The Metaphysics of Language in the Yoruba Origin Ifa System of Knowledge in a Comparative Context: Inspirational Echoes from Thinking through the Discussion of Sacred Language in Toyin Falola's African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems : Sacred Words and Holy Realms
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
The Metaphysics of Language in the Yoruba Origin Ifa System of Knowledge
in a Comparative Context
Inspirational Echoes from Thinking through the Discussion of Sacred Language
in
Toyin Falola's African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems : Sacred Words and Holy Realms
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
“Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge”
Odu Ifa Radiations Within Opon Ifa Circularity
Circular Unities Reinforcing Each Other Within a Cosmological Synthesis
as the face of the deity Eshu, the paradoxical, looks on.
Collage of visual form described as a Voodoo
symbol, used here in evoking the primary sixteen odu of Ifa, Ifa organizational
categories and active agents, emerging from the centre of an opon ifa, an Ifa divination
instrument and cosmological symbol.
The image suggests the totality of cosmic and terrestrial possibilities, represented by odu ifa, rising from the womb of ultimate creativity that may be evoked by the centre of the opon ifa, where divination instruments are cast to gain access to divine wisdom through the symbolism of the odu ifa patterns assumed by the divination instruments when cast.
When Odu, embodied as all that exists, perceives herself as flashing forth, the odu ifa configuration appears, both the word and the dark cave of the mouth, the uterus from which speech is born, in whose mysterious depths the flame like tongue delivers its force,sixteen times sixteen times sixteen, four thousand ninety six prophetic poems, full of satirical laughter and uncanny wit, carrying the wisdom of every spoken word as an offering, a unity of spatial patterns with visual forms, visual forms with words, words of imaginative power, ese ifa.
( Adaptation of the Hindu text, The Yogini Hridaya, Heart of the Yogini, trans and edited by Andre Padoux and Roger-Orphe Jeanty, Oxford UP, 2013, 27 and Susanne Wenger and Gert Chesi's A Life with the Gods in their Yoruba Homeland, Perlinger Verlag, 1983, 81; last two lines, from ''unity'' are my own composition summing up the convergent symbolic forms of odu ifa, organisational categories and active agents in the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge )
Opon ifa image from Henry John Drewal et al, Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, 1989. Voodoo symbol from defunct Geocities website. Collage by myself.
Abstract
This essay discusses the metaphysics of language in the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge, situating it within related ideas in other African spiritualities. The essay is punctuated by images and accompanying texts that amplify the main text. This piece is inspired by the discussion of sacred verbalisation in African spiritualities, and particularly the section on Ifa, in Toyin Falola's African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems : Sacred Words and Holy Realms (Bloomsbury, April 2022). The essay takes forward my survey of that book, ''The Nexus of Verbalization, Spirituality and Society:A Brief Critical Survey of Toyin Falola's African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems: Sacred Words and Holy Realms.''
"The true Magician must understand his tools and, in periods of silence, he must contemplate words as one of them.''
The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Ed. Israel Regardie. Llewellyn, 2003.93-4.
''Every day, we express realities—mindfully or carelessly—through words...''
Toyin Falola, African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems : Sacred Words and Holy Realms. Bloomsbury, 2022. 1.
Content
Image and Text: Odu Ifa Radiations Within Opon Ifa Circularity
Abstract
Ideational Context and Textual Actualization in African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems : Sacred Words and Holy Realms
Metaphysics of Verbalization in Ifa
Image and Text: Image of the Sixteen Primary Odu Ifa Superimposed on a Picture of an Opon Ifa
Image and Text: Salutations to Odu Ifa
Poetic Rhythm in Spiritual Language: Senghorian Negritude and Ahmadou Hampate Ba on Bambara and Fulani Thought
Between the Metaphysical and the Sociological in Spiritual Verbalization
Image and Text : Nsibidi Symbolic Stance Assumed by Chief of Ekpe Esoteric Order in Calabar Wearing Wrapper Inscribed with Nsibidi Graphic Symbols
Image : Adinkra Mandala by Incombile
Image: Adinkra Symbol Kuntunkantan
Image : Adinkra Symbol Osidan
Image and Text: Adinkra Symbol Nkyinkyim
Image : Detail of Adinkra Mandala by Incombile
Image and Text: Adinkra Symbol Dwennimmen
Image and Text: Adinkra Symbol Akoka Nan
Ideational Context and Textual Actualisation in African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems : Sacred Words and Holy Realms
What is the role of words in spirituality? Words are human’s primary means of communication and are therefore central to all human activity, leading to various theories about their power and the development of approaches to their use in spiritual systems. Words as intimately linked with the sources of existence, words as means of transforming reality, words, in their character as names, as encapsulating the essential identity of living beings, an identity beyond those entities' social characterisation, words understood as a web of possibilities through which existence is configured and reconfigured, among various perceptions of verbal expression, are fundamental to spirituality across the world.
I have been curious about the views of polymathic scholar Toyin Falola on this subject, on account of his being a person immersed in the creative use of words as scholar and poet, thus I looked forward eagerly to reading his African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems : Sacred Words and Holy Realms.
On reading the book, I observed Falola's strength in his individualistic reflections on the power of language, perhaps the richest part of his discussion of that subject, complemented by analyses of texts from various sources. Moving beyond the preface, acknowledgements, notes on sources and introduction, however, I concluded that the author's flight into a subject of strategic importance had been interrupted by his choice not to proceed beyond those introductory sections in focusing on the subject of verbalization in African spiritualities, choosing instead to develop general surveys of these engagements with the sacred in the understanding that these overviews demonstrate ideas and practices dramatizing linguistic forms. These sections, as he describes his plan, would project linguistic expressions bringing spirituality alive, thereby exemplifying what he portrays in the preface as his central thesis, sacred words and their creation of holy realms.
For this plan to be actualised, would the discussion of linguistic articulations not have been integral to the examination of various aspects of the religious practices discussed? Since spirituality involves a complex of activities, from the gestural to the social, in which language is central but not totalistic, can these linguistic vehicles be adequately inferred in general terms rather than being foregrounded and the discussion shaped around them, using them as the inspirational matrix and point of integration of all other considerations?
Falola does refer to such linguistic dynamisms in the main chapters, but consigns them to brief paragraphs or to longer sub-sections within various chapters, rather than working out their centrality for the discourse at hand. The exploration of verbalisation is therefore tantalising but inexpansive. He develops, however, a lucid and rich discussion of Sufism and other aspects of Islam. He crafts a survey of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge perhaps unique in its relationships between conciseness and scope. A broad but ideationally dense distillation of shamanism is smoothly actualised. A significant range is developed, for a book section, in the explorations of ideas, social impact and history of Christianity in Africa. The engagement with magic and witchcraft is adventurous in its positive valuation of these belief systems but may require a more critical stance for the possibilities of that identification to be adequately fulfilled.
I continue my study of the book by
addressing those issues I see as open to being taken further
through the inspiration of the text, in its strengths and limitations,
issues representing strategic aspects of African thought. I begin
with the discussion of verbalisation in Ifa and compare this with brief examples from the book's engagement with Christianity and Islam.
I also correlate the exploration of verbalisation in Ifa with
Ahmadou Hampte Ba's trenchant examination of the role of speech in classical Bambara and Fulani thought as well as with Abiola Irele's exposition of the metaphysics of art in the Negritude philosophy of Leopold Sedar Senghor, highlighting convergences evident in these ideations. Indirect correlations with Gayaman and Akan Adinkra and Nigerian Cross River and Cameroonian Nsibidi symbol systems are also evoked through images and commentary on them.
Metaphysics of Verbalization in Ifa
The first chapter of
Falola's book is a general description of divination in Africa, with a focus on Ifa, bringing together a broad range of activities demonstrated by that system.
He references the heavy reliance of Ifa on words, on orality, on language, in the preface and introduction. In his comprehensive
summation of the disciplinary scope of Ifa in the main text, he presents the use of ese ifa,
Ifa literature, as an information carrying system with historical significance as well as highlighting its other values.
Ifa verbal expression
may also be further better understood by exploring the dynamic between ideas about its
metaphysics and its practical expressions. Ifa, like other forms of what
are known as text divination, relates to language and literature in a manner that
compels enquiry into its metaphysics of language, the understanding of the
nature of language in relation to the character of existence as a whole.
This
metaphysics may be understood as underlying the entire spectrum of activities
Ifa babalawo-adepts in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa-engage in, activities
carefully highlighted and summed up by Falola. Beyond a reference to Ifa oral literature as the foundation of Ifa, as already exists in the book, a discussion of relationships between the practical and the metaphysical in those linguistic contexts is likely to be further illuminating.
This metaphysical grounding is presented in its basic form in Wande Abimbola’s An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus ( Oxford UP, 1976, 26-7). This book references the multi-ontologicality, the embodiment of different forms of existence, of the odu ifa, the organizational categories of Ifa.These organisational categories are the organisational system for the ese ifa, the central information carriers of Ifa represented by Ifa literary forms.
In this book odu ifa are described as ''divinities in their own right,'' spirits who descended to Earth from orun, the world of ultimate origins, where the presence of Olódùmarè, the ultimate creator, is concentrated ( 26-7). Thus, odu ifa, a symbol system evident as spatial patterns formed by the Ifa divination instruments when cast in divination, patterns then rendered in visual form as pairs of horizontal lines, patterns representing a vast corpus of literary texts, are also understood as projecting divine beings.
Image of the Sixteen Primary Odu Ifa Superimposed on a Picture of an Opon Ifa
as the face of the deity Eshu, guide to unravelling the mysteries of Ifa and its speech, looks on
''The spiritual world of the Yoruba is a powerful, metaphysical-forest wilderness, vegetatively ferocious and of a scarcely conceivable variety. A turbulent order prevails, in which all life is closely intertwined with itself, maintains itself mutually, while with great intensity each part holds its ground.
If this jungle arcanum is metaphorically compared to a mighty, mansion like giant tree, with all its innumerable forms of animal and plant tenantry, Ifá would be neither root, trunk, branch, twig, leaf, flower nor fruit of this tree, but the unimaginably complex network of veins and channels that permeates it throughout...a meta-algebraic universe of equations that manifests itself in the poetic Ifá corpus of 4096 symbol-laden poems.. a translation of ...metaphysically rhythmic cadences into their physical dimension, a magnificent architecture of word-symbolisms, the word-cathedrals of Odù, Odù, the main structure of meaning of Ifa and of life, called Odù, after the goddess Odù'' ( Susanne Wenger and Gert Chesi, A Life with the Gods, 74 and 76; I have slight edited the sentence sequences for continuity).
Opon ifa image from Henry John Drewal et al, Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, 1989. Odu ifa image from Pinterest. Accessed 9th June 2022. Collage by myself.
Ifa babalawo Joseph Ohomina, speaking from his own understanding, without reference to Abimbola, incidentally takes Abimbola's presentation further in describing the odu ifa 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.
I discuss Ohomina's perspective in my
account of his personal communication of this idea in ''Cosmological
Permutations : Joseph Ohomina’s Ifa Philosophy and the Quest for the Unity of
Being''( Ifa Student and Teacher blog; USAAfrica Dialogues Series; LinkedIn).
Nyornuwofia Agorsor, initiate of the Ghanaian Fon Efa, a system within the constellation of similar cognitive systems in Africa, of which Ifa is one, responds to the odu ifa as ''angels,'' entities to be reverenced even in general conversation, as she does in response to babalawo Ifaniyi Okanola's renditions of the odu ifa inscriptions as presented at the University of African Art Facebook group by Olalekan Babalola (May 15, 2012). I discuss Agorsor's interjections in "Performative, Visual and Lyric Spirituality: Space, Image, Interpretation: Nyornuwofia Agorsor, Efa Initiate, Speaks to Lekan Babalola's Ifa/Efa Shrine/Priest Image" ( Cognitive Diary blog; The Cosmos of World Art and Correlative Cultural Forms Facebook group).
Salutations to Odu Ifa
Collage by myself displaying the lyric power of the votive language of Nyornuwofia Agorsor, top left, responding to odu ifa inscriptions in Lekan Babalola's picture of the odu ifa shrine of Ifaniyi Okanola, centre. The picture seems to depict individual shrines, locations of veneration, of spiritual relationship with a sequence of odu ifa represented by their visual symbols. Agorsor refers to the odu ifa as angels, saluting each of them by the names they are given in the Efa variant of the knowledge and divination system of which the Yoruba origin Ifa is another variant.
In one aspect of their existence, odu ifa,
as described by Abimbola, may be seen as ''chapters'', of ese ifa (1976, 26), organizational forms of a great text of unknown scope, inhering in the memories and creative capacities of its network of creators and memorisers, as well as in the written texts in which it is increasingly rendered. As textual forms, they may be understood as demonstrations of human imaginative creativity responding to
various developments in Yoruba history.
A metaphysical interpretation of odu ifa, however, sees them as trans-historical forms, as sentient, divine agents, beyond history but active in history, existing before the emergence of humanity but vital for the ongoing business of human life. It characterises them as sentient agents, self aware entities who transcend their material expressions, one way of
defining the concept of spirit. In chanting ese ifa during the divination process, therefore, babalawo who share such views may understand themselves as engaging in a dialogue with the spiritual identities
animating those linguistic forms or of which those forms are an expression.
This understanding of the metaphysics of language in ese ifa is amplified by Rowland Abiodun’s explorations of the metaphysics of language in Yoruba thought in Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art (Cambridge, 2004), on the relationship between mythology, metaphysics and visual and verbal art in Yoruba aesthetics. It dramatizes and analyzes ideas of the pre-human, divine origins of human expressive powers, and particularly of their demonstration in verbalization, of relationships between verbal and visual expression in their creative and destructive potential, as depicted in examples from ese ifa.
Pierre Verger's monumental Ewé: The Uses of Plants in Yoruba Society ( Odebrecht, 1995) compiled from extensive engagement with babalawos, describes a large number of effects depicted as achievable through particular ritual processes, from healing to initiation into esoteric spiritual identities to destructive outcomes. It gives precise instructions stating how these activities may be carried out through a combination of employment of plants, at times along with the drawing of odu ifa visual symbols, and in relation to the chanting of poetic incantations. This use of odu ifa suggests it is understood in this context as demonstrating spiritual properties, embodying or catalysing transformative powers. It depicts them as symbols representing, embodying or igniting forces active at the level of the reconstitution of the fabric of reality.
In his introduction, a section of which is quoted directly below, a presentation he elaborates on in the section of his book after the introduction, titled ''The Action of Plants and the Activating Words of Incantations,'' Verger provides an informative description of this nexus of verbalization and various aspects of symbolism :
My interest in Yoruba botany was awakened as a consequence of my initiation as babaláwo (father-of-secrets) in 1953 in Ketu, Republic of Benin. Because of that honour, I had to learn the secret utilization of plants for traditional medicinal preparations and practices. I learned that during their preparation, the names of the plants and ingredients are always associated with short incantations called ọfọ̀ which express their qualities in poetical terms. At the beginning of my research, it was the literary aspect of these ọfọ̀ which attracted my attention.
…
The research was undertaken in West Africa, in a cultural universe established through oral traditions where the values are different to those of a civilization based on written documents. In the first case memory plays a fundamental role. The recipes were collected among the babaláwo, who in the Yoruba community, perform divinations using a system called Ifá. This is based on 256 signs called odù under which traditional medical practices are classified (13).
…
During the preparation of a plant medicine the babalawo establishes a link between it and the corresponding Ifá sign which he draws on the Ifá divination board with the powder ìyèròsùn.
…
During my studies I observed the existence of verbal links between the name of the plant, the name of its expected medicinal and magical action and the odù or sign of Ifá under which it is classified by the babaláwo. These verbal links are essential to help them memorize the knowledge transmitted by the oral traditions believed to be the vehicle of àṣè (power). This means that they consider the written word to be entirely ineffective: in order to have an effect and in order to act, words have to be spoken (14).
...
Thus knowledge, verbally transmitted, is an essentially creative force, not just at the intellectual level but at the dynamic level of behavior. It is based more on reflexes than on reasoning, reflexes which originate from impulses that come from the cultural background of the Yoruba society. This knowledge is transmitted by babaláwo to ọmọ awo (from master to disciple) through short sentences based on the rhythm of breathing.
…
Later we shall see the importance of melody in the magical usage of the Yoruba language, where assonance and alliteration play a vital role (15).
Poetic Rhythm in Spiritual Language: Senghorian Negritude and Ahmadou Hampate Ba on Bambara and Fulani Thought
What is the significance of poetic rhythm in spiritual language, this being a universal development also emerging in various spiritual texts in their musical and imaginative features? Means of concretising the abstract, of focusing attention, of weaving into a unity through verbal rhythms the powers such verbalisations are understood as distilling, focusing and directing? Approaches to elevating the mind, taking it beyond its quotidian, mundane contexts into the arena of the arcane, the sacred, the numinous?
In the African context, Abiola Irele on the Negritude thought of Leopold Sedar Senghor and Ahmadou Hampate Ba on a cluster of African peoples, including the Bambara and the Fulani, are incidentally in agreement in describing an idea integrating verbal and cosmic rhythm.
Irele's Senghor quote, mapping a quality Senghor understands as unifying African thought, is particularly eloquent:
Rhythm is the architecture of being, the internal dynamics which gives it form, the system of waves which it sends out towards Others. It expresses itself through the most material, the most sensuous means: lines, surfaces, colours, volumes in architecture, sculpture and painting; accents in poetry and music, movements in dance [ guiding] this concrete reality towards the light of the spirit.
( Abiola Irele, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology, Heinemann, 1981, 76, quoting Senghor's ''L' Esthetique Negro-Africaine,'' in Liberte 1:Negritude et Humanisme, Editions du Seui, 1964, 212-15)
Ba amplifies such orientations from another context:
…just as Maa Ngala's divine speech [ ''in Bambara cosmology, the creator God of all things, which
he creates by means of speech, the fundamental force which emanates from him,'' Wikipedia] animated the cosmic forces that lay static in Maa [ the human being], so man's
speech animates, sets into motion and rouses the forces that are static in
things. But for spoken words to produce their full effect they must be chanted
rhythmically, because movement needs rhythm, which is itself based on the
secret of numbers.
Speech must reproduce the to-and-fro that is the essence of
rhythm [ by creating] a bond of coming-and going (yaa-iparta, in
Fulfulde) which generates movement and rhythm and therefore life and action...its
harmony creates movements, movements which generate forces... forces...acting on spirits which themselves are powers for action.
This movement to and fro is symbolized by the weaver's feet going up and down [on a] loom [symbolizing] creative speech in action[ in a craft linked to ] the creative Word deploying itself in time and space.
The craftsman's work was sacred because it imitated the work of Maa Ngala and supplemented his creation [ left] unfinished so that Maa, his interlocutor, might supplement or modify them with a view to leading nature towards its perfection. The craftsman's activity in operation was supposed to repeat the mystery of creation [ in a ] visible universe…thought of and felt as the sign, the concretization or the outer shell of an invisible, living universe, consisting of forces in perpetual motion.
[Thus]Traditional craftsmen accompany their work with ritual chants or sacramental rhythmic words, and their very gestures are considered a language. In fact the gestures of each craft reproduce in a symbolism proper to each one the mystery of the primal creation…bound up with the power of the Word.
( From Ahmadou Hampate Ba's "The Living Tradition," in The UNESCO General History of Africa. Vo.1: Methodology and Pre-History, Ed. J. Ki-Zerbo, UNESCO, 2000. 166-205. Some of the paragraphs in the quote are partly constructed by integrating sentences from different sections of the chapter)
Between the Metaphysical and the Sociological in Spiritual Verbalization
What could be the
relationship of the metaphysical and spiritual interpretation of
odu ifa to presentations of its ese ifa texts as tools of
social engineering, the oral artists, for example, crafting Ifa literature as
means of privileging a particular understanding of reality and shaping people’s
perceptions in that direction, as Akinwunmi Ogundiran argues in The
Yoruba : A New History (Indiana, 2021) on the strategies that enabled the centralisation
of the city of Ife in the Yoruba sacred universe and the
ascendancy of Ifa as a premier knowledge system among the Yoruba? (128-149).
The question of the relationship between metaphysical conceptions and sociological explanations also resonates in descriptions of the evolution of Yoruba spirituality through the dynamics of oral literature as described by Karin Barber in the evocatively titled ‘’How Man Makes God in West Africa: Yoruba Attitudes Towards the Orisa’’ (Africa, 51, 3, 1981,724-745) and "Oríkì", Women and the Proliferation and Merging of "òrìṣà" (Africa, 60,3, 1990,313-337) ideas taken further by Noel Amherd in Reciting Ifa: Identity, Difference and Heterogeneity ( Africa World Press, 2020) on the contexts shaping ese ifa composition and use, as well as in Rowland Abiodun and Jacob Olupona's edited Ifá Divination, Knowledge, Power, and Performance, Indiana, 2016.
Conjunctions in the Metaphysics of Language Between Classical African, Islamic and Christian Spiritualities
Similar possibilities of elaboration as briefly discussed above about verbalisation in Ifa, taking further the brief discussions in Falola's book, also apply to his rich
summation of the values and techniques of Sufism, which he describes as an
Islamic form of knowledge related to but not identical with mysticism, the
quest for direct perception of or unity with the source of existence, as mysticism may
be described. Falola discusses Sufi hermeneutics of the Koran, of which the following lines of his account are particular luminous: ''Sufi commentators recognize that the holy text not only fulfills a
practical need to communicate to the hearts of people but also relates to the
Divine Manifestation process as the Spirit loves to clothe Itself in basic and
tangible forms.'' (114)
He outlines the impact of Sufi approaches to language in the naming of children, in modifications in African languages, interwinings extending into folklore and music, developments most promising for further study at the intersection of metaphysical conceptions and both spiritual and secular practices, possibilities Falola sums up in terms of the need for further study of Sufism's creation of ''a
multidimensional epistemic theory on the discourse of music, performance,
culture, and religion'' (119).
Nsibidi Symbolic Stance Assumed by Chief of Ekpe Esoteric Order in Calabar
Wearing Wrapper Inscribed with Nsibidi Graphic Symbols
“Word and gesture : The vast category of
gestures that accompany the spoken word is based on a highly specific relationship
between physical movement and language.’’
( Geneviève Cálame Griaule, quoted in “Africa: The Power of Speech” by Amadou Hampâté Ba.Texts chosen by Hélène Heckmann. The UNESCO Courier, September 1993. 20-24. 23)
How may this apply to Nsibidi hermeneutics of Nigeria's Cross-River and of Cameroon? What conjunctions exist between the performative/gestural, graphic, object arrangement and perhaps verbal vectors of this clearly highly eloquent, significantly textualized yet still highly secretive semiotic form, whose deeper interpretive keys remain closely hidden?
Image Source: Jordan Fenton, Take it to the Streets: Performing Ekpe/Mgbe Power in Contemporary
Calabar, Nigeria, University of Florida PhD Diss, 2012, 244.
Text based spiritualities, oral or written, often,
perhaps invariably, develop a textual metaphysics, a development Falola
references in his preface and introduction. What is the correlative significance, in various African religions, of the role of the belief in the
sacred character of words, an
article of faith at times constituting an understanding of the structure and dynamism of the universe
in relation to the shaping character of divine speech, pre-temporal yet
active in time, in relation to human speech?
Exploring such questions could take one
perhaps from the multi-ontologicality of Ifa discourse, where language
exists within an interdisciplinary network, in which human creativity and the
belief in the sentience of expressive forms are interwoven in terms of the
belief in the odu ifa, the organizational categories and central expressive
forms of Ifa, as spirits, sentient agents expressed as spatial patterns, visual forms and literary works.
This conception of Ifa visual forms and literary creativities may be related to Christian ideas of the cosmos as coming into existence through language, a creative power the believer may also harness. The Christian belief is itself correlative with Yoruba ideas of relationship between àṣẹ, cosmic creative power, divine verbal expression, and human speech, elaborated by Abiodun in relation to a Yoruba creation myth and in his discussion of àṣẹ, in Yoruba Art and Language, convergences between àṣẹ theory and Christian ideas of the spirituality of sacred speech discussed by Falola in "Beliefs and the Power of Biblical Words'' (219-222).
The conjunctions between the Yoruba and Christian ideations are also correlative with the belief in the role of language as a divine creative power in Islam as discussed in the book, intersecting with student of Judaism and Islam Cornelius Hamerlberg's reference in the USA Africa Dialogues Series Google group to Islamic debates about the Koran as the created or uncreated word of God, ideas of textual sacrality feeding into controversies around Koran burning that prompted Hamerlberg's comment in the debate on the subject.
The exploration of sacred language in African spiritualities, using the template of African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems : Sacred Words and Holy Realms, represents an opportunity to examine in depth the sociology, metaphysics and epistemology of language in African spiritual orientations. The goal of further investigating the significance of verbalisation in African spiritualities, building upon the book's insights into this subject, using them in expanding the more general frameworks examined in the text, represents a magnificent idea, huge with potential, and awaiting further examination beyond the rich programmatic pages of the preface and the introduction as well as the informative discussions in the body of the book which yet cry out for further excavation and navigation.
Adinkra Mandala by Incombile on AdobeStock
“The use of symbols to connote ideas which defy simple verbalization is perhaps one of the oldest of human traditions. The Asante people of West Africa have long been accustomed to using simple yet elegant motifs known as Adinkra symbols, to serve just this purpose. With a nod to this tradition, we christen our graphical symbols as ‘Adinkras.’ ”
( From Michael Faux and S. J. Gates Jr's pioneering physics paper which gave birth to the field of Adinkrammatics, “Adinkras: A Graphical Technology for Supersymmetric Representation Theory”, arXiv:hep-th/0408004 v1. 2 Aug 2004.1)
Adinkra is an ancient and yet contemporarily vibrant system of knowledge originally developed in the Gyaman and Akan nations of West Africa, the members of which now belong to the states of Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, respectively.
The system is made up of hundreds of patterns of visual designs, each with a name of its own and a distinctive symbolic significance. This symbolic value is at times associated with a proverb and a story that illustrates the symbolism. The system, therefore, integrates the visual arts and literature, and in some cases, mathematics, on account of the mathematical forms of some of the designs.
Adinkra express ideas about the meaning of life, meanings, which in the original contexts of its use, were dramatized in the visual display of the symbols on funeral garments at the threshold between life and death symbolized by the activities embodied in funeral rites. Within this originating context, Adinkra could be understood as related both to the intelligence or message which each kra, as the eternal essence of the human being is understood in Akan thought, takes with it from the Supreme Being when it obtains leave to depart to Earth, as well as the message it carries with it on its departure from the Earth, a message which could be understood as the distillation of understanding that emerges from the experience of living and which is consummated in the transmutation of death.
The mathematical symmetry of Adinkra and Ifa take one into the exploration of shapes and patterns, patterns describing the world without and the world within, real or imagined, visual or mental, static or dynamic, abstract patterns, numerical patterns, verbal patterns, patterns of shape, patterns of motion, patterns of behaviour, from the material to the social worlds, from the depths of space and time to the inner workings of the human mind and the permutations and stability of the cosmos, a summation adapted from Keith Devlin’s Mathematics: The Science of Patterns: The Search for Order in Life, Mind and the Universe, Scientific American, 1994, 3.
“Learn to listen to silence, and you will discover that it is music.”
(from “Africa: The Power of Speech” by Amadou Hampâté Ba.Texts chosen by Hélène Heckmann. The UNESCO Courier, September 1993. 20-24. 20)
Adinkra Symbol Kuntunkantan
If I took the pains to internalise these symbols, dwelling daily on them, inviting their dark power into myself, letting them infuse me, body and spirit, energising the cells of my brain, impregnating me with the visas of cognitive possibilities alive within the living centre of abstract forms, their palpitating essences, could I not then, one day, one fateful day, or by degrees, by slow maturation, through infinitesimal stages of fermentation, become Tzinacan, in his prison as I am now imprisoned within the dimensions of human finitude, its circumscription of knowledge, a circumscription imposed by my encasement within a body, within the limitations of my mind through the iron necessities, the imperatives of time and space, walls in which we all live regardless of the individual capaciousness of those walls, but walls, nevertheless?
Could I not become as Tzinacan, into the walls of whose mind broke the script which Qaholom wrote on the first day of Creation, a single sentence that penetrates all corners of the cosmos with a force equidistant from the centre, so that, I would step forth from this prison, this cocoon that has made me possible but from which I must emerge as the butterfly steps forth from the chrysalis?
Adinkra Symbol Osidan by Endurance Dan-Jumbo on Dribble
As I share with the Yoruba origin Ifa priests and Ijala chanters, and other adepts at the art of integrating expressive forms into the self through the arts of memory, I would participate in the hidden truth of the oral traditions, sophisticated ways of relating with the world, in which the powers of memory are honed in such a manner that not only are a vast range of ideas stored in the mind, but theses ideas are correlated with other forms of existence, plant, animal, geological, elemental and other forms of being.
I would now become a true participant in the line of thought and action that emerged in a time lost in the darkness of unknowing, through the voices of those people of wisdom who speak to me in their creations, an understanding in which I wake to the whispers of growing things.
Adinkra Symbol Nkyinkyim
Inscrutability, Initiative, Dynamism
My brain aflame with quests for knowledge that had taken me in imagination, to India, Egypt and Europe, where I had sat at the feet of Indian sages as they dialogued in forests, listened as they developed their ideas about language as the expression of cosmic creativity as expressed in the reverberations of the sonorous OM and the dynamics of the Sanskrit of the Vedas, with Egyptian priests at Memphis and Heliopolis as they invoked the devastatingly potent sound through which Amen Ra created the cosmos, listened in observatories planted at the rarefied apex of lonely mountains crowned by clouds, as I deciphered with the astronomers the echoes of the primal explosion that brought the universe into being, I began to see Adinkra as my portal into infinity, as the fragments of an ancient and possibly timeless language that had survived in the creative activities of human beings in terms of enigmatic and powerful symbols, which, if pieced together by a determined mind, would reveal to me a picture of the ladder of the universe, as it stretches from earth to the stars, from life to death, from one world to other worlds.
Detail of Adinkra Mandala by Incombile on AdobeStock
( An adaptation of a section of my work in progress, Adinkra Cosmos: An Exploration of Being through Meditation on the Adinkra Symbol Kuntunkuntan. The reference to Tzinacan comes from Jorge Luis Borges' ''The God's Script,'' Labyrinths'', Penguin, 203-207).
