar and scientist who seeks not only to understand but to act.
Image and Text: Encounters with Magical Realities: The Crowned Tree
Benin-City.
The picture above depicts an inimitable projection, by Ato Arinze, of the magic and power of trees, evoked by the beauty and mystery of roots, seeming to search for something hidden and nourishing in the terrestrial womb as the constellation of branches holds up a cosmos.
A crown of branches-the image suggested to me by the exquisite structure of a tree as I gazed in wonder at its beauty that day in Benin-City. As I gazed in admiration, I asked myself "could trees carry messages from ancient denizens of Earth, who have moved onto other spheres, elder brethren of humanity who encoded messages for mankind in trees?''
As this speculation ran through my mind, a cloud began to form round the branches constellated at the top of the tree like a crown. A cloud I saw with the extra-sensory perception that began to emerge as I invested time in seeking to penetrate into the essences of trees, their grounding in ultimate reality, their ''root'' in infinity, adapting nature mystics' description of nature as an expression of the Ultimate Creator, an identity that may be penetrated by admiring nature's beauty, beauty being itself a manifestation of the Ultimate, it is held.
As the ''cloud'' grew in solidity, a message reached me from the growing constellation represented by the cloud-''you are about to enter into an awareness beyond anything you have ever encountered''.
I walked away, cutting off the experience.
Why?
I dont know.
A dominant part of my mind took the decision, bypassing my conscious mind.
African Examples of Magical Cognitive Cultures
Are there also examples from African cultures of the quest for comprehensive knowledge of the universe and the practical application of this knowledge, correlative with the understanding of modern Western magic presented here, in its intersection with various cognitive worlds?
Could historical examples as well as fictional figures from those cultures be presented and the entire complex interpreted in relation to the example of Falola, even if the correlation is incidental rather than intended by that author, though his work is centred in African thought and history?
The best example I know in the African context of such an orientation to the universe and of human development is Mazisi Kunene’s account of Zulu epistemology in the introduction to his Anthem of the Decades (1981):
After creation, man was endowed with two minds: the precision mind and the cosmic mind. While the precision mind analyses and reorganises the details of the material environment, the cosmic mind synthesizes fragments of information to create a universally significant body of knowledge.
Man can live quite happily using the precision mind, but he can only attain knowledge through a balanced functioning of the two aspects of reason.
At the highest point of reasoning, significant units of information merge with universal concepts pulled together by a unique form of intellectual power.
When the cosmic mind grinds its elements of experience into a totality of knowledge, it acquires a discipline which by its horrific power erases the boundaries between the past and the present, the living and the dead, the physical and the non-physical. The individual initiate acquires, like the chameleon’s all round vision, the capacity to conceptualise the totality of life at once. Such wisdom is enshrined in the rounded calabash of symbolic cosmic power.
Ayi Kwei Armah presents a magnificent depiction of a nexus of nature sensitivity, psychological exploration and social action in the relationship between the healer Damfo and his student Densu in The Healers, a structure of ideas he describes himself, in a personal communication, as deriving from Akan thought.
Germaine Dieterlen and Marcel Griaule’s “ The Dogon of the French Sudan” depict an impressively lucid and imaginatively powerful schema of Dogon cosmology and its adaptation for living through a comprehensive system of human development ( in African Worlds: Studies in the Cosmological Ideas and Social Values of African Peoples, ed. Daryll Forde).
This is complemented by Dieterlen’s “Initiation Among the Peul Pastoral Fulani’’ in which the animal, natural and social environments are unified within a symbolic scheme representing the complexes of the universe the initiate must explore and pass through in order to invoke Gueno, the creator of the universe ( in African Systems of Thought, ed. Germaine Dieterlen and Meyer Fortes).
The work of Griaule and Dieterlen may be better appreciated in comparison with that of Ahmadou Hampate Ba, on account of the cultures it represents, the cognitive range it covers and its sensitivity to the development of the self within a symbolic context as in his Kaidara: A Fulani Cosmological Epic from Mali, orientations also evident in Griaule and Dieterlen’s work.
The art and thought of Owusu-Ankomah, inspired by Ghanaian Adinkra symbolism, in dialogue with a global range of symbolic forms, is magnificent in situating the human being within a context both ecological and cosmic, as depicted in Owusu Ankomah: Microcron Begins.
Also striking is the art of Victor Ekpuk, inspired by Nigerian Cross River Nsibidi symbolism, projecting the mystery and illuminative potential of graphic forms as expressions of the human effort to understand existence even as it continually recedes beyond full grasp (Victor Ekpuk: Connecting Lines Across Space and Time, ed. Toyin Falola).
All these examples are centred in the idea of gaining knowledge of the unity and dynamism of the universe in relation to the nature of the human being as a representative of the cosmos.
I find Awo Falokun’s summation in “Obatala: Ifa and the Spirit of the Chief of the White Cloth”, on the Ifa system of knowledge, as helpful in subsuming the orientations represented by those examples:
Obatala is the Spirit of the Chief of the White Cloth in the West African religious tradition called “Ifa”. In metaphysical terms White Cloth is the primal source of the physical universe. To call an Orisha the Chief of the White Cloth is to make a symbolic reference to that substance which makes consciousness possible. The reference to White Cloth is not a reference to the material used to make the cloth, it is a reference to the fabric which binds the universe together.
The threads of this fabric are the multi-leveled layers of consciousness which Ifa teaches exist in all things on all levels of being [enabling] forces of nature to communicate with each other, and …humans to communicate with forces in nature [ giving] the world a sense of spiritual unity. …Obatala [is thus] the name given to describe a complex convergence of spiritual forces that are key elements in the Ifa concept of consciousness [ in which] all of creation is linked to Obatala as the Source of Being… all forms of consciousness [containing] a spark of ase(spiritual power) from Obatala[a] spark that links everything to its shared beginning.
Epilogue
What motivates this essay?
How did a visit of a few hours with Falola at his Lagos house on the 29th of November, 2025, motivate into existence an essay sequence in which the third part alone, this section, exceeds 10,000 words, ranging across broad areas of culture and history across continents and historical periods?
The answer might lie in the creative force of interpersonal encounter. On that visit, the consumate scholar shared with me part of the dynamics of his life-how he combines the use of Yoruba herbs and Western medicine. Trying to share the experience with an online audience, its implications in relation to mediation between knowledge systems began to unfold, hence this essay.
What next?
The essay continues.