Biography as Cosmology: The Significance of Toyin Falola's Ifá Priestcraft: Ifáyemí Elébuìbon and Yorùbá Ancestral Knowledge Systems: An Anticipatory Review
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
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Abstract
Toyin Falola’s Ifá Priestcraft: Ifáyẹmí Ẹlẹ́buìbọn and Yorùbá Ancestral Knowledge Systems promises to be a landmark study of the life, thought and spiritual vocation of one of the most prominent contemporary practitioners of Ifá as an indigenous Yoruba knowledge system. Reading the book’s chapter architecture as an intellectual map, the essay examines its promise to unite the biography of the distinguished babaláwo Ifáyemí Elébuìbon with sustained inquiry into Yorùbá metaphysics, cosmology, epistemology and social philosophy.
This essay situates the book within the sparse literature on individual adepts of indigenous African spiritual systems and examines biography as a vehicle for understanding spirituality as lived experience. The discussion ranges across cosmology, metaphysics, destiny, sacrifice, invisible agency, social ethics, gender, sacred presence, àṣẹ and Ifá epistemology. It also places the projected study in conversation with comparative religion, phenomenology, science, computing, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Fulani spirituality and Western esotericism.
The essay argues that Falola’s
conjunction of biography and cosmology may illuminate not only Ẹlẹ́buìbọn’s
life but also the distinctive ways in which Ifá unites knowledge, practice,
personhood and society, presenting the African spiritual practitioner as a
thinker, interpreter and living source of knowledge as it demonstrates how a human life can become a lens
through which an entire universe of thought comes into view.
The main text of the essay is punctuated by images, often complemented by commentary, through which I expand the referential and evocative force of the essay, developing my philosophical and mystical aspirations in Ifa as a means of exploring the essence, structure and dynamism of existence.
Apart from the picture of the book's cover and of the cover of Elebuibon's autobiography, all others images are by ChatGPT as directed by myself.
Contents
Book Announcement
Abstract
Why Write an Anticipatory Review?
A Landmark Study of an Adept in an Indigenous African Spirituality
Image and Text: Baobabs of Thought on the Journey into Infinity
Biography as the Phenomenology of Spirituality
The Babaláwo at the Intersection of Spirit and Matter
The Introduction: Cosmologies in Global Historical Context
Chapter One: “Ẹlẹ́bùibọn: The Preternatural Voyage of a Mystic”
Image and Text: An Autobiography of Yemi Elebuibon
Chapter Two: “Being: The Immaterial Beginning”
Chapter Three: ''Human Actions and Destiny''
Image and Text: Emergence
Chapter Four: “Sacrifices and Sacred Communications”
Chapter Five: “The Invisible Hands”
Chapter Six: “Ọbàtálá and His Children: Constructing a Functional Society”
Chapter Seven: ''Ọ̀rúnmìlà and Akápò: Conflict Management and Resolution in Ifá''
Image and Text: The Rebirth in the Forest
Chapter Eight: “Inclusivity and Gender in Ifá”
Chapter Nine: “Sacredness in the World”
Image and Text: Self as Cosmic Encapsulation and Expansion
Chapter Ten: ''Àśę: The Performative Force of Ìwúre''
Chapter Eleven: ''Ẹlẹ́bùibọn: Ifa Epistemologies and Yoruba Cosmologies''
Conclusion: Ẹlẹ́bùibọn and Cosmologies in Contemporary Society
The Promise of Ifá Priestcraft
Why Write an Anticipatory Review?
Why not read a book before writing a review of it? Why write a review examining what the book may contain? Is that not a contradiction, since reviews are conventionally understood as composed in response to a creative product one has fully encountered?
An anticipatory review is an opportunity to navigate the universe constructed by the book before reading it. One thereby savours its ideational delights, like delicious biscuit crunching under delighted teeth, even as the mind races forward to further immersion within the cosmos unleashed from within the borders shaped by the book's opening and conclusion, a world leaping into existence from within the solidity of the front and back covers of the citadel of wonder that is one of humanity's greatest achievements, fixing the topographies of speech into scribbles on a surface which may be carried compactly from place to place, and even more compactly translated into an invisible form that opens to sight when certain keys are touched-the digital text.
A Landmark Study of an Adept in an Indigenous African Spirituality
Toyin Falola's Ifá Priestcraft: Ifáyemí Elébuìbon and Yorùbá Ancestral Knowledge Systems is perhaps the second book on a babalawo, adept in the Yoruba Ifa knowledge system, in Nigeria, the first perhaps being by Elebuibon on himself.
Falola’s study promises to go beyond the wonderful work of Henry Drewal and Margareth Thompson Drewal on the babalawo Kọ́láwọlé Ọ̀ṣítọ́lá in ''An Ifa Diviner's Shrine in Ijebuland'' and taken further by Margareth Drewal in Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play Agency.
It may also be the most recent major book devoted to an adept in an indigenous Nigerian spiritual system. The first such study known to me is Ulli Beier’s The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger, followed by other books by and on Wenger, whose life and work were shaped by the indigenous Yorùbá spiritual and philosophical tradition, as Ẹlẹ́buìbọn’s have been. Ifá Priestcraft therefore belongs to a small but vital body of writing on accomplished practitioners of indigenous African spiritual systems, both within Africa and beyond it.
Accounts of personal spiritual and philosophical exploration in indigenous
African traditions have often been obscured by the limitations of oral
transmission and by the relative de-emphasis on individual spiritual identity
in many classical African art forms. In this respect, the situation differs
from Buddhism and Christianity, for example, where extensive traditions of
biography, autobiography, hagiography and spiritual testimony preserve the
paths of individual seekers and adepts.
Image and Text: Baobabs of Thought on the Journey into Infinity
Biography as the Phenomenology of Spirituality
Why are writings about accomplished people within spiritual systems significant?
They are valuable particularly because they demonstrate the lived experience, the phenomenological realities of that spirituality. They dramatise its significance beyond theories, theologies and institutional structures. Religious systems crystallise aspiration and experience into doctrines, rituals and organisations, but such structures reflect the experiential dimension with varying degrees of luminosity—brilliantly in some instances, dimly in others. At times they elevate those who identify with them; at other times they restrict them.
The life of an adept can disclose how inherited structures are inhabited, interpreted, tested and transformed by a particular person. Biography thus becomes a meeting place of doctrine and experience, community and individuality, tradition and innovation. Through it, we may see how a spiritual system actually works within a human life.
Falola’s book may therefore be expected to offer a survey of Ẹlẹ́buìbọn’s life and thought in the context of the knowledge systems in which he works-Ifa and the larger body of classical Yoruba thought, written in Falola's characteristic blend of simplicity and ideational range.
The Babaláwo at the Intersection of Spirit and Matter
What might a book about a babaláwo, an adept in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa, reveal about Ifá that a more general study cannot? Might it illuminate the intersections of spirit and matter, the exploration of which is central to a babaláwo’s vocation?
Might it examine ideas of time that are thought to enable a babaláwo to predict the future accurately, as I have witnessed at first hand? Could it show how divination links cosmic pattern, personal circumstance and practical decision?
Looking through the description of the book, it seems Falola bridges biography and cosmology, rooting both in the social contexts fed by Ifa and which Ifa feeds.
It would appear he is making another ambitious push, as he did in Yoruba Metaphysics, to achieve something unique in Yoruba thought. In this instance, correlating biography with a dense study of a knowledge system and its social expressions, using these in shaping the new field of study he is developing, African Ancestral Studies, a rich manifesto of which could be his essay ''Ritual Archives''.
The Introduction:Cosmologies in Global Historical Context
The title of the introduction, ''Cosmologies in Global Historical Context'' is deeply promising. It suggests that rather than simply focus on his subject and its immediate ideational contexts, the author seeks to contextualise it in relation to its global cosmological frame, a planetary field of possibilities. He would thereby map Ifa as one node in a vast network of similarities and differences, permutations akin to the patterns of divergences and convergences, the Odu Ifa, in terms of which knowledge of Ifa is organized.
This being a very broad subject, how will the author go about it? Which cosmologies will he privilege since he will need to make selections? Will he address the West African divination network to which Ifa belongs in terms of cosmological, structural, practical and at times symbol similarities-from the Igbo Afa, to the Benin Oguega, the Dahomean Fa and the Ghanaian Afan, if I recall the last name correctly, and ranging even further to the Chinese I Ching?
How does the binary organisation of these systems relate to binary order as fundamental in nature and in how it has been developed in various ways down to the information management system represented by computing as Olu Longe pioneered the discussion in his ''Ifa Divination and Computer Science''?
Or will Falola use a more expansive approach in discussing global cosmologies? The wording of the introduction evokes the infinite possibilities of this zone of study, which protean scholars such as Mircea Eliade in Patterns in Comparative Religion and Cosmos and History and Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy have grappled gamely with, exploring the cosmological hunger of the human being, with other scholars, such as Paul Davies in The Mind of God and other works exploring this cosmological imperative of the human being even in the context of the sciences.
The title of the introduction, ''Cosmologies in Global Historical Context'', is therefore most ambitious, and for a book on Ifa, such an expansive framing may well be unique.
Chapter One: “Ẹlẹ́bùibọn: The Preternatural Voyage of a Mystic”
Chapter One would certainly narrate and examine Elebuibon's journey into his sacred calling. Will it extend the account he has already given in his autobiography? Will Falola reinterpret the events of that life through the larger philosophical architecture of Ifá?
Image and Text: An Autobiography of Yemi Elebuibon
The Buddha's withdrawal into solitary meditation for years to discover the meaning of existence after his shocked awareness of mortality represented by old age, sickness and death; Ignatius of Loyola discovering his vocation during confinement for injuries received as a soldier, a period fundamental for his founding one of the greatest of Catholic Orders, the Jesuits; Ramana Maharshi's meditation for years in isolated places through which he came to understand the power of his divine, inner self, the essence of the human being as perceived in Hindu thought; developments of relationships with spirits through plants as recounted by shaman Manuel Córdova-Rios, these and more constitute frontiers of human being and becoming, explorations measuring human potential against the human condition, as stated by Arnold Toynbee of the drive that moves people towards the more extreme of spiritual quests in withdrawal from society.
Chapter Two: “Being: The Immaterial Beginning”
Chapter Two promises an engagement with the metaphysics underlying Ifa as an exploration of the intersection of ''Being'', the ultimate ground of existence, and its expression in terms of the multiplicity, dynamism and order of the universe.
Does the universe have a centre of meaning, direction and creation? What is the source of the capacity to perceive possible futures, which the babalawo may demonstrate ?
Wande Abimbola describes Odu Ifa, the organizational categories of Ifa, the system in terms of which ese ifa, Ifa literature, is organized, as akin to chapters of a vast book of unknown scope, as the number of extant ese ifa is unknown. Yet, unlike a conventional text, these organizational structures, the Odu Ifa, are also depicted by him as spirits, sentient entities ( An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus). The Odu Ifa are thereby depicted as multi-ontological, self conscious entities expressed in varied forms, as spatial patterns and numerical combinations
Babalawo Joseph Ohomina goes further to depict the Odu as
...the names of spirits whose origin we do not know. We understand only a small fraction of their significance. They are the power behind the efficacy of whatever we prepare. They are the names of all possibilities of existence. Abstract and concrete, actual and potential. Concrete forms such as rain, water, land, air and the stars, abstractions such as love and hate, situations such as celebrations and conflict, all have their spiritual names in the various Odu.
( Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, ''Cosmological Permutations : Joseph Ohomina’s Ifa Philosophy and the Quest for the Unity of Being'' )
Ghanaian Efa practitioner Nyornuwofia Agorsor depicts them as angels ( Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, ''The Metaphysics of Language in the Yoruba Origin Ifa System of Knowledge in a Comparative Context").
What could Elebuibon's views on this be? What may be his experience of the spiritual dimension of Ifa, the aspect that goes beyond conventional awareness into relationships with forms of existence ordinarily inaccessible to human senses or mind?
The
chapter on Being is one of the richest in Falola's Yoruba Metaphysics.
Will a comparable depth and scope emerge in this chapter of Ifa
Priestcraft? More particularly, will abstract metaphysical questions be
illuminated through Ẹlẹ́buìbọn’s experience, so that ontology is presented not
only as an intellectual construction but also as a lived orientation?
Chapter Three: ''Human Actions and Destiny''
This chapter would engage the question of the relationship between fate and free will at the centre of Ifa divination. To what degree is the course of human life the outcome of a person's actions and to what degree is it shaped by destiny?
The circumstances of our birth juxtaposed with the outcomes of our actions, the inevitable progression towards biological maximisation and eventual decline, ultimately leaving the world in spite of all actions to stave off this degeneration, all foreground the question of the convergence of factors that shape human life.
Is the human being an actor in a cosmic drama designed by more powerful entities, as Falola states in Yoruba Metaphysics, the scope of action possible to those actors circumscribed by the boundaries of the drama, boundaries ultimately structured by the inflexibility of space, time, biology and the variability of social contexts?
A babalawo may or may not be a philosopher critically probing such questions, but ese ifa, Ifa literature, contain texts engaging such issues through narratives.
How do particular babalawo respond to the ontology of ese ifa? How do they engage the intersection between the imaginative character of the texts and their use as what is understood as divine insight enabled by Orunmila, the orisa or deity of wisdom, described as the founder of Ifa?
Perhaps the book will explore Elebuibon's views on this subject, taking forward Noel Armherd's examination in Reciting Ifa of the situational implications of the use of ese ifa in divinatory contexts.
Image and Text:Emergence
''Things, their character and the relationships between them
extending infinitely in all directions yet constellated in a multiplicity of centres, of which I was one, subsumed in an ultimate core''
The dawn of Ifa in the mind of the first Ifa initiate as the system revealed itself to her in a night of lions.
Was there ever a human founder of Ifa, in contrast to the belief that it was founded by Orunmila, the Little Man of Igeti Hill,
''of whom the Supreme Fount of Thought sought counsel at the time of creation" as Wole Soyinka puts it in The Seven Stanzas?
Chapter Four: “Sacrifices and Sacred Communications”
This chapter will explore the centrality of material sacrifices in Ifa as a means of communication between humans and spirit. Would it involve a discussion of Elebuibon's perspectives on what has become a controversial subject despite its ancient orthodoxy? The necessity of the kinds of ẹbọ, particularly of animals, traditionally integrated into Ifa textual prescriptions, is challenged by such an Ifa reformer as Moyo Okediji and his Ifa Tuntun, New Ifa. People, in various contexts, express reservations about the cost of taking part in indigenous Yoruba spirituality on account of the cost of ẹbọ.
How does Ẹlẹ́buìbọn interpret sacrifice in Ifa: as payment, exchange, transformation, symbolic realignment, spiritual nourishment, ethical discipline or some combination of these?
How might Falola distinguish between the internal logic of the tradition and the ethical, economic and social questions raised by contemporary practitioners and critics?
Chapter Five: “The Invisible Hands”
This chapter is likely to be about the assistance of invisible, sentient agents at work in a person's life, particularly in that of such a dedicated spiritual practitioner as a babaláwo.
Wole Soyinka, a preeminent writer on Yoruba spirituality, puts it this way, " [those] whose voices we often heard, whose touches we often felt, whose wisdoms come suddenly into the mind when the wisest have shaken their heads and murmured; It cannot be done' " ( Death and the King's Horseman).
Jetsun Milerepa, a Buddhist wandering in the solitary grandeur of Tibetan mountains, sustained himself in that distance from physical humanity by calling on what he understood as the invisible but potent presence of the gurus of his Kargyutpa Buddhist school. ''Vouchsafe your grace waves, O gurus'', he would call ( Evans-Wentz, ed., Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa ). ( ''In Tibetan Buddhism, grace-waves (chinlab) represent the cascading spiritual influence and inspiration flowing from the lineage of masters down to the student'' (Google AI).
Elizabeth Haisch's Initiation, the most powerful autobiography of spiritual quest known to me, written by a Hungarian within an ancient Egyptian and modern Western esoteric cultural context, dramatizes themes also strategic for African cosmologies. These are the persistence of ancestral memory, expressed in latent and flowering possibilities of the self and in the guidance of ancestors. These possibilities are depicted as live realities amidst the fluctuations of individual identity across vast spans of space and time.
To what degree could Elebuibon's life story actualize a similar dynamic, as he makes sense of existence in a belief universe that sees the individual as constituted by the balance between individual and communal identity, an identity encompassing those living on Earth and those who have passed on from it?
Chapter Six: “Ọbàtálá and His Children: Constructing a Functional Society”
The title of chapter six, in relation to an exploration of the life and vocation of Elebuibon in its cultural contexts, suggests a relationship between the Yorùbá conception of a deity as central to personal identity and the convergence of this human-divine nexus with the construction of society.
A poem celebrating the orisa or deity Ọbàtálá depicts him as resting in the sky like a swarm of bees (African Poems), an image of intense vitality, as described by Ulli Beier ( The Return of the Gods) but also of balance between order and dynamism, of the fluidity and indispensable power of air, where the swarm rests, and the deadly potency of a bee swarm as well as the nourishing force of their productivity. These ideas are translated into an evocation of the locational, directed and focused power of a spiritual agent, describabe in terms of material metaphors projecting physical life, the bees, and spiritual life, the deity, as both dynamic and constellated by unity in diversity.
The same poem represents Ọbàtálá as patient, restrained, silent and distant, yet always watchful over the town. He embodies the paradoxical powers of initiatory transformation and generative creativity—''He kills the initiate/and rouses him to new life/He is playful like death/he carries the child away'' yet, concluding ''Obatala:you turn blood into children''( From Yoruba Poetry, compiled and edited by Ulli Beier).
What relationships could be established between such a divine figure, the idea of constructing a functional society and the life and work of such a personage as Elebuibon?
Elebuibon is Araba of Osogbo, chief babaláwo of the city. Obatala is understood as embodying patience and long suffering, uniting power and restraint, sensitivity and discipline. He is depicted as demonstrating the deeply rooted potency of nature in its inexorable march towards fulfillment, in relation to the blaze of moral purity. These qualities constellate round the imaginative resonance of Obatala's pervasive white ( ''banta banta nla'', immense one, who sleeps in white/who rises in white, Oludumare, Bolaji Idowu). These qualities ascribed to Obatala would certainly be strategic to the role of Araba. It would be intriguing to see how Falola would handle the deity/social function conjunction he pursues in that chapter.
Chapter Seven: ''Ọ̀rúnmìlà and Akápò: Conflict Management and Resolution in Ifá''
This chapter could be based on an Ifa story in which the theme referenced in the chapter title emerges. An akápò is understood as a devotee of Orunmila, the orisha of wisdom. The idea could have been personified in an Ifa narrative, as Ifa literature at times works through the personification of ideas. Perhaps a story involving Orunmila and Akápò in connection with conflict management would anchor the chapter, a more complex narrative, most likely, than this one about Orunmila's dialogue with his Akápò, as narrated by Efe Mena Aletor.
Will Ẹlẹ́buìbọn’s own experiences also shape the exposition? As Àràbà of Òṣogbo and an internationally recognised representative of Ifá, he must have encountered conflicts involving people, institutions, traditions and competing interpretations of spiritual authority, enabling him engage Ifá not merely as a divinatory system but as a technology of mediation and social repair.
Image and Text: The Rebirth in the Forest
Seated by the iroko that had become my companion, my mind clear, my thoughts crystalline, the fire within me blazing in power and comfort, the permutations of the universe opened to my amazed gaze-the glorious sixteen, the infinity of possibilities beginning from the multiplication of one by one into sixteen, to two fifty six, onward into infinity.
This was the awareness reached by me, in the third watch of that night—ignorance dispelled and knowledge won, darkness dispelled and illumination gained, as befitted my strenuous and ardent life, purged of self.
( An imaginary account of the inspiration that led to the founding of Ifa, in terms of numerical permutations representing the dynamism of existence. The last paragraph is adapted from the Buddha's account of his illumination in the Majjhima-nikaya, translated by Lord Chalmers in Further Dialogues of the Buddha, quoted in Mircea Eliade, From Primitives to Zen, 1977, 481)
Chapter Eight: “Inclusivity and Gender in Ifá”
This chapter addresses a delicate subject in Ifa, sensitive at the level of both ese ifa, Ifa literary scripture and its practice. These complementary dimensions of the tradition may be understood as demonstrating a degree of ambivalence about what may be described as the feminine principle. Core to this ambivalence are the concepts of àjẹ́, Àwọn Ìyá Wa and Odù.
Àwọn Ìyá Wa translates as “Our Mothers,” while àjẹ́ is another name for those mysterious beings. Various ẹsẹ Ifá portray the aje as irrationally bloodthirsty characters, but a strategic break from that orientation emerges in a famous ẹsẹ Ifá, in which it is declared that the revered orisa, the deity Ọ̀ṣun, “is àjẹ́, as all women are àjẹ́.”
This declaration is the climax of a story in which Ọ̀ṣun is ignored by other primordial beings, other divinities, when they are sent by Olódùmarè as a group to establish the Earth and its mechanisms.
In this example of the variety of Ifá creation stories-a variety which may be interpreted as suggesting the narratives are understood by their creators as imaginative rather than factual accounts, the value of which does not consist in their being understood literally-the other divinities discover that all their endeavours prove fruitless until they integrate Ọ̀ṣun into their work, as directed by Olódùmarè, to whom they report their predicament.
A
feminist reworking of a fundamental aspect of the Yoruba cosmos, as Akinwumi
Ogundiran recognises in his exploration of the development of Yoruba society up
till the 19th century ( The Yoruba: A New History).
A particularly imaginatively powerful but less well known Ifa narrative
celebrating the power of women as a fulcrum of existence is that of the
encounter between Orunmila and the imposing naked woman, as retold by myself
at that link, a story that conflates the animalistic and the fearsome, the
arcane and the feminine, emblematized by Orunmila's meeting a woman who
embodies these qualities in the depths of the forest, in the depths of night,
an eldritch creature who reveals to him the power of women as the pivot of
existence.
The tension between the valoristic and the negativising portrayals of feminine
spiritual power haunts some classical Yorùbá spirituality
related to human women, specifically in ẹsẹ Ifá and Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́,
a tension perhaps working against the full unleashing of the powerful nexus of
ideas and arts related to the feminine in those institutions,while the Yoruba
ogboni esoteric order seems to have come closer to achieving this synthesis ( I study this at
length in ''Developing Universal Ogboni Philosophy and Spirituality'' ).
How would Falola's Elebuibon book handle this subject? Elebuibon has written and published a book on àjẹ́. To what degree is his approach to that subject based on knowledge and to what degree on belief?
Would the babalawo's approach to the subject of the feminine in relation to Ifa be presented? How does Elebuibon see restrictions of women in their practice of Ifa in some Ifa schools? How does he negotiate the gap between the authority of tradition and the ethical demands of inclusivity?
How does Elebuibon's extensive relationship with the practice of Ifa in the African diaspora shape his views on these issues, given that, in the more liberal and gender equality sensitive cultures of the West, limitations on women's practice in Ifa have come under serious scrutiny by practitioners from the West, even as female Iyanifa, the female equivalent of the babalawo, are increasingly prominent in Nigeria.
Such prominence is exemplified by Efe Mena Aletor, a multi-authored practitioner who demonstrates the presence of Ifa in non-Yoruba communities, suggested by her video series on Iifa in pidgin English, pidgin English being a lingua franca particularly prominent in the former midwestern region of Nigeria adjoining Yorubaland.
A particular ese ifa is used in justifying the exclusion of women from access to what is described as the climax of initial Ifa training with a master, ''looking into the pot of Odu'', evoking Odu, the wife of Ifa ( Abimbola, An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus).
She is also represented by the Odu Ifa, the organizational categories of Ifa, who are also understood by some views as sentient agents, self conscious entities manifesting in various forms of being, a multiplicity of entities subsumable as one entity, the feminine principle, Odu. Odu, as the wife of Orunmila, is depicted in the Ifa story in question as forbidding other wives of Orunmila from looking upon her face, hence the act of ''looking'' into her pot is forbidden to women in some Ifa traditions.
How
did the unnumbered multitude of Ifa stories come into existence? What are the
implications of the variety of perspectives on the same or similar
subjects in the various ese ifa? What are the implications of their evidencing various
eras of Yoruba history, such as the one that describes Jesus as born in
Yorubaland, given a Yoruba name derived from circumstances of his birth,
''Jekewesun'', which was corrupted to ''Jesus'' when he travelled abroad?
How may be examined the relative validity of the claims of ese ifa as representing divinely revealed truth
of timeless significance, as some devotees hold, and the contrastive understanding of
them as socially motivated constructs created by oral artists to project
perspectives and shape society at various points in time, as
Ogundiran argues?
What are the implications of the role of these deeply human, variegatedly
oriented texts in a system of knowledge seeking insight into otherwise
concealed aspects of reality, depths of knowledge hidden in what Wole Soyinka
calls the abyss of transition, the process or zone of motion between non-being
and being, between potentiality and actuality, the seed and its flowering, or even
the coming into existence of the seed?
What insights could Falola's book throw on Elebuibon's understanding of the dynamic between imagination and truth, the temporal and the timeless, the human and the divine in the verbal/divinatory nexus of Ifa?
How does the huge verbal dimension of Ifa relate to Elebuibon's teaching himself to read and write and becoming a prolific author, a further stage of self education beyond the rigorous initial training and eventual life long education of the babalawo in its traditional oral contexts?
Chapter Nine: “Sacredness in the World”
The title of this chapter suggests the idea of sacredness as active in the world as a fundamental dimension of existence or as a dynamic presence that comes and goes at will without being focused in any point in space or time.
Kaidara, the decrepit old man moving from place to place testing unsuspecting people to see how ready they are for the wisdom he embodies as a beam from the hearth of Gueno, the creator of the universe, as the Fulani sacred figure is described by Ahmadou Hampate Ba, may be said to exemplify this molibility of the sacred.
Another example of a related form of sacred dynamism is Ọ̀rò, moving naked across the world, forbidden to be seen by the naked eye on account of its embodiment of the incandescent force of divine knowledge, wisdom and power, approachable only through imaginative expression, even as it enables human expressive and reflective creativity, a marvellous image of the pervasive dynamism of cognition and expression, as evoked by an ese ifa from Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language,
As an animistic spirituality, indigenous Yorùbá religion is likely to affirm both the omnipresence of the sacred and its capacity for concentrated manifestation. It is likely to represent both the idea of the pervasiveness of the sacred and its creative dynamism, present everywhere yet open to activation in particular contexts, by design or by seeming chance and to being focused in particular natural or humanly created identities.
How is this conception developed in approaches to Ifa? What is Elebuibon's attitude to or view of the idea of the character of the sacred in the world? How are his perspectives shaped by his experiences at the intersection of matter and spirit?
Image and Text: Self as Cosmic Encapsulation and Expansion
Self as Cosmic Encapsulation and Expansion
Ori, the essence of self, around which constellate the odu ifa
From the farthest reaches of the universe to the intimacy of myself, the little room within me which yet contains the stars, planets, galaxies and beyond, the voices beyond space and time, being and becoming, spoke to me in the language of fire, calling me home after my long trek through cycles of birth and rebirth, across worlds, continents and peoples, after we had formed then only the forms were formed and all the forms were formed after our forming
(The image of the little room adapts the Upanishads. The italicised words adapt Christopher Okigbo's Labyrinths)
Chapter Ten: ''Àśę: The Performative Force of Ìwúre''
Chapter Ten strikes at the heart of the idea of the presence of the sacred in the world, in focusing on the role of pervasive yet individualistically actualized divine power, àśę, as the active agent of ìwúre, prayers, invocations, sacred affirmations, particularly in their orally expressed form. The human voice, particularly as projected through the tonal and rhythmic modulations of speech, described as vehicles of àśę, creative power shaping reality.
Such a belief is core to Ifa as originally an oral tradition, and even in writing, it relies heavily on imagistic, narrative and lyric registers in communicating ideas. The oral dimension, however, remains irreplaceable, its sonorous and lyrical power dramatizing the power of sound, in general, and the human voice, in particular, to transcend barriers of explicit semantic meaning and deliver evocative force, regardless of the degree to which one understands exactly what is being said.
Rowland Abiodun chose not to include in his Yoruba Art and Language his personal observation and practice of àśę laden speech, even in reinforcing his trenchant study of àśę in the book, as demonstrated by our discussions on his forthcoming second edition of that book, perhaps beceause he did not want to contradict the text's effort to treat ideas that are not intellectual in intellectual terms, part of the challenge of exploring, through first hand experience, ideas from outside the rationalist centralisation of the Western academy while operating within the same academy.
Such
Western scholars as David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous pursue
such aspirations with a degree of positive regard from the Western academy.
How could such ideas be addressed in a book about a spiritual
practitioner who lives by such ideas? Will Falola simply describe them or
will he subject them to critical examination? Will he present
Elebuibon's views and experiences as forms of knowledge in their own
right? How will he balance phenomenological openness with analytical
scrutiny?
Chapter Eleven: ''Ẹlẹ́bùibọn: Ifa Epistemologies and Yoruba Cosmologies''
The
title of this chapter suggests that Elebuibon's views on the subject in the
title will be the focus of the chapter. That is an exciting idea in promising
an insight into how a life long practitioner of a semi-esoteric
discipline understands the relationship between the methods
through which knowledge is gained in his discipline and the
larger cosmology within which it is embedded.
What is his view of the balance between knowledge acquired through being taught
what they know by others and those aspects of knowledge that can only be learnt
by personal experience? How does he negotiate knowledge received through
teaching, memorisation and the mechanics of initiation alongside knowledge
attainable only through personal experience? What is the relationship
among inherited authority, divinatory interpretation, intuition, spiritual
encounter and critical reflection? How does he, as a babaláwo,
distinguish knowledge from belief, insight from projection, and revelation from
imaginative construction?
Such questions are not external to Ifá. They concern the foundations on which its claims to knowledge rest. A sustained presentation of Ẹlẹ́buìbọn’s answers could establish him not merely as a practitioner represented by scholarship but as a philosopher and epistemologist speaking through his own tradition.
Conclusion: Ẹlẹ́bùibọn and Cosmologies in Contemporary Society
Will
this conclusion address the full gamut of prominent cosmologies in
contemporary Yoruba society? These include the indigenous, which Elebuibon represents. It also integrates the Islamic, the practitioners of whom at times also practice or enable
indigenous Yoruba spirituality.Also prominent are the Christian, most of whom are more
likely to distance themselves from classical Yoruba spiritualities. Yet, Bolaji Idowu, a Methodist minister, produced a yet unsurpassed
exploration of indigenous Yoruba cosmology from a mythic, narrative and
lyric perspective, Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief.
What is Elebuibon's attitude to this plurality of cosmological
universes? Falola's Malaika and the Seven Heavens: A Memoir of My
Encounters with Islam presents an image of immersion in the cultures
of these diverse yet socially convergent worlds.
Would Elebuibon's approach be similar? Has he developed a
theoretical orientation to this rainbow of faiths, something perhaps along
the lines of English poet Percy Shelley's vision in "Adonais"?
The
One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity.
The ''One'', in the context of this essay, refers to the unity of ultimate reality, ''Eternity'' being one of its attributes, while ''Life'' is the kaleidoscope of possibilities through which the One expresses itself, experienced, from one angle, as the multiplicity of human efforts to relate to the Absolute.
The Promise of Ifá Priestcraft
The questions raised here emerge before a full encounter with Falola’s argument. They are not conclusions about what the book has accomplished but indications of what its conception makes possible. Its chapter titles suggest a movement from global cosmology to personal vocation; from Being to destiny, sacrifice and invisible agency; from divine character to social organisation, conflict, gender and sacred presence; and finally from the performative power of speech to the epistemological vision of Ẹlẹ́buìbọn himself.
This architecture joins the life of one person to the structure of a cosmos. It positions biography as a form of philosophy and spiritual practice as a mode of knowledge. If Falola fulfils the promise of this design, Ifá Priestcraft will do more than explain Ifá through the life of a distinguished babaláwo. It will also demonstrate how a human life may become a lens through which an entire universe of thought comes into view.