The Master of Equanimity and Seeker of Balance : Initiation into Edan Ogboni Foundational : Aesthetic and Cognitive Mysticism 1
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Initiation into Edan Ogboni
Foundational
Aesthetic and Cognitive Mysticism
1
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
“Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge”
and
The Greater Ogboni Fraternity
“Earth, Humanity, Cosmos”
Abstract
An effort at developing a version of the crafting, ensouling and dedication to an initiate, of an edan ogboni, a central symbolic form and spiritual vessel of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order.
Dedicated to the indomitable scholars of Ogboni, and particularly to
Babatunde Lawal
whose scholarship is particularly strategic for an understanding of the Earth grounded, embodied and yet transformative character of classical Yoruba thought, at the intersection of aesthetics, epistemology and metaphysics to which Ogboni is distinctively central.
Contents
Abstract
Picture of Master of Equanimity and Seeker of Balance Edan Ogboni
Dedication
Aspirational Summation
Contemplative Matrix
Aspirations in Aesthetic and Cognitive Mysticism
The Inspirational Edan Ogboni
Intercultural Inspirational Contexts
Invocation through Aesthetic Contemplation
Ontological Questions in Ogboni Mysticism and Magic
Logic of Contemplative Method
Sequence and Sources of Contemplative Progression
The Master of Equanimity and Seeker of Balance
1
Aspirational Summation
My eye stable in the perception of the coming and going of everything from Nothing.
My emotions, the still, potent depths beneath the ocean surface.
The dynamism of being and becoming
the crescents of transformation
the circles of totality.
I situate myself at the intersection of the crescent and the circle
between change and stability
between transformation and totality
circles dividing and conjoining
flame breathed from flame.
Knowledge, meditation, action
evidence, inference, experience;
study, concentration, renunciation.
Grinding the elements of awareness
into a totality of understanding by their horrific power
discrete forms of knowledge
significant units of information
merge with universal concepts
unfolding their ultimate significance
erasing the boundaries between past, present and future
the living, the departed and the unborn
the physical and the non-physical.
Emerging as
the chameleon’s all-round vision
the power to conceptualize the totality of life at once
the concavity of the ground of being
the circumference of eternity
the calabash of symbolic cosmic power.
The tongues of flame are infolded
into the crowned knot of fire
and the fire and the rose are one.
2
Contemplative Matrix
In the cave of mind, at the vortex of today and tomorrow, of being and aspiration, I was presented with an edan ogboni, to make as my own.
Not in the arcane consecration of the ancient ones, in which, through an exacting ritual, the brass form with iron stem, female and male powers in unity : luster and permanence, health, wealth, beauty, and fertility, the allure of the life giving vitality of the silken essence of the ancient woman steeped in transformative magic, alloyed with valor, creative energy, industry, hunting, warfare, strength for hammering, cutting, securing, bracing, vigor, and "cutting edge" vital for success and longevity, transformer of the abyss of transition where the cosmic will is given expression and reality takes shape, is incarnated by a spirit bound to the initiate.
I was invited to make the edan my own, in my own way, ensouled by a spirit invoked by my aspiration, that spirit that comes and goes as it will, everywhere present, nowhere confined, the power that enables the galaxies, the lifting of my hand and the firing of neurons in my brain.
Day by day, I kept vigil in my mind, through physical gaze and mental recollection, with the Master of Equanimity and Seeker of Balance, what the edan had become to me, embodying the mediation between my mind and my emotions, between awareness of myself and all facets of that awareness, between myself and the world, between my minisculity and its ability to contemplate the All.
Slowly, It rose within me, the Shadow, the Living Darkness, the Nothing from which All comes, experienced but beyond description.
O brethren, do not desert me!
We meet at last in conclave, in the no-time and no-place.
The mission entrusted ripens to fulfillment.
The other shore is in sight.
Aspirations in Aesthetic and Cognitive Mysticism
The lines above are a summation of an understanding of the path of Ogboni mysticism, a development of the mystical potential of the ideas and practices of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order as described in my “Metaphysics and Epistemology of Ogboni Mysticism”, of which parts 1and 2 have been published on Facebook. The poetic expressions demonstrate an aesthetic mysticism and a cognitive mysticism, two approaches of this mystical philosophy.
Aesthetic mysticism involves reaching towards the source and unification of existence through the appreciation of beauty. This aspiration is pursued, in this context, through the contemplation of the aesthetic power of a particular edan ogboni, a central symbolic form and spiritual vessel of Ogboni.
The unity of structural balance and symbolic evocation actualized by the edan ogboni inspires imagistic conjunctions between the design of the edan and ideas from various cultural contexts.
These correlations thus motivate a cognitive mysticism, an effort to conceptualize and experience existence as a unity grounded in an ultimate source through the study of its constituents and the relationships between them. These convergences are explored through the ideas and images understood as evoked by the inspirational edan.
The Inspirational Edan Ogboni
Elegant yet powerful, arcane yet recognizable in its imaging of the human, the tubular concentration of form in harmony with the solemnity of the face give the work a sense of ascetic dignity, even as the twin edan ogboni held in its hands like a scepter of power project an impression of authority, reinforced by the constellation of abstract forms framing the human structure.
These abstractions suggest a symbol configuration bodying forth a scale of values more internal and abstract than related to the concrete, in the context of the figure’s freedom from any embellishment of its bare form.
This example of edan ogboni shown in this text inspired the poetic lines that open the essay.
The picture comes from Getty Images and is possibly by the great photographer Werner Forman, his art capturing magnificently the sense of self possessed centring within a convergence of symbols dramatized by the edan.
Intercultural Inspirational Contexts
A foundational background to the approach to relating with edan ogboni represented by the poetic lines is the inspiration of Wole Soyinka’s distillation of classical Yoruba thought and ritual through depth of identification in relation to breadth of intercultural evocation, evoking the universal human values the culturally grounded inspiration emerges from.
In the dramatic, poetic and autobiographical scope represented by Death and the King’s Horseman, The Credo of Being and Nothingness, A Shuttle in the Crypt and The Man Died, for example, he either dramatizes the specificities of classical Yoruba cosmology, demonstrating its universally human essence or distills from while transcending the culturally specific matrix evident in his cosmologically oriented works.
These dynamisms are accomplished through language of inimitable beauty and memorable force, readily accessible yet pointing to inexhaustible depths in Death and the King’s Horseman and The Credo of Being and Nothingness, a balance between profundity and simplicity different from the uncompromising expressive individuality represented by the lyricism of A Shuttle in the Crypt, the powerful narrative experimentation of The Man Died and the linguistic muscularity and imaginative daring of Myth, Literature and the African World, the latter being the book which transformed a central part of my inner self in the image of classical Yoruba thought and art.
Resonating with the Soyinka inspiration is the figure of Tibetan Buddhist poet and hermit Jetsun Milarepa, one of Soyinka’s empowering recollections while in prison during two years of the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1970, as narrated in his autobiographical The Man Died. Milarepa embodies an example of inner strength through the inward recollection empowered by the hermit’s outward withdrawal, an inspirational mainstay of Soyinka’s during his imprisonment, as evident in the autobiographical text and in A Shuttle in the Crypt, poetry written during that confinement.
Milarepa’s poetry, in its conjunction with his life, is a magnificent demonstration of the humanizing of complex philosophical conceptions and their luxuriance of imagistic expression. He masterfully projects the architectonic power and beauty of the philosophy of his Kargyutpa school of Tibetan Buddhism, ensparkled by the emotional depth of his commitment to that vision, enriched by the tension between his emotional relationships with other humans and the focus of his heart on his uncompromising solitude in quest of ultimate wisdom, as demonstrated in Evans Wentz’ edited Kawa Samdup’s translation of Tibet’s Great Yogi Milarepa and Garma Chang’s translation of the Sixty Thousand Songs of Milarepa.
The form of the meditation represented by this reworking of edan ogboni ritual is also influenced by my decisive encounter with W.G. M. Gray’s Office of the Holy Tree of Life, subsuming a cosmological scope of reference with detailed evocation of the nodes of this cosmological scheme, in terms of a poetic luminosity that brings wonderfully home the symbolism of the cosmos as a tree, remarkably developed by the Jewish origin Kabalistic Tree of Life.
The central source for the ideas adapted for the interpretation of the symbolic universe of the edan is Babatunde Lawal’s “À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New Perspectives on Edan Ògbóni”, ideas on which I have constructed a network of associations drawn from various cultural contexts.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Initiation into Edan Ogboni
Foundational
Aesthetic and Cognitive Mysticism
Refinements
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
“Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge”
and
The Greater Ogboni Fraternity
“Earth, Humanity, Cosmos"
Abstract
An effort at developing a version of the crafting, ensouling and dedication to an initiate, of an edan ogboni, a central symbolic form and spiritual vessel of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order, in the context of an aesthetic and cognitive mysticism, the mysticism of beauty and the mysticism of knowledge.
Aspirations in Aesthetic and Cognitive Mysticism
The lines above [ poem in larger text] are a summation of an understanding of the path of Ogboni mysticism in relation to a reworking of the traditional procedure for the ensouling of the sculptural form known as an edan ogboni and its dedication to an initiate, a development of the mystical potential of the ideas and practices of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order as described in my “Metaphysics and Epistemology of Ogboni Mysticism”, of which parts 1and 2 have been published on Facebook. The poetic expressions demonstrate an aesthetic mysticism and a cognitive mysticism, two approaches of this mystical philosophy.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Initiation into Edan Ogboni
Foundational
Aesthetic and Cognitive Mysticism
1
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
“Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge”
and
The Greater Ogboni Fraternity
“Earth, Humanity, Cosmos”
Abstract
An effort at developing a version of the crafting, ensouling and dedication to an initiate, of an edan ogboni, a central symbolic form and spiritual vessel of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order.
Dedicated to the indomitable scholars of Ogboni, and particularly to
Babatunde Lawal
whose scholarship is particularly strategic for an understanding of the Earth grounded, embodied and yet transformative character of classical Yoruba thought, at the intersection of aesthetics, epistemology and metaphysics to which Ogboni is distinctively central.
Contents
Picture of Master of Equanimity and Seeker of Balance Edan Ogboni
Abstract
Dedication
Invocation through Aesthetic Contemplation
Ontological Questions in Ogboni Mysticism and Magic
Invocation through Aesthetic Contemplation
Inspired by my relationship with the image of the Adhi Buddha Vajra Dara, an overarching deity guide of Milarepa’s Kargyutpa school of Tibetan Buddhism, as depicted in the Evans Wentz’ text, of similar visual presence and of related symbolic value to me as the edan ogboni discussed here, and on account of the traditional ritual techniques for relating with edan being unavailable in the texts I have read, I approach this image, my favorite edan ogboni picture, as a contemplative form, adapting the traditional idea of the edan as the subject of invocations of a spirit meant to inhabit the sculpture and work with the initiate to which it is consecrated as a companion till the departure of that initiate from the world, as described by L. E. Roache in “Psychophysical Attributes of the Ogboni Edan”, African Arts, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1971, 48-53+80, by Denis Williams in “The Iconology of the Yoruba ‘Edan Ogboni’ ", Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 34, No. 2, 1964, 139-166 and in the particularly impressive account of Evelyn Roache Selke in From the Womb of Earth: An Appreciation of Yoruba Bronze Art.
I imagine the possibility of a similar ensoulment of form enabled by contemplation of the representation of the edan ogboni, at the intersection of mind and image, the “cave of the mind”, the cave metaphor evoking correlations between the primordial spirituality represented by Ogboni veneration of Earth and the caves where some of the earliest human art is to be found, caves being perceivable as the vagina of Earth as primal mother, as suggested by Max Oelschlaeger in The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology, caves where early humans imaged their visual explorations of the universe in art, conjuncting physical reality and the world of the mind represented by imagination, thereby giving birth to the human ability to transcend the material immediacies of their existence, visualizing possibilities transformative of those material conditions, as J. Ki Zerbo argues for art as the defining quality of emergent humanity in “African Prehistoric Art” from UNESCO General History of Africa, Vo.1 : Methodology and Prehistory.
Ontological Questions in Ogboni Mysticism and Magic
I thus suggest how one may develop a mental relationship with the edan through contemplation of an image of the sculpture or through a visual focus on the sculpture itself, thereby indicating a version of the classical approach of invoking a spirit into the physical structure of the edan.
If spirit is understood as mobile and amenable to human shaping, as is suggested by the Yoruba concept of ase, as described by the representative accounts in Henry Drewal at al’s Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, Rowland Abiodun’s “Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics: The Concept of Ase”, “Ase: Verbalizing and Visualizing Creative Power through Art” and Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, and the Igbo idea of ike, as depicted by Chinua Achebe in “The Igbo World and its Art”, may such an animating presence not be shaped by the power of thought and emotion, vehicles of depth of aspiration, within the context of a physical edan or a mentally visualized one or one encountered purely in terms of a picture on the screen of an electronic device, as in digital versions of this essay?
Can an intimacy of relationship not be thus developed with the edan, inviting the transformation of the perceived and the imagined through the energizing power of the conjunction between the idea of cosmic force as unifying classical African thought as recounted by John Mbiti in African Religions and Philosophy and other conceptions of such a force, here evoked in terms of an adaptation of Jesus’ words along similar lines, about the mobility of spirit, in his reworking of Jewish spirituality in the Biblical Book of John?
May an edan ogboni thus energised through the power of thought and emotion be able to demonstrate the qualities attributed to edan in the classical context? The ability of the edan to effect healing of illness, the power of the spirit invoked into the edan sculpture to leave the confines of its physical form and move invisibly across space, passing through walls, alert to otherwise concealed activity, even sensing danger to the initiate and investigating this danger and reporting back to him through dreams or engaging with non-human spirits in the interests of the initiate to whom it is dedicated, as memorably summed up by Roache, “when ill fortune is attributed to the anger of gods/spirits… the Edan leaves its ‘body’ and communes spirit to spirit with the supermortals, attempting to placate and discover what appeasing measures would be required”.
In other words, can a relationship with edan of the kind I develop in this essay enable the empowerment of the role traditionally attributed to ori in Yoruba thought, the immortal, spiritual centre of self through whom all influence from various deities is filtered, the centre of a person’s ultimate potential, the only one who can follow his devotee on distant journey without turning back, even the most distant, the journey of death, as this identity is depicted in Yoruba cosmology and particularly in the ese ifa, literature of the Ifa system of knowledge, “The Importance of Ori”, from Landeg White and Jack Mapanje’s edited Oral Poetry from Africa, from where the journey image in the poem comes from, and adapting a Rosicrucian Order AMORC First Temple Degree initiation manual formulation of a similar conception, of a personage intrinsic to the self but transcending its temporal character, one which, no matter how far one travels within the journey of life and its vicissitudes, one would not find a friend more devoted to serving one?
This aspiration could be pursued by making the edan one is cultivating a relationship with a representative of one’s ori, one’s highest potential, an identity grounded in the source of existence. Hence the need to choose to build a relationship with an Ogboni sculpture expressing such a personalization of ultimate values as one understands these values and how best one wants to see these values expressed in oneself. Hence I have chosen the edan ogboni that inspires this essay, interpreting it in terms of the ideas expressed in the poem that opens the essay.
Israel Regardie makes a compelling presentation of a similar idea in The Tree of Life : A Study in Magic, in which the Holy Guardian Angel in the Western esoteric tradition represents an identity similar to that of the ori in Orisa cosmology:
...when one inflames oneself in prayer towards the Holy Guardian Angel, as the secret aspiration of the soul will have been, upon that will the Angel seize, in the ecstasy of bliss which ravishes the soul away, to convey hismanifestation to the world.
Along related lines Hindu, Christian and Buddhist thought identify the essence of the self, or with Buddhism, the self’s ultimate possibility, with the source of existence. These spiritualities go further to identify ultimate reality with a personality that is both anthropomorphic and transcendent of the anthropomorphic, thereby facilitating the identification of the human with the ultimate. Srividya reinforces this orientation by providing a unifying logic to this spectrum of the embodied and the transcendent in depicting deity in terms of the anthropomorphic, the geometric and the sonic in an ascending order of abstraction understood as defining the underlying structure of being.
Along such lines, one may contemplate the edan ogboni in terms of its identification with the human form, its suggesting particular values through its modeling of the human body. One could proceed from that contemplation of its visual character to transcend the image and enter into the silence of the mind fed by the elevating character of that imagistic contemplation.
The visual evocation of elevated values feeds the soil of the contemplating mind as it moves beyond the particularities represented by the visual image to immersion in the oceanic silence of consciousness, possibly enabling entry into the silence at the source of being, breaking the silence of an ancient pond, a frog jumps into water, a deep resonance, to adapt a translation of Japanese poet Matsuo Basho’s frog haiku, an extremely compressed poetic form of vast evocative force.
Thus, contemplating the edan ogboni, proceeding though the path represented by the beads of transformation: black : hidden mystery; red : fire of transformation emerging from the unknown; white : light of illumination, consciousness in its primal form.
Through these emerge concentric circles of làí-làí, eternity, a vision of the content of the original agreement between Orí and Olórun, the compact between the self and the ground of being, a poetic summation of aspiration distilled from Awo Falokun Fatunmbi’s “Initiation into the Mysteries of Nature” and “Ifa and Embracing Good Fortune”.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Initiation into Edan Ogboni
Foundational
Aesthetic and Cognitive Mysticism
2
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Initiation into Edan Ogboni
Foundational
Aesthetic and Cognitive Mysticism
3
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
“Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge”
and
The Greater Ogboni Fraternity
“Earth, Humanity, Cosmos”
Abstract
An effort at developing a version of the crafting, ensouling and dedication to an initiate, of an edan ogboni, a central symbolic form and spiritual vessel of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order.
Dedicated to the indomitable scholars of Ogboni, and particularly to
Babatunde Lawal
whose scholarship is particularly strategic for an understanding of the Earth grounded, embodied and yet transformative character of classical Yoruba thought, at the intersection of aesthetics, epistemology and metaphysics to which Ogboni is distinctively central.
Contents
Picture of Master of Equanimity and Seeker of Balance Edan Ogboni
Abstract
Dedication
Logic of Contemplative Method
Sequence and Sources of Contemplative Progression
Logic of Contemplative Method
The contemplative technique employed here, different from but also adaptable to a relationship with the physical handling of the edan in the classical context, is influenced by my practice of visualization in Western magic, Buddhism and Hinduism, systems which, along with cultivating a strong culture of contemplation and visualization, incidentally resonating in this reworking of Ogboni ritual`, also demonstrate a reliance on physical ritual forms as Ogboni traditionally does with edan.
The focus of this adaptation of the traditional invocatory method, however, is on psychological interiority, mental mobility and ideational flexibility, values also emerging in the classical Ogboni symbiosis of sculpture, ensouling spirit and initiate, but actualized here in experimental terms different from the social and ritual contexts of traditional practice, from edan commissioning to its delicate construction and elaborate consecration, the novel method evident here demonstrating a suggestion of what may be done, in different ways, with the inspiration provided by Ogboni thought and spiritual activity.
The foundation of my aesthetically centred approach to relating in meditation with the edan ogboni is to admire and contemplate it, letting it work on my mind, with what I know about the edan kept in suspension, allowing the visual immediacy of the work exert itself on me, thus fertilizing what I know without being limited by my existing knowledge.
The power of art consists primarily in its ability to touch depths of the self that may be reached through but are not confined to structuring by concepts, a force at times bypassing ideas and plumbing beyond the filters of the intellect, even as it may energize such conceptual dynamisms.
This is best achieved by contemplating art, opening the mind to its force through admiration of its distinctive beauty, letting mind and work, abstraction and concreteness, the invisible dynamism of consciousness and the shaping by mind and hand that is art, meet at the point that is composed by these forms of being, enabling the birth of a summative oneness from the convergence of two, in the spirit of the Ogboni symbolism of the emergence of three from two and the sublime deployment of a similar idea by Hindu Trika Shaivism, particularly as it is actualized by Abhinavagupta in terms of the union of his father and mother emblematizing the coming together of the God Shiva and the Goddess Shakti in generating the cosmos, to which his heart beats in rhythm to its pulsating core, as he describes this in the opening stanzas of such works as the Tantraloka, the Tantrasara and the Paratrisika Vivarana.
In this context, interpretations of art may be seen as an invitation to glory in the creation of the artist and the creative capacity of the interpreter, a guide in constructing one’s own individualized relationship with the work of art. Striking interpretations could prove indelible in one’s mind, creating the foundations of one’s own interpretations and continually inspiring rich reflection.
In this sense, adapting a Christian writer’s formulation, readings of art are like guides to cultivating one’s own approach to prayer by using the prayers of others in developing the depths of the self calling out to the depths of the cosmos that is prayer, the scaffolding that aids the construction of the building is not discarded but integrated into the structure of the architectural form, and, employing a Zen Buddhist image, the bridge through which the shore is reached is not transcended but becomes part of the significance of the destination arrived at with its aid, in the spirit of the Western esoteric Hermetic maxim that “The way is the goal and the goal is the way”.
Dorothy Sayers declares in her introduction to the first volume, Inferno, of her translation of Dante Alighieri’s cosmological epic The Divine Comedy, that “a great poetic image is more than the sum of its parts”, constituting a potency that cannot be summed up by any level of analysis or interpretation, a fact that is also true of powerful and particularly, of great art, such as the edan ogboni that motivates this work.
Salutations to the now anonymous master who created it.
Sequence and Sources of Contemplative Progression
The structural and numerical centrality of the crescent and the circle in the image, in relation to Babatunde Lawal’s description in “À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó”, of the crescent, spiral and concentric circle in Ogboni iconography as evoking recreative capacity, lead to my adapting the exhortation to the initiate in the seminal Western esotericism text, The Teachings, Rites and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, edited by Israel Regardie, to “Situate yourself at the centre of the cross of the elements, from whence issued the creative word at the birth of the dawning universe”, the rhythmic beauty of that expression supremely rich in associations running from the Christian symbolism of the cross to the account of creation through the Word in the Biblical Book of John to the Hermetic conception of the elements as the foundations of spiritual growth.
Interpreting the crescents of the edan as suggesting temporality associated with the phase of the moon in which it assumes a crescent shape, as Lawal states, and the concentric circles on which the circles terminate as evoking the integration of all possibility around a centre, a universal and ideationally compelling manner of viewing a concentric circle, I arrive at “Situate yourself at the intersection of the crescent and the circle/between change and stability/between transformation and totality”.
This understanding of the mystical potential of Ogboni thought is thus depicted in terms of sensitivity to the tension between temporality and change and the human aspiration to transcend these dynamisms, between the ultimacy that is Olodumare, “axiom paradoxon,…beginning and consequence”, as summed up by Susanne Wenger on Olodumare, a central Yoruba conception of ultimate reality, in her review of Harold Courlander’s Tales of Yoruba Gods and Heroes, and the opposites Olodumare integrates and transcends, as superbly described by Ulli Beier in The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger.
In this context, Olodumare subsumes the various perspectives from which the cosmos may be perceived as represented by the orisa, deities in Yoruba cosmology. This cosmology may also be understood in relation to the quest for a point of synthesis in the emphasis on process as a central rhythm of being, process in terms of recurrent transitions between emergence from and return to orun, the zone of primal origins where Olodumare is centred, a process known to most humans as birth and death but in Yoruba and other cosmologies which share similar perspectives as a cycle of birth, death and rebirth.
The configuration of three concentric circles forming an elegant amplification of the visual power of the centripetal force of the circles, their location on the figure’s chest suggesting the figure as embodying the qualities they symbolize, leads to my evocation of this structure in images inspired by Dante Alighieri’s great visual picture in the Divine Comedy, of the Christian conception of God as Three Persons in One, depicted by Dante in terms of three circles occupying the same space, each breathed out of the other as flame emanating from flame.
I adapt, in referencing a sequence of activity, from knowledge to action to study and renunciation. lines from the Hindu Katha Upanishad of the methods through which the self may be transmuted from its focus on temporality to a cognitive grounding in eternity.
I conjoin with those lines a slightly adapted sequence from Mazisi Kunene’s exposition of classical Zulu epistemology in Anthem of the Decades, a distinctively articulated conception of cognitive mysticism though resonant with correlative ideas beyond its originating cultural context.
The Kunene lines are given striking visual particularity through
the images of the chameleon and the calabash, indicating the methods through which human perception may
be transmuted from its accustomed focus on linear temporality and
mono-dimensionality to a cognitive grounding in temporal unification and an
immediate perception of the multi-dimensional unity of being.
I conclude part 1 by adapting T.S. Eliot’s lines from his poetic cycle Four Quartets, of the consummation of spiritual development in terms of the image of the fire of transformation and the rose of consummating beauty.
The descriptions of brass in terms of luster and permanence, health, wealth, beauty, and fertility, comes from Lawal’s “À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó, where he relates those virtues to Osun, the river goddess, whose personality is further alluded to here in terms of the harmony of images of silken essence and magical aged power drawn from Beier’s The Return of the Gods. The associations of iron as valor, creative energy, industry, hunting, and warfare, strength for hammering, cutting, securing, bracing, vigor, and "cutting edge" vital for success and longevity also come from Lawal, who correlates them with Ogun, the god who clears the way, the characterization of the deity as pathfinder evoked in the poem adapted from the delineation of Soyinka’s picture of Ogun in Cultures of Creativity: The Centennial Exhibition of the Nobel Prize, 2001, edited by Ulf Larsson and translated by Daniel Olson.
The concept of “Nothing” in the first line of the poem is inspired by the conjunction between the idea of “Nothing” in scientific cosmology, described by Tian Yu Cao in “Ontology and Scientific Explanation” as the “Quantum Nothing”, the unknown possibility representing the zone before the emergence of the cosmos, and similar ideas in various religious cosmologies, such as the Great Unmanifest of Kabala, the ultimate fecundity at the source of existence but which exists as a potential rather than an actualization and so is beyond even the most exalted encounter by any entity, as understood in Dion Fortune’s The Mystical Qabala, the Void of Buddhism, beyond being and non-being,so described because it transcends all categories through which the mind apprehends phenomena, and the Tao of Taoism, that which has no name yet is the mother of the myriad things, as depicted in Lao Tzu’s Tao te Ching.
These ideas from scientific and religious cosmology are reinforced by "the Living Darkness” of the penultimate passage, evocative of the biological darkness of the womb, fundamental to the conception and gestation of human life, the darkness of night and the darkness experienced on closing one’s eyes, both crucial for human regeneration in sleep and for recreative thought in contemplation, imagination and introspection, gestative possibilities at the human and terrestrial scales resonating with the cosmic frames represented by the cosmological "Nothing", the equivalent of darkness in biological and atmospheric terms, values constellating in relation to ideas of absence of light enabling gestative capacity, subsumed for me by the symbolism of black in Akan Kente cloth.
The "Shadow”, complementing the concept of “Nothing”, comes from Ayi Kwei Armah’s adaptation of Akan thought, as he describes it in a personal communication, in the chapter “The Inspirers” from his novel The Healers:
Those who learn to read the signs around them and to hear the language of the universe reach a kind of knowledge healers call the shadow. The shadow, because that kind of knowledge follows you everywhere. When you find it, it is not difficult at all. It says there are two forces, unity and division. The first creates, the second destroys.
The meditator on the edan is finally depicted as encountering, in the numinous space enabled by the arcane presence of the edan, brethren in relation to whom he was entrusted with the task of projecting a broader understanding of Ogboni, assuring them, in the language of Buddhist evocation of reaching a zone of ultimate achievement, that the shore of his accomplishment of this task is opening to increasing fulfillment.
The edan ogboni is thus interpreted in terms of visual correlations between its form and some of the most vividly realized and sublime ideational constructions from various ideological contexts around the world.
This interpretive exercise may thus be understood as actualizing, through verbal interpretation of the motifs that define this example of edan art, Lawal’s luminous summation, in “À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó”, of the intersection of creativity and tradition in the art of edan ogboni:
Edan [unlike descriptive orientations in traditional Yoruba sculpture ] is concerned with the essence and timelessness of being, and therefore is metaphorical in its imagery; its form, though inspired by the human figure, has a meta-empirical reference.
Yet the emphasis on the esoteric provides the brass-smith…with a unique opportunity to exercise his creativity and experiment with the human figure while still complying with… prescribed characteristics handed down over generations. A close examination of the edan corpus reveals variations on common themes and a great diversity in artistic skills, inventiveness, and temperaments.
The handling of headgear and coiffures, facial expressions, and body decorations is individualized, and form ranges from the two-dimensional to the volumetric and architectonic.
The society's concern with archetypes in its rituals and corporate emblems would seem to impose severe restrictions on the artist. Yet, it is the same concern that gives the artist the inspiration to operate at a higher level of creative consciousness, enabling him to dissociate the human figure further and further from the mundane. The result is a corpus of startling and highly original forms.
Emmanuel Babatunde
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Professor and Chair
Department of Sociology & Anthropology
Senior Fulbright Scholar
Lincoln University
Pennsylvania, USA
(484) 365-7545