Reworking Ifa : Self Initiation into Èṣù through Contemplation, Invocation and Prayer Inspired by the Work of Toyin Falola Part 1
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Papa Legba, fashionable man-about-the-world, journeyer between realms of cosmos, enabler of inter-dimensional crossings, inter-ontological messenger, his Voodoo veve, his abstract expression, exemplifying his integration of contraries in its intersection of vertical and horizontal axes, its symbolism amplified by its being inscribed at a crossroads, as his elegant hat on the ground stands witness to his invisible but potent presence. The African Diaspora, as represented by the imagistic scope of the image of Legba, the Voodoo version of Èṣù, has developed magnificently its African inheritance.
This reworking of Ifa constructs a distinctive philosophy and a personal spirituality using the structures provided by the Ifa system. This recreation of Ifa is meant to be of intimate value for myself but also relevant to other people, demonstrating my own approach to concerns universal to humanity as projected by Ifa.
I find this Èṣù image powerful and disturbing in its suggestion of mysterious power, loaded as Èṣù seems to be, in instruments of magical force. The multi-coloured cloth covering the uncanny phallic protrusion from his head amplifies the sense of a potent artifact.
I love this Èṣù piece for the combination of tenderness evoked by its pose and the sense of mystery suggested by the second face, at the back of the protrusion from the head, faces looking into various dimensions of possibility, contrastive but complementary worlds of time and space, a work evoking the interdimensional liminality of Èṣùwho "throws a stone today and hits a bird yesterday" as he is is celebrated in an iconic oriki Èṣù, "Eshu, God of Fate", a poetic celebration of the dynamism of the deity.
Another inspirational figure in the individualistic transmutation of Orisa spirituality is Susanne Wenger. Within the awesome power of her writing and interviews and distillations by others of her thinking on Orisa cosmology, can be found rich hints about practice, but I am yet to encounter systematic descriptions of ritual or contemplative method in those works, although such can be inferred from them. I, on the other hand, am creating explicitly described and clearly explained ritual and contemplative techniques directed at facilitating an intimate experience of the beauty and power of Orisa spirituality, in general, and Ifa, in particular.
These modalities are meant to contribute to the exploration of approaches different from the traditional methods. Fruitful as those older ritual strategies are, I am developing, in contrast, techniques that are more mentalistic, more centred on the abstractions represented by the ideas projecting the spiritual imperatives and personalities of Orisa cosmology. While the older ritual applications employ organic or inorganic concrete forms, from food items to animalsacrifices, the innovative techniques I am constructing use only contemplation, imagination, verbalization, and symbolic physical motion, and whenengaging with concrete forms, avoid sacrificing animate creatures. This last point is vital because veneration of all entities and the recognition of animal right to life on a par with that of humans is critical within the animistic universe in terms of which I understand Orisa cosmology.
The methods I am developing highlight the adaptability, portability and potential for solitary practice, of Orisa spirituality. The explicit description of the logic of these methods facilitates others adapting or modifying the techniques as they wish. My expositions of the creative logic of these novel creations may motivate people to construct their own ritual and contemplative methods or even their own reinterpretations of Orisa cosmology. Within this cosmology, mydevelopment of an individualized approach to understanding its character and of engaging with it in ritual and contemplation could contribute to a betterappreciation, in the Orisa and Ifa communities, and beyond, of the fact that a vital way of making spiritual and philosophical systems meaningful is thepractitioner individualizing them, customizing them to suit themselves.
The crossroads of possibilities, of convergence and divergence, of dimensions, of choices, of Papa Legba, emblematised by the harmony of his starkly contrastive colours of red and black, accompanied by the walking stick of his ceaseless travels and his cigar as a man of the world.
David Wilson, Awo Falokun Fatunmbi
Another inspiring figure for me in the creative transmutation of the Orisa tradition and Ifa is David Wilson, whose Ifa initiatory name is Awo Falokun Fatunmbi, and whose essays, such as "Obatala: Ifa and the Chief Spirit of the White Cloth" and "Esu-Elegba: Ifa and the Spirit of the Divine Messenger" have beencrucial to my understanding of Ifa as more than a divinatory system but as also encompassing a path of spiritual and philosophical growth.
His translations of prayers and invocations and his description of the training of Ifa awo, students in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa, are among my first encounters with publicly presented descriptions of methods of training in Ifa. I aspire, however, to go beyond Fatunmbi's presentation of Orisa and Ifa ritual and prayer bydeveloping new rituals, prayers and invocations, employing a broad range of sources based on the traditional material but expanding its significatory range, depicting the innovative forms I introduce in terms of a sequence of activities demonstrating how the theory and philosophy of the system may beunfolded through novel ritual and contemplative disciplines.
My favourite Èṣù image, in its combination of dynamism and stasis, of exuberant design and structural concentration, the animated force of the arch rising from his head and on which what might be a chameleon is perched, as befits Èṣù's mercurial personality, anchoring a sense of wild but disciplined power at the core of the composition.
Toyin Falola
Another remarkable figure whose example inspires me in recreating Orisa cosmology and practice is Toyin Falola, out of whose omnivorous scholarship andliterary writing I have been privileged to discover a jewel that can be easily adapted to a contemplative and ritual purposes in this spirituality, thatadaptation from Falola being the thrust of this essay. With Falola's example in his essay "Ritual Archives", we arrive, within this list of inspirational figures I am presenting, at a relationship with the aesthetic force of Orisa art as this is engaged with by an individual grounded in the traditional cosmology but relating with it in terms of his own creative dynamics, as Soyinka, Wenger and Fatunmbi have also done, but, in addition, describing an explicit contemplative method through which this individualistic transposition is achieved, a method this essay describes, elucidating its resonance with disciplines from other cultures,particularly the Indian discipline Yoga.
Falola, however, integrates the contemplation of an Èṣù figurine into his essay in a manner that could make its character as containing a precise description for cultivating a relationship with Èṣù unclear to people unfamiliar with the kind of mental exercise he is describing. My intention is to highlight the character of approaches such as Falola's, as representing, not simply speculative descriptions of contemplative possibilities, but as precise depictions of strategies of engaging with an idea, in this case, the idea of Èṣù, through the stimulation of a form, in this instance a work of art representing the deity, by which the complex of ideas integrated by the image of Èṣù may be stimulated into thought, mobilized in terms of the distinctive mental space of the contemplative.
Minimalist majesty. Economy of form channelled into a sense of contained power focused through the regal bearing of the face crowned by the subtle grandeur of the headdress. Great art, like this sculpture, is marked by the ability to accumulate power even in subtle details. What looks like a cascade of cowries casually but eloquently resting on the floor from their attachment to the middle of the pole that serves for Èṣù's body takes my mind to the transposition of cowries as currency in classical Nigeria to their post-classical use as ritual objects, thus evoking for me the occult, the invocation of numinous forces through carefully consecrated forms, " actions that have re-situated objects in space and in social context as vehicles of meaning", adapting David Doris' formulation on Yoruba strategies on transforming everyday objects into signifiers of occult force "[revealing] as eloquently as any canonical artwork the channels of power that underlie the surfaces of the visible", as stated at the Amazon page of his book on Yoruba anti-aesthetics.
Adapting Contemplative and Ritual Techniques from Other Systems to Orisa Spirituality and Ifa
Falola's contemplative technique and the contemplative and ritual methods I am adapting to Orisa spirituality and Ifa are not new, the precise or general character of these approaches having been developed in other spiritualities. Even though I am not aware of Falola's inspirational sources or whether his method is largely orpurely self created, mine are adaptations to Orisa spirituality and Ifa of methods already highly developed in Western esotericism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity, systems that demonstrate great flexibility in the relationship between a variety of techniques of engaging with the sacred, methods liberatory for those who want something more personalized, less fixed on physical structures and therefore more mentally portable than I understand traditional methods in Orisa spirituality and Ifa to be.
Physical constructs are vital but one may also wish to transpose them into a mental space, moving from a physical shrine to the shrine within, from using the opon ifa, the Ifa divination board, into making oneself, one's mental constitution, into an example of the cosmological framework and divinatory template represented by the opon ifa, one's mind becoming as the empty centre of the opon ifa where the divinatory instruments are cast, the symbolic values of the resulting spatial configuration constituting the emergence of oracular insight, a configuration that may also be seen as the arising of possibility from the womb of being, the actual and the potential intersecting at the meeting point of the quaternary division of the tray, an approach to Ifa divination which I am developing, itsconstruction at the moment being embryonic, but demonstrative of the imaginative range of Ifa symbolism.
Regeneration. The quiet beauty of life. Those are the impressions that come to my mind in contemplating this enchanting piece. Who is this woman, dressed in Èṣù's colours of red and black, thus evoking his unification of contraries and standing by a ground level image of Èṣù's most basic form as a conical head with the bare hint of a face, as if poised to dissolve into the clay of which he is formed and thus continue his endless cycle of metamorphosis? Clearly something glorious is going on here which one can participate in to a degree even if one can't penetrate fully into its symbolic language.
Metaphysics and Epistemology of Ifa Narrative
One may construct varied descriptions of Èṣù and Ifa in order to continually expand one's understanding of the multivalent structurings the deity and the cognitive system actualise. Ifa may be seen as a method of probing relationships between aspects of the self as demonstrating the convergence of transcendent divine wisdom and the demonstration of this wisdom in the structure and dynamism of existence. The transcendent is represented by Olodumare, the creator of the cosmos and Orunmila, the wisdom present at creation, and the immanent, the structure and dynamism of existence, by the odu ifa, the essences of all possibilities of existence and the organizing structures and active agents of Ifa, as odu ifa is interpreted by babalawo- adept in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa-Joseph Ohomina.
The intersection of these cosmological correlates within the self is represented by the dialectic between ori lasan, the biological head as centre of embodied consciousness and ori inu, the inward head, the immortal essence of self, integrating the individual's ultimate potential, an invisible essence symbolized by the biological head. Ifa investigates and tries to influence the manner in which this dynamic plays out within the challenges of human life, from daily decisions to the course of a person's terrestrial journey.
These conjunctions between the transcendent and the immanent are dramatized within the self's terrestrial journey, a journey that is part of the dynamism of the cosmos. This individual journey, in its intersection with the journeys of the other humans and other forms of existence that affect the individual's life at various levels of immediacy and remoteness, may be seen as a narrative sequence. This personal narrative is part of the larger story constituting cosmic progression, an overarching matrix embodying the innumerable stories created by the development of each phenomenon, from a thought to a human being, from an animal to a mountain, from the earth to the solar system, in ever increasing scales of inclusion.
Through the stories generated by the progression of their existence, all existents contributes to composing the matrixial narrative that is the cosmos. A central purpose of Ifa may be seen as that of facilitating a reflexive engagement with and a creative directing of one's own unfolding story. The individual's story emerges through a convergence between aspects of the self and the totality of one's life as this individual context intersects with the network of stories that constitute the cosmos.
I developed this description of Ifa in terms of a metaphysical theory of narrative as a response to the construction, in Ifa, of what is perhaps the largest volume of literary texts developed in the context of a divination system. This interpretation of Ifa as a narrative system may be summed up in the question- are we a story being told by the cosmos or is the cosmos composed by the stories we tell or is a confluence of both perspectives the richest appreciation of the situation?
This Èṣù image evokes a sense of quiet majesty in the context of disciplined exuberance projected by the backward looking face connected to the face in front by a cone. Immense visual power is focused through the foreshortening of the torso and limbs, even as the soaring headpiece amplifies the sense of concentrated force through the contrast represented by its elaborate stylisation. A daring design masterpiece.
A central method of information storage, organization and application in Ifa is through its vast repertoire of stories and poems, known as ese ifa, themselves organised into categories known as odu ifa, the ontology of these going beyond the conventional understanding of book chapters as non-conscious, inanimate, static forms, the odu ifa being seen as cosmological structures, names or essential identities of all possibilities of existence, sentient agents who are the primary vehicle of the babalawo, the adept in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa, this interpretation of odu ifa by babalawo Joseph Ohomina being the most inclusive of the various perspectives on odu ifa known to me as well as being the most precise and the most evocatively resonant, a suggestive power I describe in "Cosmological Permutations : Joseph Ohomina's Ifa Philosophy and the Quest for the Unity of Being".
The interpretation of this repertoire of symbolic fictional narratives in relation to specific human needs requires a hermeneutic intelligence grounded in the significatory dynamics of ese ifa. This intelligence is described as embodied by and facilitated in the human being, by Èṣù , the ultimate mediator, enabling traffic between situations, between forms of being and between modes of knowledge, between humans and spirits, between human beings and nature, and between Ifa's symbolic literature and enquiries relating to specific human needs.
Èṣù thus facilitates correlations between between modes of existence and between modes of knowledge, between the imaginative subtlety demonstrated by ese ifa, Ifa literature, and their relevance for queries brought to the Ifa oracle, between the visionary wisdom of Ifa and the challenges of human existence, an ontological and epistemic conjunction visualized in terms of Èṣù 's association with entrances and crossroads as well as the carving of his eyes or face being an unvarying feature of every opon ifa, a central cosmological symbol and divination template of Ifa, his visage overlooking the empty space of the opon where the divinatory instruments are cast to reveal the response of the oracle through the patterns assumed by the instruments as they fall, characteristics of Èṣù described, among other sources, by Hans Witte's Ifa and Eshu: Iconography of Order and Disorder and Robert Pelton's The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight, and central to Henry Louis Gates Jr's particularly impressive, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism while Toyin Falola's edited Esu : Yoruba God of Power and Imaginative Frontiers, provides an encyclopaedic exploration of various interpretive possibilities of Èṣù . I discuss Èṣù iconography in opon ifa in "Opon Ifa : Being and Becoming at the Nexus of Time and Space".
One of my favourite opon ifa in its spellbinding combination of neat lines and elaborate design. The eyes of Èṣù at the top of the opon are particularly thrilling, potently minimalist yet bulging with power in their elegant streamlining, surmounted by exquisite folds, like a crown.