The Dilemma of a Babaláwo : Ogunbiodun and the Tension between Politics and Spirituality in Classical Ifè
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
The Dilemma of a Babaláwo
Ogunbiodun and the Tension between Politics and Spirituality in Classical Ifè
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
“What have we become?” Ogunbiodun asked himself. “Are we liars or creators of honest fictions?” he puzzled. “Even then, how can fiction be honest, how can it be true?” he wondered.
Ogunbiodun was in a dilemma. He was one of the babaláwo, adepts in the áwo-hidden knowledge of spiritual realities- of Ifá, a body of knowledge developed among the Yorùbá people, in whose greatest city, Ilé-Ifè, Oluwade Ogunbiodun lived.
Ifè had become great by combining commerce, politics and religion, in making itself the centre of the Yorùbá universe.
Its control of the glass bead trade garnered wealth and prestige. Its military power enabled control of strategic regions. Its Ifá priesthood was the centre of knowledge of the vast diversity of Yorùbá peoples, from Oyo to Ekiti, Owu to Igbomina.
All these were combined with astute politics that yielded glory among many peoples within and beyond Yorùbáland.
From Benin to the East to even the Portuguese from across the sea, Ifè was
known as the “city of daybreak,” the splendor of which made it easy to believe
the wide spread idea that Ifè was where the world began, where the deities
descended to initiate habitable land for humanity, land that became Ile, Earth, Ifè, where all souls returned after death.
These spiritual glorifications were Ogunbiodun’s problem. He knew their
origins because he had been one of those who had constructed them. The stories in which they were told were
circulated as if they were recordings of what had actually transpired, when in
fact, his fellow Ifá priests and himself were the creators of the narratives.
Working with the rulers of Ifè, the babalawo had constructed tales that would
reinforce the prestige and power of the rulers, the merchants and themselves,
the priests, adding religious consolidation to commercial affluence and
political eminence.
Radiating
that power and prestige was the lofty eminence of Òkè-Ìtasè, the great school
of Ifá, centre of Ifá studies in Ifè and within and beyond Yorùbáland.
Sited at the tallest hill in the city, visible for miles beyond Ifè, students, masters
of various kinds of knowledge, babaláwo seeking to confer with the most
illustrious minds in their profession, and pilgrims, hungry for the experience
of a lifetime, trooped from great distances to learn from and bask in the glory
of great Ifè, at the centre of which was Òkè-Ìtasè.
These developments had taken generations in which he had been at the heart of the enterprise, but with its shining success, Ogunbiodun had begun to question its value.
“In all our manipulations, what is left of that glow of power, the sense of drawing close to something beyond full human understanding that sustained me in my study of ese ifá, the stories and poetry of Ifá, in the long years of my apprenticeship?” he asked himself, seated in the privacy of his shrine as the lengthening shadows of sunset created a serenity provoking reflection.
“Does this mean all those stories are themselves also fabrications, created by people now unknown, for purposes unrealised by later generations?
Why then do we claim that the stories that correspond to the patterns made when we cast our divination instruments are the voice of the Ifá oracle, a voice beyond space and time but knowing even of the secret name of an ant crawling in the corner of a house in what seems to a person on one side of the world as the most remote place on the other side of the world?
Stories that are the voice of the Little Man of Igeti Hill, Òrúnmìlà, whom even
the Supreme Fount of Thought, Olodumare consulted at the time of creation?”
Òrò gbé ’nú àgbà kìn
Óró kù
Óró kè
Óró gì.
Òrò tó ’já nínú àgbà
Ó tóbi bí agbè.
Òrò tó jánínú àgbà
Ó kún agbè
Ad’ ífáfún òrò-òrò-òrò
Nígbà un ò rí enìkan básòrò
Mo bá ń gbin.
Òrò, the cause of great concern for the wise and experienced elders
It sounds kù (making the heart miss a beat)
Kè (as a ponderous object hitting the ground)
Gì (making the last sound before silence)
The Òrò that drops from the elderly
Is stupendous
Divined for Òrò - òrò - òrò
Who did not have anyone with whom to communicate
And started groaning.
So Ogunbiodun ruminated, at that dry place between faith and politics, between human calculations and the ineffable.
Was he able to arrive at any resolution?
We do not know, but the dilemma resonates in his descendants Akinwumi Ogundiran, Oluwatoyin Adepoju and Rowland Abiodun, centuries after Ogunbiodun’s time in 12th century Ifè, suggesting the same challenges remain live across that vast span of time, the dilemma of the Ifè babalawo Ogunbiodun persisting even ten centuries after his bones have become one with the dust of the earth.
Ogundiran, having spent decades researching Yorùbá, and particularly Ifè history, describes, with compelling force, in his 2020 book The Yorùbá : A New History, how the Ifè babaláwo constructed stories legitimizing the claim of Ifè as the centre of the Yorùbá world and of the world as a whole.
Ogundiran puts it superbly on ps.129-130:
Although Ilé-Ifè was not by any means the sole inventor of the òrìsà pantheon[ the cosmology of the Yorùbá people], it played a dominant role in standardizing and promoting a version of it.
…
The city’s intellectuals...gave most of those existing pan-regional deities their own flavor by domesticating them as local deities. One of those methods of domestication was the insistence that those deities had their origins in Ilé-Ifè.
…
[thereby creating] a new ritual field [ and promoting it] as a universal experience.
...
This was the birth of the Ifè-centric òrìsà ritual field, which expanded along the overlapping political, economic, and social networks that the city unquestionably created and dominated from the twelfth century through the beginning of the fifteenth century.
…
This system became an epistemology and a compass for navigating life’s journey and memory, managing both social order and turbulence, exploring the relationships between the earthly and the spiritual worlds, and seeking meanings.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, another scholar of Yorùbá culture, describes himself as creating new ese ifá, Ifá stories and poetry, the practice of constructing new forms of these imaginative literary forms having declined across the centuries.
How may one interpret Adepoju’s project in relation to Ogundiran’s compelling description the construction of ese ifa to fulfill goals unifying political, economic and religious prestige, the construction of meaning and the shaping of experience through human initiative, rather than through any spiritual influence.
What may be spiritual about constructing a story out of your own mind, to suit ends chosen by yourself, as the Ifè babalawo did, as Ogundiran strikingly describes and as Adepoju also does
What may be the point of intersection between human construction and divine
inspiration?
Is there a clear demarcation between the
holy and the profane, the sacred and the secular?
Is the “community of practice,” as Ogundiran puts it, defining the Yorùbá universe, in constant development, in the spirit of life as a river, the river that never rests, the Yorùbá saying echoed by the scholars who see Yorùbá history as a great river, scholars referenced by Ogundiran in the conclusion of his book?
If so, would Adepoju and the Ifè babaláwo that Ogundiran brings alive not be partners in the creation of that community of practice, using similar methods for different goals?
In
fact, would the Ifè babaláwo Ogunbiodun, at the point of crisis of faith
described above, of tension between spirituality and politics, not recognize in
Adepoju a brother at that intersection, using human imagination in pursuing not
the political goals that so disturbed Ogunbiodun
but other goals beyond political power, goals conducing to imaginative
enlargement and spiritual expansion, in the spirit beautifully depicted of
imaginative creativity in the Òrìsà tradition by Rowland Abiodun’s Yorùbá Art and Language, from where the italicized
lines above also come:
òwe [ imaginative constructs] as visual and verbal oríkì [ imaginative description of the self-expression of an entity] constitutes a means or esin (horse) by which Orí [ the essence of existence and the distinctive essence of each entity] as Òrò [ the capacity for understanding and expression embodied in anything humans engage with] can descend to the human level and humans can make a spiritual ascent to Orí.
How should Ogundiran’s summation, in his book, of a related interactive process be understood, literally, metaphorically, or a combination of both?:
The historicity of the Òrìsà pantheon and the Ògbóni, Epa, and Gèlèdé institutions sheds a bright light on the lives of the people who created gods and goddesses in their own image in the quest to make sense of their living world and their temporality. In turn, we come to the understanding of how these gods and goddesses (re)created the men and women whose experiences fill the pages of this book.
In fact, an astute reader may conclude that the story of the Ifè babaláwo Oluwade Ogunbiodun is an imaginative reworking of Chapter 3, “Knowledge Capital and Referentiality” in Part II, “Birth of the Yorùbá Community of Practice,” of Ogundiran’s book in terms of the dramatization of “Oluwade Ogunbiodun,” a construct representing the tensions emerging from the history of thought and practice within this cosmology, an identity crafted from the names Oluwatoyin Adepoju, Akinwunmi Ogundiran and Rowland Abiodun, in the spirit of Jorge Louis Borges’ story “The Theologians,” in which two theologians, Aurelian and John of Panonia, who had been in intense theological conflict all their lives, conflicts involving career and life in the vast network of religion and politics to which they belonged, appear before God, in a scene which
can only be related in metaphors since it takes place in the kingdom of heaven, where there is no time.
Perhaps it would be correct to say that Aurelian spoke with God and that He was so little interested in religious difference that He took him for John of Panonia.
This, however, would imply a confusion in the divine mind. It is more accurate
to state that in Paradise, Aurelian learned that, for the unfathomable
divinity, he and John of Panonia (the orthodox and the heretic, the abhorrer
and the abhorred, the accuser and the accused), formed one single person.