Ecofeminism in Yoruba Thought: From Earliest Times to the Present: A Factual and Speculative Overview Inspired by Akinwumi Ogundiran's The Yoruba : A New History
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Dedicated to Odun Balogun, one of my sterling lecturers in
my BA in English and Literature at the University of Benin, Nigeria, who gave
of their best in spite of limited resources.
Wherever a person like me is able to journey in the world of scholarship is due
significantly to the self sacrificing vision of people like you.
Looking within and beyond the delights of the visible as landscape and skyscape harmonise
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
The correlation between
nature, the feminine and the sacred in Yoruba thought is very rich.
This essay
contributes to highlighting these conjunctions.
Interspersed within the main essay is a sequence of images and texts inspired by the images, meant to stimulate contemplation on relationships between nature and ultimate meaning.
In addition to visualization and expository and argumentative techniques, I also use imaginative creation, moving between text based study, image/text correlations and imaginative
speculation in which fictional scenarios are created to anchor speculation. The fictional sections are italicised.
The images, mainly by Fela Sanu, Mathew Omojola, Uli Beier and Aribidesi Usman, are largely drawn from hills and caves in Nigeria's Yorubaland, evoking the hills and caves of the ancestral environment of the Yoruba as described in
Akinwumi Ogundiran's The Yoruba : A New History, 2020, which inspires this essay.
I also use Uzoma Uche's superb picture of the cave interior of the Awhum Waterfall in Nigeria's Igboland in resonance with the cave and hill images from Yorubaland. The Ahum Waterfall picture is a particularly grand one and powerfully evocative of the womb/vagina/rebirth motif that may be correlated with the feminine associations of landscape that the essay addresses.
The essay is part of my series of writings inspired by Ogundiran's book. A linked list of these productions is at the conclusion of this piece.
Contents
Dedication
Image and Text
Abstract
From Pre-Historic Origins of Yoruba Cosmology to
the 20th Century with Akinwumi Ogundiran and Susanne Wenger
Image and Text: Oshun Forest Sculpture and Architecture Complex
Perceptions of Landscape among the
Proto-Yoruba
Image and Text: Idanre Hills Panorama
Image and Text: Ogun Cave Interior, Igbomina
Image and Text : Ekiti Hill Dome
Image and Text: Idanre Hill Covered by Clouds
Image and Text: Ekiti Hill and Sky Converge
A Transcendentalist Perspective on Yoruba Origin Orisa Cosmology
Image and Text: Majesty of Earth and Sky in Ekiti Hills
Unifying Nature Centred and Transcendentalist Orisa Theologies
Image and Text: Clouds Descend to Hilltop in Idanre Hills
Between Individualistic and Integrative Orisa Theologies
Image and Text : Pyramid of Stone in Ekiti Hills
The Ifa Achievement and the Feminine Dynamic
Image and Text: Rock Formations in Ekiti
The Paradox of Odu
The Controversial Aje and Awon Iya Wa Concepts
Image and Text: Entrance into Agbaku Cave, Old Oyo
Nature and the Feminine
Image and Text: Olumo Rock Caves, Abeokuta
Encounter with Ini
Earth, Odu and the Feminine Principle in Ifa and Ogboni
Image and Text: Awhum Waterfall, Awhum, Enugu State
Obatala and Cosmic Unity
Donate to Compcros
My Exploratory Journey with Akinwumi Ogundiran's The Yoruba : A New History
From Pre-Historic Origins of Yoruba Cosmology to the 20th Century with Akinwumi Ogundiran and Susanne Wenger
Correlations between nature, the feminine and the sacred may be seen as the structure of ideas constituting ecofeminism as it has been conceptualized in Western thought. Ecofeminist thought, however, may be understood as present in various cultures before this 20th century formulation.
Yoruba thought demonstrates a wealth of ecofeminist ideas. These conceptions, however, might be in need of greater systematization than has been
achieved so far. With increasing correlation of these perspectives, they can be more
readily built upon or adapted to developments beyond the foundations they
represent.
This essay contributes to this systematization by building on possible roots of these orientations in what Ogundiran in The Yoruba describes as the relationship between landscape, perception, cosmology and the feminine among the proto-Yoruba, the ancestors of the Yoruba in the Niger-Benue confluence as they had achieved a degree of defined identity by the 3rd century BC.
Ogundiran's image of the pre-historic foundations of Yoruba cosmology is compared with Susanne Wenger's account of Yoruba cosmology in its 20th century context. Possible lines of development are traced between these descriptions of this cosmology as it existed at its inception and at a point when it emerged into writing many centuries later in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Two accounts of this cosmology by Wenger are presented. The first one, part of a commentary on a map by Uli Beier of the Oshun forest sculpture and architecture complex created by her artistic school, the New Sacred Art, is nature centred. The second one, discussed much later on in the body of the essay, is transcendentalist, depicting the cosmology in terms of an emphasis on its features that go beyond nature.
The nature centred depiction harmonizes with Ogundiran's narrative about the origins of this cosmology. The transcendentalist picture from Wenger contrasts with
naturistic orientations of the kind in which Ogundiran locates the origins of the world-view. The Ogundiran projection of the origins of this cosmology as of the 3rd century BC, and Wenger's 20th century perspectives on its character thereby operate as contrasts and complementarities across origins and a state of greater systematization and reworking centuries later.
In her transcendentalist characterization of Orisa cosmology, Wenger was reacting to what she saw as a dilution of the elevated force of this spirituality. In that context, she may be understood as over-emphasizing its abstract character and transcendental aspects. This observation is reinforced by the fact of her signature artistic achievement as the correlation between forest space and Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology through the architectural and sculptural forms she built with her artistic collective, the New Sacred Art, at the Oshun forest in Osogbo. This artistic accomplishment is complemented by masterworks of theology and philosophy which explore Yoruba cosmology as dramatizing a synthesis between humanity, non-human nature and spirit.
These works, among the richest in the history of religious thought, include Uli Beier's The Return of the Gods : The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger, written through close interaction with her, Adunni: A Portrait of Susanne Wenger, a collection of interviews with her by Rolf Bockmann and Gerd Hotter, Wenger's The Sacred Groves of Osogbo, her The Timeless Mind of the Sacred and her most comprehensive and conceptually powerful work, with Gert Chesi, A Life with the Gods in their Yoruba Homeland.
I discuss this nature based cosmological orientation in relation to the Oshun forest art of Wenger and her collective in Cosmogeographic Explorations: Metaphysical Mapping of the Osun Forest and Glastonbury.
''The Nomination to the World Heritage List of OSUN-OSOGBO SACRED GROVE Osogbo, Osun State,Nigeria by the Government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria National Commission for Museums and Monuments'' also provides a superb picture of the cosmology/nature dramatization through art in that space, a forest rather than a grove as the document calls it.
Oshun Forest Sculpture and Architecture Complex
This map shows a section of the Oshun forest sculpture and architecture complex, composed of the sculptural and architectural forms of Wenger’s arts collective, surrounded by thick forest, indicating the physical and symbolic integration of the architectural/sculptural framework into the surrounding landscape.
The deity names dispersed across the map indicate the locations of sculptures of deities or of architectural structures dedicated to them, with the architecture and some of the sculptures being used as shrines. The spatial coordination between the constructs demonstrates a metaphysical significance in relation to the deities they symbolize. This significance consists in the understanding of the deities as demonstrating the coexistence of divergent but ultimately complementary aspects of the Ultimate. The forest within which the sculpture/architecture complex is located could evoke the cosmos of possibilities of which the cosmology represented by the sculpture/architecture complex is a description. The river running through the forest is generally understood as the expression of the goddess Oshun.
In Wenger's thought, the river is also akin to what Christopher Okigbo describes of the water goddess Idoto in his poetic cycle Labyrinths, as ''the water spirit that nurtures all creation.''
Wenger expresses her sensitivity to the mystical significance of the Oshun river and forest, in relation to the sculpture/architecture complex. She describes the natural environment as a manifestation of spirit which galvanizes her into union with the essence of being. This mystical state is described as expressed in her art and sustained and fueled by that art.
The catalog of the exhibition
of the work of her school, the New
Sacred Art held at the MUSON Centre, Lagos, in March 1994 introduces the
reader to this view of hers:
She does not worship the river, she is part of it. Art is total
involvement in another unit of life, and the form of this involvement’s
contented manifestation. She gratefully accepts and answers the call to be in
the same priestly orders as all the life which is in the river and on its
banks: the spiritual fragrances of trees, animals and the organisms of all
other vegetations.
The potent breath of EARTH and AIR forms her sculpture. So
does the nearness, spiritual and physical, of the “waters of life.” Every
living thing is begotten by and born from this river. So is her art. Everything
that lives here is its “other realization,” just as the pot is the other realization of the
room for whose sake it came into existence.
...
For more than ten years now, she has been working contentedly on this complex sculpture near the river, under the trees. These trees, their inhabitants and their vegetable entourage are all her GURUS. The swarms of monkeys come and go; they have accepted her as one of them. Snakes mate or shed their skin nearby. “Maybe my body’s vital frequencies have approximated theirs.” There are many kinds of birds, some of them “sacred” to her in their cries or in the way they fly. They are all mirrored in that sculpture-complex. So is EARTH. So is AIR.
Her architectures are sculpture. ...her work’s dome of
treetops and their swinging shadows ... My sculptures are done by the trees. I myself am partly tree. Nearly half
of me is human; all the other fractions of my identity are tree, earth, animal,
rock. So, nearly half of that sculpture asserts its humanness.
In another sequence of passages, she describes this mystical orientation as blossoming in terms of flight within and beyond nature into eternity:
Here I am, one with the water: I think and feel like the river, my blood flows like the river, to the rhythm of its waves, otherwise the trees and the animals would not be such allies.
I am here in the trees, in the river, in my creative phase, not only when I am here physically but forever-even when I happen to be travelling-hidden beyond time and suffering, in the spiritual entities, which, because they are real in many ways, present ever new features.
I feel sheltered by them-in them-because I am so very fond of trees and running water-and all the gods of the world are trees and animals long, long before they entrusted their sacrosanct magnificence to a human figure. ( From back cover, Rolf Brockmann and Gerd Hotter, Adunni: A Portrait of Susanne Wenger,1994.)
Image Source : Ulli Beier, The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger, 1975.
Aspects of the conjunction of the feminine and nature within this cosmology are further highlighted in this essay through reflecting on tensions between masculine and feminine presences in the Yoruba origin knowledge systems Ifa and Ogboni.
The expository and argumentative section of the essay highlights the imagination stimulating power of Ogundiran's descriptions of the pre-historic existence of the ancestors of the Yoruba. The fictional creations I construct respond to this power through scenarios that dramatizes implications of this account of the pre-historic. The symbiosis of exploratory methods, expository, argumentative, visual and fictional, is directed at suggesting the creative possibilities of Ogundiran's verbal reconstruction of a landscape and the life lived within it, possibilities represented by imagining those who lived in those spaces and the impact of their lives across the centuries.
[ By the] third or second century BC … the speakers of proto-Yoruboid had occupied the [ Niger-Benue Confluence ] for about twenty-five hundred years. Located between two granitic hills, the Ògìdì and Orókè-Òtún [a] rockshelter overlooks a narrow valley through which a seasonal stream, Apamimoya, now runs. Bare and vast granitic hills, slopes of different gradients, broad and narrow valleys, and several rockshelters define the landforms of the area. Hundreds of rivulets, streams, and rivers cut through this rugged but scenic landscape, emptying into the nearby Niger River. (33)
The rock overhangs were valuable as shelters, and they were used for defense and recreation. They also provided a great view of the valley below and the hilltops around. These rockshelters were part of the hill complexes highly revered in the area as embodiments of sacred power. They offered access into some of these ancient, “timeless,” massive rocks. (33)
Allah is the light of heaven and earth: the likeness of his light is as a niche in a wall, wherein is a lamp, the lamp enclosed in glass; the glass a shining star.
Lit with the oil of a blessed tree, an olive neither of the east, nor of the west: the oil aflame, although no fire touches
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I withdrew into the cave in search of who I am. In the crystalline darkness, only my sense of self remained.
"Who can follow his devotee on a distant journey across the seas?''
Withdrawing from the depths within, from depths of the cave and depths of myself, I approached the heights exterior.
Meditating on the hill, it seemed to
communicate its force to me.
Pebbles of silence, solidify within me as I
cast about for answers from cosmic mind.
''[a] Creator God [who] lived on the top of and beyond the massive and ageless granitic hills of the southwest confluence.''(38)
Ogundiran infuses his description with a sense of how the inhabitants of the place saw the landscape. Having endured for all generations of communal memory, the hills would seem ageless, unrelated to the permutations of time, preceding and outlasting all generations of those who were born, lived and passed away in that place, their descendants repeating that cycle within the presence of those natural constructs.
Those bare granite
formations were the anchor of the hamlets and homesteads that dotted the lower
slopes of the rugged landscape in the last quarter of the first millennium BC.
They were more than the backdrop for the proto-Yoruboid communities. They were
also the compasses that provided individuals and communities with a sense of
direction and their location in space and time. (38-39)
Ogundiran later references ''Òrìsà Òkè or Òrìsà Ńlá (the supreme sky god associated with the hills)'' ( 129) as one of the most ancient of Yoruba deities, òrìsà, that "were conceptual in nature, rather than ancestral, had regional appeal because they addressed broad human conditions and derived from common origins and deep-time experiences." (128-129)
as put by the North African master , Augustine.
A Transcendentalist Perspective on Yoruba Origin Orisa Cosmology
In contrast, Susanne Wenger insists in a review of Harold Courlander's Tales of Yoruba Gods and Heroes (Research in African Literatures , 1976, Vol. 7, No. 1, 74-76 ) that the Yoruba image of ultimate creativity, Olodumare or Olorun, is not associated with physical nature such as the sky. She describes as inadequate most of the following sequence of translations from Courlander's account of Yoruba cosmology- " Olorun: (Owner of the Sky) -The Supreme Orisha, Ruler over the Sky and the Earth beneath the Sky. Called variously Oba-Orun (King of the Sky), Olodumare (Owner of Endless Space), Eleda (Creator), Oluwa (Lord) and Orisha-Oke (Sky God)." (75)
Moving away from a concentration on such nature centred descriptions, Wenger privileges a transcendent understanding of Olorun. To her, ''Just as the Lord's Prayer does not begin, 'Our Supreme Spirit in the Sky,' so Olorun etymology has nothing to do with the sky. Ol'orun means 'the one who is, has, proceeds through, sustains, manufactures, inheres, etc.' (li) 'heaven' (Orun). Heaven is Orun, sky is Sonmon.'' (75)
She proceeds to elaborate a theology of transcendence and ultimate integration in her characteristic ideational and expressive force:
Olorun Olodumare is…like Sohar-Kabbala's "The
Unlimitable, The Incomprehensible, En-Sof, The In Itself Content God." He
is axiom paradoxon, is both origin and consequence. (75)
The casual explorer in Yoruba culture encounters only the higgledy- piggledy Jack-of-all-trades Olorun, who is a crude and ethically degenerate mixture of incompatible god-concepts (diametrically opposite aspects). (75)
She
thus alludes to the Yoruba culture of, adapting the British writer James Joyce, the
''jocoserious,'' addressing serious issues in seemingly unserious
terms, represented particularly by stories and other
references in which the divine may be presented in ways that suggest fun
rather than reverence, burlesque cunning, rather than wisdom.
This is different from Greek myth or Biblical narrative, where deity may
also demonstrate the inadequacies of human character or
questionable attitudes, and yet dramatize these in a spirit of
power that suggests something larger than the human.
In stories from the Yoruba origin Ifa system, for example, Orunmila,
embodiment of wisdom, is more astute than beyond frailty,
constantly engaged as he is in adventures in which he may be wise in one
and not wise in another and therefore needing to learn wisdom.
Even
beyond such laudatory contexts as gaining wisdom through experience,
Orunmila could be an outright thief and suffer no consequences ( ''Òjòǹtarìgì, the Wife of Death,'' Ifa Divination Poetry, trans. ed.
by Wándé Abímbóla, 1977, 101). He could engage in random erotic
dalliances, incidentally leading to marriage in the example referenced (
''Ifá, Threatened by Death, was Saved by the Giant Rat and Iyewa,’’ Sixteen
Great Poems of Ifá, trans. and annotated by Wande Abimbola, 2015,
111-131). An Ifa poem could even involve an admonition to a deity to go into the
forest and cut leaves and wood to make a shrine for himself if he is not
satisfied with the one his devotees have provided for him ( ''Gentleman, Open
the Gate Intelligently,'' Ifa Divination Poetry, 61).
The beast of fortune, the colossus of possibility, the irruption of circumstance.
A certain two-legged creature walks the Earth
seeking ways to navigate the intersection of free will and the inescapable.
Drops of liquid fire, solidifications of black death in the palm,
sought answers from the unknown for the journeyers through the land of seven hills and seven rivers.
Picture from
Wenger elaborates on this paradoxical unity of irreverence and veneration:
While Olodumare is always kept hidden behind veils of taboo and awe, this "modern (so-called) Olorun is an ever-ready accomplice in any affair, no matter how trivial. He swears, curses, sells and buys, cheats, lies, whores and kills.
Yet Olorun, who is Olodumare, demonstrates what is meant in Deuteronomy: "Thou shalt not take my name in vain." (75-76)
She then addresses the idea of the pervasive presence of the ultimate creator as the source of all individual identity and as the unifier of existence:
And in his quality as the creator, he is called Eleda or Ori, which is the summary of God-distribution in His creation, is all creations being godhead and unperishable part of Olodumare, God.(76)
She then presents a view on the deities, the Orisha, whom she is careful to
distinguish from Olodumare, the ultimate creator:
The Supreme Orisha is Orishaala (Obatala). But all sacred numinosity is, as one complex, also Orisha, the other disparate transcendent entity already mentioned. All individualized fractions, diversions and variations of the sacred, complex numinosities are, each in his own right and in his own transcendent (metapsychological) domain, Orisha.
Orisha functions as an intermediary between Olodumare's unaddressable and imperceptible sanctity and his work-that is, ourselves. Man's aim is ritual awakening of matters, sanctity and lucid awareness of its being part of the divine. The crucial point in Yoruba metaphilosophy (in the collective subconscious) is reciprocal mystic transformation (god-man, man-god), a willfully controlled, dynamically relaxed, complex and perfect integration. (76)
Unifying Nature Centred and Transcendentalist Orisa Theologies
Interestingly, though, Ogundiran, trying to reconstruct the sources of such elevated and yet humanly centred abstractions, describes them in terms that evoke similarities with Wenger's formulations, suggesting that those lofty, transcendental concepts which yet project the unity of humanity and the ultimate are rooted in nature related ideas:
[For the ] proto-Yoruboid people [the] Creator God lived on the top of and beyond the massive and ageless granitic hills of the southwest confluence. In a tradition that continues till today among many Yorùbá subgroups, the sky god is believed to reside on those hills and is associated with “the making of rain and the creation of the day.” The proto-Yoruboid believed that the sky god ruled over the elements of the sky—thunder, lightning, and rain—and their earthly implications—fertility of the soil, water, and agricultural productivity.
Therefore to the cry of prayer … do I first invite the reader, lest perchance he should believe that it suffices to read without unction, speculate without devotion, investigate without wonder, examine without exultation, work without piety, know without love, understand without humility, be zealous without divine grace, see without wisdom divinely inspired.
in
Idanre town in Ondo State of southwestern Nigeria.
The focus of worship was on the territorial deities presiding over the hills, valleys, drainages, and other landscape features as well as on the ancestors—the deceased heads, priests, and priestesses of houses, families, villages, and communities. The ancestors were incorporated into the pantheon and called upon to intercede with the greater and more distant Creator God and the territorial deities during the daily devotions, seasonal festivals, and times of crisis. (39)
The character of the Ogundiran and Wenger explanations of Yoruba cosmology, as complementary aspects of the same phenomenon, interpreting Yoruba cosmology in its roots and later expressions, is evidenced by the obvious metaphorical correlations possible between key terms in both accounts.
Orun is certainly not the sky, as Wenger rightly asserts, orun being an invisible dimension of ultimate origins where the essence of the self, ori, is described as coming to an understanding about its future life on Earth in the context of the enabling power of Olodumare.
The sky, however, being visible and yet evocative of the transcendent character of orun through its distance from Earth and its's luminous beauty shaped by clouds which are beautiful yet of limited substantiality, is a superb image for representing orun.
Hence, Idowu presents an image of the sky as a mat on which Olodumare is positioned as he towers into space, a picture best understood as metaphoric rather than literal ( Olodumare : God in Yoruba Belief, 1962, 40).
Hence, Tibetan Buddhism uses the image of the sky, of its translucent depths and seemingly infinite expanse, in evoking the idea of the essence of existence as a possibility beyond human comprehension, hence described as Voidness, a paradoxical emptiness akin to the seeming emptiness of the sky which yet harbors water as clouds, water vital for nourishing the earth, water strategic to all terrestrial life.
This is how I understand the image of the dakini, ''the traveler in space'' as developed in such a superbly beautuiful elaboration as Judith Simmer-Brown's Dakini's Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism,2001. June Campbell's Traveller in Space : In Search of Female Identity in Tibetan Buddhism,1996 presents a lived engagement with these ideas as they shape a person's life, describing both their attractive power and how they may be used in reinforcing patriachal rather than female empowering thought and behavior.
Thus, Olodumare may be understood as Lord of Endless Space, as Wenger quotes Courlander as stating, a space both spiritual and material, celestial and transcendent, the sky the analogue of a reality that cannot be seen but is believed in.
Yoruba cosmology, however, is not simply one in which the ultimate may be metaphorically described in terms of the contingent, through imagistic association with the material universe. It is an animistic universe, in which sentience, consciousness, is understood to be present in the material universe, in inanimate nature and even in human constructs. This is a cosmos in which spirit, understood as consciousness unlimited by physical form, is understood as inherent in individual natural forms and capable of being focused in an object.
This perspective is both cosmic and localized. Its cosmic aspect is represented by the idea that ase, life force emanating from Olodumare, permeates the universe, imbuing all existents with the capacity for creative power, sustaining the stability and dynamism of the cosmos ( Henry John Drewal et al, Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, 1989,16-26; Babatunde Lawal,''Èjìwàpò: The Dialectics of Twoness in Yoruba Art and Culture,'' African Arts, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2008, 24-39, 25).
This orientation is localized in understanding sentience as existing, not only in human beings, but also in particular natural forms and in human constructs, such as shrines, into which spirits have been invited ( Henry John Drewal and Margaret Thomson Drewal, ''An Ifa Diviner's Shrine in Ijebuland,'' African Arts, Vol. 16, No. 2, 1983, 60-67+99-100, 64; L. E. Roache, “Psychophysical Attributes of the Ogboni Edan,” African Arts, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1971, 48- 53+80, 53; Denis Williams, "The Iconology of the Yoruba ‘Edan Ogboni,’ " Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 34, No. 2, 1964, 139-166, 143-147; Evelyn Roache-Selk, From the Womb of Earth: An Appreciation of Yoruba Bronze Art, 1978, 9-11).
Within such a theology, would Olodumare simply be the enabler of these possibilities while being above them, transcending them, as Idowu seems to argue? Or could this diverse spiritual matrix be understood as expressions of Olodumare, who subsumes them all, as Beier states in The Return of the Gods and as Wenger suggests in her review of Courlander's book? Could this subsummation be seen as swallowed up in a transcendence of those realities, into an identity unfathomable in terms of those expressions of itself conceivable by humanity, as Wenger suggests in her review?
Fascinating possibilities, made all the richer by the movement from the eye, the ear, hearing, touch and smell to reflection on possibilities beyond these. Reflection on that which ultimately makes possible what the senses know. The perceptions of the ancestors of the Yoruba converge with the more complex reflections of their descendants in belief across the centuries, a continuity of orientations across time and space.
The viewer may move in vision across the hills of the Benue-Niger confluence, into the sky and back to the hills, thereby traversing though sight the motion between concreteness and abstraction that defines perspectives on Orisa cosmology in its motion from earliest times to the present, particularly as represented by the Wenger/Ogundiran dialectic.
Between Individualistic and Integrative Orisa Theologies
The hills, elevated protuberances positioned at particular coordinates in space, rising towards the sky from the great mother, her soil feeding our food, her breath the air without which there is no life, are they perhaps signposts left behind by those who came and are now gone, the shapers of what we now know as time and space, constructors of the knowable and that which knows, working across aeons through what are understood as natural processes?
In this journey beneath the stars, we reach out for assurances that we are not alone, that others also look out on those luminosities, possible partners in dialogue, others older or younger, knowing more or knowing less, even as some claim that the very stars themselves are the brethren we seek, but too far removed in mind for us to grasp.
Dion Fortune, J.R.R. Tolkien, interpreters of our journey, philosopher of Western esotericism and Western novelist of alternative realities also known as fantasy, expanders of our minds to grasp the unknown but inspiring, I greet your footprints in the lines above.
This centrist theology emerging from the Wenger and Ogundiran accounts, reinforced by Idowu, is relatable to what Ogundiran describes as the drive by Ife cognoscenti to reshape Orisa cosmology in centralising terms, with Olodumare as the spiritual centre, in my view, Ife as the physical centre and Ifa as the epistemic core, as Ogundiran describes the last two coordinates of this system.
This centrist theology has come to be seen as summing up Yoruba cosmology in its definitive form, an influence shaped by the powerful advocacy of influential written texts, reinforced by similarities to the increasingly dominant monotheisms of Christianity and Islam, to which such holistic Yoruba theology could be seen as an answer depicting the coherence and ideational nobility, the architectonic power, of Yoruba thought.
Ilésanmí's critique of this development is compelling:
The local practitioners of Yorùbá religion have always treated their òrìṣàs as independent deified heroes and heroines or, in some cases, as nature gods (reification), who are approached as the final point of worship with no reference to a supreme deity.
Òsun worshippers in Olúpònnà, Òṣogbo and Ìpòndá, see their deity as the only
point of reference, and not as an intermediary or mediatrix between them and
another superior being.
Ṣàngó is ubiquitously treated as the supreme controller of all the activities
of his advocates. The worshippers of Ògíyán in Ìrágbíjí believe that their
deity does everything for them; they do not send him to any Ólódúmarè. Bàbárákè
controls the traditional life in Ìgángán without any reference to Ólódúmarè;
while Ògún wields total divine power in Oǹdó, Ìpólé, Ìrè Èkìtì and in many
parts of Yorùbáland, without his advocates feeling that he refers their cases
to a superior deity.
The Ìkéré people in Èkìtìland in Ondo State have a nature god-Olosuta-who they
believe does all things for them without alluding to any other power. The
catalogue can be extended copiously.
That the world conference on the religion of the Yorùbá is not named after Ólódúmarè
but after all the òrìṣàs, is a pointer to the practical acceptance, that
the Yorùbá worship Òrìṣà per se, and make them the focus of their
rituals rather than the intermediaries between them and Olodumare.
Even the term 'òrìṣà' is only recently universally attributed to all ' Yorùbá' deities. Many dialect groups are only familiar with Umọlè, Èsìdálè, Ọlúa, Osùtá, Alè, Olókun, Eégún, etc and not with the term, 'òrìṣà'. (221)
The textualizing enterprise represented by Ifa is one of the most extensive in history, a series of loosely interferential texts the complete number of which is unknown. Such an oral tradition, rigorously sustained and consistently expanded across the centuries, would readily be seen by observers as the most authoritative source for Yoruba cosmology, a declaration made by Idowu in Olodumare, a book deeply enriched by various kinds of Ifa narratives.
A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.
The heaven being spread with this pallid screen and the earth with the darkest vegetation, their meeting-line at the horizon was clearly marked. In such contrast the heath wore the appearance of an instalment of night which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour was come: darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stood distinct in the sky.
Looking upwards, a furze-cutter would have been inclined to continue work; looking down, he would have decided to finish his faggot and go home. The distant rims of the world and of the firmament seemed to be a division in time no less than a division in matter.
The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.
In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding hours before the next dawn; then, and only then, did it tell its true tale. The spot was, indeed, a near relation of night, and when night showed itself an apparent tendency to gravitate together could be perceived in its shades and the scene.
The sombre stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it. And so the obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land closed together in a black fraternization towards which each advanced halfway.
The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis—the final overthrow.
...
Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. The qualifications which frequently invest the façade of a prison with far more dignity than is found in the façade of a palace double its size lent to this heath a sublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of the accepted kind are utterly wanting.
…
The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.
[ A ] highway traversed the lower levels of the heath, from one horizon to another. Along the road walked an old man...white-headed as a mountain, bowed in the shoulders, and faded in general aspect.
…
Before him stretched the long, laborious road, dry, empty, and white. It was quite open to the heath on each side, and bisected that vast dark surface like the parting-line on a head of black hair, diminishing and bending away on the furthest horizon.
The old man frequently stretched his eyes ahead to gaze over the tract that he had yet to traverse. At length he discerned, a long distance in front of him, a moving spot, which appeared to be a vehicle, and it proved to be going the same way as that in which he himself was journeying. It was the single atom of life that the scene contained, and it only served to render the general loneliness more evident. Its rate of advance was slow, and the old man gained upon it sensibly.''
Those are the opening passages of English novelist Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, drawn from his native Wessex countryside. They are evocative, for me, of the vast, granitic hills of the landscape that defined the world of the proto-Yoruba, resonating across their cosmology to the present day, centuries later, as described by Ogundiran, and suggested by the magnificent images of landscapes in Yorubaland in this essay.
The admirer of these landscapes could be moved to relate with them in the spirit described of Hardy's landscape images by Ashoke Kumar Agarwal "...a great background, vital and vivid… It is only when its solemn spirit
has sunk deep into our consciousness that the sound of the human voice is
allowed to interrupt this silence [a] silence ... felt all through the book ( ''Egdon Heath in Hardy’s Return of the Native'' ).
Presenced by these landscapes in Ekiti, Ondo and elsewhere in Nigeria's South-West and encountering pictures of them and responses to them in this essay, we may experience Jean Jacques Lercele's description of types of silence evoked by Hardy's work, as Lercele may be collaged from his ''Thomas Hardy’s Silences,'' 2013:
a gradient of silences in which the silence of the ineffable is expressed, the silence of things as a metaphor for the silence of inexistence, the silence of the ineffable leading to the silence of vision, experienced within temporal silence, the silence of what is no more and the silence of what will be, the silence of communion, in which communication and meaning are achieved to the full, from religious epiphany to amorous ecstasy, in which silence is golden, when the deepest form of communication is achieved through silence, subsumed within metaphysical silence, a sequence moving from the silence of things to the silence of God.
The Ifa corpus-using the term corpus
to indicate a body of expressions but which may be open ended, open to
expansion, although the question of the expansion of Ifa text is controversial-
is significantly sexist and is dominated by the male anchor of the system,
Orunmila.
The Paradox of Odu
The feminine polarities, such as Iwa-Pele, Osun and particularly Odu, are also
recognized in stories that demonstrate their foundationality to the system,
with Odu described as a wife of Orunmila who teaches him how to divine.
This description is circumscribed in the same story, however, by her
being depicted as forbidding Orunmila's other wives to see her on pain of
death, a rule subsequently taken to apply to all women being forbidden to
behold her.
Hence, three stages of initiation in Ifa which may be seen as encapsulating the Ifa journey according to the practice of Ifa in Yorubaland are barred to women's participation in the centre of those processes because they involve entering into the symbolic presence of Odu. These are the entry into igbodu, the grove of Odu at itefa, the induction into Ifa conducted for a new participant in the spirituality. Women may not enter the grove even though the feminine prerogative of birth is central to the ritual rebirth of the initiate this process involves, an invocation of the feminine dynamic conducted through the participation of actual women in the context of the womb symbolism of the calabash, as exquisitely described by Margaret Thompson Drewal (Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency,1992, 63-88).
The second is entry into igbodu at the culmination of the supervised training of a babalawo, an adept in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa. The third is ''looking into the pot of Odu, a climatic point of this training
(
Wande Abimbola, An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus, 1976, 22-23). All these processes involve entry into, or perception of spaces of enclosure, of rebirth, of nurturing, of entry into the possibility of transformative knowledge represented by the pot and grove of Odu.
There is a historic debate on this at the Ifa/Orisa/Egun People Worldwide Facebook group, involving African-American female Ifa activists, traditional Nigerian Ifa practitioners and others. The group has become a private group so its contents are no longer visible to non-members.
Ayodeji Ogunnaike examines the subject across Nigeria, Cuba and the United States of America and discusses the Odu taboo but presents an understanding from practitioners that a woman, may, in special conditions, see Odu, but lose the power to bear children as a consequence of being exposed to the enigmatically creative and destructive power of Odu. ( “Mamalawo? The Controversy Over Women Practicing Ifa Divination,” Journal for the Study of the Religions of Africa and its Diaspora 4.1, 2018: 15-34, 27-30 and Note77).
M. Ajisebo McElwaine Abimbola's explorations demonstrate the strategic role of women in Ifa in Nigeria and the Americas. Abimbola affirms the taboo against women seeing Odu but argues that not being able to see Odu does not preclude an Iyanifa, a female Ifa priest, from doing everything that a male Ifa priest who has seen Odu can do ( "The Role of Women in the Ifá Priesthood: Inclusion versus Exclusion," Ifá Divination, Knowledge, Power, and Performance, ed.Jacob K. Olupona and Rowland O. Abiodun, 2016, 246-259).
Abimola's style of expression is both lucid and incantatory, scholarship intersecting with the poetics of religion:
It should be recognized that there are two
types of odù: odù the literature and Odù the woman, the great wife of
Orunmila, who is in essence Ifá himself.
…
There is no question whatsoever as to the gender of the backbone of Ifá, the master of the secrets of the wisdom of Ifá, the keeper of the key to divination, and the very foundation of Ifá religion. She is a woman. Although other women cannot see her, Odù possesses something that she shares with all women, and especially with all female Ifá priests. Odù is female intuition; she is the Knowing that happens before knowledge is revealed on this earthly plane. She is kept in the deepest crevices of the house of Orunmila and in the most private cavities of babalawos’ shrines.
Ìyánífá around the world huddle together sometimes and meditate upon the fact that this cavity is a metaphor for the womb, the uterus, and that although women cannot see Odù, to some extent Ìyánífá are Odù.
…
Odù the woman can be considered the embodiment of odù the literature in the sense that every Ifá priest, babalawo or Ìyánífá, on his or her initiation day at the end of a seven-day ritual, is born into a new person, an Iyawo [ wife ] who meets the earth guided by a particular odù Ifá. (254-255).
The Controversial Aje and Awon Iya Wa Concepts
The aje, also known as awon iya wa, our mothers, are almost
uniformly described in Ifa narratives as bloodthirsty creatures,
cannibalistic forces of irrationally destructive disposition, an
orientation which some writers, such as Teresa Washington, have tried to
interpret in positive terms, an argument I do not see as sustainable,
particularly given the association of aje in negative terms with female biology
in Yoruba culture, although Washington's two books on the subject, Our
Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts and The Architects of Existence,
are very richly constructed, vital sources for ideas that may be used in
rethinking aje/iyami thought, a process consistently pursued in the Orisa community diaspora, to which Washington belongs.
If the aje and iyami concepts are to be claimed for their potential for female
valorization, they would need to be reimagined. The denigrative stories
either reworked to indicate a male/ female category or rejected and new stories
constructed.
The seminal account of Odu in relation to the wives of Orunmila would benefit
from being restructured to dramatize inclusion amongst women as well as between
women and men, instead of the current stilted picture in which a feminine
intelligence and power is depicted as being accessible to men alone.
These reconstructions would need to be worked out within the context of
expanding the Ifa corpus to include stories that privilege female
personalities, particularly since these personalities, as with Osun, are seen
as also aje, a particularly strategic Ifa story describing Osun, as a
feminine personality, as aje, as all women are aje.( Rowland Abiodun, Yoruba Art and
Language: Seeking the African in African Art, 2014, 97-100; "Woman in
Yoruba Religious Images," African Languages and Cultures, Vol.
2, No. 1, 1989, 1-18, 5-6; ''Hidden Power: Òṣun, the Seventeenth
Odù,''
Òṣun Across the Waters, ed. Joseph Murphy and Mei Mei
Sanford, 2001, 10-33; Ogundiran, 2020, 336-7 interprets this story
as a strategy of reasserting gender balance and its political implications in
the Yoruba polity through emphasizing the indispensability of Òṣun to
the workings of the universe as engineered by the deities, though he does not
mention the aje reference).
The aje identity needs to be rethought, its valoristic capacities highlighted, its evocation of negative possibilities also referenced in terms of negative uses of power, but this orientation treated as an issue of the choice of the individual or group rather than inherent to the aje identity.
The rocks towered over me, huge, ageless, suspended as if to crush, but steady in space, creating
Void within and void without, the cave I sat in and the cave in me coalesced, the womb from which is born
Nature and the Feminine
We now come to a central interest of mine in this essay, inspired by these lines from Ogundiran:
The Creator God of the proto-Yoruboid world was likely
androgynous but may have been more feminine than masculine in the gender
spectrum. Not surprising, as women were the pillars of the society... these massive rocky hills were also gendered feminine, as evident
in the names many of them still bear and the fertility attributes they are
accorded. (39)
[According to a] version of the Yoruba creation myth (collected by Samuel Ajayi Crowther, [ A Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language] 1852:207)...the Yoruba once regarded Oduduwa as the Supreme Goddess, an embodiment of Heaven and Earth.
According to J. Olumide
Lucas, one of the pioneer scholars of Yoruba religion and himself a Yoruba
elder:
In the early myths she
[Oduduwa] is credited with the priority of existence ... She is regarded as
having independent existence, and as co-eval with Olorun [aka Olodumare], the
Supreme Deity with whom she is associated in the work of creation ... Oduduwa is
known as lya Agbe-'Mother of the Gourd' or 'Mother of the closed calabash.' She
is [sometimes] represented in a sitting posture, nursing a child. Hence prayers
are often addressed to her by would-be mothers ( [The Religion of the Yorubas]1948:45). (25)
D. Olarimiwa Epega, another Yoruba elder, makes a similar point: "Odudua is the Self-Existent Being who created existence. He is both male and female ... The word Olodumare is a praise title of Odudua" ( [The Basis of Yoruba Religion. Rev. ed.] 1971:13-14).( 25)
The calabash referred to is described by Lawal as symbolizing the cosmos, the top representing the worlds beyond earth and the bottom, the earth (25). Suzanne Preston Blier, on the other hand, argues that this image is inadequate, suggesting that one that evokes integrality and intertwining of being, between spirit and matter, is more appropriate for depicting the Yoruba cosmos:
to the Yoruba, religious forces and persona are continually moving, intersecting, cross-pollinating, challenging, and energizing one another (and humans) across a myriad of celestial and earthly spheres. Human and sacral worlds, in short, are conjoined here. (“Cosmic References in Ancient Ife," African Cosmos:Stellar Arts, ed. Christine Mullen Kreamer, 2012,11).
Such an image may be found in the motif of the interlaced spiral carved on opon ifa and Ògbóni doors, although I am yet to encounter in the literature accounts of whatever symbolism they may have had for the carvers.
Abiola Irele's depiction of the forest as cosmos in the thought of Ijala, Yoruba poetry of hunters, reinforces this image of integrality of diverse orders of being:
[ The Yoruba cosmos is] a
comprehensive theatre of human drama of the natural and supernatural
realms...a universe in which the 'normal' barriers between the physical
and the spiritual world have been dissolved.
... the African, and specifically Yoruba, conception...sees the
supernatural not merely as a prolongation of the natural world, but as
co-existing actively with it. ....the real world [reveals] its essential
connection with the unseen...giving to the everyday and the finite the
quality of the numinous and the infinite [ dramatizing ] the universe, inhabited by
obscure forces to which man stands in a dynamic moral and
spiritual relationship and with which his destiny is involved
Abiola Irele,"Tradition and the Yoruba Writer:D.O.Fagunwa,Amos
Totuola and Wole Soyinka". The African Experience in
Literature and Ideology.London: Heinemann,1981. 174-196.179-181
Within these contexts, however, a masculine/feminine struggle for dominance may be seen as evident, explicit in Ifa and less pervasive but still evident in Ogboni, a struggle suggesting questions of how such conflicts may best be resolved in enriching the gender empowering capacities of Yoruba naturist thought, its cosmological values and epistemic implications.
From
Having gone through the more factual framework of this essay, we further develop the speculative, where these ideas are adapted in imaginative terms, complementing imaginative expressions in some of the commentary to the images above.
Ini was drawing on the sandy ground. Her mother had taught her the marks said to represent the children of the great mother, Odu. These children were male and female. Odu lived under the earth but all that existed were her children. Human beings and animals, spirits and the stars, anything that could exist, even the thoughts in people's minds, and all situations, from love to hate, fighting to celebrations, were children of Odu, a description of Ini's understanding as presented in the Ifa philosophy of Joseph Ohomina centuries later, in the 21st century.
She was the great pot that rolls on and on without breaking, reverberating with vibrations from the deep, the awesome waters that were another aspect of her, as Babatunde Lawal drew upon these ideas in his Gelede Spectacle, again, centuries later.
Drawing the images of her children on sand was believed to draw upon her power, because that power permeated the earth and the universe.
Earth, Odu and the Feminine Principle in Ifa and Ogboni
In later times, the earth on which Ini had drawn would be replaced by the form of the opon ifa. The sand would be replaced by iyerosun, a powder sprinkled on its surface.
Odu would still be called upon, but she would be described as working through a male deity, her husband Orunmila, depicted as present at the time of creation, and thus knowing of all possibilities. Images of Odu would still be represented in the stories passed down as well as those newly constructed across the centuries, but they would not be as prominent as those with Orunmila.
The privileged place of the feminine principle would be muted, though acknowledged, women banished from the interior of the system of which they had been at the centre.
Their presence would be recognized in images of Odu, in ''the pot of odu,'' in ''igbodu,'' the forest, grove or symbolic evocation of such natural spaces, where the babalawo to be undergoes rebirth, but the masculine principle would have taken over and the feminine could participate only as an assistant and not as a central figure.
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Obatala is the Spirit of the Chief of the White Cloth in the West African religious tradition called “Ifa”. The word Obatala is the name given to describe a complex convergence of spiritual forces that are key elements in the Ifa concept of consciousness.[ They represent] a body of wisdom called “awo” which attempts to preserve the rituals that create direct communication with forces in Nature.
Awo is the esoteric understanding of the invisible forces that sustain dynamics and form within Nature. The essence of these forces are not considered secret because they are devious, they are secret because they remain elusive, awesome in their power to transform and not readily apparent. As such they can only be grasped through direct interaction and participation. Anything which can be known by the intellect alone ceases to be awo.
The primal
inspiration for awo is the communication between transcendent spiritual forces
and human consciousness. According to Ifa, everything in nature has some form
of consciousness called “Ori”. The unique function of Obatala within the realm
of Orisha Awo (Mysteries of Nature) is to provide the spark of light that animates
consciousness.
To call an Orisha the Chief of the White Cloth is to make a
symbolic reference to that substance which makes consciousness possible. The
reference to White Cloth is not a reference to the material used to make the
cloth, it is a reference to the fabric which binds the universe together.
The
threads of this fabric are the multi-leveled layers of consciousness which Ifa
teaches exist in all things on all levels of being. Ifa teaches that it is the
ability of forces of nature to communicate with each other, and the ability of
humans to communicate with forces in nature that gives the world a sense of
spiritual unity.
Ifa teaches that all forces in nature come into being through the manifestation of energy patterns called Odu. Ifa has identified and labeled different Odu which can be thought of as different expressions of consciousness. But because consciousness itself is generated by Obatala, every Odu contains an element of Obatala’s ase (power).
In metaphysical terms, this means that all of creation is linked to Obatala as the Source of Being. Ifa teaches that all forms of consciousness contain a spark of ase(spiritual power) from Obatala, and it is this spark that links everything to its shared beginning.
The Quest to Know
How may one explore these ideas and perhaps penetrate to their realities? They resonate across humanity's efforts, in various times and places, to understand the ultimate significance of nature.
Penetrate and be penetrated. The depths of reality cannot be known except through a synthesis between surrender and analysis, between admiration and reason, one view holds, a view correlative with what may be described as the vagina and womb aesthetics of Susanne Wenger and her school at the Oshun forest in Osogbo, in which vagina and womb motifs are prominent in a number of their sculptural and architectural forms in the forest, evoking the navigation of that space as a penetrative, incubative, transformative and rebirthing experience, an aesthetic exemplified by the most prominent of these sculptures along such lines, the Vagina of the Chameleon.
Donate to Compcros
Donate to Compcros, from where this project comes.
My Exploratory Journey with Akinwumi Ogundiran's The Yoruba : A New History
Inspirational book description from Call For Papers from Yoruba Studies Review journal that led me to Ogundiran's book.
General Summations
On Specific Themes
" Convergence and Divergence of Politics and Spirituality in the Yoruba Origin Ifa System of Knowledge: A Dilemma Emerging from Conflicts Between Akin Ogundiran as Scholarly Book Author and Social Media Contributor"
"Ifa Divination as Historiographic Paradigm: Between the Sacred and the Secular, Politics and Spirit in Akin Ogundiran's The Yoruba: A New History on Yoruba History as a Quest for Meaning : Part 2 : Very Short Reflection" [ With a discussion at this link]
"Fact and Speculation in Historical Narrative: Akinwumi Ogundiran’s The Yorùbá: A New History: Yorùbá History as a Quest for Meaning" ( Parts One, Two and Three).
"Developing a Historiographic Method Inspired by Yoruba Thought 1 : Motivated by Akinwumi Ogundiran’s The Yoruba : A New History, on Yoruba History as a Quest for Meaning."
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