Pankya and Pankan Philosophy and Mysticism : Death and Installation as Transformation in Pankya and Pankan, the Last Rites and Installation Ceremonies of the Aku Uka, King of Wukari of the Jukun of Nigeria : Images and Texts in a Multicultural Synthesis
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Pankya and Pankan Philosophy and Mysticism
Death and Installation as Transformation in Pankya and Pankan
the Last Rites and Installation Ceremonies
of the
Aku Uka, King of Wukari of the Jukun of Nigeria
Images and Texts in a Multicultural Synthesis
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The White of Aspiration and Totality
In which all colours and possibilities are subsumed
unfolding as the aspirant walks the path of Pankya and Pankan
''The white triangle, called the Kahwa, the Sword of Justice, among the Jukun,
represents vigilance and a call to arms, readiness and preparedness for battle.''
Paraphrase of Emman Okunna and Solomon Gausa in "Adapting the Jukun Traditional
Symbols for Textile Design and Production" (Mgbakoigba: Journal of African Studies. Vol.
3. July, 2014, 107-124, 112).
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
An interpretation and adaptation, through
images and texts, of Pankya and Pankan, the last rites and installation
ceremonies of the Aku Uka, king of Wukari of the Jukun people of
Nigeria.
All links in the essay were active between January and early April 2022 when the essay was composed.
Acknowledgements
Great thanks to Moses Ochonu, whose passionate, lucidly argued January 17, 2022 Facebook post on the transition rites of the Aku Uka of Wukari, ''The Aku Uka's Funeral and Matters Arising'', and the discussion that post provoked inspired my interest in the subject.
“Unravelling Pankya: The Transition Rites of the Aku Uka,” the live Facebook
discussion on this subject on the 22nd of
January, 2022, exposed me further to the significance of those rites and
their relationship to the Aku Uka's installation rites, through the deeply
intriguing exposition by Dr. Shishi Zhema.
The core of the image and information research for this essay came from Facebook posts and the names of as many as possible of these contributors are mentioned in the text. The most important source has been the Facebook page of the Jukun cultural centre Apajukun. May they keep flying on all things Jukun as well as other news they present and analyze.
My publication of Ochonu's Facebook post
and its associated debate in the USAAfrica Series Google group run by
Toyin Falola, thereby provoking a rich discussion, provided the first
opportunity to develop some of the ideas discussed in this essay.
Great thanks to that group, its founder, its moderators and
the participants in that discussion.
Image and Text: The White of Aspiration and Totality
Abstract
Acknowledgements
Puje to Nando and Back to Puje: The Circle of Being and Becoming in Pankya and Pankan Philosophy and Mysticism
From Documenting Culture to Interpreting and Reworking Culture
Image and Text: Symbol of Ultimate Aspiration
Image and Text: Intercultural and Interdimensional Journeys
Accompanied Death
Image and Text: Grandeur in Simplicity in the Palace of the Aku Uka of Wukari
Colour and Paradox in the Burial Rites of the Aku Uka of Wukari
Images and Text: The Departed Aku Uka and the Tripod of Power
Images and Text: The Eagle Flew from Steeple to Steeple
Books Mapping the Journey Beyond Death
The Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead
Images and Text: Collective Mourning
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
Image and Text: The Red of Blood and Dynamism
The Golden Dawn Adaptation of the Death and Rebirth of Osiris
Image and Text: Celebrating the Joy of Life as Life Moves On
Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman
Image and Text: Youth, Age and Childhood Converge
Imaginative Transpositions, Modifying Cultural Forms While Retaining their Evocative Essence
Hindu Mysticism
Image : The Horseman on his Way to Nando, the Unknown, with the Departing Aku Uka
The Coronation Ceremonies of the Oba of Benin
Image and Text: The Return of the Companions
Reworking the Aka Uka’s Burial Rites in the Name of Sanctity of Life
Image: The Horseman, Sallah Atobe, Just after his Return from Nando
Shaping Mystery in Relation to Human Life in Pankya
Image: The Horseman with his Wife after his Return from Nando
The Feminine Imperative in Pankya as Symbol Nexus
Image and Text: The Pankya and Pankan Circle of Being and Becoming
The Challenge of Pankya and Pankan Scholarship, Writing and Presentation
Image and Text: The Spiral of Transformation
Correlative Need for Adequate Study and Presentation of the Coronation Ceremonies of the Oba of Benin
Image and Text: Majesty in Simplicity as New Aku Uka Assumes His Role
Issues of Adequacy of Cultural Exploration in Relation to Various African Systems
Between Yoruba Ifa and Benin Ohminigbon
Image and Text: Transformation of the New Aku Uka
Benin Erhia and Other Benin Cognitive Strategies
Image and Text: The Aku Uka as Embodying Human Birth and Ultimate Transition
Between Yoruba Aje and Benin Azen
Image: The New Aku Uka Seated in State
Jukun Cognitive and Performative Forms
Between Cross River, South East Nigerian and South West Cameroonian Nsibidi and Yoruba Ifa
Image and Text: The Star of the Ultimate
Akan and Gyaman
Adinkra
Image and Text: The Black of Fulfillment
Reworking the Vision of Pankya and Pankan
Image and Text: Star and Crescent Moon
Pankya:The Transmogrification & the Transition of the Aku Uka of Wukari
Image and Text: Connecting the First and and the Last, Space, Time and Infinity
Donation Request
From Documenting Culture to Interpreting and Reworking Culture
This essay began life as ''Death as Transformation in Pankya : The Last Rites of a Wukari King: Images and Text in a Multicultural Synthesis,'' a description of the explicit symbolism and an exploration of the further associative values of the January 2022 transition rites of the Aku Uka of Wukari, ruler of a Jukun community in Nigeria's Taraba State, a ceremony magnificent in its visual force, symbolic permutations and evocation of spiritual mystery.
Correlating the symbolism of Jukun abstract art with the explicit symbolism of the transition rites, I realised a philosophical system was emerging, a picture of human existence in relation to other realms of being. An image distillable from the transition rites of the Aku Uka, a body of ideas distinctive yet universally resonant, its evocative force amplified through its correlation with other efforts across the world. Integrating these with the symbolism of Pankan, the installation rites of the new Aku Uka, further expanded these interpretive possibilities.
The circle of human existence goes from Puje to Nando and back to Puje. From the possibility of life evoked by the blood of the rising of the moon to the final doorway between matter and spirit, convergences in time yet beyond time, what may we see in the motion between existences that is Puje and Nando as we journey between the two?
The italicised lines directly above are an attempt at a poetically evocative summation of my understanding of how the Aku Uka's transition and installation rites suggest a perception of the nature of human existence. It also evokes my view of how this insight may be used as an inspiration for the effort to perceive the foundations of existence at the intersection of birth and final transition as journeys between possibilities.
The summative statement of the nature of existence is the philosophy. The aspiration to employ this summation as a means of insight into the foundations of existence is the mysticism.
This structure of ideas is evoked by the circle, a visual form described as suggesting continuity in Jukun thought, specifically, cultural continuity across generations, as stated by Okunna and Gausa in "Adapting the Jukun Traditional Symbols for Textile Design and Production" (112).
In the context of this essay, the motion between possibilities of existence represented by birth, ultimate transition and re-emergence is imaged by the spiral, adapting Okunna and Gausa's description of the chameleon in Jukun textile symbolism as connoting social change. ''Since the colour of the chameleon changes gradually over ...time, the Jukun man believes that change in the society ought also to be a gradual process'' ( 111).
The stages of this journey of existence are indicated by a
sequence of coloured triangles, the white of totality and aspiration, the red of blood and dynamism, and
the black of fulfillment, images symbolising other values in Jukun thought but
adapted in this context as a means of evoking the stages of a journey between
modes of existence. This is a journey demonstrated in every person's life cycle. This concept of life as journey sees life as a dynamic process. It also aspires to understand the foundations of this dynamism in a reality
underlying terrestrial being.
Image and Text : Symbol of Ultimate Aspiration
"Among the Jukun the circle symbolizes continuity. The Jukun believe that there should be
continuity of cultural values among the younger generation."
(Okunna and Gausa, 112)
"Circle": a continuous curved line, the points of which are always the same distance away from
a fixed central point" ( Cambridge Dictionary).
The circle is the most common symbol across the world for the continuity of existence, the unity of being. It could represent the unity of humans on Earth, with humans beyond Earth, with spirits on Earth and beyond Earth and all these with the creator of the universe, as perceived in Jukun thought, a world view deducible from Moses Ochonu's ''The Aku Uka’s Funeral and Matters Arising'' ( BusinessDay, Jan.22,2022).
''Does anyone understand for sure the nature of this unity, unity between the magnitude of the world, in its details and totality, with omnipotence, the relationship of the world-order to highest wisdom, or the unity of the world to the absolute unity of its author? I don't think so,'' as the words of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant may be adapted from his Critique of Pure Reason ( trans. and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge, 2009, 582, also numbered as A628/ B 656 in reference to the first and second editions of the book in its original German publication).
Yet, the circle continues to be used to express this idea and claims of having achieved the goal it evokes. The circularity of the calabash, a common household object and symbolic form in African cultures, plays this role in Zulu thought, according to Mazisi Kunene:
After creation, man was endowed with two minds: the precision mind and the cosmic mind. While the precision mind analyses and reorganises the details of the material environment, the cosmic mind synthesizes fragments of information to create a universally significant body of knowledge. Man can live quite happily using the precision mind, but he can only attain knowledge through a balanced functioning of the two aspects of reason. At the highest point of reasoning, significant units of information merge with universal concepts pulled together by a unique form of intellectual power.
When the cosmic mind grinds its elements of experience into a totality of knowledge, it acquires a discipline which by its horrific power erases the boundaries between the past and the present, the living and the dead, the physical and the non-physical. The individual initiate acquires, like the chameleon’s all round vision, the capacity to conceptualise the totality of life at once. Such wisdom is enshrined in the rounded calabash of symbolic cosmic power.
( Anthem of the Decades, Heinemann, 1981, xxiii)
Image and Text : Intercultural and Interdimensional Journeys
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
...
Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid,
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago; a church stands near,
By the road an ancient Cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase,
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words [above] are cut:
( From ''Under Ben Bulben,'' by Irish poet, W.B. Yeats,
in Poetry Foundation.
Like W.B Yeats wished for himself with Ben Bulben hill and Drumcliff churchyard in Ireland, and as was granted for him, Nando, the zone primarily associated with the Aku Uka-Greatest King-of Wukari's transition to the world of spirit, is rich with associations of his ancestors, previous Aku Uka who have also passed through there into the Beyond, however that transition is understood, either as the literal transmutation of his body into the world of spirit, as described in Jukun thought, or as the final resting place of his body as his spirit moves on.
History and spirit converge. A hill, churchyard and cross for Yeats, marking the place of final rest for a man dedicated to Irish myth and its pre-Christian culture, evoked by the hill, a mythic and historic place, yet willing to assimilate to himself the newer religion. Nando, for the Aku Uka, where past, present and future converge through all who have passed through there, or whose final passage is associated with the place and all whose motion into the Unknown will be so associated, a shrine to the convergence of spirit and matter, time and eternity.
Dr Shekarau Angyu Masa Ibi Kuvyon ll, the immediate past Aku Uka of Wukari, whose transition rites inspire this essay, shown above resplendent on a horse, the same kind of animal his body would ride in evoking his final voyage, his journey into the Unknown, ferried on a horse to Nando, shared with Yeats that convergence of two social and knowledge universes, the pre-Christian and Christian worlds for Yeats and the Aku Uka, pre-Christian Irish lore coalescing with Christianity and other spiritualities for Yeats, traditional Jukun spirituality and culture converging with Christianity and Western culture for the Aku Uka.
''Sew the old days for us, our fathers,
That we can wear them under our new [clothes]'
After we have washed ourselves in the whirlpool
Of the many rivers estuary''
declares Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor in ''The Anvil and the Hammer.''
''...the late Aku Uka, Dr. Shekarau Angyu Masa Ibi II was a devout Christian of the Reformed Church of Nigeria. Not only that, he was a trained theologian. A friend of mine recounted in our online forum how the departed Aku Uka used to have theological debates and discussion with my friend’s father, a prominent Bible scholar and missionary.
But the Aku Uka was also a man who was not
ashamed of his culture or the traditional religion and rituals of his people.
He skillfully navigated the obligations of both his Christian faith and those
of his ancient Kwararafa/Jukun people and kingdom. He was an excellent model
for how to be a Christian without succumbing to the colonial mentality of
disavowing and rejecting your cultural heritage, history, and traditions. Many of
us can learn from his example.''
Moses Ochonu, ''Ten Further Thoughts on the Aku Uka's Transition,''USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google group, 20 Jan.2022
Image source: Kwararafa People's Assembly. Accessed 2/22/2022
Accompanied Death
Accompanied death, the process of a person dying along with a person already dead, recurs in various civilizations. It emerges in the now defunct Indian tradition of Sati, discontinued by the colonizing British, in which a wife burnt herself alive in the process of her husband's cremation, as discussed in its historical detail on the Wikipedia page of the subject and in its philosophical signicance in Indian thought by Bimal Krishna Matilal (Ethics and Epics : Philosophy, Culture and Religion, Oxford, 2002, 154-158).
It has also been visible in a number of African civilizations. Wole Soyinka builds his play Death and the King's Horseman around that custom as it was demonstrated in 1946 in the Yoruba city of Oyo ( Text, critical and contextualising essays in Wole Soyinka,
Death and the King's Horseman, ed. Simon Gikandi, Norton, 2002). The sections of the play centred on the attempted ritual suicide of the king's horseman who is to follow his lord to the beyond are among his greatest work, in its projection of Yoruba metaphysics in sublime poetry bringing alive the human effort to imagine an ultimate unknown represented by death. This practice has also been described in African cultures as actualized in the forceful seizure of people to be killed in accompaniment of a dead ruler, though whether it still continues in some or all of those cultures, I have not been able to ascertain.
In the case of the Aku Uka of Wukari, in Nigeria, his corpse is seated on a horse, leaning on the horse rider, who rides with the body into a forest believed, by one perspective, to be the abode of spirits where the deceased ruler will achieve his final transition. The spirits, this view states, may or may not decide to take the horse rider along with the deceased ruler, whose body is also believed to experience a fate unknown to any but the spirits and the departed ruler's final companion. The Aku Uka's burial rites in January 2022 yielded a complex of images and texts on social media, in particular, worthy of being preserved and explored as documents of timeless value, a task to which this essay contributes.
Image and Text: Grandeur in Simplicity in the Palace of the Aku Uka of Wukari
The Palace of the Aku Uka of Wukari
in the Time of
Dr Shekarau Angyu Masa Ibi Kuvyon ll, CON
"The Aku Uka of Wukari, His Majesty, Dr Shekarau Angyu Masa Ibi Kuvyon ll, CON, is the newly appointed Chancellor of the Federal University of Lafia.
... his palace...is not among the best built, it does not portray elegance and material riches but… one lesson became absolutely clear to us. That is, material wealth, richness of the king and elegance do not define a palace.
Instead, what defines the size of the palace and respect it commands, are the occupant of the palace and the history he represents."
( Abubakar Ibrahim and Paulinus Auta, "Abdul Rahman's Memorable Visit to Aku Uka of Wukari, " Federal University of Lafia, Sept.5, 2021)
Image Source: Apajukun Reporters. Accessed 2/22/2022
Colour and Paradox in the Burial Rites of the Aku Uka of Wukari
The subject of accompanied death in the burial rites of the Aku Uka is both colorful, given the spectacle of the burial rites, and paradoxical, representing human efforts to manage the enigma of death, an abyss, which, like the time before birth, does not enjoy any universal perspective on it's character, being characterized by general ignorance about it's nature amongst most of humanity.
The paradox emerges in the demand, that in a world where life is the primary identity of each person, an expression of their existence, the most valued of all a person has, subsisting even when the person may have nothing else, a person’s life is demanded as sacrifice or put at risk in the name of a person already dead.
Everyone comes into the world alone, and most people leave alone, but this kind of death insists that someone must depart the world with the person or put his own life at risk in the name of the departed person, escorting them to the beyond by dying with them or risk death in the process of performing part of this ritual of accompaniment.
The horse rider in the Aku Uka's burial rites is depicted in the official narrative as a heroic figure, one commentator even describing him as pursuing his task in a sublime mood as he rides with the body of the deceased ruler to the forest of ultimate transition to the beyond.
Images and Text: The Departed Aku Uka and the Tripod of Power
Image Source: Apajukun Reporters.Accessed 2/22/2022
What is the stone that balances the pot as it is heated by fire?
The Supreme is absolute but through what is it expressed?
Those creatures gazing at the sky wondering what existence is all about?
The Ultimate, the Aku and the dedicates to seeking the ultimate
pointers to something beyond the walls of space and time?
''...the unsurveyable magnitude of worlds upon worlds and systems upon systems...the limitless times of their periodic motion, their beginning and continuation...my invisible self, my personality... a world which has true infinity...an animal creature, which, after it has been for a short time provided with vital power, one knows not how, must again give back the matter of which it was formed to the planet it inhabits (a mere speck in the universe) [yet] an intelligence [ revealing] a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world [pointing to] a destination not restricted to conditions and limits of this life, but reaches into the infinite.'' German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Practical Reason, 1788; trans. Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge, 2012, 133-136.
''The tripod circle [ three circles in which one is positioned on top of the other two,
which touch at their circumference] stands for the respect that the Jukuns give to
God, the Aku, and the Religious Teachers of their time. They believed that just as
the stone is used for balancing of the pot while cooking so also the power of God
depends solidly, on God ’s sovereignty, Aku and the Religious Teacher in the Jukun
community.''
(Okunna and Gausa, 112)
I wonder why it's only authority figures-husbands in patriarchal India in the days when Sati was still performed and rulers in African cultures-that are deemed as needing to be accompanied or honoured by people whose death is enjoined after the authority figure dies.
Why is it rulers alone who need to be guided by the spirits of such people into the beyond after they die? Another dramatization of inequality of persons, trying to prolong feudal hierarchies even into the domain of death, the Great Unknown?
Image and Text: The Eagle Flew from Steeple to Steeple
Image Source: Apajukun Reporters.Accessed 2/22/2022
.png?part=0.3&view=1)
"The eagle flew from
steeple to steeple until it reached Paris." "I flew so high, so high, I seized
my quarry in the end." The Buddha declared,''I have taught all I need to teach
and now must leave.'' So saying he entered into trance, going deeper and deeper
until at last, he entered into Nirvana, beyond being and non-being. His most advanced disciple followed him from trance to deeper trance, until, at last the Buddha's consciousness was gone beyond his ability to follow. ''We must be still and still moving/Into another intensity/ For a further union, a deeper communion/Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,/The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters/ Of the petrel and the porpoise./In my end is my beginning.''
The people of Wukari may
also be said to fly from location to location like eagles, as Clarence Edward Macartney and Gordon Dorrance imaginatively describe the aspirations of Louis Bonaparte in his bid to become French emperor ( The Bonapartes in America, 1939).
They could be seen
as flying in spirit, in identification with the departed Aku Uka, so
powerful is the image they generate of processions of people, respectably
dressed but in the most basic attire, to register withdrawal from the things of
the world, a withdrawal associated with transition to the Great Unknown.
They may not be able
to fly into the Unknown with him as the Buddha's disciple did at his final
departure and as the Christian mystic St. John of the Cross claims of his own
contemplative flight into the sources of existence, in ''On Falconry,'' but they taste, at least a
little, of those aspirations to move from the known to the Ultimate Unknown, as
they are confronted with the mystery that shapes the walls of space and time.
They thus become like far flying sea birds, the petrel and the porpoise, evoked by the English poet T.S.Eliot in "East Coker", as he states, ''in my end is my beginning,'' dramatising cyclic creativity akin to the rhythm of birth, transition and rebirth of the Jukun life cycle, imaged in the new Aku Uka's installation journey from Puje to Nando and back to Puje, an image of human life as a process between states of being on Earth and beyond Earth.
These images of flight between possibilities are suggested for me by the aerodynamic elegance of the Jukun
symbol directly above, described as evoking the sea bird in its search for
food for its children, akin to the king's attitude towards the progress of his
people (Okunna and Gausa, 112).
Books Mapping the Journey Beyond Death
The Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead
The Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, purports to guide a newly deceased person into the Great Beyond through a set of instructions responding to the same mystery as the burial rites of the Aku Uka. It operates, however, through a different understanding of the self, as open to guidance by those in the flesh who guide the departing person through the instructions from the book. This text is a logical development from Buddhist belief in the inevitability of change and the need to manage expecations in relation to change.
In this context, death is perceived as a great opportunity to engage creative possiblities not as readily accessible while a person is living in a physical body, hence the book guides the departing person as to this process, as evident, among other examples,in the version that made it famous, W.Y. Evans Wentz' edited and Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup's translated The Tibetan Book of the Dead or the After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane ( Oxford, 1960).
Images and Text: Collective Mourning
Image Sources: Right: Apajukun Reporters. Left: Apajukun Reporters. Accessed 2/22/2022.Middle, unconfirmed.
Collage by myself.
.png?part=0.9&view=1)
The four directions of
physical space, in their intersection with spiritual space, as these
spatial axes converge in infinity, the centre of the construct where the
four lines meet.
This structure of two intersecting
lines bent at right angles at their ends is perhaps best known as the swastika,
the symbol of the rabidly racist and genocidal German Nazi party that initiated
World War II. The swastika, however, as evident from its name as an adaptation
of svastika, from the ancient Indian language, Sanskrit, is an
ancient, globally occurring symbol for natural, divine and human
creativity, as distinctively understood in various contexts, a scope described
at length in the Wikipedia essay on the symbol.
Okunna and Gausa describe it in Jukun thought as a compass representing the
four cardinal points of the Aku's kingdom, extending to North, South,
East, and West (113).This spatial interpretation and visual structure is
similar to that of the Benin Olokun igha-ede, a means of marking and navigating intersections of spiritual and physical space ( Norma Rosen, "Chalk
Iconography in Olokun Worship,'' African
Arts, 1989, 22 ,3: 44–88) ,
itself part of a family of continental African and Diaspora African
symbols of intersecting vertical and horizontal lines playing a similar role as the igha-ede, such as the Voodoo
peristyle (Leslie Desmangles, "African Interpretations of the Christian
Cross in Vodun,'' Sociology of Religion, 38, 1, 1977, 13–24) and
the pattern drawn on the empty centre of the opon ifa of the Yoruba origin Ifa
system of knowledge (Henry John Drewat et al, Yoruba:Nine Centuries, 1989, 16),.
All these geometric forms share broadly the same meaning as Rosen describes of the
igha-ede, as depicting the unity of physical and spiritual space and time, in
relation to infinity ( ''Chalk Iconography" 48,
51). A similar structure is elaborated into more complex geometric forms
serving a similar symbolic role in the Buddhist mandala and the Hindu yantra ( Maddhu
Khanna, Yantra: The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity, Inner Traditions,
2003).
Such conjunctions facilitate the expansion of the meaning of the Jukun symbol from evoking physical space alone, and the Aku's kingdom primarily, into suggesting space as defined in terms of four directions mapped by the structure of the human body's division into four unified parts, left and right, front and back. These mappings from the human body are complemented by larger natural rhythms and structures, such as the points of the rising and setting of the sun, understood as indicating east, west, north and south.
The belief in the intersection of spiritual and physical space, pervasive across African cultures, could thus be also be evoked by the Jukun symbol, as is done by the other African examples of the quaternary division of space in ritual contexts. In relation to the rites of transition of the Aku Uka, Soyinka's imaginative evocation of the physical/spiritual nexus in an African funerary rite may suggest the possibility of motion within physical and spiritual space such a symbolic progression may assume, within the template of the visual dynamism and multidimensional symbolism of the Jukun symbol being discussed:
In the hours before dawn the song-leaders from the dead Custodian’s household followed Ahime through the sleeping town, swift dark-brushing motions of maroon loin-cloths. All paths must be trodden in the pre-dawn hours, heads bent to the ground, acknowledging no one and seeing none.
A low moan rose, thrilled in the slumbersome air, the earth gave answer in trembling accents, a lead voice prompted the sleep-washed dirge of earth and a sudden motion of feet would thud in velvety unison.
The dark figures swayed backwards, leant into the yielding night membrane, uncoiled in a python lunge upwelling into a darktoned monody. Then they leapt forward again along the path, sending soft vibrations along the path.
Blood, oil, colanuts red and white in clay vessels at every crossroads, slain pigeons at every spot where a founder had fallen, sacrificed or finally rested, at every meaning left behind by the first progenitors. The departed were appeased, venerated, welcomed, touched and brought among the living. The new deceased was on his way. (Season of Anomy, Arena, 1988, 12)
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
It seems the ancient Egyptians also had a similar kind of book as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a text of sublime poetry translated as the Egyptian Book of the Dead, described by Normandi Ellis as The Book of Coming Forth by Day, representing the god Osiris' movement from death to life, "an image of the seed waiting in the dark to burst forth into renewal,’’ as he puts it in his translation Awakening Osiris: The Egyptian Book of the Dead (Phanes, 1988).
Image and Text : The Red of Blood and Dynamism
the rhythms of the earth and of the whole universe
the wise crafts of ancient hands
gathering what is scattered, mending what is broken.
The Golden Dawn Adaptation of the Death and Rebirth of Osiris
The Western esoteric school the Golden Dawn adapts ideas like Ellis’ reading of such ancient Egyptian texts as the Egyptian Book of the Dead as dramatizing Osiris’ “death and rebirth [in illuminating] the path from darkness to light, from unconsciousness to enlightenment’’ (15).
The Golden Dawn synthesizes this idea with other mytho/historical figures such as Jesus and the Rosicrucian Christian Rosencruz, in magnificent ritual and meditations blending ancient Egyptian, Christian, Judaic and Western magical elements into one of the world’s greatest books, equivalent in exalted aspiration to such better known texts as the Bible and the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, but exceeding them in presenting, in detail, techniques of prayer, meditation and ritual for reaching the exalted spiritual heights the texts evoke.
This fusion of the ancient Egyptian and the Christian in an exalted tone is evident in these lines from Israel Regardie’s edited The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Weiser, 2003, 334:
Osiris-on-Nophris hath said:
These are the Elements of my Body,
Perfected through Suffering, Glorified through Trial.
For the scent of the Dying Rose is as the repressed Sigh of
my suffering;
And the flame-red Fire as the Energy of mine Undaunted Will:
And the Cup of Wine is the pouring out of the Blood of my Heart:
Sacrificed unto Regeneration, unto the Newer Life:
And the bread and Salt are as the Foundations of my Body,
Which I destroy in order that they may be renewed.
As correctly argued by some commentators on the Aku Uka's burial rites, the Christian Mass distills ideas of human self-sacrifice in the eating of the flesh and drinking of the blood of Jesus Christ, in the symbolic manner instituted by Jesus himself.
This is a transformation of the idea of ritual cannibalism, reported in different parts of the world, as a method of imbibing the virtues of a deceased person by partaking of their biological remains, transposing this idea from the zone of physical enactment to that of symbolic action, where consuming the bread/wafer and wine replace the older practice of eating a person’s flesh and drinking the person's blood.
Image and Text: Celebrating the Joy of Life as Life Moves On
A life well lived is a cause for joy when it achieves elevation to an existence beyond the limitations of space and time. Will it return again to that spatio-temporal matrix in a cycle of continuous growth, as African, Asian and other theories of reincarnation indicate? Hence the balance of sobriety and joy, of gravitas and splendour in the transition rites of the Aku Uka. The poet of the Indian Rig Veda, translated by Ralph Griffith as celebrating the glory of the rising of the sun from the depths of night, evokes a related sense of renewal: "Last of the countless mornings that have vanished, first of bright morns to come has Dawn arisen."
Image Sources: Left, Middle,: Apajukun. Right: source unrecovered.
Collage by myself.
Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman
"Is there now a streak of light at the end of the passage, a light I dare not look upon? Does it reveal whose voices we often heard, whose touches we often felt, whose wisdoms come suddenly into the mind when the wisest have shaken their heads and murmured; It cannot be done?' , are the drums on the other side now tuning skin to skin with ours in [the cult house at ] osugbo?" declares the praise singer, Olohun Iyo, the Honey Voiced One, urging the Elesin, the king's horseman, in his journey to escort the king through the portals of death in Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman ( Six Plays, Methuen, 1984, 143-220;185; sequence of lines slightly modified)
That particular journey was aborted because the ritual dance into a magical death was interrupted by the colonizing British who saw it as their duty to prevent someone killing himself to escort another through what no one actually understands, as they must have thought.
That "dance into death" is likely no more performed in Oyo, from where Soyinka got the story, but Soyinka's rendition remains valid as a powerful ritual which anyone may use as a means of leading the mind to explore what may exist beyond the conventionally perceptible, the world of the ancestors and the zone beyond death, similar rituals being employed for that purpose by shamans.
Image and Text: Youth, Age and Childhood Converge
Youth, Age and Childhood Converge at the Transition Rites of the Aku Uka of Wukari
A small child works his way off the edges of his sleeping mat
a bird soars high above it all
looked into the mirror of Ifa
seeking the sprouts of tomorrow in the seeds of today
seeking to shape the spaces of the days to come
through cultivating today’s earth.
“Where do you go?”
“Why do you go?”
I go from orun to ayé
from the world of ultimate origins to the world of Earth
from the zone beyond space and time to the material cosmos shaped by time
and space.
I come from the space of absolute potential
to the expression of that potential in the space of earth and water, air and fire.
I come with they seeking wisdom.
I come seeking the source of the great river.
What are the ultimate possibilities of human knowledge?
How may we explore this scope?
How can we understand ourselves,
the universe,
what it contains
and, what, if anything, is behind the cosmos
responsible for its existence?
The river has crossed the path
The path has crossed the river
Which is the elder?
We made the path and found the river
The river is from long ago
The river is from the creator of the universe.
The poem directly above is a reworking of Kolawole Ositola’s narration of a poem from the Yoruba origin
Ifa system of knowledge, providing an interpretive matrix for the journey of
learning represented by the life of the initiate of Òṣùgbò, a version of
the Yoruba origin Ògbóni esoteric order, as presented in Margaret
Thompson Drewal’s Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency (Indiana UP, 1992, 33) in a discussion that runs from pages 32-38, embedded
within chapter 3, “The Ontological Journey.”
This discussion occurs within the context of the book’s
grounding in the idea from Yoruba thought,
of ritual as journey, in which ritual is microcosmic of the progression of human life as a transformative process. This process is actualized, as Drewal’s interprets it, in terms of spiral
rhythm representing Yoruba spirituality’s
understanding of life as a continuous transition between birth on Earth,
leaving Earth and rebirth on Earth (46-47).
The opening of the poem quotes the first two lines of the poem from Ositola. I rework the rest of the poem, in lines either composed by myself or adapted from other sources, as well as adapt his exposition of the poem.
From "What
are the ultimate possibilities of human knowledge? To "what, if anything, is
behind the cosmos/responsible for its existence?” is a summation of philosophy, as growing out of “curiosity
and wonder; wonder about life, existence, universe, nature, [humanity]”
speculating about the “complexities of the universe and its constituents”( 39),
through a focus on the philosophical fields of epistemology “a critical enquiry
into the nature, foundations, limits and possibilities of knowledge” (29) and
metaphysics which explores “the nature and structure of reality as a whole as
well as the place of humans in the universe”(29), as philosophy is described
and those sub-fields defined by
Adegboyega Oyekunle Oluwayemisi in “The Metaphysical and Epistemological Relevance of Ifa Corpus”, International Journal of History and Philosophical Research, Vol.5. 1. Feb. 2017.28-40.
These sub-fields are rightly described by him as
“fundamental in the ultimate aim of human kind to understand and unravel the
reality that surrounds their existence” (39) in the effort to address the most
strategic questions of human existence represented by “ ‘Who am I?’, ‘Where am
I coming from?’, ‘Where am I?’, ‘What can I do?[ How should I live?]’, ‘Where
am I going to?’ ” (29)
Though Oluwayemisi’s succinct analysis helps interpret the poetic expressions, the expressions were inspired by David Bell’’s summation of Kant’s central project ( From “Kant” in The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy. Ed. Nicholas Bunnin and E.P.Tsui-James. Blackwell, 1996. 589-606, 590) and Peter Jones, in the same book, on English philosopher David Hume’s key themes (571-588, 573).
From “The river has crossed the path” to “The river is from the creator of the universe” and from “Slowly and patiently, I get on my feet” to “From time immemorial” further down in the poem are quotations from “Akan Poetry” by Kwabena Nketia in Ulli Beier’s edited Introduction to African Literature ( Longman, 1980, 23-33. 30-31).The poem and its explanation come from my forthcoming "Tales of Mystery and Power 5: The Magic of Human Creativity 2:Ògbóni Aesthetics in a Multicultural Context.''
Image Sources: Middle: Apajukun. Right and Left (Sources unrecovered). Collage by myself.
Imaginative Transpositions, Modifying Cultural Forms While Retaining their Evocative Essence
Hindu Mysticism
Discussing ‘’Sacrificial Mysticism’’ in his Hindu Mysticism, 2002, Surendranath Dasgupta superbly describes the interrelation of physical and contemplative ritual, of revelation and reason, in the emergence of the more exalted aspects of Hinduism.
He describes some Indian contemplatives as moving from the practice of sacrificing a horse in a ritual that identifies the animal with the configurations of the cosmos, an animal/cosmos identification observable as similar, but without the aspect of sacrifice, to that of the Fulani in relation to cattle, as described by Germaine Dieterlen in her co-edited, with Meyer Fortes, African Systems of Thought ( Oxford, 1966, 314-327). The Hindu thinkers visualized the dimensions of the horse in relation to cosmic structure, thereby lifting the ritual process from the physical to the mental plane, thus making unnecessary the killing of the horse:
The next step in the development of this type of mysticism consists in the growth of a school of thought which sought to intellectualize the material sacrifices. It encouraged the belief that it was quite unnecessary actually to perform the sacrifices requiring the expenditure of enormous sums of money for the collection of materials and for labor. The same results might be as well obtained through certain kinds of meditation or reflection.
Thus, instead of the actual performance of a horse sacrifice, in which the immolation of a horse is accompanied by other rituals engaging the services of large numbers of men and the expenditure of funds such as kings alone could provide, one might as well think of the dawn as the head of a horse, the sun as its eye, the wind as its life, the heaven [s] as its back, the intervening space as its belly, the sky as its flesh and the stars as its bones.
Such a meditation, or rather concentrated imagining of the universe as a cosmic horse, would, it was maintained, produce all the beneficial results that could be expected from the performance of an actual horse sacrifice.
Thus, these attempts to intellectualize sacrifices took the form of replacing by meditation the actual sacrifices, and this substitution was believed to produce results which were equally beneficial ( 18-19).
Image: The Horseman on his Way to Nando, the Unknown, with the Departing Aku Uka
Image Source: Apajukun
The Coronation Ceremonies of the Oba of Benin
A related process of symbolic distillation occurs in the coronation ceremonies of the Oba of Benin-one of the world's greatest symbolic and ritual spectacles- in which various episodes in Benin history, such as the battle between the Oba's forces and those of Ogiamen when the 13th century Oba Ewedo moved his court from Usama, outside what is now the Benin centre, to it's current centre, are symbolically re-enacted, as described in Joseph Nevadomsky's "Kingship Succession Rituals in Benin. 3: The Coronation of the Oba" ( African Arts,1984) and my “Developing the Philosophical and Mystical Possibilities of the Coronation Ceremonies of the Oba of Benin 1 : Vision and Method” ( Great Benin blog, USAAfrica Dialogues Series, 2018) and the forthcoming “The River Floweth Not but the Bridge Floweth : The Ferryman Motif in the Coronation Ceremonies of the Oba of Benin in a Comparative Context : Developing the Philosophical and Mystical Possibilities of the Coronation Ceremonies of the Oba of Benin 3.”
The process of transforming history into symbolic action, of replacing or modifying physical ritual with more abstract distillations, is a useful guide to retaining the ideational essence of a practice while modifying it's expression.
Images and Text: The Return of the Companions
He is gone, but we remain. Where he has gone, we cannot go. But we can remember the fire of transformation, transmuting the self as the moth is consumed by the flame, his essence evoked by the casket of remembrance we brought with us from the final trek, a casket recalling the mystery of his vanishing. Body to earth, consumed by worms, or body transformed into spirit, to join the bygone voyagers, or spirit rising from body, seeing us yet invisible to us? Brother, remember us.
Image Sources: Left, Top Middle, Bottom Middle, Top Right, Bottom Right: Apajukun
Collage by myself.
Reworking the Aka Uka’s Burial Rite in the Name of Sanctity of Life
In relation to the now controversial the idea of another person having to face the prospect of actual death in order to escort the Aka Uka to the beyond, I wondered if an approach could not be found to make sure the motif of the ride of the departed to the beyond with the help of the living escort is retained, but steps are taken to make sure the escort returns to society after the exploit, having suffered no actual danger in the process.
The idea of navigating dangerous terrain, engaging wild animals and deadly spirits in majestic forest may be expressed instead in symbolic terms, as is done with the evocation of Oba Ewedo’s battle with Ogiamen in the coronation ceremonies of the Oba of Benin.
After all, the spirits described as reached through the forest where the deceased is being taken to should be amenable to persuasion that times have changed, as Ochonu observes even as he credits the cultural integrity of the burial rites, and so those spirits could be encouraged to shoulder more of the task of assisting the Aku Uka in crossing over to their world without the escort having to follow him. The escort's job would end with ferrying the body of the deceased to the meeting point with the spirits.
If the escort has to travel through forest dangerous with wild animals and spirits, adversaries that could finish him off, a more benign place could be used in place of such a dangerous region.
Image: The Horseman, Sallah Atobe, Just After his Return from Nando
At Unravelling Pankya: The Transition Rites of the Aku Uka, the live Facebook discussion on this subject on the 22nd of January, 2022, Dr. Shishi Zhema, a Jukun cultural expert who described himself as also on the ceremony’s planning committee, made it clear that because some of the Aku's escorts had failed to return in the past, rigorous divination is now conducted to ensure the gods guide the planners of the rites in choosing the right person for the job, a person whose personal qualities, along with the gods’ own protection, will make sure he returns from the journey of escorting the Aku Uka to Nando, the zone of the Aku Uka's transmutation to the spirit world.
He also made clear, if I recall correctly, that Nando, mysterious as it is, is a place with it's own guardians, who maintain it.
I'm struck by what I understand as the Jukun ritual architects’ manner of creating and sustaining mystery, and protecting human life in the process.
Image: The Horseman With his Wife after his Return from Nando
Image Source
" Wukari Monarch Death: Wife of Wukari Horseman Say She No Go Allow her Husband Enter Forest Again"
BBC News Pidgin, 17th Jan.2022
and
The Feminine Imperative in Pankya as Symbol Nexus
I'm also struck by the centrality of the feminine persona in the process, as it relates to the creativity of female biology and the honouring of this by a community.
Zhema stated that Puje, the place that is the starting point of the Aku's final earthly journey, plays that role because it is strategic in the personal history of the founder of present day Jukun communal life, the first Aku Uka of Wukari, after the fall of the Kwararafa kingdom, a previous social system from which present day Jukun emerged.
On his journey from the collapse of the Kwararafa empire, his wife entered into her period in the place that is now known as Puje, hence he had to wait there for several days.
Having established what is now known as the Wukari community, Puje became the place where every new Aku's wife receives him when he ascends the throne as well as the point from where his final earthly journey begins in earnest to Nando, the point of his final transition.
On ascending the throne, he journeys from Puje to Nando and back to Puje. This is a motion from the zone of fecundative promise represented by Puje in its association with the power of female biology.This location represents the promise of the beginning of terrestrial life evoked by its association with the first Aku's wife's biological imperatives. The journey moves from Puje to Nando, the point of the Aku's eventual transition to the spirit world at the end of his terrestrial life. The journey then returns to Puje, the location representing the promise of the beginning of terrestrial life evoked by its association with the first Aku's wife's biological imperatives, as I would interpret this reverse progression, if I recall it clearly enough.
This is a progression from the zone representing the beginning of a kingship to its end and back to the point of its beginning. In beginning from Puje, a nexus evoking female procreativity enabling the continuity of the human species, to Nando, suggesting the end of terrestrial life and the idea of entry into the world of spirit, the Aku Uka's transition and kingship installation rites dramatise the dynamism of life as a motion between primal possibbilities, between beginnings, endings and continuations, between visible and invisible transmutations, between biology and spirit, between motion through the material universe, beyond it and back to the material universe.
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The Pankya and Pankan Circle of Being and Becoming
"In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning"
Anglo-American poet, T.S.Eliot in ''Little Gidding'' of the Four Quartets cycle.
The circle of human existence goes from Puje to Nando and back to Puje.
From the possibility of life evoked by the blood of women in the cycles of the
the moon to
the final doorway between matter and spirit, is death final?
Do
we but step through a door into another space, as is
said of the Aku Uka of Wukari?
"Is there a light at the end of the passage, a light I dare not look upon?’’ Does it
reveal bygone voyagers, those “whose voices [are] often heard, whose touches
[are] often felt, whose wisdoms come suddenly into the mind when the wisest have
shaken their heads and murmured; It cannot be done?," as Wole Soyinka insightfully
puts it in A Shuttle in the Crypt and Death and the King's Horseman?
The Challenge of Pankya and Pankan Scholarship, Writing and Presentation
The installation and transition rites of the Aku Uka are symbolic dramas rich in historical, communal and spiritual values. I wonder what scholarly or more general explorations may have been done of those rich rites. The possibilities are immense. People are referencing the need for written expositions of this dramatic and spiritual complex.
Essays and books exploring the entire rites and parts of them would be wonderful, dramatising their great visual power, as demonstrated both by the general Jukun populace, visitors from outside the Jukun and the ritual and other symbolic activities carried out.
Ideally, this complex should have a dedicated website for the installation and transition transition of each Aku Uka and all linked through a central website or a single website employed to host the official descriptions, explanations and analyses of these rites.
Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and perhaps other social media would be vital locations for the real time dissemination of this information with an official book coming out of the proceedings, a book replete with first class photography.
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Change, symbolised by the chameleon's ability to change its colour, is evoked by the spiral in Jukun thought, according to Okunna and Gausa (111). The spiral and the chameleon are among the richest of African symbols while the spiral is one of the richest symbols in the world, as demonstrated by Jill Purce's The Mystic Spiral:Journey of the Soul ( Thames and Hudson, 2008).
In the African context, the values of the spiral include the spiral of cosmic unity evoked by the curled formations of reptiles in Igbo thought and the spiral of solar illumination, journey and eternity in Cross River and SE Nigerian Nsibidi symbolism (
(Robin Sanders, The Legendary Uli Women of Nigeria: Their Life Stories in Signs, Symbols, and Motifs, XLibris, 2013; "Nsibidi," in Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, 2008-2008).
The symbolism of the chameleon includes the Vagina of the Chameleon, in the Oshun forest in Nigeria. Passing through this evocation of birth space suggests rebirth into new awareness in the transformation of the forest into a microcosm of Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology by Susanne Wenger and her artistic school ( Rolf Brockmann and Gerd Hotter, Adunni: A Portrait of Susanne Wenger, Machart, Hamburg, 1994; Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, ''Aetelier Wenger and Relationships between Space and Form'', Space of Becoming blog, 12th March 2009 and ''Womb Wisdom to Cosmic Wisdom: Women and African Spiritualities in Africa and the Diaspora,'' The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies, ed. Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso and Toyin Falola, Palgrave, 2021, 2187-2208; 2198).
This chameleon symbolism also includes the tension between positive and negative qualities represented by the chameleon in Fulani thought as described by Amadou Hampâté Bâ (Kaidara: A Fulani Cosmological Epic from Mali, Three Continents Press, 1988, strophes 1755-1830 and ''The Five Teachings of the Chameleon'' translated by Wanda Boeke. Accessed 4/5/2022).
It also resonates with the cognitive unity of the opposites defining existence, grasping them in terms of cosmic unity, a perceptual scope evoked by the 360 degree vision attributed to the chameleon, as this ideal is described of Zulu thought by Mazisi Kunene, “When the cosmic mind grinds its elements of
experience into a totality of knowledge, it acquires a discipline which ...erases the boundaries between the past
and The present, the living and the dead, the physical
and the non-physical. The individual initiate acquires, like a chameleon’s
all-round vision, the power to conceptualise the totality of life at once” (Anthem of the Decades, 1981, xxxiii ).
It also includes the limitless splendour of Osanobua, the creator of the universe, dramatised by the infinite transformative capacity of his servant, the chameleon, as represented in Benin myth ( as narrated and explained by myself in '' A Son,his Father and his Father's Servant: The Aesthetic and Cognitive Power of Benin Olokun Narrative and Visual Symbolism,'' Yoruba Affaris Google group, 29.Nov.2010, using a story from Bolaji Idowu's, African Traditional Religion: A Definition, SCM Press,1973, 152).
The chameleon curls its tail into a spiral, thereby suggesting the unity of the values associated with both the spiral and the chameleon's own capacity for changing colour. The chameleon therefore correlates the biologically derived associations of the spiral, as occurring in such natural formations as snail shells, with its more abstract, mathematical values, as evident in various African and non-African contexts ( As discussed in ''The Equiangular Spiral'' in D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's On Growth and Form, Cambridge, 1992, 172-201, a discussion adapted to the exploration of logarithmic spirals by William Babbitt, et al in ''Adinkra Mathematics: A Study of Ethnocomputing in Ghana,''Multidisciplinary Journal of Educational Research, 5 (2), 110-135. 116-119. 110-135).
In relation to Pankya, the chameleon and its spiral associations could unify
all conceivable interpretive possibilities of this motif, subsuming them into
Pankya symbolism as dramatising the dynamism of life, represented by biologically
created spiral formations, reaching beyond life as conventionally understood to
questions of life beyond the gateway of death.
These associations, adapting those already referenced here, constitute a spiral of possibilities
reaching from the sun that illuminates terrestrial existence, in a journey into
eternity, peering into questions of the perenniality of life, seen as going
beyond materiality into the infinite, or as persisting in a spiral formation of
birth, transition and rebirth, understood literally in terms of individual
transformation or metaphorically as the human race constantly replenishing
itself in its journey into the unknown.
Correlative Need for Adequate Study and Presentation of the Coronation Ceremonies of the Oba of Benin
The coronation ceremonies of the Oba of Benin, one of the greatest symbolic spectacles in the world, also need a similar concentrated effort of representation and analysis, complementing the amazing images and basic explanations that came out on Facebook and other online outlets from the last coronation through the general public and privileged participants in those rites.
I am not aware of any initiative from the Oba's palace or the Edo State government dedicated to the presentation of this sublime historical spiritual and symbolic drama. Such a presentation would benefit from the magnificent three part, richly illustrated essays on the coronation ceremonies and a summative essay on the same subject by Joseph Nevadomsky, along with others by other people, including my own two essays on the subject, with a third one and perhaps more forthcoming, representing a fraction of the possibilities of study of these ceremonies.
In fact, such a ceremony as the Oba of Benin's coronation is so rich, a dedicated scholarly team should be set up for it's study, in relation to the entire complex of Benin culture.
Image and Text: Majesty in Simplicity as New Aku Uka Assumes His Role
Majesty in Simplicity as New Aku Uka, His Royal Majesty Manu Ishaku Adda Agbumanu Ali 25th, Aku-
Uka, Assumes His Role at the Installation Rites of the Aku Uka of Wukari
Awesome gravitas. Suspenseful presence of attendants. A great image. Particularly so in the absolute austerity of the central figure, the new Aku Uka, reinforced by that of his companions, all minimally but decently clothed, barefooted on naked earth, feet covered in dust, in wild, natural space.
Why does he look so grave, like a person
shouldering great pain? Is the gravitas of his new role so great? Surely, long
past are the days when it was held that the new Aku Uka would eventually have
to die willingly at the hands of his own attendants, a death held to
prevent a disconnection between his office as Aku Uka and the cosmic forces it
maintained connection with on behalf of his people's well being.
A death engineered when famine,
possibly recurring in seven year cycles, or aging or illness, indicated that
this connection was either broken or was in danger of being broken, according
to Michael Young in ''The Divine Kingship of the Jukun: A
Re-Evaluation of Some Theories'' ( Africa: Journal of the International
African Institute, Vol. 36, No. 2, 1966,135-153), a process of regicide-king killing- poignantly described by Young:
Responsibility for the
king's death lay with the senior counsellors of the king-the same officials who
were to choose his successor. These senior counsellors or state
officials, of which there were traditionally four or five, were usually close
agnates [ a relative from the male line of the family] of the king. It was they who are
said to have decided whether or when a king should be killed.
They charged the king's most intimate personal attendants with the task of execution, which was carried out at night with the utmost secrecy. It is said that if a king tried to summon help to save himself, he was reminded by his executioners that they were but performing the ancient custom and that he should behave quietly as did his ancestors. There was a clear expectation of the king's acquiescence.
There were certain minimal or negative requirements: the king must not be killed publicly or by spontaneous violence, nor must his blood be shed; the approval and co-operation of the chief minister, the Abo Achuwo, was essential and the royal diviner had to give divine sanction-even if it was necessary to bribe him. Secret strangulation was the only legitimate means of slaying a king, though the present Aku asserts that poison rather than strangulation was the rule.
Finally, no one with a claim to the throne might witness, much less take part in, the execution. The strict injunction regarding the secrecy of the whole operation and its aftermath served to minimize conflict between contenders for the succession. Overt political machinations were discouraged.
Paradoxically, it was the most intimate royal attendants who were said to have actually slain the king, yet it was these very officials who were recruited by the king from among his uterine relatives [ descended from a female figure] for the expressed purpose of 'surrounding himself with attendants whose families had no claim to the throne' in order to secure his safety (142. Quote slightly modified for continuity).
Or has some ritual injury been imposed on him on account of his new office? Or could he be responding to eating the powdered heart of his predecessor whose arm he must retain, all as means of transfer of spiritual power across the lineage of Aku Uka, if that tradition continues at this time? ( ''Divine Kingship,''149)
Or is he expressing the
new orientation of self represented by his role as symbolizing ''the
whole society and [thus] must not become identified with any part of it...his
office...raised to a mystical plane (137) as ''the supreme incarnation' of deity,'' ''an earthly image of the plurality of the gods,’’ constituted by ''a
creator and creatrix, the cosmic deities of natural and celestial
phenomena, the 'tutelary' or cult deities, and the ancestral spirits,
four main categories of supernatural beings collectively designated Basho-the
mighty ones''? (145, slightly modified).
Perhaps the reality of his new identity dawns on him:
At the point of integration between nature, society, and the gods, the king's ritual task was superhuman: a god unlike other gods, a man unlike other men, he must yet be acceptable to both. He must live in harmony with his officials and the various groups they represent, with the priests of the various cults, and with his own ancestors . Transcending nature by controlling it and transcending society by embodying it (150-151. Sequence slightly modified).
Whatever has happened, his mien, his stance and those of others around him suggests he has experienced an initiation into a new reality.
Image Source: Tijani Sale
Issues of Adequacy of Cultural Exploration in Relation to Various African Systems
Benin culture is every bit as rich as that of the Yoruba, but I'm not aware of any other Nigerian people whose culture has been studied as much as that of the Yoruba by the Yoruba themselves, by African and Diaspora non-Yoruba Africans and by non- Africans.
Between Yoruba Ifa and Benin Ohminigbon
Material on the Yoruba origin Ifa divination system, for example, is everywhere, but much less so on the Benin divination system Ohminigbon, much on Yoruba epistemology and metaphysics, from "oju inu" to "ase", can be read online and offline, but much less so on Benin thought.
Image and Text: Transformation of the New Aku Uka
I wonder how a person can project such a sense of portentous meaning simply through the expression on their face and the way they hold their body, as the new Aku Uka is doing in these pictures. Is he demonstrating his own self generated sensitivity to his new role or is he responding to ritual practices meant to empower him in that role, reconfiguring consciousness through mysterious agencies that inspire juwe, the creative and potentially destructive power inhering in the Aku, ''immortal and inviolable,'' linking him with the Aku before him and those after, a community of power? ( Michael Young, ''Divine Kingship,'' 149).
His attendants at this historic moment, in this powerfully evocative scene, are themselves charged with a sense of gravitas and sensitivity to the actualisation of something beyond the conventional, a king understood to be deity though he was previously a man.
Image Source: Tijani Sale
Benin Erhia and Other Benin Cognitive Strategies
The only reference I have seen to the very rich Benin hermeneutic term "erhia", for example, comes from one article by Daryl Peavy, "The Benin Monarchy : Olokun and Iha Ominigbon" (Umẹwaẹn: Journal of Benin and Ẹdo Studies, Vol.1, 2016, 95-217 on blog and pdf) while Benin philosophies and spiritualities are not much visible in written texts, in my view, apart from the academically positioned and superb work of people like Charles Gore, Ben Amos, Bradbury, Ndubuisi Ezoluomba and Norma Rosen, whose first hand account of Olokun initiation and symbolism is wonderful, central to my own work on Olokun.
Image and Text: The Aku Uka as Embodying Human Birth and Ultimate Transition
The Aku Uka is a person
who begins his entry into his office through a journey from Puje, a space
suggesting humanity's biological origins in female fertility, to Nando, a
zone evoking the human being's dissapearance from the world of fellow humans at
the person's final transition, the living, breathing personality vanishing from
the body it animated into a zone unknown to most but described in Jukun
thought as the world of ''they whose wisdoms come suddenly to the mind when the
wisest have shaken their heads and uttered 'it cannot be done,' '' adapting Soyinka's
depiction of a similar idea from Yoruba thought in his Death and the King's
Horseman.
Not suprising, then, that the Aku's face is shaped in terms of deep
sentivity, perhaps, to the emergence into something greater than his humanity. This is the
abyss of birth and final transition that his entry into office dramatises,
an encapsulation of mystery humanity tries to address and perhaps transcend
through methods of divinization, as in the understanding of the Aku as crossing
over into becoming divine once the rites of initiation into his new role are
completed, a person who embraces and transcends the ultimate mysteries of
birth and death, an agent of the Ultimate.
Henceforth, he shall be gorgeously attired and befits his role as the ultimate terrestrial leader of his people, but these initiatory ceremonies may enjoin that, in his heart, he should always be clothed in the basic sense of the wrapper tied in the manner of a woman as in the picture directly above, possibly evoking the human emergence from uterine space, its colour suggesting the thick red of blood in which the squalling infant is covered as it enters the world from womb space.
The Aku Uka will henceforth wear splendid shoes, but it may be enjoined that in his heart he should always be barefoot, as in this picture, feet touching Earth, the ultimate mother who feeds humans in life and receives the body of the human being in their spirit's departure from Earth. Hence the sense of the new Aku as an embodiment of the mysteries of birth and transition may be evoked in the lines below. They are drawn from varied literatures across the world reflecting on these ultimate mysteries and used here in evoking the kind of depth of thought the Aku's features in the picture above suggest:
I have seen the end from the beginning.
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the
stars, which thou hast ordained
what is man that thou art mindful of him
and the son of man that thou visitest him?
within the unfathomable immensity of worlds beyond worlds
and systems within systems
and then into the limitless times of their periodic motion,
their beginning and continuation
annihilating my significance as an animal creature
which must give back to the planet
a mere point in the universe, the matter from which it came
the matter which is for a little time
provided with vital force, we know not how
fearfully and wonderfully made
in secret, in the depths of the earth.
In my end is my beginning.
(Text sources: Opening line adapted from line one of T.S. Eliot's ''East Coker.''
Lines 2-5: from Psalm 8:3-4, King James Bible. Lines 6-14:Immanuel Kant,
Critique of Practical Reason, 1788; trans. Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge, 2012,
133-136. Lines 15-16: from Psalm 139, 14 and 15, King James Bible, slightly
adapted. Last line: T. S. Eliot, ''East Coker.''
Image Source: Tijani Sale
Between Yoruba Aje and Benin Azen
Much is available on the mysterious idea of the Yoruba aje, in spite of the largely ideational and speculative nature of the material, unbalanced by more investigative aspects of study. Exceptions are represented by Hallen and Sodipo's Knowledge, Belief and Witchcraft (Lilian Barber, 1986), the relevant section on self initiation into aje in Pierrer Verger's Ewe: The Uses of Plants in Yoruba Society ( Odebrecht, 1995) and Mercedes Morgana Rees' efforts, on Facebook and offline, to create an initiatory school along such lines, which unfortunately seems to have collapsed under charges of false representation.
The Yoruba aje concept may be described as referencing a form of witchcraft, correlative with the varieties of witchcraft ideas in Western history from the negative to the positive, and often related to conceptions of the feminine. The correlative Benin concept of "azen" is little known outside Benin, talk less studied.
My exposure to scholarship and discourse on Benin, however, is even less systematic than that on the Yoruba. I have not looked carefully at such biblios on Benin studies as that by Gore nor looked into most of the issues of the journal of Benin studies, Umẹwaẹn: Journal of Benin and Ẹdo Studies set up by Uyilawa Usuanlele and his collaborators, and so my assessment is more rough than specific, my exposure more episodic than organized but I think that I'm likely to be right on the comparative scope of study between Benin/Edo and Yoruba cultures and their philosophies and spiritualities and on the need for better organized and more extensive efforts in representing and studying the coronation ceremonies of the Oba of Benin.
Image: The New Aku Uka Seated in State
Image Source: ''Congratulations on Your Coronation, HRM Manu Ishaku Adda Ali Aku Uka of Wukari''
Frontline News, 2022.
Jukun Cognitive and Performative Forms
Similar observations may be made about the level of study and exposure to the world, of Jukun culture in it's evident wealth, it's knowledge systems, its forms of visual, verbal and performative symbolism, on dramatic display at the transition and installation rites.
Between Cross River, South East Nigerian and South West Cameroonian Nsibidi
and Yoruba Ifa
Another classical Nigerian system of knowledge crying out for study and depiction adequate to it's evocative power, communicative force, imaginative creativity and structural genius is Cross River and South East Nigeria and South West-Cameroonian Nsibidi, organized in terms of a subtle and complex network of associations between graphic arts, gestural arts, arts of arrangements of objects, performative arts of symbolic physical motion, masquerade spectacle and language, convergences structured within a cosmological system.
Some years ago, the masquerade arts and perhaps a surface presentation of Nsibidi were presented to UNESCO for recognition as a monument in the world's intangible heritage, like the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge has been so recognized.
Not surprisingly, it did not work. The crafters of the application seemed to have focused on the masquerade element. Masquerade is everywhere, including the visually colossal Igbo Ijele masquerade, whose symbolization of the Igbo material and spiritual cosmos is readily learnt about.
The application explicitly stated they would not be divulging the arcana of Nsibidi symbolism. I could not see how their application could succeed without a significant degree of such openness.
The specific symbolism of the primary organizational matrices of Ifa, the 256 odu ifa, are not often discussed in writing, from my last exploration of the subject some years ago, but the vast scope of the varied literary works they symbolize is readily accessible, while the structural ingenuity of the system, unifying creative mathematical organization expressed through spatial and graphic symbolism, correlated with literature and the visual and performative arts, is readily appreciable and endlessly presented and discussed online and offline.
Nsibidi, as publicly presented, reveals little of the symbolism of it's graphic forms, it's best known feature, and last I knew, little of it's gestural symbolism or arts of stylized motion, while it's arts of object arrangement were never displayed in all in the works I have read on the subject, from PhD theses to book chapters, journal articles and museum exhibition brochures.
It's that demonstration of symbolic range and multi-expressive scope that is the unique element of Nsibidi but how will Nsibidi get the recognition it deserves if these qualities are largely hidden from the public?
Can't a method be devised to sustain the economic value of Nsibidi esotericism since it seems people pay to learn this knowledge within the hierarchical structure of such esoteric systems as Ekpe and Mgbe?
Knowledge of Ifa symbolism is not the same as Ifa practice as spirituality or divination, which is centred on the application of the theory of Ifa.
Can't a method be found to balance theory and practice in Nsibidi in terms of public access to knowledge about the system, focusing on making money through book publications and less of monetization of the learning process, opening the system up in the name of cultural preservation and projection?
The visual artist Victor Ekpuk has done great work in dramatising the evocative potential of Nsibidi, his centre of inspiration as he explores various expressive possibilities and creates his own expressive forms. Literature on his work clarifies and expands the possibilities of his project. Toyin Falola's monumental edited Victor Ekpuk: Connecting Lines Across Space and Time, the first print book on Ekpuk (Pan African University Press, 2018) goes a long way in laying foundations for sustained Ekpuk scholarship.
The novelist Nnedi Okoroafor is also exploring the possibilities of Nsibidi in her novels. The Nsibidi activist Nsibiri is working seriously on developing a readable script from Nsibidi. I am developing what I describe as Nsibidi/Ekpuk Philosophy and Mysticism. These initiatives, among others, are made possible by the evocative power of the fraction of knowledge on Nsibidi available to the public, people responding to the evocative force of its graphic arts, coupled with some exposure to its symbolism.
What more could be achieved with greater opening up of the system?
Image and Text: The Star of the Ultimate
(Okunna and Gausa, 112)
Can the creator and sustainer of the universe, if such an identity exists, have a personality, a structure of orientations representing how they view themselves and the universe? Without a personality, is any coherent action possible? Is the cosmos the outcome of furtuitous convergences with no originating motive force?
Can an identity represented by the scope of cosmic creativity be reflected in the personality of a human being, as is alleged of the Aku Uka in relation to the Atswi symbol?
The aspiration to embody the divine is one of the most pofound of ideas, a vision running from equating rulers with deity to understanding other humans in such terms, including the development of methods for achieving this goal.
The Indian Upanishads dramatise this vision at the nexus of conceptions of death and immortality, ideas also woven around the person of the Aku Uka in relation to his installation and final transition, in his journeys between Puje and Nando, origination and transition, beginings and final transmutation.
In the Katha Upanishad, Death and Nachiketas are in dialogue as Nachiketas asks how one may go beyond Death, upon which Death responds after much pressure to give up his ultimate secret:
Count the links of the chain:
worship the triple Fire: knowledge, meditation, practice;
the triple process: evidence, inference, experience;
the triple duty: study, concentration, renunciation;
understand that everything comes from Spirit,
that Spirit alone is sought and found;
attain everlasting peace; mount beyond birth and death.
When man understands himself, understands universal Self,
the union of the two, kindles the triple Fire, offers the sacrifice;
then shall he, though still on earth, break the bonds of death, beyond sorrow, mounts into heaven.
(The Ten Principal Upanishads. Trans. by Shree Purohit Swami and W.B.Yeats. Faber and Faber, 1952, 27)
Akan and Gyaman Adinkra
Another African symbol system that might have much more to it than is conventionally known is the Ghanaian Akan and Gyaman visual symbol system Adinkra. Adinkra is not known to be esoteric, to harbour interpretive possibilities known to its adepts which are not known to the public, but Ghanaian esotericist and artist Kofi Agorsor suggests otherwise in a comment he once made on Facebook but did not take further.
The views his wife, singer and dancer Nyornuwofia Agorsor and himself express on Ghanaian esotericism, some of which I have published in my work on her, as in the section on her in my ''Womb Wisdom to Cosmic Wisdom: Women and African Spiritualities in Africa and the Diaspora'' in the Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies, suggests they represent some very rich streams of knowledge awaiting exploration, capable of yielding something different from the great work of Owusu-Ankomah, which, like Ekpuk building on Nsibidi, cultivates the evocative powers of Adinkra, eventually exploding into his own visual and symbolic language in dialogue with a global complex of visual forms.
Image and Text: The Black of Fulfillment
A black-wrapped journey into the cave, into darkness and shadow
into underworld, a place to confront and understand our fears
then to emerge empowered.
Exploring the profound mysteries of death and life
loss and restoration
discovering the ultimate gift of ashes and earth
enriched by the intricate weaving of lament and wonder
a moment of awakening in which we follow the quickening woman
along the seam where death and life are knitted together
where balance exists between the winding of shrouds
and the unfurling of vibrant new threads
walking to a wild place to taste the alchemy of sacred water
a journey of germination and renewal
supported and nurtured by the ancient land.
From Carolyn Hillyer, ''The Cloth on the Loom.'' Slightly adapted.
Reworking the Vision of Pankya and Pankan
The Aka Uku burial rites and responses to it demonstrate a passionately exalted rhetoric similar to those great texts earlier referenced on death as transformation. These Aka Uka ritual expressions, from various sources on Facebook, by Prince Beavens Ajiduku, Dankaro Solomon, Umaru Emma, Solomon Ajiduku, accessed through the Apajukun Facebook page, Nahum Sule in “Pankya: The Taraba Ancient Mystery Behind the Transition of the Jukun King and his Horseman” ( The Nigerian News Leader, 17th Jan, 2022) and Moses Ochonu, as shown in my compilation of texts on the burial rites,"When You Die, Someone Should Die With You": Perspectives on Accompanied Death by Moses Ochonu and Friendson Facebook in Relation to the January 2022 Burial of the Aku Uka of Wukari,'' and Moses’ ''Ten Further Thoughts on the Aku Uka's Transition'', may be organized in terms of a unified poetic sequence, as shown below.
Such unified textualization, particularly through written text, is a method of distilling the imaginative essences of cultural forms, demonstrating their mythic character, the ''creative or reconfogurative powers of the human mind
[expressed] in varying degrees of intensity,'' as Isidore Okpewho describes myth in “Rethinking Myth,” and the movement from oral to written cultures in “The Modern Poet and the Oral Tradition,” ''transforming the oral tradition into symbols so as to demonstrate its mythic essence.'' ( ''Rethinking Myth,'' African Literature Today 11: Myth and History, 1980, 5-23, ;
“African Poetry : The Modern Writer and the Oral Tradition,” Oral and Written Poetry in African Literature Today 16, 1988, 3-25).
Such efforts could address the gap identified by Andre Agbese, in “African Literature and the Passage of the Aku Uka,” as quoted at the Apajukun page, “It is… perplexing that with such a strong culture that has survived till date, the Jukuns have not made the transition of their kings a theme in modern literature despite the mystery it evinces and the debate it engenders.”
Image and Text: Star and Crescent Moon
.png?part=0.25&view=1)
''Ason (moon and star) stand for Love, Faithfulness and Fondness.
They also represent the way the Jukuns see their king. The Jukun
see Aku as God.''
Okunna and Gausa (113)
“Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth” [24:35] Quran gives some details of how the Divine Light might be:
" .... The example of this light is a niche, in which there
is a lamp. The lamp is in a glass. The glass is as if a brilliant star. It is
kindled from a blessed tree of olive neither of the East, nor of the West. Its
oil is well-nigh to shine, even though no Fire has touched it. Light upon light. Allah guides to His light whom He will." [24:35]
To explain the meaning of the parable, and to know how the light
illuminates the innermost of Man's being, we have to expound the meaning of
some of the technical terms or words that are found in the verse of Light:
The Arabic," MESHKAT", translated to niche, is a little recess in a wall of ancient rooms, especially for putting a lamp or a bust in it. The niche is raised up enough to diffuse the light all inside the room. Of course, this was before the invention of electric lamps.
The Arabic," ZAJAJEH" basically means transparent stones or crystals. It also means glass, and here it refers to the glass globe that covers the flame.
" MESBAH" is the lamp which consists of a wick and a pot of fuel for burning and giving out the necessary light.
This light which is emitted from the Divine lamp can be," FAITH IN ALLAH", that illuminates the heart of Man. If so, the lamp is the faith, the glass bulb is the heart of the believer. The niche is then his breast, and the blessed tree of olive can be the Inspiration which ends in purifying the believer. (Commentary Nimunih, Vol4, Page:353)''
Ali Ali, in Qura, Oct.12, 2016, response to ''Is Allah the Light of the Heavens and the Earth? What Does that Mean?"
''the quality of the light of guidance provided by Allah– is the most superb kind of soft light that shines through the most luminous of the chandeliers brightening and illuminating every nook and corner, without blinding with brightness or being hazy with dimness.
....
These enlightened personalities [ guided by Allah, are personalities who may be seen as] (niches) [ in the structure of reality] [They] are found in the
houses about which Allah has decreed that they be built and therein His name be
recited; and wherein glorify Him day and
night the people whom neither business nor shopping distracts from Allah’s
remembrance, establishment of Ŝalah and payment of Zakah, fearing the Day when hearts and eyes will
be fearfully upset – so Allah rewards them according to the best of what they did and gives them
even more out of His bounty. And Allah provides for anyone He wishes beyond
eligibility, without counting.''
Ayub Hamid, in Qura, Dec. 22, 2015, response to ''Is Allah the Light of the Heavens and the Earth? What Does that Mean?"
Pankya:The Transmogrification & the Transition of the Aku Uka of Wukari
He does not belong here alone, he belongs to the gods!
He descended from far beyond.
He was born mortal yet immortal.
His persona is twined betwixt two worlds.
He is an enigma beyond comprehension.
He is a satellite of the gods over the people.
He is a vicar of the gods.
He is the blend of the real & the surreal.
He knows no hate and hates not one.
On his hands is the power to make or stop the rain.
He possesses the power to silence the thunder and forbid the lightning from striking.
He does not die.
He is a son of the gods, the guardian and protector of his people.
His place is between the mortal and the immortal.
He is not venerated or honoured.
He is WORSHIPPED by his subjects
a priest-king to whom libation is offered every morning.
He is not associated with affairs of mortals such as funerals and weddings.
He is beyond emotions and weakness.
Thus, he Does Not Die.
There is no 'funeral rite' for him but the rite of journeying to Nando
and finally to Kindo
the zone beyond Nando.
He does not die.
There are no undertakers, coffin or grave, that will make him mortal.
He rides majestically on his royal horse to meet his forebears
with another man serving as his sheath bearer
but also as the proverbial scapegoat
on behalf of the community.
The horseman’s spirit
the ATOBE
essential to helping the Aku’s spirit ascend to the afterlife.
He goes with the horse
majesty engulfs him in darkness
encapsulated in thought.
The journey to the final place of entry to the world of spirits takes three days
a tortuous, painstaking and dangerous journey to Nando
en route Kuntsa to Bye-vyi and finally Nando
as the people bid the monarch farewell.
at a point only he will be left
only him,
the horse and the body of the Aku Uka.
He must deliver it to the gods
owners of the crest of the Aku Uka
in a forest dangerous with wild animals and evil spirits
his return dependent on his level of spirituality and bravery
he might not come back
if he does, he becomes a myth, to be feared, looked at as a ghost.
A man who rode a horse deep into the forest by himself unarmed
a great warrior who has encountered and vanquished
wild animals, evil spirits, thirst, hunger, physical injury, and climatic vagaries,
a man with a clean conscience and pure love for his community, otherwise the gods would have killed him
in order to save the community from the repercussions
of his evil deeds or intentions
the gods are happy with him and the community
when he returns from the forest,
he brings blessings, powers,
and positive messages from the gods.
Should the companion of the Aku survive and return to Wukari safely
he must undergo a three times cleansing bath
before being allowed to join the community and his family.
The horse, an innocent calf, has to go together with the body of death.
Now, the appointed time beckons & the Aku’s spirit must transit to Kindo, the great beyond
where he will commune with the gods in the land of the living dead.
From Puje to Bevyi, Bevyi to Kuntsa, Kuntsa to Nando, Nando to Kindo
his path takes him.
In his left hand, he holds the esoteric grains which he must release for the survival of the people.
In his right hand, he holds all the natural elements which he must let go of for his people as he journeys ahead.
But behold, a young hero on a stallion riding along gallantly with pride, dignity & majesty with the illustrious one to the great beyond.
The ground quakes
the multitudes tremble at the sight of the young hero who must not look back
until he delivers the new citizen to the land of the gods.
The atmosphere charged
with people hailing, "Abagaidu Nasha'in," the Aku’s title
yelling and asking for the Aku’s blessings,
as the horse stops intermittently and the young man puts his
hand in a bag
brings out grains of corn and spreads them.
He waves his hand and bids the people farewell as he marches
on to Nando.
Nando, a place where kings rest
a thick forest
the final destination for every late Jukun King.
the zone of rebirth into another world.
Journey from Puje
the starting point of the Aku's final earthly journey
strategic in the personal history of the founder of present day Jukun communal life
the first Aku Uka of Wukari, after the fall of the Kwararafa kingdom
a previous social system from which present day Jukun emerged.
On his journey from the collapse of the Kwararafa empire
his wife entered into her period in the place that is now known as Puje
hence he had to wait there for several days.
Having established what is now known as the Wukari community
Puje became the place where every new Aku's wife receives him
when he ascends the throne
as well as the point from where his final earthly journey begins in earnest to Nando
the point of his final transition.
On ascending the throne, he journeys from Puje to Nando and back to Puje
a journey evoking motion
from the zone of fecundative promise represented by Puje
in its association with the power of female biology
to Nando, the point of his eventual transition to the spirit world
at the end of his terrestrial life
and back to Puje
the location representing the promise of the beginning of terrestrial life
evoked by its association with the first Aku's wife's biological imperatives.
Is it true that because some of the Aku's escorts had failed to return in the past
rigorous divination is now conducted
to ensure the gods guide the planners of the rites
in choosing the right person for the job
a person whose personal qualities
along with the gods’ own protection
will make sure he returns from the journey of escorting the Aku Uka to Nando
the zone of the Aku's transmutation to the spirit world?
The proverbial scapegoat, the sacrificial lamb,
in a sublime spirit letting on his back be laid the body of the late Aku
to be taken to a destination known only to the proverbial lamb and the cultists
the owners of the mystery.
An awesome tradition.
We came with it from Southern Yamen.
Our grand parents were of it, our fathers too, we also partake in it.
It is running in our blood.
Mystical, those who do not belong cannot understand.
Abaga'idu Nasha'in has gone to Kindo, his mission here
accomplished.
Another will take his place. May his reign last long in peace.
(Text Sources: Stanzas 1, 15-17, from ''The Transmogrification & the Transition of Aku Uka,'' by Prince Beavens Ajiduku, quoted at Apajukun, Jan.18, 2022. Stanzas 3-7 and last stanza from ''Pankya and its Mysteries,'' by Dankaro Solomon at Apajukun, Jan.15, 2022. Stanzas 9-11, 14, 25-26 by Solomon Ajiduku, quoted by Umaru Emma in thread of Apajukun post of Jan.17. 2002, ''Good News Coming from Nando to Bye-Vyi to Kuntsa.''Stanza 12 from Moses Ochonu's ''Ten Further Thoughts on the Aku Uka's Transition'', January 18, 2002 Facebook post.
Image and Text: Connecting the First and the Last, Space, Time and Infinity
(72).png?part=0.24&view=1)
Tracing a straight
line, the journey from Puje to Nando and back to Puje, four straight lines are configured around it, the central line and its related lines evoking actions and their significance, meanings of the journeys between Puje and Nando. A bird in flight, in the streamlined elegance of this Jukun symbol. Thus
the last matter is connected to the first, a recurrence in
space and time absorbed into infinity.
The last sentence directly above adapts to the journeys of the Aku Uka of Wukari the conjunction of physical motion and spiritual insight Islamic mystic Ibn Arabi demonstrates of his own journeys of pilgrimage in the Meccan Illuminations, as translated and interpreted by Eric Winkel in ''Understanding, and Translating, the Futūḥāt al-Makkīya, the First Chapter'' at the site of The Ibn Arabi Society.
Arabi's lines and Winkel's interpretation of them are both sublime works of art, incidentally reflecting the vision of unity of being consummated through motion between priomrdial possiblities represented by the journeys between Puje and Nando of the Aku Uka of Wukari in his installation and transition rites.
Arabi's lines:
the arm of the [draftsman’s] compass returns, during the opening of the circle, after reaching the end of the circle’s being, to the beginning point. Thus the last matter is connected to the first, and its endlessness curves with kindliness into its timelessness, and there is nothing but a wujūd continuous and a Vision stable, enduring [ a perception of unity of being].
Winkel's interpretation:
The visualization is of a two-armed compass, the one arm fixed on a centerpoint. Keeping the pencil on the paper, the other arm is stretched out to ‘open’ the circle. There is now a line from the centerpoint to the arc of the circle. The pencil goes around and joins back to the circle – it is now ‘continuous being’ – thereby joining the last to the first. Following the pencil trace, one travels endlessly around the circle, and/or one gazes at the Seen centerpoint, which remains fixed and stable without regard to the journey along the circumference.
"Atsoshi (spear) signifies the Aku's symbol of authority, a mysterious spear which is believed to cause noise and earthquake once it is thrust to the ground." (Okunna and Gausa, 112)
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