From Wizard to Cyborg:The Journey of Toyin Falola 2 : Trance, Intellect, and the Polymathic Mind
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
From Wizard to Cyborg
The Journey of Toyin Falola
2
Trance, Intellect, and the Polymathic Mind
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Climbing the Mountain of Knowledge
I stood on the roof of the world in exhilaration as an ocean of clouds stretched in all directions around me. The air was crystal clear, vibrating with purifying force as my lungs drank it in, vivifying me as never before. The clouds formed themselves into ever changing patterns, glimpses of possibilities I felt deep inside, as if they were shaping themselves within me, possibilities that would later emerge into my mind as time went on, possibilities of knowledge, patterns of being and becoming undergoing change under the pressure of circumstance and choice.
The sunset glow drew me onward into space.Yet I remained anchored within the rocks at the mountain peak, nourished by the nutrients of water and soil feeding the grass at the summit even as I soared towards the luminosity calling me onward into an ever receding horizon, radiant with ever expansive life. The elevated and the grounded. Soaring yet focused. Marvellous light suffusing all.
I sensed Leku's presence, like a heartbeat within me. This was what she had promised on that last day of our parting at Ode Aje, an entry into possibilities of knowledge that cannot be contained in word or image, yet flowing endlessly through an an ocean of words, an abstract form of her marvellous store of herbs and ritual objects, each a node in a complex network that only she fully understood.
The initiation must change with the initiate. I was not going to tend a shop like she did, glorious with objects dense with meaning in the mind of the knowing person, but was going to be a dealer in ideas, in abstractions distilling the sweat and blood, the toil and joy of humans as they strive to make meaning of their brief lives within the revolutions of the Earth around the sun.
I was to be a watcher, a scribe of the permutations of time, seeking and sharing understanding of the patterns of the river's flow, of the beauty and structures of the stones on the river bed.
Historian, philosopher, poet, my various faces as I perched on the river bank, swam within the caressing flow, yet always recording and interpreting.
An expression of the Ibis headed one, poised and reflective as he inks on the scroll with his quill, master image of our guild, recorder of all unfoldings in and beyond time and space, a small part of whose task I was sanctified to execute in the great mosaic as the web of diamond matrices expands into infinity.
( Extract from a vision of vocation-''the orientation of a person's life and work in terms of their ultimate sense of mission''-Webster's- described as experienced by Toyin Falola in Walker Across Time and Possibilities: A Biography of Toyin Falola, by Bo Zeki, Helicon Publications, 2028.
I stumbled on it on the windowsill of a recently cleared office in London in 2015 and claimed it for myself when no owner could be found for it. I can't explain the discrepancy in the year of publication, only state what I saw on the book's information page.
The extract references Leku, Toyin Falola's herbalist and spiritual adept mentor and her shop of herbal and ritual goods in his memoir A Mouth Sweeter than Salt (2004) and their parting encounter in the succeeding memoir Counting the Tiger's Teeth: An African Teenager's Story (2014,2016).
The Ibis headed scribe clearly alludes to Thoth, ''the ancient Egyptian god of wisdom, writing, magic, the moon, and knowledge, often depicted as a man with an ibis...head acting as the gods' scribe, mediator, and recorder, credited with inventing hieroglyphs, mathematics, and the calendar, and playing a crucial role in the afterlife by recording the heart-weighing ceremony [of a person entering the after-life], representing divine order and learning''( Google AI).
Thoth is visualized here as the archetypal historian as well as a thinker, Falola's academic training being in history, a foundation of his multidisciplinary creativity. The vision the extract depicts is correlative with an Islamic themed dream vision at the conclusion of his latest memoir Malaika and the Seven Heavens: A Memoir of My Encounters with Islam (2025).
Image source: Marco Bottigelli, ''Paved footpath at Pico do Arieiro, Madeira Island'', Bing wallpaper from Getty Images.
Abstract
How does one actualize intellectual and creative potentials that are deeply sensed yet not fully articulated? How does knowledge come into being when its sources appear to exceed conscious rational control? This essay examines these questions through the creativity of Toyin Falola, one of the most prolific of contemporary scholars and writers. Falola describes his writing process in terms of spiritual direction, trance, and surrender to non-linear forces of inspiration—thereby posing a provocative challenge to the rationalist self-image of Western academia that shaped him and within which he works.
By situating Falola’s testimony within comparative frameworks drawn from Western philosophy, Western esotericism and magical theory and classical African epistemologies, the essay questions whether modern academia's emphasis on purely intellectual methods overlooks deeper sources of genius, concluding that Falola exemplifies a form of non-linear rationality: an integration of disciplined intellectual method with non-discursive, spiritually mediated cognition. Rather than undermining scholarly rigor, this synthesis may explain the scale, coherence, and originality of his work. Ultimately, it suggests that Falola’s work gestures toward a recoverable unity between intellect, spirit, and embodied cultural memory—one largely disavowed but not absent within global knowledge production, arguing for cultivable genius through symbolic and ritual practices.
Keywords
Creativity; Polymathy; Yoruba Epistemologies; Igbo and Afa Epistemologies; Western Esoteric Epistemologies; Trance; Scholarship; Ancestral Studies; Toyin Falola
Previous Essays in this Series:
"From Wizard to Cyborg:The Journey of Toyin Falola: Part 1: An Encounter and its Significance"
''The Wizard Paradigm : Aṣẹ and the Metaphysics of Creativity: Mapping the Cognitive Cosmos of Toyin Falola'' (USAAfrica Dialogues Series; Facebook
Contents
Image and Text: Climbing the Mountain of Knowledge
The Allure and Challenge of Human Potential
Image and Text: Adinkra and Akan Polymathicity
The Paradox: Spirituality in the Western Academy
Unifying Diverse Knowledge Creation Strategies
Indigenous Epistemologies and the Limitations of Mainstream Western Epistemology
Image and Text: Indigenous Masters of Knowledge and their Cognitive Universes
Spiritual Journeys and Scholarly Trance
Trance, Spirit and the Architecture of Knowledge
Theoretical Framework: Non-Linear Cognition and Scholarly Creation
Cultivating Genius
Comparative Epistemologies: Western Magic and African Knowledge Systems
Synergy of Diverse Cognitive Strategies in Western Magic
The Cognitive Spectrum in Yoruba and Igbo Afa Thought
Image and Text: Ancestral Consciousness and the Scholar as Mediator
The Ancestor Vision Across Traditions
Cultivating the Unseen Foundation
Synthesis and Practical Application: Toward Ancestral Studies
The Allure and Challenge of Human Potential
How may one actualise the sensitivity to greater potential than one has been able to fulfil? How may a person give birth to possibilities within themselves which they are sensitive to but have not yet been able to express?
One of such hungers is the yearning for ultimate knowledge, encapsulating all that can be known or a broad spectrum within the scope of human understanding.
Polymathy represents a recurrent intellectual response to the intuition that reality exceeds disciplinary fragmentation.
Polymaths either aspire to grasp a broad range of knowledge across many disciplines or a broad range within one or more disciplines, and perhaps from there try to understand reality as a whole or within the framework of that discipline.
Polymathy begins not with mastery, but with restlessness—a sensitivity to the excess of reality over any single structure and process of knowledge.
Aristotle laid the foundations for Western thought through such polymathic achievement across various disciplines. The Yoruba strand of the Ifa/Afa/Fa and related systems of knowledge could be described as pursuing something similar through the confluence of diverse disciplines, from mathematics to literature.
Image and Text: Adinkra and Akan Polymathicity
The mathematical symmetry of Adinkra takes me into the exploration of shapes and patterns, patterns that describe the world without and the world within, real and imagined, visual and mental, static and dynamic, abstract patterns, numerical patterns, patterns of shape, patterns of motion, patterns of behaviour, from the material and the social worlds, from the depths of space and time to the inner workings of the human mind, as described of mathematics in Keith Devlin’s Mathematics: The Science of Patterns.
Adinkra are visual symbols from the Akan and Gyaman of Ghana of which there are hundreds of distinct examples. Each one has a particular shape associated with a distinctive symbolic meaning. One Adinkra I find particularly intriguing is known as Kuntunkantan, shown above. It combines most evocatively the correlation of mathematical, literary, philosophical and spiritual possibilities that multivalent African knowledge systems demonstrate.
Kuntunkantan is particularly intriguing on account of its evocation of universes of association in amplifying the symbolic possibilities of a circle by conjoining the smooth flow of multiple circles, creating a form of soundless music.
Two circles on the left, two circles on the right, one on top of the other. The space at the centre where they all touch forming a four sided polygon, a star shaped quadrilateral. The fifth circle in the centre intersects all four circles, holding in balance both the four outer circles and their polygonal nucleus.
The intersection of all four circles at one centre pulls the eye towards that centre, while the integration of the circles round a central point enables the gaze to hold both the central point and the radius and circumference of all for circles at once.
The structuring of the gaze through the design of the symbol enables the eye to perceive at the same time, the integration of unity-the centre-through multiplicity-the four distinct but intersecting/conjoined circles.
It also enables the structure to be seen simultaneously in terms of a dynamic movement from a multiplicity-the four circles-to a unity-the centre they all share. The development of dialectic of unity to multiplicity and back again, evokes possibilities of conceiving the symbol in terms of ideational or conceptual possibilities of various kinds where such a correlative movement between the multiple and the unitary is foregrounded.
The character of this geometric form suggests and invites cognitive processes. Those processes enable me see Kuntunkantan as suggestive of both the methods for achieving polymathic knowledge and skill and the outcome of that achievement.
Kuntunkantan is expressive for me of the processes for arriving at a mental integration of the cosmos and a transcendence of that unity. It also suggests to me the structure of knowledge that results from this process. Kuntunkantan thus embodies for me what the Hermetic philosopher describes in lines that have long haunted me with their enigmatic beauty “The way is the goal and the goal is the way”.
The understanding of Otweaduampon Nyame as the pivot of the cosmos is symbolised in Akan drum language by the expanse of the terrestrial and celestial worlds. Kwabenia Nkentia’s translation of Akan drum poetry illustrates this:
Otweaduampon Nyame, the Ancient God,
The Heavens are wide, exceedingly wide,
The Earth is wide, very, very wide.
We have lifted it and taken it away,
We have lifted it and brought it back,
From time immemorial.
Within the esoteric level of meaning often encoded in Akan drum language and not previously accessible to the uninitiated, the notion of lifting the earth, taking it away and bringing it back, evokes the process of combining various interpretive possibilities of phenomena, deconstructing and reconstructing them.
The transformative processes made possible by human cognitive capacity become a lever for “lifting” the earth, taking it away and bringing it back, metaphorically speaking. The earth is conceived here as the cognitive image that constitutes each person’s understanding of the world. The act of lifting and taking it away is embodied in the process of examining its components, dismantling them, as it were, deconstructing them in order to examine their relative validity in relation to each other or to an overarching conception of truth or reality, or even as a demonstration of an understanding of the contingent character of human understanding as being dependent on factors that are incidental to environmental circumstances, and, which, in various environments, make possible diverse interpretive possibilities.
So the person who would lift and take away their own world examines its constituents in the light of that understanding, and possibly reconstitutes them so as to imagine what it could be to experience other perspectives on existence, in their totality and particulars, that could be inspired by environmental possibilities different from those that have shaped one's own conceptions. The person therefore opens a window into other possibilities of seeing the world within the otherwise significantly homogenous and endogenously grounded conceptions of the world that characterise human thought in various cultures.
The act of “bringing back the world” which had been “lifted and taken away” involves a process of reassembling the constituents of one’s view on the world, in relation to whatever modifications have occurred within it in relation to the exercise of re-examination of its constituents and general/overall structure, and or/of imaginative participation in other cognitive universes.
Within these cognitive exercises, the conception of Otweaduampon Nyame as the pivot of existence can be variously understood. It could be approached as a cognitive tool that facilitates efforts to develop a relational integrity in one's understanding of the universe. The functional relationships between various aspects of consciousness is better understood. The truth value of one’s conceptions is better examined. Sensitivity is developed to differing conceptions of the world in its particulars and as a whole.
( From Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, Kuntunkantan: An Exploration of Being through [Speculative] Meditations on Adinkra)
The Paradox: Spirituality in the Western Academy
This essay is about one polymath, the contemporary scholar and writer Toyin Falola, whose focus is on all aspects of African civilisation. The essay is motivated by his description of his work as spiritually inspired, suggesting that, in its scholarly expression, this spiritual inspiration is filtered through an intellectual prism.
This account presents a curious contradiction because Falola has spent all his adult life as either a student or a teacher and researcher in Western style universities in Nigeria and the United States. The Western academy does not traditionally develop a spiritual approach to scholarly work, the focus being on intellectual creativity while all other creative sources are de-emphasized or ignored, remaining at the discretion of the student and the researcher. In fact, spirituality does not generally exist as an aspect of cognitive strategy in Western academia and its global influence, a cultural expansion shaping Falola's education and work in Nigeria before moving to the Western heartland represented by the US.
Compared to the movement from the figure of Socrates at the roots of the Western cognitive tradition, who attested to the influence of a guiding spirit, to such scientists as Isaac Newton who demonstrated belief in God as central to their world views, describing how his science was an intellectual expression of his cosmology grounded in God ( The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), to contemporary academic scholarship and science which largely emphasize distance from such orientations, could the testimony of a Falola suggest that in the aspiritual character of mainstream Western cognitive culture, particularly in academia, the heart of the Western educational system, the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater in the exclusive centralization of intellectual rigour, away from the greater subjectivity represented by claims of spiritual direction and trance?
Falola is after all one of the most accomplished contemporary scholars in the global Western academic system as a professor at the University of Texas who is widely published with major Western academic publishers. If such a person alleges spiritual direction and trance as inspiring his books published by such giants of the Western academic publishing landscape as Cambridge University Press, Bloomsbury and Routledge, books that make no reference to such inspirational force, deriving their scholarly identity purely from the conventional protocols of legitimacy in Western academia, logical rigour, ideational range and coherence and cross-referential embedding in a textual tradition, should questions not be asked of various ways in which such conceptual, expository and analytical coherence and cognitive breadth can be reached beyond the purely intellectual methods taught in the classroom and cultivated by research training?
Unifying Diverse Knowledge Creation Strategies
Falola's description of this binary unity in his scholarly creativity is correlative with his calls for a diversification of learning systems in African academia to accommodate a conjunction of classical African and mainstream Western knowledge systems.
He has also called for the study of such classical African knowledge systems as Ifa, and more controversially, witchcraft.
Could these various conceptions-from an account of personal creativity to advocating the study of definitive knowledge systems-Ifa and shadowy belief systems-witchcraft, be critically examined and correlated to generate something practical, perhaps a contribution to Falola's suggestion that African Ancestral Studies, systems of knowledge and ways of being from classical Africa, be constituted as a distinctive discipline, perhaps along the lines of Classics, the study of ancient Greek and Roman life ways?
In responding to these questions, let us first go to Falola's accounts of his creative processes:
He states:
Today, I held my elegantly produced book, 402 pp. Yoruba Metaphysics, a few hours after I spoke with Professor Bewaji and promised him a copy. The book was inspired by just one neighborhood in Ibadan, Ode Aje. I have written four books based on this area, within walking distance to Agugu, Aremo, and Ojagbo. Four books: three memoirs and one academic-cultural activist book. Toyin Adepoju has pressured me multiple times to write on an iconic figure in the first memoir, Iya Lekuleja, but I am not your regular scholar driven by the academy. Since 1977, I have been a rule breaker and not a conformist. I disrupt the genres. It is the spirit that directs me on what to write at a particular time. Without the spirit, I don’t write anything. I cannot explain this, but this is how it works for me, a spiritual “journey” precedes anything I write. And as the spirit commands, words pour like rain, intellectual drenches that become a flood.
He emphasizes the epistemological significance of his formative environment:
But why is it important to say Ode Aje? Because the Western academy has harmed us. We are blind, completely blind to indigenous epistemologies. We don’t see, we don’t hear, we don’t think.
The starting point in connecting to the Western academy creates blind spots and intellectual damage.
Reflecting on a cultural performance, he describes a moment of recognition:
When I attended Professor Badejo’s 70th birthday celebration in Lagos, what I enjoyed most was the Apepe dance (I hope that’s the correct name). Badejo came alive, as if the ancestors sent him from heaven. He became a masquerade. This was the moment—the organic moment of self-realization. His energy came, as if he were in the gym. He danced like the possessed in a trance, lifted by higher forces beyond his physical form.
He traces the sources of his authentic knowledge:
Ode Aje gave me a sense of authenticity, a knowledge that the Western academy can never provide. By age ten, I could read any text in Yoruba and had read all of Fagunwa's works [ a great writer in Yoruba ].
Few know that I attended a madrasa [ an Islamic school ]. To write my third memoir [ Malaika and the Seven Heavens: A Memoir of My Encounters with Islam ], I had to relearn Arabic. Few are aware that I was part of a choir for eleven years. And few realize that I went to Igbale to assist the Egungun [ Yoruba cultural performances dramatizing the visit of ancestors to the human world] . This background forms the foundation for four books.
To wise people, it should have been “Falola, can you teach us about this methodology?”
...
I thank Ode Aje, as I now move to Ife, with a fourth memoir in progress and a possible book on the University of Ife. A wise person seeks social relevance, the highest form of success, greater than any award that one can ever receive.
(Email communication of 13th September, 2025 to a private group. Quoted by permission of the author).
Indigenous Masters of Knowledge and their Cognitive Universes
Tunmise Alagbo, Tunmise, the seller of herbs ( and spiritual items for
classical Yoruba spirituality), and her grandmother, her mentor in the trade
and a Muslim, as Tunmise is, the younger woman's trade being successful enough
for her to buy a big car, build a house and make the pilgrimage to Mecca.
In the central image, Tunmise and her grandmother are seen inside her grandmother's herbal shop, a few minutes walk from her own. Top left is a close up of both of them in the same shop. The background image is of Tunmise's own shop, indicating the more traditional items, such as ritual pots, on the left, and the modern herbal distillations into bottles on the right.
These pictures, taken by myself on the 9th of July 2025 at Osogbo, in South-West Nigeria, near Ibadan, where Falola experienced his childhood and teenage years, are placed her to evoke Falola's relationship with Iyalekuleja, ''venerable woman selling assorted (herbal and magical) items'', a strategically creative influence in making his formative years in Ibadan's Ode Aje catalytic for his psychological, cognitive and scholarly development.
She introduced him, through her person, her activities and the organised profusion of her shop, to classical Yoruba spirituality and herbalogy as living knowledge systems embodied in its adepts, projected in their private and public activities and their techniques of organising and expressing knowledge.
The relationship between the incredible diversity of items in her shop and her razor sharp knowledge of where every item was located exposed him to the idea of organized knowledge as a physical construct and a configuration of the self. Her skill in ritual and sacred verbalization opened him to the potency of sacred action and the resonance of language as communicative medium and transformative force.
His writing and scholarly career can be correlated with this early experience of near apprenticeship to an embodiment of a cognitive system created by his Yoruba ancestors, deeply rooted in the individual, interpersonal, institutional and environmental networks constituting his native land but existing in tension with the later dominance of Western created political, economic, cultural and educational systems implanted by British colonialism and Christianity.
Leku's disciple would later become a sterling embodiment of the Western system, but his ancestral core remains luminous, through his embodiment of Yoruba, in which he writes poetry, as well as in English, his continuous efforts at developing dialogue between the ancient civilization and the newly introduced culture, from his University of Ife location as student and teacher and his University of Texas migration from where his most trenchant work on this nexus is being developed, exemplified by his autobiographies, by his essay " Ritual Archives", which incarnates a textual version of the multifarious organization of Leku's store and a vision of African sacred space projecting its sense of unified, many sided wonder as well as of numinous beauty and power.
Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies explores his personal culture in relation to Yoruba culture as archives of possibility, actualizations of possibilities bracketed from the realm of the possible, thereby taking further the first and second person progressions represented by his memoirs and scholarly investigations of Yoruba and African lifeworlds, from Yoruba Gurus to Malaika and the Seven Heavens, the latter narrating and reflecting on his Islamic identity representing the religious cross fertilisation of Yorubaland, akin to that of Tunmise Alagbo, who like others in Osogbo, is both a Muslim and a seller of classical Yoruba spirituality ritual items to Global Yoruba: Regional and Diasporic Networks, following the Yoruba journey from its origins to its trans-continental spread, a cultural and geographical odyssey extended to Falola's studies of Africa, its history, literature, politics, spiritualities and more.
Falola's description of his creative processes in relation to another project complements the previous account :
The call came while I was in Japan on August 28. Without checking my calendar, my city people appointed me as the speaker for the First Olubadan Coronation Lecture.
I had other commitments; I needed to introduce my classes, and God blessed us with a new grandchild that I had to hurry to see in New York.
I really never organize on what to write. I had previously given two Adelabu Lectures, [a] Spam FM lecture and several others, written two books on Ibadan, and numerous essays. I don’t repeat myself.
I accepted the lecture, with an imposed topic by two long standing associates, Tunji Oladejo and Amidu Sanni, who chairs one of the Committees. I had to cancel events. By September 2nd, what existed was an imposed topic. Although I don’t like the topic, I told myself not to fight the topic but to work with it.
A trance took over as the spirit moved through me. I couldn't sleep at all from the moment I began until I finished the last sentence. Now, a book of over 400 pages in print has been created [ Ibadan in History: Issues in Tradition and Modernity, 2025].
( Email communication of 20th September 2025 to a private group. Quoted by permission of the author ).
Trance, Spirit and the Architecture of Knowledge
What are the implications of those references to "trance", to spiritual direction and spiritual journeying in relation to writing, particularly scholarly writing?
Why is a scholar, a thoroughbred scion of the Western academy, foregrounding descriptions of his creative processes that seem to contradict the linear rationality at the centre of the intellectual systems defining scholarship in the Western tradition?
Is the notion that intellectual work and non-linear thinking don't go together false, an imposition by poor understanding of the relationships between various ways in which the mind works, in the name of a tidy but false uniformity of the human cognitive landscape, a constriction facilitating organizing people into groups for easier direction and assessment?
Do the idiosyncrasies represented by artistic and religious inspiration also exist in scholarship, but are channelled through intellectual frames?
Falola’s description of writing as trance contradicts the rationalist self-image of the modern university, yet it is not anti-rational. It is non-linear rationality: the same mind that masters archival minutiae and econometric data also surrenders to forces it cannot fully command.
Theoretical Framework: Non-Linear Cognition and Scholarly Creation
The creative mind building structures of knowledge, systems of understanding, operates best when it achieves a balance between passivity and control, when it combines self-direction with submissiveness, surrendering to forces in the mind working with the same mysterious potency as the power of life that enables the maggot to emerge from meat after its unseeable gestation, the conscious and subconscious minds working in tandem, Immanuel Kant could be imagined to have written, summing up his insights on the architectonic, the understanding of structures of knowledge, their rhythms and interrelations, as organically constituted architectural complexes ( On the "Architectonic of Pure Reason" in the Critique of Pure Reason).
Kant’s “architectonic” of reason, the subconscious gestation of ideas, the sudden synthesis that feels like grace — these are not foreign to scholarship; they might be simply rarely admitted.
This balance is at the core of all kinds of creativity, but to what degree is such unified mental development part of the globally dominant educational system? Those who have cracked this insight about creativity become creators of new knowledge, synthesizers of existing understanding in ways that go beyond mere repetition.
Is this not the universe of creativity Falola is referencing?
While doing a graduate program at University College, London, I took part in a supplementary seminar in which a writer led participants through a meditative process meant to unlock creativity in academic writing.
Is that related to the kind of thing Falola has in mind? The Yoruba cognitive tradition recognizes the use of herbs in aiding memory. It also privileges ideas of self-transcendence and of surrender to spiritual forces through the influence of chanting, drumming, dance and other elements of ritual as well as through artistic expression and creativity.
Which techniques of cognitive expansion could Falola have in mind as an aid in scholarship?
Is genius cultivatable?
Cultivating Genius
An approach to understanding why a highly trained and highly accomplished academic in the Western tradition is testifying to spiritual direction in his work, describing non-intellectual inspiration filtered through intellectual skills, is through theories of knowledge that combine both approaches, the non-intellectual and the intellectual, particularly theories that emphasise the force of spirit, invisible forms of sentience, which Falola references as inspiring him.
Comparative Epistemologies: Western Magic and African Knowledge Systems
Synergy of Diverse Cognitive Strategies in Western Magic
One of these is the mystical strand of modern Western magic, understood as the use of symbols in exploring the structure and dynamism of reality, seeking its essence in relation to the essence of the self, as may be observed of the influential magical school the Golden Dawn ( The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order by Israel Regardie and John Michael Greer), and such of its members as Aleister Crowley ( Magick: Liber ABA:Book Four), Israel Regardie (The Tree of Life: A Study in Magic), and Dion Fortune ( The Training and Work of an Initiate; Applied Magic; Sane Occultism; The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage), oriented towards a mystical form of magic in which all activities are directed towards the quest for the intersection of the self and ultimate reality (Neville Drury, Stealing Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Modern Western Magic).
This strand of Western magic may be correlated with Yoruba epistemology as described by Babatunde Lawal ( ''Àwòrán: Representing the Self and Its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art'', The Art Bulletin, Vol. 83, No. 3, 2001), Yoruba thought being a system Falola is deeply invested in, from his formative years in Ode Aje.
Western magical theory, however, having a much longer history of writing, explicitly integrating and distilling ideas from various Western cultures over the centuries, may be more explicitly developed, particularly in terms of epistemology, theories of knowledge, than published accounts of Yoruba epistemology. Through a study of their similarities and differences, though, Western magical thought could enrich Yoruba thought and vice versa.
Israel Regardie presents a picture of the sources of genius correlative with Falola’s account of his creative processes and indicates how such a level of creativity may be cultivated through working on the mind using the processes of magic:
The appearance of genius, regardless of the several aspects and fields of its manifestation, is marked by the occurrence of a curious phenomenon…that flash of spiritual light making descent in splendid tongues of flame like the Pentecostal Holy Ghost, radiant with joy and the highest wisdom, pregnant with spontaneous inspiration.
Genius is not, nor has it ever been in years gone by, the result of merely infinite care and patience.
No matter how great the value of perspiration, it cannot produce the magnificent effects of genius.
These outward expressions in genius-care, patience, perspiration -are simply the manifestations of a superabundance of energy proceeding from a hidden centre of consciousness. They are but the media by which the genius distinguishes itself, striving to make known those ideas and thoughts which have been hurtled into the consciousness and penetrated that border-line which successfully larks off and divides the profane from that which is divine ( The Tree of Life: An Illustrated Study in Magic, ed. Chic and Sandra Cicero, 2001, 10-11).
He proceeds to describe mysticism, the quest for the essence of the self, as “a species of psychological and spiritual training to induce this experience…”, one of the two major techniques of mysticism being Magic, the other Yoga, Magic being the exaltation of the mind through symbols to reach the essence of the self in the ultimate source of existence (14).
How does this relate to Falola’s creative processes? How do his own experiences of inspiration emerge? Does he employ symbols like the magician in Regardie’s context does?
Bill Whitcomb presents what may be seen as a modification of Regardie’s stark distinction between Magic and Yoga, suggesting their unification. He emphasizes the power of concentration as a means of sparking cognitive synthesis, integrating a broad range of ideas in relation to a subject, an experience emerging in terms of the intense pleasure of knowing, in which the mind and the subject of attention enjoy a fusion, which he describes by the technical yogic term “samadhi” ( The Magician’s Companion: A Practical and Encyclopedic Guide to Magical and Religious Symbolism, Llewelyn, 2004, 20-21).
Between ideas and the words and images expressing those ideas, their symbol equivalents, between the mind as a network of symbols and the anchoring of ideas in the self, catalyzing inspirational flow, to what degree can a person’s creative roots be mapped?
Who can say when ideational sensitivity penetrates into ideational identification, galvanizing the deepest potencies of the self, crossing over into domains beyond full grasp of the mind receiving the resulting creative influx as nectar falling into a gratefully receiving cup, the receptive mind, as magical theorist and practitioner Dion Fortune may be adapted on the inexplicable seamlessness of creative mental states, "Who shall say when shrewdness becomes intuition, and intuition becomes vision?” (The Training and Work of an Initiate, Aquarian, 1955,59).
The Cognitive Spectrum in Yoruba and Igbo Afa Thought
Babatunde Lawal's summation of classical Yoruba epistemology incidentally complements Fortune's epistemic summation in suggesting a movement from conventional, exoteric forms of knowing to unconventional, esoteric forms of awareness:
As with other aspects of Yoruba culture, the eyeball is thought to have two aspects, an outer layer called oju ode (literally, external eye) or oju lasan (literally, naked eye), which has to do with normal, quotidian vision, and an inner one called ojui inu (literally, internal eye) or oju okan (literally, mind's eye). The latter is associated with memory, intention, intuition, insight, thinking, imagination, critical analysis, visual cognition, dreams, trances, prophecy, hypnotism, empathy, telepathy, divination, healing, benevolence, malevolence, extrasensory perception, and witchcraft, among others ( 516 ).
This list may be rearranged in terms of a scheme indicating a movement from conventional, exoteric, to unconventional, esoteric forms of knowing:
visual cognition, memory, intention, thinking, critical analysis, empathy, intuition, extrasensory perception, telepathy, dreams, trances, divination, insight [ as a possible outcome of all cognitive processes], healing, benevolence, malevolence, extrasensory perception, and witchcraft, among others
in which
Conventional/Exoteric: visual cognition, memory, intention, thinking, critical analysis, empathy, intuition
Unconventional/Esoteric: extrasensory perception, telepathy, dreams, trances, divination, healing, benevolence, malevolence, witchcraft
This sequence is unified by insight as a possible outcome of all these cognitive methods.
Anenechukwu Umeh, on the epistemology of Afa, a knowledge system from the geographically and culturally cognate Igbo people, incidentally suggests the two knowledge systems as variants of the same ideas, in which Lawal's account of the Yoruba example provides specificity of cognitive approaches while Umeh's description of the Igbo context extends the range of cognitive possibilities the system offers:
In the Afa language, Ose naabo is the two eyes with which one sees the mortal world while Ose ora is the eye with which one sees the Spirit and the world in addition.
...
Ose ora is Uche. Uche is ..Universal Consciousness...God's Mind.
In Uche the universal mind and universal consciousness, like God whose mind it is, transcends space and time. It knows what was, what is and what will be.
Ose ora means the Eye of the God of Light...the Anthill with Eyes All Over the Body.
...the Unity of All that Exists.
[ This visual structure is that of ] a pyramid ( with the two eyes at the bottom and one eye at the top, enabling sharing in the all seeing eye of God, the eye that is God) the extent and vividness of which (sharing) depends upon the level of spiritual development and holiness which one has developed and maintained ( After God is Dibia:Igbo Cosmology, Divination & Sacred Science in Nigeria , Vol. 2, 1999, 72-73)
Image and Text: Ancestral Consciousness and the Scholar as Mediator
Falola as Egungun with the Oloolu Egungun of Ibadan
Image sources: left: Itunu Azeez Kareem, “Oloolu: Guardian of Tradition and Mystery in Yoruba Lifestyle", Guardian, Nigeria, 28th December 1993; middle: by Moses Ogunleye in Toyin Falola, In Praise of Greatness: A Poetics of African Adulation, 2019, 953; right: Catherine Stites, “The Egungun: The Costume and the Ritual in Death and The King’s Horseman”, Medium, Dec.14, 2017).
''Few know that I attended a madrasa [an Islamic school] ...Few are aware that I was part of a choir for eleven years. And few realize that I went to Igbale to assist the Egungun. This background forms the foundation for four books.''
Toyin Falola. Private communication.
" I call you forth, all, upon terraces of light. Let the dark withdraw"
Wole Soyinka, A Shuttle in the Crypt
Egungun spirit making, using a conceptually accurate expression instead of the better known "masquerade", is a Yoruba dramatic display meant to demonstrate the presence of ancestors on Earth. Their presence is described as visits from orun, the spirit world. Such visits, however, are perceived as a concretization of the constant presence of the ancestors watching over their kin from the world of spirit.
Igbale, which Falola describes himself as present at in order to assist the Egungun performer, is the shrine of the Egungun, indicating the performance as not simply a means of entertainment but a means of relating with spiritual powers invoked through the shrine.
Could the experience have contributed to the spiritual immersions Falola gained from Islam, Christianity and classical Yoruba spiritualities, as suggested by the quote above and demonstrated by his memoirs and scholarly writing?
Could it have contributed to his developing an orientation similar to Soyinka's as quoted above, in which, invisible presences are depicted in terms of the incarnate human being, through mental elevation, entering their realm, where, ''cleansed, they await'' to guide the seeker, as in Shuttle, their presence projected through ''light at the end of [a] tunnel, light [one] dares'' not look upon'', as in Death and the King's Horseman, where they are explicitly evoked as ancestors?
''Egúngún festivals were a particularly memorable sight at harvest time, combining a response to agricultural fecundity with a vision of the cycle of life, death and rebirth, as represented by the Egúngún, understood as ancestors visiting the community from the spirit world into which they had transitioned.
I enjoyed waiting at the edge of the sacred grove for them to emerge and dazzle spectators with their bright colors. Their dramatic outing from the luxuriantly green forest, ablaze with amazing freshness and the liquid light of dew, always gave me a sense of renewal, an internal resonance to Egúngún’s message of the rebirth of life from the portal of death.''
(Rowland Abiodun, Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, 2nd ed. Forthcoming).
In In Praise of Greatness: A Poetics of African Adulation, Falola has an artist depict him as an Engugun, in a costume evocative of descriptions of the Oloolu spirit mask of Ode Aje, where he experienced a deeply formative childhood. On top of his head in the painting by Moses Ogunleye above is positioned a face akin to the head of a woman described as perched on the head of the Oloolu, although the pictures of the actual Oloolu in action, evidenced by the left and right images in the collage above, do not seem to show such a head.
In the book, Falola visualizes himself as an Egungun returned to Earth to pass on messages to his friends. Does that imaginative exercise suggest being comfortable with the inevitability of death as well as with the idea of ancestorhood and its implication of life after death?
What mental frame is cultivated by imagining oneself as alive and well after the dissolution of the body in death and being able to communicate with and guide loved ones even after departure from the Earth into a realm distant from but interpenetrative with the Earth, as the Yoruba idea of the relationship between the Earth, aye and the world of spirit, orun?
May such ideas be applied in an imagative exercise that facilitates a perspective on reality transcendent of the temporal limitations of human life?
The Ancestor Vision Across Traditions
''As long as space abides, as long as the world abides, so long shall I abide, destroying the sufferings of the world'', states the Buddhist writer Santideva in his Boddhicaryavatara, dramatizing the Buddhist Boddhisatva ideal, in which the aspirant aspires to transcend death, operating from the world of spirit as a guide to humanity, an expression of the Buddhist version of the ancestor vision, resonant with the Catholic Communion of Saints ( Karl Adam, The Spirit of Catholicism) , the Theosophical ( Helena Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine) Western esoteric (Vera Stanley Alder, The Initiation of the World) and Western New Religions ( Paul Twitchell, The Spiritual Notebook) Masters of Wisdom and more, in which the departed constitute a wall of protection and guidance for those on Earth, embodying understanding and power to which their Earthy brethren aspire.
Bernard Bromage describes a method and value of taking advantage of such ideas:
''All over his mentally constituted universe [ the aspirant] can set up his own martello-towers, places of fortification and succour which are a never-failing help in times of trouble.
Interconnected by cables and wires of which he alone knows the secret, these strongholds of the spirit will be peopled by the missionaries and guides he holds most dear.
For example, most of us have a particular fondness for some inspirational voice of the past, some personality whose echo comes down to us along the avenues of time to uplift and sustain.
What better practice than to contact this silent friend in his own haunts ? It is not particularly difficult to see the Buddha under the bo tree or Ignatius Loyola wrestling with his soul at Manresa.
…
We can, then, if we will, make friends with the great psychic figures and scenes of the past.
And we shall realise at the same time that, in the world of the spirit, there is no absolute past, present, nor future but one glorious sustaining Now. This is why help is so ready to our hands when we take the trouble to ask for it from "mythical" personages we have come to venerate: we are conferring with forces so near to us that they can be said to be at our very ear.''
(Tibetan Yoga, 1952, 227)
Nimi Wariboko visualizes himself as an ancestor sending a message to his future intellectual descendants:
''Authors write acknowledgments to publicly record their indebtedness to the living and the dead who helped them in the process of researching and writing their books. I have done a lot of this in my previous sixteen monographs and four edited volumes.
Now that I am on my seventeenth monograph, it occurred to me that my acknowledgment should properly focus on the not-yet born. I expect their coming onto the academic scene, to carry forward the ideas in this book. I acknowledge their accomplishments of this task and the claim past scholarship has on them.
This approach to acknowledgment is very important for those of us who are Africans and/or Pentecostals. We write not only with an eye on the current intellectual questions and debates, but also with an ear on the distant sound of the footsteps of coming generations.
We are building a body of work for the next generations, whose coming is expected and whose joy in inheriting and encountering works and ideas left for them by their own deeply excites me. I acknowledge here the inspiration I received from the generations of Africans and Pentecostals who are coming after me.
I acknowledge the intellectual powers of those who come after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. I have no greater joy than to expect that my brothers and sisters, my children, will be committed to the quest for truth rooted in the public intercourse of rigorous ideas.
Now let me turn to the past and present generations who assisted me in bringing the idea of this book to fruition.
I acknowledge all my teachers, past and present, in formal and informal settings, who helped to form and inspire me to work at the uncomfortable intersectionality of disciplines. I am a scholar on the boundary. I work on the boundaries of economics and ethics, economics and religion, economics and philosophy, ethics and theology, philosophy and theology, social history and ethics, social sciences and theology, and present and not-yet-present knowledges.
My thinking always functions at an interstitial site, wrestling in a contact zone of disciplines that is neither/ nor. This is a site that opposes binary opposition, oscillating between spheres of knowledge. It is the fragile, fleeting, and slippery para-site of erotic, new, refreshing insights and lights. I am talking of the uncanny non-place that promises to birth the underivably new in history.
My soul finds deep peace at this frontier, the edge of knowledge that is always approaching and withdrawing approach. This book reflects this orientation of my scholarship. And I thank you, the reader, for your forbearance in walking and working with me in this unhomely space.''
( From The Split God: Pentecostalism and Critical Theory, 2018, ix-x)
Cultivating the Unseen Foundation
Falola's testimony presents a profound challenge to contemporary academic orthodoxy: can spiritual epistemology coexist with scholarly rigor? His work demonstrates that it not only can but perhaps should. The Western academy's exclusive emphasis on linear rationality may have unnecessarily constrained the cognitive pathways through which knowledge can be produced in academic contexts.
By acknowledging and studying diverse cognitive traditions—from Western magical practices to African epistemological systems—we may discover methods for cultivating the very genius that produces breakthrough scholarship. The question remains: Is academia prepared to examine, rather than dismiss, the non-linear creative processes that its most accomplished practitioners employ in private while maintaining conventional facades in public?
Falola’s work stands as a powerful testament to a holistic model of scholarly creativity. It demonstrates that the highest intellectual achievements can be rooted in what he calls the “spiritual journey”—a receptivity to non-linear inspiration, culturally coded through Yoruba or any other cosmology and refined by global esoteric parallels. The challenge he poses is not to replace intellectual rigor with spiritualism, but to recognize that rigor is most potent when it serves as the prism through which deeper, often unspoken, wellsprings of insight are focused and articulated.
The question “Is genius cultivatable?” thus finds a tentative answer in his example. Genius may be cultivated not merely through incremental study, but through the deliberate development of a cognitive ecosystem—one that, like the polymathic foundation of Ode Aje, honors the multiplicity of the mind: the rational and the intuitive, the archival and the ancestral, the intellectual and the inspired. In this, Falola’s greatest contribution may be pointing toward a more expansive, inclusive, and ultimately more creative future for the global academy itself.
Synthesis and Practical Application: Toward Ancestral Studies
Falola’s personal epistemology is inextricably linked to his scholarly advocacy. His calls for diversifying African academia, for the serious study of systems like Ifa, and even for examining “witchcraft” as a knowledge complex, are of a piece with his creative testimony. They advocate for a scholarly paradigm that can accommodate the very cognitive diversity he embodies.
The practical culmination of this is his proposal to constitute “African Ancestral Studies” as a formal discipline, analogous to Classics. This would not be a retreat into tradition but a rigorous, interdisciplinary field using all available academic tools to study classical African systems of knowledge, philosophy, spirituality, and social organization. It could require, and in turn foster, the very syncretic methodology Falola exemplifies: one that can analyze texts and archives with intellectual rigor while remaining sensitive to the non-linear, spiritual, and symbolic dimensions from which those systems emerged.
Falola's call for the integration of African Ancestral Studies within formal academic structures is not merely about curriculum diversification. It represents a fundamental challenge to epistemological monoculture—an invitation to recognize that the pursuit of ultimate knowledge may require not the abandonment of intellectual rigor but its integration with other, equally valid modes of knowing that the Western tradition has too hastily discarded.