The Cosmos in a Staff : The Glory of Ọpa Ọsanyin : An Understudied Example of Great Yoruba Art : Part 2 : Interpretive Contexts
368 views
Skip to first unread message
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Oct 11, 2020, 8:01:41 AM10/11/20
to usaafricadialogue, Yoruba Affairs, Bring Your Baseball Bat, Odua
The Cosmos in a Staff
The Glory of Ọpa Ọsanyin
An Understudied Example of Great Yorùbá Art
Part 2
Interpretive Contexts
Image Above
Climbing the Tree
Perched on a pole marked by bundles of raffia grass, the elegant bird looks out over the landscape of possibility represented by the staff of which it is the summit.
Grass and its vegetative
associations in relation to nature in general. The pole, upright like a tree on
which a bird is perched. A tree reaching deep into Earth and towards the sky.
Its branches, the possibilities of existence. Its roots, the source, its
crown, the cosmos. Its trunk, the link between them all.
The babaláwo, adept in the networks of possibility emerging from the
intersection of spirit and matter as understood in the
Yorùbá origin Ifá
system of knowledge, and the Iyáláwo, his female counterpart, as named in Ayodeji Ogunnaike’s “Mamalawo? The Controversy Over Women Practicing
Ifa Divination” ( 2018, 20), climb this
tree as they explore these intersections, seeking answers to human queries at
the points where the branches grow out of the trunk, where cosmic possibility
and material reality converge.
In climbing the tree, they aspire to stand poised at its apex, surveying the
universe of possibilities, of being and becoming, existence and change,
directing it as they can.
At times, these adventurers are imaged as chameleons, adapters to various environments, diverse but interrelated domains of existence, climbing the pole towards the summit.
This is one approach to interpreting the staff above, integrating ideas from various sources in terms of my own perspectives. The staff is described at its Facebook source at Grains Of Africa -Home Of Fine African Art And Antiquities, as an Ọpa Ọsanyin, embodying the power of Ọsanyin, the Yorùbá origin Òrìsà cosmology deity of the spiritual and biological power of plants.
It is similar in appearance, however, to an Osùn Babaláwo, a staff representing the spiritual allies of a babaláwo, as shown in the image below of a babaláwo holding a similar staff from Henry John Drewal et al's Yoruba:Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (1989, 41).
E.jpg?part=0.2&view=1)
Image Above
The Procession
Avian imagery in association with staffs, is the shaping character of
Ọpa
Ọsanyin and
Osùn
Babaláwo, enabling them share significant associational convergences, as this essay demonstrates.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
This essay is a brief examination of the interpretive contexts, embracing Yorùbá verbal and visual arts, philosophy and spirituality, that converge in the construction and associative power of Ọpa Ọsanyin, a metal structure made up of a pole with birds clustered round it and a bird surmounting the pole, a dramatization of the beauty of nature and its evocative force representing Ọsanyin, the Yorùbá origin Òrìsà cosmology deity of the spiritual and biological power of plants.
The essay employs an example of the similar but less visually complex Osùn Babaláwo in building the foundations for exploring Ọpa Ọsanyin and proceeds to study various examples of the Ọsanyin staff in forthcoming parts of this essay series.
This study of Ọpa Ọsanyin is inspired by my ongoing project "Intrinsic and Universal Significance of Yoruba Aesthetics : Babatunde Lawal and Rowland Abiodun" in which the symmetrical clustering of birds around a central bird is used in symbolizing the unity of individual research orientations around a common ideal in constituting the Ifè School of Yoruba Studies, as I name a culture of the former University of Ifè, now Obafemi Awolowo University, foundational to the scholarly careers of Abiodun and Lawal.
Continued from Part 1.
Contents
Image : Climbing the Tree
Image : The Procession
Abstract
Acknowledgements
The Grandeur of Ọpa Ọsanyin and Limitations in its Study
Image : Flight from Manifestation to Origins
Responding to the Inspiration of Ọpa Ọsanyin
Interpretive Contexts
Ọpa Ọsanyin as an Example of Yorùbá Arts of Nature
The Bird Motif as Evocative of the Dynamism of Àse, Creative Cosmic Force, in Ọpa Ọsanyin,
Osùn Babaláwo and Ọpa Erinlè
Ìwà : Between the Intrinsic Character of a Phenomenon and its Associative Values
Òwe, Imaginative Expression, and Òrò, the Unity of Thought and Expression, as Correlative Horses of
Discourse
Bird Imagery and the Fascination of the Forest
Ọsanyin, Dweller in the Forest, Master of Plant Lore
Image : A Journey from Knowing to Knowing
Acknowledgements
Great thanks to Henry John Drewal,
sculptor of delightful and mysterious beauties,
maker of images and stories of light, sound and motion,
projecting varied lifeways of diverse peoples,
writer of ever restless creativity,
scholar majestic,
Everest of Yorùbá and African arts studies and their ideational dimensions,
journeyer intrepid into regions recondite,
companion of the arcane glories of Gèlèdé of mysterious feminine powers,
as we journey to and fro seeking this and that in this landscape of knowing,
where does your voice not resound,
digger into the world of water spirits and their human companions,
expositor of the beauty and meanings of beads in the Yorùbá cosmos,
master of Striking Iron,
dweller in ideas yet demonstrator of the unity of body/mind,
collaborator extraordinaire,
only God knows how you are able to organise those glorious once-in-a-lifetime art exhibitions.
We salute you for this journey you are walking,
entering unto this planet well before our eyes opened to the light of this world
and clearing the way for the likes of us decades before they expanded to the glory of this search.
O master,
adepto cognitio,
your name penetrates everywhere are assembled those who rightly know,
so do I celebrate your journeys tireless by invoking great texts crafted by you on this quest.
May all who seek to explore the cosmos of Yorùbá and African Arts enjoy the privilege of your guidance and that of your collaborators, among whom we salute the particular prominence of Rowland Abiodun, Margaret Thompson Drewal, John Pemberton III and John Mason.
Great thanks for your consistent goodwill represented by sending me your essay with Rowland Abiodun, ''Ògún/Gu's Resonance in Yorùbá, Edo, and Fon Worlds, ''which confirmed my speculations on Ọpa Ọsanyin and Osùn Babaláwo.
Great thanks too to Seyi Ogunfuwa for his call one morning, describing his quest for knowledge across various spiritualities and secular systems of knowledge as he develops his own philosophy, encouraging my work on the study of the Yoruba origin Ògbóni esoteric order in creating a new school of this body of ideas and practices.
I salute Akinsola Abiodun Solanke for his translation suggestions and translations included in this essay. I am very grateful for Kola Tubosun's advice on tone marks in the expression on the mutuality of imaginative expression and discourse in Yoruba thought.
Such interactions represent my sustaining community as an Independent Scholar.
The Grandeur of Ọpa Ọsanyin and Limitations in its Study
Ọpa Ọsanyin is one of the greatest examples of Yorùbá art, yet this construct, pictures of many varied examples of it readily available online from art dealers in different parts of the world, is little studied in the literature in English on Ọsanyin and associated art, to the best of my knowledge of writings in Yorùbá Studies, which I know as embracing Yorùbá, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, although I think the paucity of information on the subject in texts in English is likely to suggest a similar state in other languages.
Awo Fategbe's '' Ọsanyin'' and Don Egbelade's “Yorùbá Ọpa Ọsanyin Erinle Herbalists Staff", both on Facebook, John Mason on Ọsanyin in Black Gods : Òrìsà Studies in the New World (1998, 36-39) and Nicholas De Mattos Frisvold's Ifá : A Forest of Mystery (2016, 43-8) are priceless on Ọpa Ọsanyin symbolism.
They are complemented by Henry John Drewal and Rowland Abiodun's "Ògún/Gu's Resonance in Yorùbá, Edo, and Fon Worlds,'' from Allen Roberts' et al's Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths ( 2019, 278-307) which discusses Ọpa Ọsanyin and the similar Osùn Babaláwo, staff of the babaláwo, adept in the esoterica of the Yoruba origin Ifá system of knowledge.
The interpretations from these texts, being those readily available to me and brief yet richly insightful, will be used in this essay series on Ọpa Ọsanyin in constructing a unification of perspectives on this art and expanding those interpretive examples.
Henry John Drewal et al in Yorùbá: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (34) represent one of the few instances known to me of response to the technical genius of what might be a demonstration of this artistic form, describing the “simple, graceful lines and energetic interplay of curves’’ in a particular example of a pole topped by birds, which may be an Ọpa Ọsanyin. This effort is inspirational for developing sensitivity to the skill actualized by the imaginative manipulation of metal evident in Ọpa Ọsanyin art, a sensitivity which needs to be further cultivated and highlighted.
The only texts I know which discuss Ọpa Ọsanyin at some length are Robert Farris Thompson's “Icons of the Mind: Yorùbá Herbalism Arts in Atlantic Perspective,” (African Arts, Vol.8. No.3. 1975. 52-59+89-90) and the Barakat Gallery notes on Ọsanyin and Osùn staffs in the section of their website on Yorùbá Staffs.
Thompson's “Icons of the Mind'' is a superb essay on the relationship between Ọsanyin beliefs and Ọsanyin art, providing a tantalizing and foundational description of the symbolic possibilities of this creativity within the Yorùbá cultural universe and its diasporic expressions.
This foundational account needs to be built upon. The associative values of this sculpture beyond its originating frameworks, speaking to the human experience in other contexts, also need to be developed.
The Barakat Gallery notes on Ọsanyin and Osùn staffs are the most sustained verbal response known to me to the interrelations between the associative values of Ọpa Ọsanyin in relation to Yorùbá culture and the artistry of the staffs.
These descriptions are priceless expositions of how the technical dexterity of these works is inspired by and projects an ideational universe, a cosmology unifying the natural and the supernatural, spirit and matter, humans, deities and the arcane personalities who unify these possibilities of existence, witches, portrayed as birds , and diviners, depicted as both birds and chameleons.
Magnificent as these expositions are, however, they represent one strand of possible interpretations of Ọpa Ọsanyin and Osùn Babaláwo and their interrelationship, a singular perspective that needs to be complemented by others, as I try to do in this essay, guided, among other sources, by the Barakat Gallery notes which I reproduce in a collage of quotes in a subsequent part of this essay series, quotes slightly edited by myself to create a unified text while retaining their distinctive language and expressive force.
The associative values and imaginative and technical genius of the Ọpa Ọsanyin sculptural corpus cry out for better understanding within their perception as an open ended development of artistic potential, a majestic demonstration of creativity within a very basic yet imaginatively inspiring and infinitely evocative tradition, in which variations are developed within a fixed set of possibilities represented by the bird motif.
Image Above
Flight from Manifestation to Origins
The sinuous flow from the exquisitely pointed beak to the neck and body, streamlined for flight, may recall English writer John Milton's description of "the poet, soaring in the high regions of his fancies, with his garlands and singing robes about him," an avian metaphor also relevant for Rowland Abiodun's description of the role of poetic, imaginative expression in the quest for and the creation of meaning, derived from the thought of thinkers in the classical Yoruba tradition, as he presents these ideas and his synthesis of them in Yoruba Art and Language( 2014, 24-52).
The Miltonian and Abiodun images are another instantiation of the depiction of creative and cognitive activity in terms of flight, represented, with particular force, by Christian mystical poet St. John of the Cross' account of flight in search of prey, on seizing which quarry he is plunged into darkness, a darkness representing transcendence of all he knows, an evocation of quest for ultimate reality that resonates with Abiodun's description of metaphorical expression, òwe, as understood in Yorùbá, as a means of penetrating from the social and material actualization of human thought and expression to its ultimate enablement in the sources of existence, "òwe as visual and verbal oríkì constitutes a means or ẹṣin (horse) by which Orí as Òrò can descend to the human level and humans can make a spiritual ascent to Orí (50).
The conceptual wealth of this line, possibly the ideational core of Abiodun's first chapter and of the entire book, a point I shall explore in detail in a forthcoming part of this essay series, may be better understood in terms of these definitions:
òwe [imaginative expression]
as visual and verbal oríkì [ verbal, visual, sonic and performative mapping of the being and development of an
entity]
constitutes a means or ẹṣin
(horse)[ imaginative vehicle]
by which Orí [ the immortal essence of an entity, transcending but active within time and space,
originating in a divine archetype, Òdùmàrè, the creator of the universe, who is to the cosmos as
the individual orí is to the individual]
as Òrò [ discourse as a demonstration of capacities for reflection and expression emerging from the
originating impulse of Òdùmàrè and ceaselessly and restlessly active in all aspects of human life]
can descend to the human level and humans can make a spiritual ascent to Orí (50).
Abiodun depicts imaginative creativity in terms of a journey between the ultimate source of cognitive possibility and the material contexts of human existence, between the origin of these possibilities in divine mind and the manifestation of these possibilities in human experience, between the nakedness of this incandescent force, divine in origin but migrant in human thought and action, a reality the core of which is dangerous for unmediated encounter with the human mind but is best approached through the indirection of metaphoric expression, a lofty vision of the essence of human creativity which is in effect a Yorùbá version of a universally recurring idea of the divine origins of human reflective and expressive powers, from Jewish, Christian and Hindu ideas of creation being effected though language to English poet S.T. Coleridge's depiction, in his Biographia Litteraria of the ''primary Imagination [as] the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.''
Responding to the Inspiration of Ọpa Ọsanyin
I am drawn to Ọpa Ọsanyin on account of its combination of relatively minimalist structure and use of the humble but deeply evocative images of birds, desisting from employing the more obvious evocative values of such grand avian creatures as the eagle, focusing instead on the structural beauty and elegance in flight of birds in general, often crafting superb depictions of the graceful curve of a bird's neck, deploying these visualizations in ways that may be seen as suggesting far reaching implications in Yorùbá cosmology, unifying humanity, nature and cosmos.
Interpretive Contexts
As demonstrated in relation to an example of Ọpa Ọsanyin in the first part of this essay series, "The Cosmos in a Staff : The Glory of Ọpa Ọsanyin : An Understudied Example of Great Yoruba Art : Part 1 : Avian Aesthetics," Ọpa Ọsanyin demonstrates great imaginative creativity, technical genius and associative range within and beyond the universe of Yorùbá culture, leading to the questions that concluded the essay-
What, exactly, is Ọpa Ọsanyin?
What is its inspiration and the logic of its construction?
Why is it crafted in a manner that can evoke values of such universal penetration?
Ọpa Ọsanyin as an Example of Yorùbá Arts of Nature
The Bird Motif as Evocative of the Dynamism of Àse, Creative Cosmic Force, in Ọpa Ọsanyin,
Osùn Babaláwo and Ọpa Erinlè
Ọpa Ọsanyin is an example of Yorùbá arts of nature as these are demonstrated across various literary genres and visual expressions.
These run from those literary forms strategic for depictions of animals, such as Ijálá, Yorùbá hunters poetry, and ese ifá , poetry of the Yorùbá origin Ifá system of knowledge, to the sculptural forms Osùn Babaláwo, “staff of the master of esoteric knowledge,’’ used by babalawo, adepts in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa to Ọpa Erinlè, a staff representing Erinlè, the deity of the forest and the powers of nature in general and Ọpa Ọsanyin, all three staffs marked by birds topping a pole.
Adapting Robert Farris Thompson's example in “Icons of the Mind,” the study of any one of these similar sculptural forms benefits from doing so in comparison with the others.
Each of these kinds of metal structure is interpretable in terms of elegant evocations of birds suggesting the quickening of life and its creative capacities through the dynamism of àse, creative, cosmic force, as understood in Yorùbá origin Òrìsà cosmology, and represented, in these images, by the mobility of birds.
Bird symbolism is particularly used in Yorùbá iconography, its visual symbolism, in suggesting the embodiment of àse, creative, cosmic force, by women, primary enablers, through their procreative powers, of the union of materiality and life that is a human being, powers understood as distilled in blood and therefore particularly concentrated in post- menopausal women who do not lose blood through monthly cycles.
Ìwà : Between the Intrinsic Character of a Phenomenon and its Associative Values
These animal depictions demonstrate a strand of humanity's sensitivity to nature as both valuable in and of itself, and suggestive of values beyond itself. These orientations are suggested by two Yorùbá expressions which Rowland Abiodun makes central to his Yoruba Art and Language.
The first of these expressions is ''mọ ìwà fún oníwà, '' which may be translated as ''I grant each existent its right to its own individuality,'' ''iwa'' being open to rendering as ''essential being,'' individuality of existence, fundamental character, understood in terms of the dynamic and yet stable nature of personality as well as of the material qualities that define a particular kind of existence.
Ọpa Ọsanyin projects, through sculpture, the unique beauty of birds, in their individuality of form within particular species as well as in terms of the beauty they demonstrate when gathered as a flock.
Òwe, Imaginative Expression, and Òrò, the Unity of Thought and Expression, as Correlative Horses of
Discourse
These intrinsic beauties also project interpretive possibilities that go beyond the avian world, implicating human existence. These extrinsic values include the beauty of the bird universe, and the question of how appreciation of beauty is developed, a development in which the character of nature on Earth, in particular, and the larger cosmos, in general, plays a strategic role.
Aligned with these harmonies between the physical character of nature and human perception, is humanity's discernment of associative values in the avian cosmos.
These are metaphorical and symbolic projections in terms of which people see the forms of birds and their behaviour. This tendency of human beings to interpret phenomena in terms of ideas not explicitly indicated by those phenomena is suggested by the following Yoruba conception, quoted from Agogo-Èdè on Facebook which expands Abiodun’s rendering (30-1) of the basic formulation of the proverb. Tone marks for the last two lines are provided by Akinsola Abiodun Solanke:
Òwe l’ẹṣin Òrò.
Òrò l’e ẹṣin òwe.
Ti Òrò bá sọnù
òwe la fií wáa.
Ti òwe bá sọnù
Òrò la fií wáa.
Nítórīwípé àwọn méjèjì
jõún gūn ãrã wõn l'ẹ́sīn nī
This expression may be translated as in the following largely non-literal interpretation, with the last stanza being a slightly modified version of Solanke's rendering given in a personal communication :
Òwe, metaphorical expressions
are the steeds of thought and expression,
swift vehicles of discourse.
Reflection and communication
are the horses of imaginative projection
subjects of interest, activities, in which imagination is at play.
When thought and expression go astray,
we seek them out through imaginative exploration.
When imaginative communication loses its way
reflection and refinement of expression are invoked as means of discovery.
Both of them ride on each other
as horses
in the journey to the unfolding of the great destination.
As imaginative forms are like horses to thought
thought also serves the same purpose to imagination
each riding on the other as vehicles to trace out the deep meaning each conveys.
These lines evoke the cardinal significance of imaginative, associative, evocative reflection and expression for teasing out possibilities of understanding beyond that accessible through plain communication.
Òwe, imaginative expressions, extend beyond language, to include all artistic forms (Abiọdun, 50). They reach even beyond the deliberately evocative structuring of art to integrate all possibilities of experience as these suggest interpretive possibilities beyond themselves, templates for understanding human experience in general or particular aspects of experience, as Abiọdun (50) demonstrates through the following idea:
Ìjà ló dé l’orín d’ òwe” (It is because people are quarrelling that a song innocently sung, becomes an Òwe ).
This idea dramatises the evocative qualities of particular contexts, represented by such commonplace life situations as quarrels, as suggesting to peoples’ minds a song innocently sung in such a context as becoming proverbial for the life situation being played out by the quarrel.
Such a resonant artistic form, the song, may transform people’s awareness of the commonplace context they associate it with, making it a metaphorical expression illuminating a broader range of situations beyond that inspirational framework.
Bird Imagery and the Fascination of the Forest
Along similar terms, avian form and flight, representing the logic of nature actualized in birds, may characterize to the human being values beyond the intrinsic character of the lives of birds. This relationship between the intrinsic, the beauty of birds in terms of both structure and flight, as well as the extrinsic, evocative possibilities of these beyond the bird universe, are the inspirational matrix of classical Yoruba bird sculpture in the cognate traditions of Ọpa Ọsanyin, Ọpa Erinlè, and Osùn Babaláwo.
These artistic forms are avian depictions related to the lives of the Yorùbá people as emerging from a forest region. The vegetative density and variety and animal profusion of the forest have proven central in the development of Yorùbá visual and verbal symbolism, philosophy and spirituality.
The Yoruba experience exemplifies the forest as one of humanity's most enduring fascinations, forbidding and alluring, alien and compelling, a primordial ancestor, as it were, inspiring various peoples across the centuries to create images evoking the universe of the forest and the ways of life it has inspired.
Ọsanyin, Dweller in the Forest, Master of Plant Lore
One of these depictions is the figure of Ọsanyin, the Òrìsà or deity of the spiritual and biological power of plants as understood in Òrìsà cosmology from the Yorùbá of West Africa and their migrant cultures in the Americas, surviving the horrors of the brutal journey of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to thrive in Cuba, Brazil and the United States.
Ọsanyin is described as dwelling in the remotest parts of the forest and as adept in the most recondite distillations of the spiritual and biological powers of plants, as described by Don Egbelade in “Yoruba Opa Osanyin Erinle Herbalists Staff.”
He is deity of “the esoteric powers of plants and their use to generate àse [creative, cosmic force] for praying, cursing, healing, or compelling others to obey one’s command,’’ as described by Babatunde Lawal in "Embodying the Sacred in Yoruba Art’’ (2012, 17).
Ọsanyin's magic is understood as "so powerful that ....he is petitioned for any purpose where unconquerable magic is required," as Egbelade puts it, his knowledge of leaves indispensable for constructing shrines to the various deities of Òrìsà spirituality, because, as described by Thompson in ''Icons of the Mind,'' (53) and by Ulli Beier in The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger, every orisha or deity is associated with particular leaves or herbal combinations, making the forest a microcosm of the cosmos as embodied by the orisa, each orisa, as depicted by Beier, perceivable as the universe as seen from a particular perspective, with the totality of the perceptual possibilities being Olodumare, creator and sustainer of the universe.
Image Above
A Journey from Knowing to Knowing
In the journey across landscapes of interpretive possibility, one's progression could be described in vertical terms, moving from the most basic to the most profound of perceptions, climaxing in a summative awareness akin to the position of the bird poised atop the Osùn Babaláwo.
A unity of construct, constructor and perceiver of the construct, of àwòrán, awòran and ìwòran, the perceived, the perceiver and the process of perception, of metal and the fire through which it is shaped, of metal, fire and constructing mind, of mind, metal, fire and structuring hands, such may be the summit of possibility projected by the Osùn Babaláwo, evocative of the union of spirit and evocative form, analogous to possibilities dramatized by the texts of terrestrial becoming
within cosmic embrace that is ese ifá, expressions of the matrices of possibility that are a central interaction of the
babaláwo.
Cosmos as text, Josipovici to Orsbon, Dante to Odu Ifá, climbing from the Awó of Earth to the Awó of Mid Air to the Awó of Òrun, I at last arrived where all possibilities of awareness exist as one simple light.
Note
The last sentence conjoins Italian writer Dante Alighieri's summative vision of the cosmos in his Paradiso with Gabriel Josipovici's ( The World and the Book, 1971) and David Orsbon's '"The Universe as Book: Dante’s Commedia as an Image of the Divine Mind," 2014)in their characterization of a central element of Dante's vision with images from an ese ifá, an Ifá literary form, narrated by Abiodun in Yoruba Art and Language (27-8).
That sentence complements the previous one, itself a depiction of mystical vision similar to but not identical to Dante's, a depiction in terms of Babatunde Lawal's description of a theory of perception from Yorùbá thought in “Àwòrán: Representing the Self and Its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art’ ( 2001 )" represented by àwòrán, awòran and ìwòran, the perceived, the perceiver and the process of perception, fusing these with the idea of unity between the sculpture and the
spirit invoked into an edan ògbóni, a sculpture of the Yorùbá origin Ògbóni esoteric order, as described by Evelyn Roche-Selk in From the Womb of Earth: An Appreciation of Yorùbá Bronze Art ( 1978), a fusion effected in those lines through ideas of perceptual unity derived from a cross-cultural range of accounts of unity of elements of perception, subsumed within echoes of Mazisi Kunene's description of such unity in terms of Zulu thought, using the imagery of fire, in Anthem of the Decades ( 1981, xxiii-xxiv).
Both sentences amplify the image of the bird on top of the pole in the first sentence. The entire sequence is a fusion of a technological and artistic mysticism, in the smelting of metal to create art, a unity of self and ultimate origination through technological and artistic creativity and a perceptual mysticism, unity of self and the ultimate through processes of perception, subsumed by a unitive mysticism, union of self and the ground of being.
You are Invited
You are invited to further participate in this journey of knowledge by donating to Compcros, Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems, one of the largest collections of original research and publication by one person freely accessible online, embracing various disciplines and cultures.
I am committed to penetrating even the most recondite zones of knowledge within my fields of interest and sharing this knowledge in a manner that demonstrates its excitement, readily accessible to most readers and illuminating even for specialists.
I self publish on public access platforms represented by social media, blogs and websites, where people congregate in engaging in the varied business of living as well as in print media.
Also published on
Rowland Abiodun and Babatunde Lawal, Philosophers of Yoruba Art blog
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Oct 11, 2020, 8:02:13 AM10/11/20
to usaafricadialogue, Yoruba Affairs, Bring Your Baseball Bat, Odua
In the first paragraph under the section on ''Òwe,'' I have added a reference to John Barrow's The Artful Universe ( 1995) where he argues for the imprinting of cosmos on the human self in the development of human aesthetic orientations, an argument I use in explaining the source of avian imagery in Ọpa Ọsanyin.
These intrinsic beauties also project interpretive possibilities that go beyond the avian world, implicating human existence. These extrinsic values include the beauty of the bird universe, and the question of how appreciation of beauty is developed, a development in which the character of nature on Earth, in particular, and the larger cosmos, in general, plays a strategic role, as John Barrow argues for the imprinting of cosmos on the human self in The Artful Universe ( 1995).
Michael Afolayan
Oct 11, 2020, 6:07:50 PM10/11/20
to usaafricadialogue, Yoruba Affairs, Bring Your Baseball Bat, Odua, yorubaaffa...@googlegroups.com
Thanks, Toyin Adepoju, for another spate of exposition. May your energy continue to surge. Please give attention to this quote from your write-up:
Òwe l’ẹṣin Òrò.
Òrò l’e ẹṣin òwe.
Ti Òrò bá sọnù
òwe la fií wáa.
Ti òwe bá sọnù
Òrò la fií wáa.
Be aware that the Yoruba do not render this proverb in the above form. There is no "Oro l'esin owe" after the sentence "Owe l'esin oro" and there is nothing like "Ti owe ba sonu/oro l'a fi n wa a." The first part is the creation of Ebenezer Obey in the early 70s when he sang "Owe L'esin Oro." The last two lines above are totally new. Except, perhaps, you want to marry these lines with the once-talked-about post-proverbials, this would not fit within the context of Yoruba rhetoric.
I assume the addition of "Nítórīwípé àwọn méjèjì/jõún gūn ãrã wõn l'ẹ́sīn nī"
is just a side comment and not a part of the Yoruba saying or even a part of the belief system off the people because only òwe is the metaphoric horse for the word. It would be a pragmatic misnormal for the word to be presented as the metaphoric horse for the proverb.
Just my small observation.
MOA
These are metaphorical and symbolic projections in terms of which people see the forms of birds and their behaviour. This tendency of human beings to interpret phenomena in terms of ideas not explicitly indicated by those phenomena is suggested by the following Yoruba conception, quoted from Agogo-Èdè on Facebook which expands Abiodun’s rendering (30-1) of the basic formulation of the proverb. Tone marks for the last two lines are provided by Akinsola Abiodun Solanke:
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Yoruba Affairs" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to yorubaaffair...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/yorubaaffairs/CALUsqTR5hTCRb8-wBTXnYJO5Cqz5vpB1D3YYfHPqO%2B_145YiRA%40mail.gmail.com.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Oct 11, 2020, 9:44:18 PM10/11/20
to usaafricadialogue, Yoruba Affairs
Great thanks, Oga Afolayan.
Please forgive the length and possibly complexity of my response.
I see your question as an opportunity to examine the relevant aspect of Yoruba hermeneutics, techniques of interpreting relationships between expression and the meaning of life, as I understand that term ''hermeneutics'' so far.
Dynamism of Yoruba Discourse
I am aware of the older version of the expression you reference.
Rowland Abiodun's book, Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, which I discussed, uses the older version.
I have chosen to add the expansions which I stumbled upon on a Facebook page because I see them as a creative development facilitating a richer exposition of the concepts at play.
Thanks for the description of the famous musician Ebenezer Obey as having coined that superbly apt expression, the Yoruba equivalent of Achebe's famous Igbo derived expression in Things Fall Apart, ''proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten.''
I had thought the Yoruba expression was one of those the creator of which is unknown.
Authorship by Obey leading to its use by Abiodun decades later, a progression from popular culture to academic culture, would be a demonstrating of the dynamism of Yoruba discourse, a dynamism emerging from individual creativity and at times flowering into public acceptance, a progressive force further dramatized by the verbal artist who has chosen to expand the decades old expression.
Oro as the Totality of Human Reflective and Expressive Capacity
The concept of oro I am working with goes beyond language, in and of itself, to encapsulate the totality of human reflective and expressive capacity, of which language is a principal vehicle.
Abiodun describes oro as referring to a subject of discussion, an issue under consideration, a point of reference.
Pius Adesanmi ' in ''Oju L'Oro Wa'' aligns with this perspective in translating oro as ''discourse.''
An unidentified translator is quoted by Arthur Nguyen on the exhibition ''The Inner Eye: Vision and Transcendence in African Arts'' as translating the well known Yoruba expression ''Oju L' Oro Wa'' as ''Oro, the essence of communication, takes place in the eyes.''
An unidentified translator is quoted by Arthur Nguyen on the exhibition ''The Inner Eye: Vision and Transcendence in African Arts'' as translating the well known Yoruba expression ''Oju L' Oro Wa'' as ''Oro, the essence of communication, takes place in the eyes.''
Oro as Grounded in Divine Mind
Abiodun takes these ideas further in identifying oro, not only with subjects referenced by human beings, but with the roots of such reference in human cognitive capacity grounded in divine wisdom, knowledge and understanding, an ultimacy to which human discourse may be seen as ultimately aspirational, with owe, metaphorical expression, particularly in its use of oriki, expressions mapping the nature and development of an entity, as means of reaching to this ultimate source of thought, knowledge and expression.
Oro as Vehicle for Understanding Owe, Metaphorical Expression
Is it possible for oro to be a vehicle for unravelling owe, metaphorical expression, a ''horse'' carrying the hermeneutic explorer deeper into understanding the evocative force of associative expression in words, sound, images and performance, as Abiọdun describes the scope of owe?
Is owe not better understood as an aspect of oro?
Oro as Verbal and Non-Verbal
One could reference different aspects of oro, the verbal and the non-verbal.
Linear and Non-Linear Verbalization
Within the verbal, one could identify the linear and the non-linear.
The linear represents denotative expression, where there is a relatively direct relationship between language and referent.
The non-linear, which corresponds to owe, metaphorical expression is allusive, evocative, connotative.
As I do in the essay, I use the more directly referential, linear expression in explaining the evocative, indirectly expressive owe quoted in the essay.
Would that make such linear expression akin to the swiftness of a horse in unravelling meaning, as ''Òrò l’e ẹṣin òwe'' '' Discourse as a steed, swift vehicle of owe, metaphorical expression,'' indicates?
Òwe, Metaphorical Expression, as a Privileged Mode of Discourse
In examining this question, we could begin by examining the paradox that underlies the entire expressive sequence.
In what sense, actually, is the following conventionally accepted formulation a practical idea?
''Òwe l’ẹṣin Òrò
Ti Òrò bá sọnù
òwe la fií wáa''
which may be translated in the following non-literal manner in order to realize the scope of ideas being evoked-
''Òwe, metaphorical expressions, are the steeds of thought and expression,
swift vehicles of discourse
when discourse is lost
it is sought out using metaphorical exploration.''
Òwe l’ẹṣin Òrò, Metaphorical Expressions as Steeds of Discourse
That ''metaphorical expression are the steeds of discourse'' is a universally accepted fact bcs they take expression beyond conventional levels, communicating with a swiftness enabled by integrating otherwise diverse ontological categories to communicate unified meaning.
The Baboon and the Hunter
This is exemplified in the line from Adeboye Babalola's translation ' Salute to the Baboon' in his The Content and Form of Yoruba Ijala (1976, 95-99) poetry of hunters in Yoruba literature, addressing the baboon as he '' from whose hands the hunter has not received a wife/Yet who receives self- prostration homage from the hunter''.
This is a salute of the hunter poet to the nobility of his prey by evoking the Yoruba tradition of prostrating to one's prospective in laws at a wedding.
This evocation visualizes the hunter seeming to prostrate as he lies supine in hiding fixing his gun on the baboon.
This metaphorical expression conjoins the art of hunting and human dependence on the life of other creatures, within the context of the nobility of those creatures, ideas further developed in the poem.
Thus, metaphorical expression conjoins various domains of reference to deliver meaning through breadth of association at a speed beyond non-metaphoric expression.
Òwe, Metaphorical Expression, as Means of Seeking Lost Understanding
Does this help in explaining the logic of, the rest of the expression, ''Ti Òrò bá sọnù/ òwe la fií wáa,'' if discourse goes astray or is lost, we seek it out using metaphorical expression'' ?
How can the allusive, the indirect and evocative help to clarify a subject that has escaped understanding?
Why use what is not straightforward in understanding something challenging to understand?
Does the expression suggest a view of reality as a complexity that resists easy categorization, and is therefore best appreciated through evocation rather than explicit description?
A view suggested, perhaps, by the ironic complexity of the relationship between the baboon and the hunter in the line previously quoted, reinforced later on in the poem by such lines saluting the baboon as ''Gentleman on the tree top, whose fine figure intoxicates him like liquor,'' ''He whom his mother gazed and gazed upon and burst out weeping/ Saying her child's handsomeness would be the death of him''?
Òrò, Discourse, as Vehicle for Understanding Òwe, Metaphorical Expression
In examining these questions, in reflecting on challenging subjects through the vehicle of imaginative expression, might one not need to break these ideas down to their fundamentals, trying to work out how imaginative expression is related to its referent, an explicatory process that carries the navigator towards understanding, even if at a slower speed than the user of metaphor in weaving the nets meant to illuminate the otherwise perplexing?
In doing that, may one not be employing the literal aspect of oro, discourse in its verbal, denotative form in trying to understand the allusive and connotative?
Would one not be therefore engaging in using this aspect of oro as a steed for exploring the meaning of owe, metaphorical expression?
Would one not be therefore engaging in using this aspect of oro as a steed for exploring the meaning of owe, metaphorical expression?
Is that slow explicatory process not what Abiodun's book is about as he grapples with the evocative powers of the visual, verbal and performative arts?
thanks
toyin
OLAYINKA AGBETUYI
Oct 12, 2020, 2:23:23 PM10/12/20
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com, Yoruba Affairs
Ojogbon Toyin Adepoju.
You totally miss Ojogbon Afolayan's point. Ebenezer Obey did not coin the proverb whose older version was used by Rowland Abiodun. Obey 'signified upon' ( to use an African- American phrase) a usage whose authorship your initial hunch correctly
interpreted to be unknown., mainly for musico- rhetorical effect even though Obey understood its correct usage.
If you are writing and not singing the Obey music in question, you are obliged to use the correct form and not the Obey version. Obey was involved in artistry, you are involved in scholarship. Even if you are involved in the analysis of Obey's
music you will be required to compare Obeys artistic representation with normal usage and not substitute one for the other as if they are one and the same.
It is hermeneutically meaningless in normal usage to say ',Òrò l'eşin òwe' The Yorùbá will tell you Àşìpa òwe. (Incongruous proverb.) It is like Achebe saying ' words are the palm oil with which proverbs are eaten. i.e. words make proverbs
intelligible rather than proverbs make words intelligible.
If you want to analyse why Obey used this non- familiar form then you go into the metaphor- musical second stage of analysis. But your essay is not about music in general nor Ebenezer Obey's music per se.
OAA
Mr. President you took an oath to rule according to the Constitution.
Where are the schools to promote the teaching of the country's lingua francas?
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
Ti Òrò bá sọnù
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CALUsqTRV-xNkMQjtVq5TRh0iGp6wSjF0PJr15qt2%3De6ckZQrgQ%40mail.gmail.com.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CALUsqTRV-xNkMQjtVq5TRh0iGp6wSjF0PJr15qt2%3De6ckZQrgQ%40mail.gmail.com.
OLAYINKA AGBETUYI
Oct 12, 2020, 2:23:58 PM10/12/20
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com, Yoruba Affairs
ADDENDUM:
Toyin:
If you use words to unravel òwe then you cannot refer to òrò as steed because the prosaic explication does not possess the speed which steed suggests because the prosaic is slow and laborious unlike the instant apprehension present in the conjorative
powers of metaphors.
When Soyinka in one of his poems states 'woman as clam' the instant picture evoked will require about four or more sentences to prosaically explicate what the phrase suggests replete with the embedded euphemism. Or the phrase ' rust is ripeness'
in his poem ' Seed' in Idanre and Other Poems.
Or when Okigbo states:
'Me to the orangery solitude invites
A wagtail to tell
A tangled wood tale
A sunbird to watch
A mother on a spray.'
How do you explicate that to bring out the instantaneous sense of foreboding suggested in the swift manner the cryptic metaphors conveyed them?
The basic meaning of the phrase òwe lęşin òrò, to the average Yorùbà no matter how much we philosophize on it) is no more than the English reflection that good metaphor sharpens discourse. If you say good discourses sharpen metaphors its not
the same thing is it?
OAA
Mr President, you took an oath to rule according to the Constitution.
Ti Òrò bá sọnù
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CALUsqTRV-xNkMQjtVq5TRh0iGp6wSjF0PJr15qt2%3De6ckZQrgQ%40mail.gmail.com.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CALUsqTRV-xNkMQjtVq5TRh0iGp6wSjF0PJr15qt2%3De6ckZQrgQ%40mail.gmail.com.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Oct 12, 2020, 11:04:41 PM10/12/20
to usaafricadialogue
Ojogbon Olayinka Agbetuyi,
Thanks.
Dynamism of Yoruba Discourse and How to Present It
Thanks.
Dynamism of Yoruba Discourse and How to Present It
In the essay being discussed, I stated that I am adding an expansion of the original expression on relationships between òwe , metaphorical expression, and discourse, òrò.
I integrated the standard version and made clear to the reader that I was adding an expansion of that version, and stated my sources.
So, I did not substitute a new version for an older one but demonstrated how the expanded version builds upon an older one.
In my response to Afolayan, I also described such addition as a demonstration of the dynamism of Yoruba discourse.
In my response to Afolayan, I also described such addition as a demonstration of the dynamism of Yoruba discourse.
Hermeneutics of Nature as Demonstrated in the Visual and Verbal Arts of
Òwe and Oríkì
This dynamism is about the expansive interpretive possibilities of nature and of artistic forms responding to nature.
Ọpa Ọsanyin is centred in imagery of birds.
Abiodun's hermeneutics, explicating Yoruba thought, is about how
òwe, metaphorical expressions, are used in evoking the interpretive possibilities of phenomena, interpretations eventuating in the depictions of the character, ìwà,of those phenomena, as this character is demonstrated in and develops through time and space, that being one way of defining the Yoruba expressive form, oríkì, which, along with òwe, he describes as both verbal and non-verbal.
The essay is therefore a scholarly discussion about art, arts of nature.
May Discourse and its Vehicles Be Understood as Mutually Illuminating?
On the discussion of the logic of stating that òrò , discourse, may be understood as the vehicle for understanding òwe, metaphorical expression, your analysis is limited to the perception of òrò as words.
Òrò and òwe, in this hermeneutic system, are both verbal and non-verbal.
On the discussion of the logic of stating that òrò , discourse, may be understood as the vehicle for understanding òwe, metaphorical expression, your analysis is limited to the perception of òrò as words.
Òrò and òwe, in this hermeneutic system, are both verbal and non-verbal.
As demonstrated by the various definitions of
òrò I presented earlier,
òrò even goes beyond such divisions in terms of expressive forms.
Òrò is better understood as a subject of reference, a discursive universe constituted by a subject and how that subject is understood and discussed.
Abiodun, in tandem with an ese ifa, a literary form of the Ifá system of knowledge from an unnamed poet, although derived from a particular person whom he names, expands the idea of
òrò to include not only subjects of reference, and by implication, how they are referred to, but to all subjects of reference and their expressions as demonstrations of human cognitive and expressive capacity and the foundations of these capacities in divine mind, a divine foundation expressed in terms of sound, a sound resonating in the term òrò, visualised as an entity, which, on account of the intensity of its divine radiance may be safely approached only through
òwe, metaphorical expression and its realisation as
oríkì, the evocation of the being and expression of an entity.
This exposition in his first chapter frames the book in which he explores various forms of approach to the being of phenomena and their expressions.
These exploratory approaches are discussed in terms of the interrelations between the visual, verbal and performative arts and their religious and philosophical expressions.
These correlations are depicted as grounded in the sonic forms represented by the epistemological and metaphysical implications of Yoruba oral literature, an understanding of oral literature correlative with Ahmadou Hampate Ba's ''The Living Tradition,'' on the discursive traditions of a group of African peoples and with Abiola Irele on African discourses in The African Imagination.
This is my own understanding of the orientation of Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art.
Within these expansive definitions, from various sources and from Abiodun's book, words are therefore understood one aspect of
òrò.
Within such a symbiosis of thought and expression, one may reference how various aspects of discourse, of
òrò, of the subject and how it is discussed, reinforce each other.
Thus, metaphorical, evocative, connotative, non-linear expression, owe, advances the understanding of discourse through owe's associative force facilitating speed of integration of various frames of reference in mapping the character of a phenomenon.
In explicating this complex unity, however, we move from that level of
òrò expressed in
òwe, to another level.
That level is the linear, denotative, relatively direct level of discourse.
It involves the unpacking of the various semantic fields fused by owe.
Thus linear and non-linear discourse in
òrò are mutually illuminating.
Enabling the poet to declare,
Metaphorical expression is the vehicle of discourse
Discourse [in its explicary capacity] is a vehicle for metaphorical expression
both being steeds of discovery of each other's capacities.
Where Does Ebenezer Obey Fit in this Discussion of Òwe and Òrò?
As for Afolayan's intentions with referencing Obey, since he did not qualify his reference so as to indicate the intentions you understand him as having, I suggest we await his qualification.
As for the entire explicatory exercise, even I might have to go over it a number of times to adequately digest what I am trying to say.
The entire expression on
òwe
and
òrò is so sweetly evocative, so tantalising, I find it irresistible.
Great thanks
toyin
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DB6PR04MB2982322240AFB3DECF665812A6070%40DB6PR04MB2982.eurprd04.prod.outlook.com.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Oct 13, 2020, 4:33:12 AM10/13/20
to usaafricadialogue, Yoruba Affairs, Bring Your Baseball Bat, Odua
Self Initiation into the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality 2
Invocation of Ògbóni Philosophers, Thinkers on Ògbóni
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Oct 13, 2020, 4:33:12 AM10/13/20
to usaafricadialogue, Yoruba Affairs, Bring Your Baseball Bat, Odua
Self Initiation into the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality
Reworking Classical African Esoteric Systems
1
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Oct 13, 2020, 4:33:20 AM10/13/20
to usaafricadialogue
Thanks, OAA, for these further efforts.
Beautifully stated, even though I disagree with the general point being made:
If you use words to unravel òwe [metaphorical expressions] then you cannot refer to òrò as steed because the prosaic explication does not possess the speed which steed suggests because the prosaic is slow and laborious unlike the instant apprehension present in the conjurative powers of metaphors.
Our respective analyses may be grounded on different understandings of
òrò
, discourse.
Òrò, as I understand it, is both the subject of reference and the means of reference, language and other expressive forms and what they refer to.
Within this framework, there exist various kinds of expression, the metaphorical and the literal.
They help explain a subject of reference.
In performing this function, they are both described by the poet in Yoruba as horses riding in tandem.
A horse performs one fundamental function.
It eases the rider by carrying them, enabling them to move faster than if they were on foot.
This speed could be slow or fast.
At whatever pace, it saves energy and enables the rider to do more than if they were on foot.
Along similar lines, various aspects of discourse, the metaphorical and the prosaic,
are mutually explicatory.
Metaphor facilitates scope of understanding of subjects of reference,
òrò
.
Prosaic explanation helps understanding of metaphor.
Metaphorical expression, a form of discourse, advances discourse.
Prosaic analysis, a form of discourse, advances discourse by explicating metaphorical expression.
Thus, may one not state, ''good discourse sharpens metaphors"?
thanks
toyin
On Mon, 12 Oct 2020 at 19:23, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagb...@hotmail.com> wrote:
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DB6PR04MB2982C241A940BB81B01B7FBEA6070%40DB6PR04MB2982.eurprd04.prod.outlook.com.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Oct 13, 2020, 4:33:26 AM10/13/20
to usaafricadialogue, Yoruba Affairs, Bring Your Baseball Bat, Odua
Self Initiation into the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality
5
Ògbóni/Adinka Stanzas
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
The initiation into the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality was completed in part 4 of this series.
What follows are meditations complementing the previous parts.
This part, “The Adinkra/Ògbóni Stanzas,” combines the visual power of Akan and Gyaman Adinkra, from Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, respectively, and the evocative force of the Ògbóni cosmogram presented in earlier sections.
The Ògbóni cosmogram is a symbol structure evoking human existence in its terrestrial and cosmic contexts, buried under the earth of the ilédi, the Ògbóni sacred meeting house, to represent the presence of Ilè, Earth.
The Ògbóni cosmogram is a symbol structure evoking human existence in its terrestrial and cosmic contexts, buried under the earth of the ilédi, the Ògbóni sacred meeting house, to represent the presence of Ilè, Earth.
The cosmogram employs the symbols of chalk, for Olorun, the ultimate creator; mud, for Ilè, Earth; charcoal for human beings; and camwood dust for blood.
The cosmogram is depicted in Dennis Williams’ “The Iconology of the Yorùbá 'Edan Ògbóni’ " (Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 34, No. 2, 1964. 139-166;142) and elaborated on by myself in “Ògbóni: From Myth to Physics: Yorùbá Esotericism at the Matrix of Disciplines ”, accessible through the compilation of my essays on Ògbóni, “My Journey in Developing Universal Ogboni Philosophy and Spirituality, a New School of the Ogboni Esoteric Order.”
The name of each Adinkra symbol is placed in italics at the conclusion of each stanza where it features.
Adinkra could be understood as evoking the intelligence and message which each kra, as the eternal essence of the human being is understood in Akan thought, takes with it from the Supreme Being when it obtains leave to depart to earth.
Adinkra may also be perceived as imaging the distillation of understanding that emerges from the experience of living on Earth, consummated and carried over into the Beyond through the transmutation of death.
Situated between mud and chalk, charcoal and camwood
I reflect on the immensity of the cosmos.
Kuntunkantan
In my mind’s eye
I see charcoal to my right , red camwood dust to my left
mud behind, chalk in front.
I embody all that humanity has ever been
and will be.
The red of blood : life’s vitality
the mud of earth : the material universe in which we live
charcoal : human creativity transforming matter to energy
all subsumed by the ultimate immensity
its symbol the radiance of white chalk.
Agyindawuru
Positioned between earth and humanity, blood and fire
I rest in the expanse of the infinite.
Dame Dame
Unraveling the knot mystic
at the intersection of science and metaphysics
myth and consciousness
Ògbóni wisdoms unfolding through space and time.
Nyansapon (1)
Seeking to penetrate to the unity of energy and intelligence
of palpitating life within terrestrial spaces
in the bowels of eternity.
Adinkrahene ( 2 )
Transformations of being and becoming
in flight to the Ògbóni mountain (3)
where earth and humanity, fire and life
unite as a cosmic flame. (4)
Akokonan
Maintain silence
Visualize
the sequence of Adinkra symbols to consolidate them in your memory, facilitating your calling them up at anytime, recalling their symbolic values in relation to the Ògbóni cosmogram.
You may position them in five directions of space around your body to reinforce the remaking of your identity, making them easier to recollect.
Kuntunkantan in front of you
Agyindawuru at your back
Nyansapon on your right
Dame Dame on your left
Adinkrahene in your chest
Akokonan at the top of your head
Maintain silence
Notes
1. Nyansapon is known as the “wisdom knot.” It a stylised representation of a knot used in evoking the creativity and skill demonstrated in unravelling knots.
I use it in this context to suggest the creativity and transformative use of knowledge required to construct the cognitive implications of Ògbóni thought, symbolism and art, from myth and spirituality to ideas of metaphysics, consciousness and science, exemplified by my essay sequence “Ògbóni: From Myth to Physics: Yorùbá Esotericism at the Intersection of Disciplines” accessible through the compilation of my essays on Ògbóni, “My Journey in Developing Universal Ogboni Philosophy and Spirituality, a New School of the Ogboni Esoteric Order.”
2. The concentric circles of Adinkrahene are used here in evoking cognitive integration in the quest to understand cosmic harmony.
In such a context, the circles would suggest either cosmic structure or cognitive progression, growth in understanding cosmic structure. They can suggest both at the same time.
This approach is adapted from the theory of mandalas in Buddhism and yantras in Hinduism.
In such a context, the circles would suggest either cosmic structure or cognitive progression, growth in understanding cosmic structure. They can suggest both at the same time.
This approach is adapted from the theory of mandalas in Buddhism and yantras in Hinduism.
Within these frameworks, the two major orientations are represented by the womb and the diamond mandalas.
In the womb mandala, the centre of the circle indicates the point of cosmic emergence while the circles emanating from it suggest cosmic expansion from an originating point.
In the diamond mandala, the external circles signify the contraction of the cosmos towards its originating core at the conclusion of a cosmic cycle.
Along similar lines, the person contemplating these rhythms may begin from a point of integration of the totality within a central point and move out from that to an expansion into the cosmic totality.
The contemplative may also begin from the material universe, represented by the outermost circle and move inwards to the integration of the various constituents of existence into an originative and summative centre.
These ideas are evoked here in order to suggest how Ògbóni symbolism in general and the Ògbóni cosmogram in particular may symbolise a similar cosmological and contemplative rhythm, from humanity to Earth to Olodumare, the ultimate creator, or from Olodumare to Earth to humanity, in cycles of expansion and integration.
[ 3] “the Ògbóni mountain” is used here in evoking the summit of achievement represented by Ògbóni ideals.
This image is adapted from the challenges and fulfillment of mountain climbing. The metaphor suggests the idea of climbing a mountain as symbolizing human development towards a crowning point.
This crowning point could also be interpreted in terms of cosmological unity, a centre around which the universe is constellated in metaphysical terms, a centre of ultimate cosmic meaning and direction, a centre to which the aspirant attains in the course of their journey of understanding.
The immediate inspiration for the use of this idea here is the following magnificent evocation of the image of a mountain as a summation of human achievement as well as a cosmological centre in the Adeptus Minor Ritual of the Western esoteric order, the Golden Dawn:
“This is the symbolic Mountain of God in the Centre of the Universe, the sacred Rosicrucian mountain of Initiation, the Mystic Mountain of Abiegnus.
Below and around it are darkness and silence, and it is crowned with the Light ineffable. At its base is the Wall of Enclosure and Secrecy, whose sole Gateway, invisible to the profane, is formed of the Two Pillars of Hermes[ Greek deity who is patron of the Hermetic esoteric tradition to which the Golden Dawn belongs].
The ascent of the Mountain is by the Spiral path of the Serpent of Wisdom. Stumbling on between the Pillars is a blindfolded figure, representing the Neophyte, whose ignorance and worthlessness while only in that Grade is shown by the [ symbol for the entry point in the initiatory journey], and whose sole future claim to notice and recognition by the Order is the fact of his having entered the Pathway to the other Grades, until at length he attains to the summit (The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites & Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order, ed. Israel Regardie. Minnesota: Llewellyn,2002. 242).”
Another image along similar lines which inspires the conception of the Ògbóni mountain is that of Mount Meru in Buddhism.
Mount Meru represents both a cosmic centre as well as the constitution of the human being. It indicates a person’s points of intersection with the cosmos.
In this scheme, the cosmos corresponds to the shape of the human body, culminating in the top of the head, understood as the top of the metaphysical mountain as it is expressed in the human form, and the nexus of intersection between self and cosmos, a centre to which the individual aspires to identify themselves through their spiritual quest ( Tibet’s Great Yogi Milarepa. Trans. Kazi Dawa-Samdop. Ed. W.Y. Evans-Wentz. London: Oxford UP, 1969, 211-12. Note 3.)
(4) The image of fire evoking the blending of human being and cosmic centre is one of the richest in mysticism, the theory and practice of union with or intimate perception of ultimate reality.
It ranges from the idea of fire as a guide, inflaming the self and illuminating the journey, as in Christian mystic St. John of the Cross’ lines in “Dark Night of the Soul”, “On a dark and secret night/starving for love and deep in flame/I went forth guided by nothing but the fire, the fire inside.”
He interprets this fire as a guide. He also depicts it in terms of the purification undergone by the mystic on their journey to sharing in the purity of the Ultimate. The journey is consummated by the Ultimate absorbing the self to itself, akin to the manner in which wood is consumed by fire.
Particularly memorable in this line of imagery is the butterfly in Farid ud-Din Attar’s Islamic mystical story, The Conference of the Birds, in which a moth , inflamed with desire to grasp the essential nature of the candle flame, penetrates it with his proboscis and keeps going, until his whole being is consumed by the flame.
“He now knows the nature of the flame because he has become one with it,” a watching moth concludes, “but, alas, he cannot share that knowledge with us, the assembly of moths, because where he has gone, he cannot return from to enlighten us.”
That is an evocation of the idea of the absolute distance between ultimate reality and human expressive powers ( The Conference of the Birds. Trans. Afkham and Dick Davis. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, 206).
The image is also used in a primarily cognitive sense, in the spirit of Mazisi Kunene on Zulu epistemology, theory of knowledge.
He describes the process of uniting specific details of knowledge and universal concepts in terms of the cooking of food by fire.
This combustive transformation culminates in the perception of the unity of the general and the particular across all categories of existence, a unitive vision imaged by the symbol of the circularity and depth of the calabash( Anthem of the Decades. London: Heinemann, 1981. xxiii-xxiv).
The Hindu Upanishads uses a similar motif of fire in an epistemic sense, enjoining the aspirant to employ the fires of reflection, contemplation and action in the effort to understand the unity of self and cosmos, upon arriving at the unity of self and universal Self, the aspirant is consumed by fire and mounts to heaven( The Ten Principal Upanishads. Trans. Shree Purohit Swāmi and W.B. Yeats. London: Faber and Faber, 1970, 27).
An Invitation to Donate to this Project
You can contribute materially to this project, facilitating research and publication in Ogboni Studies, consolidating the subject and providing foundations for the unified study of African esoteric systems, bodies of thought and action defined by secrecy in the exploration of knowledge.
Click here to donate at Ogboni Explorations blog.
__,_._,___
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Oct 13, 2020, 4:33:26 AM10/13/20
to usaafricadialogue, Yoruba Affairs, Bring Your Baseball Bat, Odua
Self Initiation into the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality
4
Concluding Invocations
%20ed.png?part=0.2&view=1)
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
The ritual is based on an understanding of Ògbóni developed from scholarly research on the esoteric school.
This foundation is developed in terms of the grounding of Ògbóni within classical Yorùbá philosophy and spirituality. These conjunctions are further correlated with philosophical, religious and artistic expressions from Africa, Asia and the West.
This is the first initiatory text of a new school of Ògbóni I am developing, the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality.
The goal of this new school of thought and action is that of publicly demonstrating how to take advantage of the contemporary and timeless significance of Ògbóni thought and culture.
These values are evident to me even as a non-member of conventional Ògbóni who prefers to work out an individualistic approach to Ògbóni thought and culture rather than join an Ògbóni group.
The logic of the ritual, the sources and reasons for the choices of elements included and why they are used the way they are, is presented in the footnotes.
These values are evident to me even as a non-member of conventional Ògbóni who prefers to work out an individualistic approach to Ògbóni thought and culture rather than join an Ògbóni group.
The logic of the ritual, the sources and reasons for the choices of elements included and why they are used the way they are, is presented in the footnotes.
The images come from various sources online. I will provide the credits later. Great thanks to the creators of the images and those who uploaded them.
Female half of a male and female edan ogboni pair
Visualize
the sequence of images of the Ògbóni cosmogram, without the accompanying invocations :
front:
white light : grains of white powdered chalk :
Olorun
back:
points of deep black light for mud :
Oduduwa
right:
black points within which a red flame glows
evoking charcoal from cooking fires :
human being
left:
red points of light for camwood dust :
blood
to consolidate them in your memory, facilitating your calling them up anytime, recalling their symbolic values.
Maintain silence
Sculpture of Ogboni horseman which could be taken as evoking journeying between dimensions
Visualize
a beam of white light
descending from orun
from where existence emanates
visualized as the farthest point in space above your head
passing through your head, your body and exiting below
penetrating to the core of the Earth and exiting into outer space.[1]
Male half of an edan ogboni male and female pair
Imagine
That light in your chest
reach out from your chest to your sides
left and right.
On the right, reaching out to touch the cluster of black points
within which a red flame glows
evoking charcoal from cooking fires
representing Ogun the fashioner
Ìwòrì Méjì, the leaves as the cosmos
the cosmos as the leaves
human creativity
Earth as the all performing wisdom
which gives perseverance and unerring action in all things.
Onile
From your right
the light moves to your front
to touch the points of white light
representing grains of white powdered chalk
symbolizing Olorun, ultimate creator
Obatala, the igniter, from whom existence explodes
Èji Ogbè, opener to all possibilities of existence
Onile, embodiment of the all-pervading wisdom
structuring the physical cosmos.
Male onile
From your front
the light proceeds to your left to touch the cluster of red points
evoking blood, standing for the life force of humans and animals
identified with Obaluaye, purifying fire
Òdí Méjì integrator and distributor
Onile, bringing strength to the spirit
turning sorrow to wisdom
pervasive yet discriminating.
Onile
The light continues
to your back
touching the constellation of deep black
representing mud
signifying Oduduwa, mountain unifying mind, world and cosmos
Òyèkú Méjì, consolidator of the doors to all possibilities
Onile as Earth, mother of mothers on whose body all life feeds.
Place your palms together and state:
Àse.
Maintain silence
Onile
Concluding Invocation of Onile
Evoking the Ògbóni Cosmogram
Mother of we, charcoal burners feeding flames for food
creators of ever more powerful forms of fire
blood palpitating, bonding us in life and judgment.
In the name of the ultimately immense one
luminous as the sky yet beyond that great immensity.
May your presence be known.
In mystery and power,
in darkness and light,
in awe and illumination, majestic yet comforting.
Ilè! Alagbara! Powerful! Immovable!
Yet dynamic as the flowing stream and the crashing waves
rhythms of ocean bottom, life teeming in silent depths.
Accept these humble gifts as we seek your presence.
Maintain silence.
Female half of a male and female edan ogboni pair
Having unified all four points of the Ilédi ògbóni you have become and consolidated this embodiment of sacred space by a summative invocation of Onile in relation to the Ògbóni cosmogram, seal the consecration of yourself.
Touch your finger to your forehead.
Declare
“May I realise my unity with
“Olodumare”
To your chest
“Ilè”
To your right shoulder
“My fellow humans”
To your left shoulder
“ All that exists”
conclude
bring your two palms together and declare
“To the greatest blessing of all beings
As long as being exists.”
Àse.”
Maintain silence
The initiation is completed.
It is complemented by the philosophical summations of Ògbóni that follow in part 5.
[1]This section is an adaptation of the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram from Western esotericism adapted and discussed in the earlier parts of this ritual.
An Invitation to Donate to this Project
You can contribute materially to this project, facilitating research and publication in Ogboni Studies, consolidating the subject and providing foundations for the unified study of African esoteric systems, bodies of thought and action defined by secrecy in the exploration of knowledge.
Click here to donate at Ogboni Explorations blog.
__,_._,___
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Oct 13, 2020, 4:33:28 AM10/13/20
to usaafricadialogue, Yoruba Affairs, Bring Your Baseball Bat, Odua
Self Initiation into the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality
3
Invocation of Onile
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
The ritual is based on an understanding of Ògbóni developed from scholarly research on the esoteric school.
This foundation is developed in terms of the grounding of Ògbóni within classical Yorùbá philosophy and spirituality. These conjunctions are further correlated with philosophical, religious and artistic expressions from Africa, Asia and the West.
This is the first initiatory text of a new school of Ògbóni I am developing, the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality.
The goal of this new school of thought and action is that of publicly demonstrating how to take advantage of the contemporary and timeless significance of Ògbóni thought and culture.
These values are evident to me even as a non-member of conventional Ògbóni who prefers to work out an individualistic approach to Ògbóni thought and culture rather than join an Ògbóni group.
The logic of the ritual, the sources and reasons for the choices of elements included and why they are used the way they are, is presented in the footnotes.
These values are evident to me even as a non-member of conventional Ògbóni who prefers to work out an individualistic approach to Ògbóni thought and culture rather than join an Ògbóni group.
The logic of the ritual, the sources and reasons for the choices of elements included and why they are used the way they are, is presented in the footnotes.
The images come from various sources online. I will provide the credits later. Great thanks to the creators of the images and those who uploaded them.
Ritual
Invocation of Onile
representing Ilè, Earth, in the Ògbóni cosmos.
Onile is Owner of Earth and of the Ogboni Ilédi, the Ògbóni sacred meeting house, that rests on that Earth.
She thus represents Earth as well as the gathering of her devotees, the Ògbóni, themselves standing for human community, itself ensconced within the community of being that is the cosmos.[1]
Contemplate
Onile
Absorb the image of wild power in the horns of the Onile sculpture. Contemplate the palpitating yet disciplined beauty defined by the shapes and polish of the bodies. Reflect on the venerational stillness expressed by the crouching and kneeling figures. Note their nakedness, dramatizing total identification with sacred mystery. Observe their holding a votive bowl or making the Ògbóni gesture of esoteric knowledge, thumb hidden in fist.
These are expressions of the scope of the Ògbóni aesthetic, its artistic expression of vision.
They project the Ògbóni stance of awareness, of sensitivity to the mystery of existence, to
…the… profound…elusive phenomenon of the cosmic location of [human being] …the patient, immovable and eternal immensity that surrounds [ us, an] undented vastness…the realm of infinity [evoked by the scope of Earth, its immensity of sky, its unplumbed depths]
[ Wole Soyinka, philosopher of Ògbóni, in Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990, 2, “The Ritual Archetype”).
Then proceed to the invocation that follows.
The invocation organizes the cosmos around Onile, using the Ògbóni cosmogram, a symbol structure evoking human existence in its terrestrial and cosmic contexts.[3]
The cosmogram employs the symbols of chalk, for Olorun, the ultimate creator; mud, for Ilè, Earth; charcoal for human beings; and camwood dust for blood.
These four everyday natural substances, drawn from the pervasive presence and seeming ordinariness of Earth, imply a cosmos of associative possibilities, associations concisely described in the invocation.
These motifs demonstrate the sublimity of the seemingly mundane, the cosmicisation of the everyday, emblematizing the creative powers of the feminine, concealed in human womb or womb of Earth, yet enabling, sustaining and regenerating all, a dynamism demonstrated by human existence.
The symbolic substances are ritually buried in the ground of the Ilédi in order to represent the presence of Earth.
The aspirant in this initiation is enjoined to visualize one of these symbolic forms in each of the four areas of space surrounding themselves, thereby integrating these symbols into their image of their own personal space. [4]
The aspirant thereby adapts the burial of these symbolic forms in the Ilédi to represent Ilè. This visualization and its accompanying invocations thereby make the initiate into an ilédi, a sacred space in which Earth is invoked through symbols signifying human creativity in its terrestrial and cosmic framework.
The cosmogram is amplified in the invocation through alignment with central coordinates of Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology. The coordinates employed here are the names and attributes of four representative orisa, deities. These names and qualities are correlated with four representative names and roles of the odu ifa, agents and organizational forms of Ifa, a Yoruba origin system of knowledge used in mapping and shaping the structure and dynamism of existence.
One of the four elements in the Ògbóni cosmogram, in terms of its symbolic form and what it stands for-white, powdered chalk for Olodumare, charcoal, for the human being, powdered camwood for blood and mud, for Earth- is first referenced, followed by an interpretation of that symbolism, then by orisa and odu ifa correlates, concluding with an evocation of Onile in terms of one of her qualities as developed from various sources.
The ritual therefore integrates Ògbóni and Ifa, two central Yoruba origin systems of knowledge, within the cosmographic shape of Orisa cosmology, organizing this configuration around the person of Ilè, Earth, the most immediate human reality within the context of cosmos.
Edan ogboni, representing the human male and female couple, children of Onile
Imagine
suspended in the air in front of you
points of white light
glowing brighter
as you declare:
grains of white powdered chalk
whiteness of dew
falling from orun, the world of ultimate origins
moulding the earth.[5]
I call upon Olorun
Owner of Orun
zone of ultimate origins
infinite depth, translucent beauty
the sky.
Infinitely distant
yet ever near.
Massive quantities of light
from the original explosion that created the universe
coming together as subatomic particles to shape simple elements
forming stars
collapsing and becoming black holes
imploding on themselves
creating fission reactions
sending huge clouds of complex elements throughout the universe
complex elements that cooled to form the solar system
within the solar system evolving the ecosystem that exists on Earth.[6]
Alasuwada, the creator of togetherness, I invoke you
Onile
I call upon
Obatala, the igniter
from whom existence tumbles[8]
chief of the white cloth
fabric binding the universe together
spark of light animating consciousness
existing in all things on all levels of being.[9]
Onile, male and female couple
I salute Èji Ogbè
opener to all possibilities of existence.[10]
The complementary polarities that define all that is[11]
male and female in unity.
I call upon
Onile
embodiment of the all pervading wisdom structuring the physical cosmos.[12]
The everlastingly rolling pot
seeds of permutation
randomness and structure
change and stability.
I offer you a calabash of earth[13]
We who walk on your body[14]
salute your radiance at dawn and dusk[15]
as you lead us
across the complexity of existence to the simple light
where the logic of our mysterious terrestrial journey is made plain.[16]
Onile
Visualize
in the air behind you
a collection of points of deep black
becoming more intensely dark
as you proclaim:
I call upon Oduduwa
mountain unifying mind, world and cosmos
glowing peak concealing hidden bulk
within earth and sea.[17]
I hail Òyèkú Méjì
consolidator of the doors to air and stars, love and hate,
celebrations and conflict
the identities of all that is.
I call upon Onile
pure black mud
between earth and water
between spirit and matter
between life and death.
Earth, mother of mothers on whose body all life feeds.
The space upon and within which life exists.
The nourishing darkness of the earth in which plants grow.
The terrestrial darkness
where the body begins the process that will lead to its dissolving
into the soil to feed other life at the end of its earthly journey.[18]
I offer you a calabash of water
representing the mirror like wisdom you dramatize[19]
enabling one perceive the essence of reality
in which each existent, organic or inorganic
is rooted
as one studies the universe externally and internally
in order to perceive its true state.
Edan ogboni, representing the human male and female couple, children of Onile
Picture
on your right
a cluster of black points
radiating inwardly with red light
increasing in force
as you assert:
I call upon Ogun the fashioner
Iron
valour, creative energy, industry, hunting, warfare.[20]
Ìwòrì Méjì, I salute you
what are the names of each possibility among the leaves that make up the universe?
How do we see the leaves as the cosmos
the cosmos as the leaves?[21]
You are the answer.
I call upon Onile
charcoal
glowing with fire
fire discovered by humans in the struggle for sustenance
evoking human creativity and sources of energy
from the stars to the human body to those created by human hands.
Power of Earth, distant but compelling
the rugged majesty of great mountains
the destructive beauty of the earthquake and the cyclone
the bone crushing immensities of glorious ocean depths.[22]
I offer you a calabash holding a stone
embodiment
of the all performing wisdom
which gives perseverance
and unerring action in all things.[23]
I offer you a calabash holding a stone
embodiment
of the all performing wisdom
which gives perseverance
and unerring action in all things.[24]
Transparent and radiant
glorious and terrifying
empower my heart!
Female figure, perhaps Onile
Envision
to your left
a collection of red points
expanding in brightness
as you assert:
I call upon Ọbalúayé
purifying fire[25]
Òdí Méjì, honoured one
integrator and distributor
through you we must all pass if we are not to be lost in the forest of the multifarious.[26]
I call upon Onile
shimmering flakes of red, powdered camwood
evoking blood
life force of humans and animals
enabling their existence on Earth
participants in the terrestrial theatre
of which the two-legged ones are both actors and spectators.[27]
You who bring strength to the spirit
turning sorrow to wisdom
inspiring endurance in hope.[28]
I offer you a calabash empty of everything but air
without which humans, animals and plants cannot live
everywhere feeding life to all
yet invisible to sight
representing the pervasive yet discriminating wisdom you emblematize
enabling one to know each thing separately yet all things as one.[29]
The beautiful complexity of the contemplative mind
tranquility incubating dynamism
placid without, potent within
alert calm gestating hidden powers.[30]
Edan ogboni, representing the human male and female couple, children of Onile
[1] An interpretation derived from Lawal, with the cosmic contextualization added by myself.
[2] The frontal, foreground image comes from Barakat Gallery. URL: http://store.barakatgallery.com/product/yoruba-brass-onile-sculpture-of-a-kneeling-woman/
The second image, in side view, is from the Femi Akinsanya Art Collection.URL: https://www.femiakinsanyaartcollection.com/gallery/FAk2009.00034/
[3] As depicted in Williams (1964, 142).
[4] An adaptation of a strategy from the Western esoteric tradition, where I first encountered it in the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram ( Israel Regardie, The Tree of Life: An Illustrated Study in Magic. Ed. Chic Cicero and Sandra Tabatha Cicero. St. Paul: Llewellyn, 2001. 239-247; described, in greater detail, along with the Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram and the hexagram ritual in Regardie’s edited The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. 6th ed.. St. Paul: Llewellyn, 2003. 280-299 ) and later in the Middle Pillar Ritual, the planting of the symbols of the cosmographic Tree of life in the space around the aspirant, the (, Golden Dawn. Ed Regardie. 89-91) and in Hinduism, in the Sri Devi Khadgamala Strotram ritual ( the most detailed English version known to me being that by the Shakti Saddhana school).
These rituals imaginatively actualise the understanding of the individual as a microcosm of the cosmos by enjoining the practitioner to visualise cosmic symbols as positioned within their personal space, as in Pentagram and Hexagram rituals, or themselves as embodiments of deity, as in the Khadgamala and the Western Assumption of God Form (Regardie, The Tree of Life. 2001.253-261. Also known in Buddhism as Deity Yoga. In the Buddhist and Hindu contexts, this imaginative identification is understood as an enactment of a reality conventionally inaccessible to the human mind but which the meditation facilitates the apprehension of.
This reality is described as the unity of human being and deity in the source of existence from which all possibilities emerge. Hindu theologian Abhinavagupta projects this idea magnificently in his opening lines of such texts as Tantraloka, Tantrasara, Paratrikisika Vivarana in terms of the union of his mother and father as dramatizing the union of thew deities Siva and Skati that generates and sustains the universe, and their giving birth to him as analogous to the emergence of the heart of cosmos that vibrates in harmony with the union of these deities.
Jaideva Singh’s translation of the Paratrisika brings out these ideas vividly while Bettina Baumer’s Abhinavagupta’s Hermeneutics of the Absolute expounds richly on them, complemented, among other sources, by Christopher Wallis interpretation of the passage in his translation of Tantraloka chapter 1. The most detailed analysis of those lines is Alexis Sanderson’s while Paul Muller Ortega’’s The Triadic Heart of Shivaexplores in detail this idea of the union of human and divine heart.
I discuss conjunctions between the Abhinavagupta’s Tantric idea of the human couple as embodying deity with the Ogboni image of the edan ògbóni couple as representing Ile, Earth, in . The edan ògbóni image also implies an erotic dimension highlighted in the nakedness and at times prominent genitalia of the figures. I also discuss this aspect of the edan, in its intersection with Tantric thought, particularly Abhinavagupta’s.
This sacred eroticism implies an understanding of the sacrality of the human body and of nature, an idea also developed in Yorùbá thought, with particular reference to the feminine, as I discuss in in. Kerry Martin Skora’s series of articles examines in depth the implications of Abhinavagupta’s sacred eroticism and its relationship to a philosophy of nature.
A book length translation of Abhinavagupta’s chapter dedicated to erotic ritual is while Lilian Silburn’s contains a beautiful translation of a summative passage of that text, which I also discuss in relation to Ògbóni in, referencing its English translation,
Female edan, nursing a child
[5] The use of white, powdered chalk in representing Olorun, another name for Olodumare, the creator of the universe, is here complemented by the imagery of dew falling from orun, the place of ultimate origins, to mould the Earth and enable existence on it, as depicted in “Ayajo Asuwada,” a poem from the Yorùbá origin Ifá system of knowledge, perhaps first translated by Akinsola Akiwowo in “Contributions to the Sociology of Knowledge from an African Oral Poetry”
(International Sociology, 1986. Vol. 1. No. 4. 343-358).
Babatunde Lawal discusses this poem in relation to the feminine principle of deity, in Yorùbá spirituality, with particular reference to Ile, Earth, the centre of Ògbóni veneration, in The Gelede Spectacle:Gender and Social Harmony in an African Culture ( ).
[6] I am yet to find my source for this beautiful summation of the current scientific account of cosmogenesis.
[7] Translated by Babatunde Lawal from “Ayajo Asuwada” (Akiwowo, 1986) in The Gelede Spectacle : Art, Gender and Social Harmony in an African Culture. Seattle University of Washington Press,1996.21.
[8] Obatala, in his character as Orisanla, the Great Orisa, is described in one myth as the source of all the other orisa. The orisa are understood, in this context, as the splinters of his being which broke into fragments when his slave Àtuńdá rolled a rock on him. Beier presents this myth, in relation to an examination of the nature of the orisa as individual and as a collective, in The Return of the Gods, presenting it as an image of expansion of possibilities of viewing the cosmos, each orisa representing a vantage point on the cosmos. Wole Soyinka explores the myth in relation to ideas of individuality and unity towards the conclusion of his poem “Idanre” (Idanre and Other Poems. London:Eyre Methuen, 1979, 57-88. 65, 68-69, 81-83).
Among engagements with Soyinka’s deployment of this myth is Niyi Osundare’s “Wole Soyinka and the Àtuńdá Ideal: A Reading of Soyinka’s Poetry” (81-97). Exploring questions of creativity within the matrix of Soyinka’s deployment of the mythic complex to which Àtuńdá belongs is Nouréini Tidjani-Serpos’ “The Postcolonial Condition of African Knowledge: From the Feat of Ogun and Sango to the Postcolonial Creativity of Obatala”( Research in African Literatures. Vol.27. No.1. 1996.3-18).
[9] From “chief of the white cloth” to “existing in all things on all levels of being” comes from Awo Fa’lokun Fatunmbi’s “Obatala : Ifá and the Chief of the Spirit of the White Cloth.”
Edan ogboni, representing the human male and female couple, children of Onile
[10] Eji Ogbe is the first in the odu of Ifá, a sequence of 256 spatial patterns and their graphic and literary correlations constituting the central information organization and storage system of the Yorùbá origin Ifá system of knowledge.
I evoke here babalawo-adept in the esoteric knowledge of Ifá-Joseph Ohomina’s description of the odu Ifá as not simply human creations but the “names,” the spiritual identities, of all possibilities of existence, a view I discuss in “Cosmological Permutations: Joseph Ohomina’s Ifá Philosophy and the Quest for the Unity of Being.”
Eji Ogbe is being referenced here, and after Obatala and Olorun as representing cosmic emergence and totality, as signifying the existence of a system, Ifá, for exploring this cosmic dynamism, as it is interwoven with the concerns of human life, and working out, through the process of Ifá divination, how the intersection of the human and the beyond-human may be shaped towards human ends.
The inclusion of the Ifá referent here and in each stage of this invocation thereby correlates the nexus of the Ògbóni cosmogram represented by Olodumare, Earth, blood and the human being, with Ifá, thereby unifying and mutually enriching these two central Yorùbá systems of knowledge.
The inspiration for this strategy comes from the almost complete identity between the Ogboni cosmogram, the Ifá story of Iya Agba and her four calabashes under the earth, and as this story is developed by Judith Gleason ( A Recitation of Ifá, Oracle of the Yorùbá ) and as I develop it in the Ìyá Àgbà series of essays ( ) and with Johnson’s account of the contents of the Igba Odu, the Calabash of Odu, representing the female pole complementing the male Orunmila, deity of wisdom, in Ifá ( ).
In the Ifá story, each of the symbolic substances, mud, camwood dust, charcoal and chalk is associated with an orisa, an attribution I replicate in this ritual.
Thus, the Ògbóni cosmogram is expanded in this context into a microcosm of Orisa cosmology, with the four orisa evoked here standing for all the others, organized in relation to Olodumare, as embodied by Earth, representing the material universe and its spiritual identities, identities implicated within Olodumare, the creator of the universe, as the ultimate source, the ground, of the material cosmos, an ultimacy intersecting materiality, an intersection evoked by the image of the crossroads, central to Orisa cosmology in general and to Ifá in particular ( Yorùbá : Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought).
This almost complete identity of symbolic forms demonstrates a deep intimacy of meanings between Ifá and Ogboni, an intimacy centred in the constellation of a symbol configuration around a female figure, Ìyá Àgbà in the Ifá story or as embodying that figure, Odu in the Igba Odu and Earth, in the Ogboni cosmogram.
Lawal’s deduces that all female orisa are best understood as expressions or forms of Ile, Earth, a helpful idea in trying to demonstrate Ògbóni as foundational to Orisa spirituality and Yorùbá philosophy, one of the goals of my work on Ògbóni.
[11] An interpretation of Eji Ogbe correlative with Babatunde Lawal’s observations in a magnificent article, its conceptual breadth and analytical depth amplified by rich visuality as the essay maps the foundations of Yorùbáorigin metaphysics in terms of the principle of complementary duality, “Èjìwàpò: The Dialectics of Twoness in YorùbáArt and Culture.” African Arts. Vol. 41. No. 1. 2008. 24-39. Ògbóni symbolism is discussed on ps. 29-30 and that of Ifa on ps. 30-32.
Onile
[12] “the all-pervading wisdom” is a quote fromthe characterization of the Dhyāni Buddha Vairochana, one of the Five Divine Wisdoms in the Kargyutpa school of Tibetan Buddhism, while the description here of this kind of wisdom is an adaptation of its characterization in the book, both as presented in W.Y. Evans-Wentz, 37.
[13] This idea of successive offerings to the deity, but using my own choice of offerings, is adapted from the Hindu Sri Devi Khadgalama Stotram ritual, in honour of the Goddess Tripurasundari. The complete version of the abridged form of the English translation of the ritual as it as it is known to me, readily accessible, provided free online, is by the Shakti Saddhana group. The calabash motif evokes the biological, metaphysical and cognitive symbolism of the calabash and similar concavities, such as the pot, in classical African thought.
In Igbo thought, it stands for the life nurturing space of the womb. In Yorùbá Orisa cosmology, it indicates the gestative space from which all possibilities of being arise, as Shloma Rosenberg states of the “odu calabash” of Olodumare, the ultimate creator, a version of Igba Iwa, the Calabash of Existence, representing the unity of spirit and matter, of orun and aye.
In Zulu thought, it signifies the cognitive grasp of all possibilities of existence, as described by Mazisi Kunene (Anthem of the Decades, ). Susanne Wenger uses the question “which comes first, the pot or the space inside it?” in evoking paradoxes of being in relation to classical Yorùbá thought in A Life with the Gods in their Yorùbá Homeland ( Worgl: Perlinger Verlag, 1983 ).
Conjoining the biological, metaphysical and cognitive symbolism of the calabash in these examples is Igba Odu, the “Calabash of Odu” in the Yorùbá origin Ifásystem of knowledge. Ifá tries to map all possibilities of existence and shape them in relation to human needs. Igba Odu may be seen as signifying existence as a hermeneutic possibility, a dynamic form open to understanding, symbolized by the feminine identity known as Odu, teacher of the Ifá system of knowledge to her husband Orunmila, divinity of wisdom, thus demonstrating intimacy of being and of cognitive generation in relation to this knowledge system.
Edan ogboni, representing the human male and female couple, children of Onile
Judith Gleason describes Igba Odu, the “Calabash of Odu,” as representing the possibility of looking:
in all directions at once…back to the moment of one’s own conception, to grasp-from this new perspective-the horizontal plane of existence, the brotherhood of all who tread the earth; below to the realms of earth-and that of the dead [and] upward to the stars and the cosmic order exemplified above ( A Recitation of Ifá, Oracle of the Yorùbá .
Evoking this range of generative symbolism, biological, metaphysical and cognitive, is the ubiquitous presence of the calabash, in relation to the feminine form, in Yorùbá religious sculpture, demonstrated in the image of a woman holding a bowl in the art dedicated to various deities as well as in some examples of the agere Ifá, in which the bowl holds the sixteen sacred palm nuts used in consulting Ifá through a divinatory process. The conjunction of the divinatory instruments and the concave container, particularly as held by a female figure, mobilize ideas of biological gestative potential with those of cognitive potential represented by the divinatory instruments, as Rowland Abíọ́dún’s observations in “Hidden Power : Oṣun, the Seventeenth Odu” (27) may be developed.
Female edan
[14] This is an adaptation of a celebration of Ile, Earth, from Babatunde Lawal’s “À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New Perspectives on Edan Ògbóni”, African Arts, Vol. 28, No. 1, 1995, 36-49+98-100, 41, translated by Lawal from Adeoye, C. L, Igbagbo ati Esin Yorùbá . Nigeria: Evans Bros. 1989:
Earth is the mother of the "One
who wakes up to meet honor,"
otherwise known as Edan
May we not step on you with the
wrong foot
May we step on you for a long time
For a long time will the feet walk
the land
May we not step on you, Earth,
Where it will hurt you.
[15] “your radiance at dawn and dusk” to “where the logic of our mysterious terrestrial journey is made plain”[15] is inspired by the address to the goddess Elebereth in J.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings Vol. 1 : The Fellowship of the Ring: “We still remember, we who dwell/ in this far land beneath the trees,/Thy starlight on the Western Seas” ( London : George Allen and Unwin, 1979, 114)
[16] “ as you lead us/across the complexity of existence to the simple light/ where the logic of our mysterious terrestrial journey is made plain” is inspired by Dante Alighieri’s summative perception of cosmic harmony in Paradise, the culminating book of his Divine Comedy, in which “all the leaves scattered throughout the universe,” representing all aspects of existence, all substances, phenomena, their accidents or qualities, and the relationships between the substances and their qualities, are perceived as “one simple light” (The Divine Comedy 3 : Paradise. Trans. Barbara Reynolds. London: Penguin, 1988, 345;348.
[17] An invocation of Oduduwa, the identity as deity rather than as human progenitor of the Yorùbá . The imagery used here is inspired by Susanne Wenger’s A Life with the Gods in their Yorùbá Homeland where she describes Oduduwa as
[18] This interpretation of the symbolism of mud is influenced by Paula Ben-Amos’ "Symbolism in Olokun Mud Art"( African Arts, 6/4: 28-31) and Ndubuisi Ezeluomba’s “The Explanation of a Text with Reference to the Mud Sculptures of Benin.”Black Arts Quarterly 33, Vol. 12, Issue 1. Winter 2007 . URL:www. stanford. edu/group/CBPA/BAQWinter2007. pdf. Accessed 25/12/09.
[19] “The mirror like wisdom” is a quotation of the characterization of the Buddha Akṣḥobya, one of the Five Divine Wisdoms in the Kargyutpa school of Tibetan Buddhism, as described in Evans-Wentz, 37.
[20] Quoting Lawal on the associations of Ogun
[21] An adaptation of Dante Alighieri’s cosmic vision at the conclusion of the Divine Comedy,
[22] Inspired by the suggestion of rugged power in the sculptural depiction of Ajagbo, a version of Onile, as her character is described and pictured by Peter Morton Williams in “The Yorùbá Ògbóni Cult in Ọ̀yọ́”, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 30, No. 4. 1960, 362-374, 369-370 and the superb image of this figure in Lawal’s “À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó,” 40.
[23] “the all performing wisdom which gives perseverance and unerring action in all things” is a quote from the characterization of the Dhyāni Buddha Amoga-Siddhi, one of the Five Divine Wisdoms in the Kargyutpa school of Tibetan Buddhism, from Evans-Wentz, 37.
Onile
[24] “the all performing wisdom which gives perseverance and unerring action in all things” is a quote from the characterization of the Dhyāni Buddha Amoga-Siddhi, one of the Five Divine Wisdoms in the Kargyutpa school of Tibetan Buddhism, from Evans-Wentz, 37.
[25] Ọbalúayé is another name for the orisa Ṣònpònnò, associated with smallpox and identified, by Susanne Wenger, with the spiritual and psychological purification that could emerge from suffering, such as the intense suffering that comes with the disease (A Life with the Gods.1983. 168, 173, 175 ). Wenger herself entered the Orisa tradition through a serious illness that opened her to its possibilities ( Ulli Beier, The Return of the Gods. ). I discuss the theme of transmutational suffering at the intersection of Orisa mythology and historical examples in Autobiographical Explorations: Ifa and Vincent van Gogh.
[26] An interpretation depicting the progression of the odu ifa as a sequence of formulation and expansion that dramatizes cosmological progression from an initial complementary polarity represented by Eji Ogbe, the first odu.
[27] Evoking human beings as capable of both immersion in experience and observation and analysis of their experience, a reflexivity that is the foundations and driving force of culture and civilization.
[28] This characterization is adapted from J.R. Tolkien’s depiction of the goddess Nienna in the Silmarillion( London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978,31) , his self created mythology underlying his fictional novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
[29] The second and third lines are almost verbatim quotes from the characterization of the Buddha Amitābha, one of the Five Divine Wisdoms in the Kargyutpa school of Tibetan Buddhism, as described in Evans-Wentz, 37.
[30] An interpretation of the aesthetics of the Yorùbá Gelede mask, in its evocation of classical Yorùbá conceptions of the feminine.
Edan ogboni, representing the human male and female couple, children of Onile
An Invitation to Donate to this Project
You can contribute materially to this project, facilitating research and publication in Ogboni Studies, consolidating the subject and providing foundations for the unified study of African esoteric systems, bodies of thought and action defined by secrecy in the exploration of knowledge.
Click here to donate at Ogboni Explorations blog.
__,_._,___
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Oct 13, 2020, 4:33:28 AM10/13/20
to usaafricadialogue, Yoruba Affairs, Bring Your Baseball Bat, Odua
__,_._,___
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Oct 13, 2020, 4:33:41 AM10/13/20
to usaafricadialogue, Yoruba Affairs, Bring Your Baseball Bat, Odua
Self Initiation into the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality
6
Invocation of Edan Ògbóni
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
This is the sixth part of a ritual for relating oneself to the foundational spiritual powers and ethical vision of the Earth and humanity centred Yorùbá origin Ògbóni esoteric order.
The initiation into the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality was completed in part 4 of this series.
The ritual is based on an understanding of Ògbóni developed from scholarly research on the esoteric school.
This foundation is developed in terms of the grounding of Ògbóni within classical Yorùbá philosophy and spirituality. These conjunctions are further correlated with philosophical, religious and artistic expressions from Africa, Asia and the West.
This is the first initiatory text of a new school of Ògbóni I am developing, the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality.
The goal of this new school of thought and action is that of publicly demonstrating how to take advantage of the contemporary and timeless significance of Ògbóni thought and culture.
These values are evident to me even as a non-member of conventional Ògbóni who prefers to work out an individualistic approach to Ògbóni thought and culture rather than join an Ògbóni group.
These values are evident to me even as a non-member of conventional Ògbóni who prefers to work out an individualistic approach to Ògbóni thought and culture rather than join an Ògbóni group.
The logic of the ritual, the sources and reasons for the choices of elements included and why they are used the way they are, is presented in the footnotes. Full references to the texts referenced in the footnotes are provided in the other parts of the text beginning from part 1. All texts will be further refined later to take care of any omissions.
The images come from various sources online. I will provide the credits later. Great thanks to the creators of the images and those who uploaded them.
Invocation of Edan Ògbóni
Contemplate the image of the male figure of an edan ògbóni[1] below and make the affirmations inspired by it[2]
Serene, dignified, contemplative
the composure and self-discipline
expected
of an
Ògbóni.[3]
Elevated features and dynamic stillness
inwardly collected, yet outwardly alert.
The pregnant calm of the face
contemplatively concentrated
the distillation of experience in reflection.
Embodiment of insight into the dynamic creativity of existence
an ideal of personality
grounded in a cosmological vision.
The essence and timelessness of being[4]
embodied in human form
human but going beyond the ordinarily human.
Eyes looking both without and within
their bulge suggesting rare insight into reality.
Crescents of life rhythms
symbolizing lunar phases and their
alignment with life
represented by female menstrual cycles.[5]
Whirlpool circles
increase and dynamism
expansive power of Olokun
goddess of the sea and abundance.[6]
Rhythm of life and increase
transformative power of Èsù,
divine messenger
mediating
unifying existence.[8]
Dynamism and balance
alignment of the temporal and the eternal
progressions of being
and their ultimate focus
within a summative unity.
Harmony and equilibrium of male and female synergy
in holding male and female edan ògbóni
dynamic power, physical and metaphysical.[9]
Accord of men and women
children of Earth
universal mother
the union of orun, the zone of ultimate origins,
and Ile, Earth.[10]
Two Ògbóni, they are three.[11]
I call upon
the harmony of two
the dynamism of three
the physical and metaphysical forces to make things happen
empowered at creation by Olodumare to link cause with effect
the physical with the metaphysical
the visible with the invisible
the human with the superhuman.[12]
I call upon the intimacy and equilibrium of two
and the mystical union of three.[13]
I call upon the dynamic force uniting two elements
towards a common purpose.[14]
I call upon that which powers the span of life
ultimately enabling entry into the post-terrestrial[15]
the cycle of transition between Earth and the beyond
the completeness and transcendence of time.
I call upon those whose voices are often heard
whose touches are often felt
whose wisdoms come suddenly to the mind
when the wisest have shaken their heads and murmured:
it cannot be done. [16]
I call upon bygone voyagers awaiting the seeker in pools of silence.[17]
I call upon that which leads into the infinity still and dynamic
I call upon that which empowers the contemplative and active.[18]
I enter into aiku pari iwa, the deathlessness that consummates existence.[19]
Maintain silence
Dedication[20]
May I be as the accomplished Ògbóni
whose mind and breath are immersed
in the dynamic between orun and Ile
between the zone of ultimate origins and Earth
between Origination and Manifestation.
May I be one
absorbed in the true and deepest nature
of both the inner Self and the outer world
at the intersection of ori lasan and ori inu
the head external and the head within
the self-grounded in biology and shaped by time, space and society and the self that predates and outlives its temporal twin
embodiment of ultimate potential
the undying flame grounded in eternity.[21]
May I be as that Ògbóni
perceiving the odu calabash in Olodumare
the repository of possibility and circumstance
from which each moment is born
the constellation of possibilities
containing all events past, present and future[22]
the intrinsic and unchanging source
from which the kaleidoscopic drama
of the dynamic, swirling, and abundant variety
of the world
continuously emerges and manifests.
May I be such an Ògbóni
abiding with a silenced though open vision
the pupils of the eyes unmoving.
May I be a person
gazing on the outer world
my vision resting not only on its apparent outwardness
but also on its inner reality.[23]
May I be an Ògbóni
my sight falling on the surface play of existence
penetrating its pulsating layers
continuously discovering, uncovering, and recognizing
its ultimate, unitary, and silent source in supreme consciousness.
May I be one
abiding in the space encompassing inwardness and outwardness
in one overarching and paradoxical consciousness.
Ògbóni may I be
seeing the world reveal its deeper layers of being
laying bare its ultimate and secret source
in the resplendent domain
at the intersection of orun and ilè
the silent pulsating core
of the essence of the supreme consciousness.
May I thus embody the seal of Ògbóni
the Ògbóni stance of awareness.
May I be one abiding with eyes opened and alert
and yet with a mind that is motionless and serene,
a gaze focused on the secret portals that opens to one’s subtle perception.
The sun and moon, the ‘sun’ as the means of knowledge and the ‘moon’ as the known objective universe, dissolving into the great interiority of awareness that pulsates naturally with the triple vibration, the vibration of the energies of will, knowledge, and action, the vibration of the supreme àse that constantly tends towards the manifestation of the visible reality, the pulsations of consciousness…
Àse.
Maintain silence
[1] Edan ògbóni, sculpture evoking the human being as embodiment of Earth, symbolizes central Ògbóni values.
[2] The first set of affirmations from “serene, dignified, contemplative” to “dynamic power, physical and metaphysical” are adaptations of Lawal’s description of the symbolism of Ogboni art in “Ayagbo Ayato.” The second set, from “I call upon the harmony of two” to “the completeness and transcendence of time” is an adaptation of his explanation of Ògbóni symbolism of threes from the same essay. Other adaptations come from Wole Soyinka and Rowland Abíọ́dún. All sources are referenced.
[3] As above
[4] As above
[5] As above
[6] As above
[7] As above
[8] Falokun, Idowu and Falola.
[9] As above
[10] Adapted from Dennis Williams (1964) on edan ògbóni.
[11] Morton-Williams and Lawal.
[12] As above
[13] As above
[14] As above
[15] As above
[16] Adapting and quoting Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman.
[17] Adapting and quoting Wole Soyinka’s “O Roots” from his A Shuttle in the Crypt.
[18] An adaptation from Christian spirituality but which applies to spirituality and philosophy generally. A particular Christian formulation takes this idea into metaphysical realms by describing God as “ever active and ever at rest.” Rest could be understood in this context in terms of the comparatively relaxed state of mental activity and activity in terms of the outwardly dynamic expression represented by physical action.
[19] Adapting a Yorùbá expression from Rowland Abíọ́dún’s “The Future of African Art Studies: An African Perspective,” and my translation of this expression.
[20] The affirmations in “Dedication” are adapted from a poem depicting the mystical vision of the Hindu sage, Abhinavagupta on account of similarities between the Kashmiri thinker’s thought and the appearance of the edan ògbóni above. I find this edan particularly inspiring as an evocation of Ògbóni ideals as described by Babatunde Lawal in “Ayagbo Ayato.”
The poem is the “Anubhava-nivedana-stotra,” translated and complemented by commentary by Paul Muller-Ortega in “On the Śeal of Sambhu: A Poem by Abhinavagupta” in Tantra in Practice. Ed. David Gordon White. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000, 572-586.
I quote the poem but amplify it by integrating Muller-Ortega’s interpretive lines with those of the poem they explain.
I slightly modify the ideational universe of these sources by interjecting ideas from Yorùbá cosmology to which Ògbóni belongs. I reference the Yorùbá àse concept of pervasive cosmic force as well as Shloma Rosenberg’s description of the odu calabash of Olodumare, the Yorùbá idea of ultimate reality, in his account of this idea in Lukumi, a diaspora version of the Yorùbá Orisa tradition, from his essay “Olorun” one of the names of Olodumare at his site Mystic Curio.
[21] Ori is the human head understood as metaphorical for the invisible and immortal embodiment of the individual’s ultimate potential, the centre of ultimate direction of the self, a primary concept of the Orisa cosmology to which Ògbóni belongs.
All influences constellate in relation to the ori, an understanding exemplified, among numerous sources, by the ese ifa, Ifa literary work, titled in translation “The Importance of Ori,” available free online, and Adegboyega Orangun’s Destiny: The Unmanifested Being, these being the two most important texts on the subject known to me, complemented by Olabyi Babalola Yai’s summation of ori as “essence, attribute and quintessence… the uniqueness of persons, animals, and things, their inner eye and ear, their sharpest point and their most alert guide as they navigate through this world and the one beyond” ( Review of Henry John Drewal et al, Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought in African Arts in African Arts, Vol. 25, No. 1, 1992, 20+22+24+26+29, 22).
All influences constellate in relation to the ori, an understanding exemplified, among numerous sources, by the ese ifa, Ifa literary work, titled in translation “The Importance of Ori,” available free online, and Adegboyega Orangun’s Destiny: The Unmanifested Being, these being the two most important texts on the subject known to me, complemented by Olabyi Babalola Yai’s summation of ori as “essence, attribute and quintessence… the uniqueness of persons, animals, and things, their inner eye and ear, their sharpest point and their most alert guide as they navigate through this world and the one beyond” ( Review of Henry John Drewal et al, Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought in African Arts in African Arts, Vol. 25, No. 1, 1992, 20+22+24+26+29, 22).
[22] Shloma Rosenberg, Mystic Curio.
[23] This and succeeding depictions of perceptual penetration by Abhinavagupta may be aligned with classical Yorùbá epistemology, particularly as described by Lawal in “ Aworan: Representing the Self and its Metaphysical Other in Yorùbá Art” and elaborated upon in relation to African art by Mary Nooter Roberts and its implications examined in some depth and correlated with African, Western and Asian contexts by myself in “The Significance of Yorùbá Theory of Knowledge for Philosophy of Education,” (Yorùbá Studies Review).
An Invitation to Donate to this Project
You can contribute materially to this project, facilitating research and publication in Ogboni Studies, consolidating the subject and providing foundations for the unified study of African esoteric systems, bodies of thought and action defined by secrecy in the exploration of knowledge.
Click here to donate at Ogboni Explorations blog.
__,_._,___
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Oct 13, 2020, 4:33:43 AM10/13/20
to usaafricadialogue, Yoruba Affairs, Bring Your Baseball Bat, Odua
Self Initiation into the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality
7
The Ògbóni Quest
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Introduction
This is the seventh part of a ritual for relating oneself to the foundational spiritual powers and ethical vision of the Earth and humanity centred Yorùbá origin Ògbóni esoteric order.
The ritual is based on an understanding of Ògbóni developed from scholarly research on the esoteric school.
This is the first initiatory text of a new school of Ògbóni I am developing, the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality.
Possible stages on the path of growth in this spirituality and philosophy are suggested in this part by the complementarity of the images of a horseman from Ògbóni sculpture with text indicating progressions on the journey. The journey is described as a penetration into áwo, a Yoruba term indicating the mystery or mysteries at the foundation of existence, symbolised, in this context, by darkness, the darkness of the interior of the Earth, the mother venerated by Ògbóni.
“Knowing you from the outside is just a way to strengthen us for the world, but what is most profound comes from your intimate Being ... Oh! Wonderful Creature ... Born of Divine Love that supports us at all times of our Living! What else could we want? We pray with all our might that the Yabás bless all mothers [ even though] we can’t always be with you until your memory makes us relive… how wonderful…”
“Knowing you from the outside is just a way to strengthen us for the world, but what is most profound comes from your intimate Being ... Oh! Wonderful Creature ... Born of Divine Love that supports us at all times of our Living! What else could we want? We pray with all our might that the Yabás bless all mothers [ even though] we can’t always be with you until your memory makes us relive… how wonderful…”
Salutation in quotation marks above adapted for Ilè, Earth, from a post on Pickuki.com by Umbanda Ponta de Luz do Caboclo Cobra Coral, a group in the Brazilian religion Umbanda.
The initiation into this philosophy and spirituality was completed in part 4 of this series.
Here are parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.
The initiation into this philosophy and spirituality was completed in part 4 of this series.
Here are parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.
What follows after part 4 are invocations and meditations complementing the previous parts.
The logic of the ritual and of the invocations and meditations, the sources and reasons for the choices of elements included and why they are used the way they are, is presented in the footnotes. Identification of the texts referenced in the footnotes are provided in the various parts of the text, beginning from part 1. All texts will be further refined to take care of any omissions.
The images come from various sources online. I will provide the credits later. Great thanks to the creators of the images and those who uploaded them.
The Journey Begins: Entry into Ògbóni Áwo
The Ògbóni Quest[1]
A small child works his way off the edges of his sleeping mat
a bird soars high above it all[2]
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?”
How best may we live within this mystery
this journey on which we find ourselves
origin unknown
destination unknown?
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?[3]
Do we 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?
Do we 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.
Can the path cross the river?
The river cross the path?
Which is the elder?
Could we make the path and find the river
the river from long ago
the river from the creator of the universe?[4]
The Journey Continues: Penetrating into Ògbóni Áwo
The journey from orun to ayé and from ayé to orun is undertaken every moment in the life of the Ògbóni initiate. This transformative voyage is inspired by the spirit of the Yoruba expression “babini ko to ka tura eni bi,” “being born is not as significant as giving birth to oneself anew.”[5]
A Yoruba saying goes “ayé l’ọjá, orun ni le,” “ayé, the world, is a market place, orun, the zone of ultimate origins, is home,” but who is to say where ayé ends and orun begins in a universe where every point in time and every location in space is a site of intersection of orun and ayé?[6]
Without the originating forces of orun, would ayé exist?
Without the dynamism of ayé, how would the potential of orun be realized?
In the journey between these realms, the visible and the invisible, ultimate potentiality and finite actualization, existence is constituted.
Slowly and patiently, I get on my feet.
Slowly and patiently I get on my feet.
Firampon!
Otweaduampon Nyame,
the Ancient God.
The Heavens are wide, exceedingly wide.
The Earth is wide, very very wide.
We have lifted it and taken it away.
We have lifted it and brought it back,
From time immemorial.[7]
The Journey Unfolds: Light Shines on the Path to Ògbóni Áwo
[1] This is a reworking of Kolawole Ositola’s narration of a poem from the Yorùbá origin Ifá 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 Yorùbá origin Ògbóni esoteric order, as presented in Margaret Thompson Drewal’s Yorùbá Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992, 33) in a discussion that runs from pages 32-38, embedded within chapter 3, “The Ontological Journey”, within the context of the book’s grounding in the idea from Yorùbá thought, of ritual as journey, in which ritual is microcosmic of human life progression as a transformative process, actualized, as Drewal interprets it, in terms of spiral rhythm representing Yorùbá spirituality’s understanding of life as a continuous transition between birth on Earth, leaving Earth and rebirth on Earth (46-47). I am most fortunate to have been directed to this text by Adriano Migliavacca Migliavaccato.
[2] This opening 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.
One of the delights of Ifá literature, particularly those collected by Wande Abimbola, as in Ifa Divination Poetry, An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus and Sixteen Great Poems of Ifa, is the use of ingenious opening lines that have no obvious connection with the poem, and describing these lines as the babalawo, the Ifá diviner who made the Ifá divinatory consultation the initiation and outcome of which are described in the poem. These references are striking because these lines refer to non-animate phenomena, at times depicting situations, like these ones above or truisms, such as “No man no matter how wise can tie water into a knot in his pocket.”
Ositola interprets the opening first two lines of this poem as suggesting the need for humility like that of a child in order to reach the elevation suggested by the bird.
While that interpretation demonstrates a tenuous link with the poem, I see those lines as the poet simply exercising their skill in creating incongruous juxtapositions with no particular overarching semantic intention except to generate the quality of what James Joyce, in another context, in his novel Ulysses, describes as the ‘jocoserious,’ the presentation of serious issues in a jocular manner that, incidentally, often defines Ifá poetry, a demonstration of the humanism of the Orisa tradition to which Ifá belongs, a tradition where human and deity, the mundane and the sacred are intertwined.
While that interpretation demonstrates a tenuous link with the poem, I see those lines as the poet simply exercising their skill in creating incongruous juxtapositions with no particular overarching semantic intention except to generate the quality of what James Joyce, in another context, in his novel Ulysses, describes as the ‘jocoserious,’ the presentation of serious issues in a jocular manner that, incidentally, often defines Ifá poetry, a demonstration of the humanism of the Orisa tradition to which Ifá belongs, a tradition where human and deity, the mundane and the sacred are intertwined.
The Journey Progresses : Immersion in Ògbóni Áwo
[3] A summation of 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 defined by Adegboyega Oyekunle Oluwayemisi and 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 life 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) in “The Metaphysical and Epistemological Relevance of Ifá Corpus”, International Journal of History and Philosophical Research, Vol.5. 1. Feb. 2017.28-40.
Though Oluwayemisi’s succinct analysis helps frame the poetic expressions, the expressions were inspired by David Bell’’s summation of German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s central project in “Kant” in The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy. Ed. Nicholas Bunnin and E.P.Tsui-James. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. 589-606, 590 and by Peter Jones on English philosopher David Hume’s key themes in the same book (571-588, 573).
[4] From “The river has crossed the path” to “The river from the creator of the universe” are adaptations of quotations from “Akan Poetry” by Kwabena Nketia in Ulli Beier’s edited Introduction to African Literature. London: Longman, 1980, 23-33.30-31.
[5] Against the background of my other exposure to this idea within and beyond Yorùbá contexts and crystallized in my essay “Between the Calabash and the Infinity Symbol: Contrastive and Complementary Cosmographic Images from Yorùbá Thought”, I interpret the journey between orun and ayé in terms that emphasize cognitive motion between both realms rather than limiting these mediations to the physical transitions of birth and death or of journeys from orun to ayé at the beginning of time.
The reference to the Igbo version of the Yorùbá expression “ayé loja, orun ni le”, “ayé, the world, is a market place, orun, the zone of ultimate origins, is home” is to Nkeonye Otakpor’s “The World as a Marketplace” where he discusses the Igbo version of a similar understanding.
The allusion to the occurrence of the same perspective in the ideas of other African philosophies is inspired by the graphic dramatization of this conception in the Akan lament for a loved one passing away early “What were your wares that they sold out so quickly?” from the same essay by Nketia (24) depicting life on Earth as a process of selling and perhaps buying, in which people depart from Earth when the wares they are selling have been sold out.
The Journey Expanding : Actualization in Ògbóni Áwo
[6] The idea of “a universe where every point in time and every location in space is a site of intersection of orun and ayé” is most powerfully realized for me in the African context by the image of the crossroads, represented, particularly forcefully by Norma Rosen’s superb description, in “Chalk Art in Olokun Worship” of igha-ede, a particular motif in Benin-City Olokun chalk art, used as a means of mapping intersections between material and non-material space and time and between temporality and infinity. I am also inspired by T.S. Eliot, at the intersection of Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, dramatizing a similar idea of trans-dimensional intersections in his Four Quartets.
This idea generates further momentum for me in being represented in various spiritualities, as in the Jewish Kabbalistic expression, “Kether, the zone of primary cosmic manifestation, is in Malkuth, the material universe and Malkuth is in Kether” and the Buddhist maxim “ Nirvana, the awareness of the source of existence, beyond time and space, is in sangsara, understanding of the universe shaped by the limitations of time and space.”
[7] From “Slowly and patiently, I get on my feet” to “From time immemorial” further down in the poem are quotations from Nketia, 30-31.
In my forthcoming Adinkra Cosmos: An Exploration of Being through Meditations on the Adinkra Symbol Kuntunkantan, I interpret those lines of Akan drum poetry, “The Heavens are wide, exceedingly wide/The Earth is wide, very, very wide/We have lifted it and taken it away/ We have lifted it and brought it back/From time immemorial,” in terms of the process of combining various interpretive possibilities of phenomena, deconstructing and reconstructing them:
“The transformative processes made possible by human cognitive capacity become a lever for “lifting” the earth, taking it away and bringing it back, metaphorically speaking. The earth may thus be conceived in this context as the cognitive image that constitutes each person’s understanding of the world.
The act of lifting and taking it away is embodied in the process of examining its components, dismantling them, as it were, deconstructing them in order to examine their relative validity in relation to each other or to an overarching conception of reality.
This process could also involve an examination of the contingent character of human understanding as dependent on factors defined by environment, and, which, in various contexts, make possible diverse interpretive possibilities.
So the person who would lift and take away their own world examines its constituents and possibly reconstitutes them so as to imagine what it could be to experience other perspectives on existence, in their particulars and general structure, orientations perhaps inspired by environmental possibilities different from those that have shaped their own conceptions.
The person therefore opens a window into other possibilities of seeing the universe within the otherwise significantly homogenous and yet endogenously grounded conceptions of the cosmos that characterize human thought in various cultures.
The act of “bringing back the world” which had been “lifted and taken away” may thus involve reassembling the constituents of one’s own view on the world, in relation to whatever modifications have occurred within it in relation to the re-examination of its constituents and general structure.
Within these cognitive exercises, the conception of Otweaduampon Nyame as the pivot of existence can be variously understood. It could be approached as a cognitive tool that facilitates efforts to develop a relational integrity in one’s understanding of the universe, as well as a sensitivity to differing conceptions of the world in its particulars and as a whole.
Otweaduampon Nyame could also be approached as representing an actual factor that IS in its own right, a factor that participates in the constitution of consciousness, either as its originating ground or as an aspect of its nature.
An Invitation to Donate to this Project
You can contribute materially to this project, facilitating research and publication in Ogboni Studies, consolidating the subject and providing foundations for the unified study of African esoteric systems, bodies of thought and action defined by secrecy in the exploration of knowledge.
Click here to donate at Ogboni Explorations blog.
The Journey Infinite : Consummation in Ògbóni Áwo
The Journey Infinite : Consummation in Ògbóni Áwo
__,_._,___
Michael Afolayan
Oct 13, 2020, 4:33:47 AM10/13/20
to usaafricadialogue
I can't say it any better than Alagba OOA has stated it. I should let Toyin Adepoju ponder over the response.
MOA
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CALUsqTQSZFg-WkMiCKOSM3iXxbdYqChrOpj__JCFpx%3DYyyn2mw%40mail.gmail.com.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Oct 13, 2020, 8:55:10 AM10/13/20
to usaafricadialogue, Yoruba Affairs, Bring Your Baseball Bat, Odua
Self Initiation into the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality
8
Seeking Meaning in the Terrestrial Journey
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Introduction
This is the eighth part of a ritual for relating oneself to the foundational spiritual powers and ethical vision of the Earth and humanity centred Yorùbá origin Ògbóni esoteric order.
The ritual is based on an understanding of Ògbóni developed from scholarly research on the esoteric school.
This is the first initiatory text of a new school of Ògbóni I am developing, the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality.
The initiation into this philosophy and spirituality was completed in part 4 of this series.
What follows after part 4 are invocations and meditations complementing the previous parts.
This part is enriched by pictures of Ògbóni art and of Ògbóni philosophers and philosophers of Ògbóni, people whose works are directly and indirectly central for understanding the inspirational power of Ògbóni.
The images come from various sources online. I will provide the credits later. Great thanks to the creators of the images and those who uploaded them.
Ile, Earth, flanked by her children, the human male and female couple
Dialogue on Ògbóni
Seeking Meaning in the Terrestrial Journey
“The Yoruba origin Ògbóni esoteric order is a group of people united in their secret deliberations by their belief in Earth as universal mother.”
“Interesting. Even if their discussions are largely secret one can appreciate their veneration of Earth as an effort to make meaning of terrestrial existence.”
“True. Life on Earth can be seen as brief and puzzling, at times requiring reassurance to persist with.”
“Absolutely. We find ourselves here without any known prior agreement of ours to come here, ignorant of any identity we might have had, any place we might have been in before entry into the Earth, and where we shall go after that. Various answers are provided to these questions, none of definitive value or universally accepted.”
“A perplexing situation indeed.”
“The human being grows in physical and mental powers, reaches a climax in both, though at different times, then descends in strength of those powers, until they break down totally, leading to the person leaving the Earth, the body interred in soil. A distressing prospect, a bird flying swiftly through a lighted room and out again into the dark, the dark of a cold, winter night, as Bede describes human life in his Ecclesiastical History of England.”
“Interestingly, this sensitivity to transience is core to Ògbóni thought. ‘In the light of life being bracketed by the two great immensities of birth and death, how should a person live?,’ is a question that drives their philosophy, as may be deduced particularly from Babatunde Lawal's rich summation "À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó."
“True?"
“Yes”
“How does their philosophy respond to this question?”
Onile, Owner of Earth and of Ogboni House of Congregation, Symbol of Human Community, in Onile's male and female forms, representing Earth through her children
The Inspiration of the Forest
“It responds by transposing the understanding of nature into the human realm. Ògbóni is the product of a forest civilization, a world surrounded by forest, a society built by shaping space for humanity out of forest space, relating with the forest as a zone from which to win ground and livelihood as well as an immensity that inspires awe.”
“Interesting.”
“Exploring the variety and wonder of the forest, its integration of various forms of existence, the forest came to stand for ‘the universe, inhabited by obscure forces to which the human being stands in a dynamic moral and spiritual relationship and with which his destiny is involved’ as Abiola Irele describes the vision of Ijala, Yoruba hunter’s poetry, in his 'Tradition and the Yoruba Writer.' ”
“An intriguing perspective.”
“Exploring the forest facilitated an appreciation of ‘animal and plant life, of the essence and relationships of growing things and the insights they enable into the secrets of the universe’, as Wole Soyinka sums up on Ijala in Myth, Literature and the African World.”
"Striking"
"Ahmadou Hampate Ba, in "The Living Tradition" published in the UNESCO General History of Africa. Vol.1: Methodology and Pre-History, amplifies this style of understanding with reference to African peoples south of the Sahara, particularly the Bambara, the Fulani and the Dogon:
If an old teacher comes upon an ant-hill during a walk in the bush, this gives him an opportunity for dispensing various kinds of knowledge according to the kind of listeners he has at hand. Either he will speak of the creature itself, the laws governing its life and the class of being it belongs to, or he will give children a lesson in morality by showing them how community life depends on solidarity and forgetfulness of self, or again he may go on to higher things if he feels that his audience can attain to them.
Thus any incident in life, any trivial happening, can always be developed in many ways, can lead to telling a myth, a tale, a legend.
Every phenomenon one encounters can be traced back to the forces from which it issued and suggest the mysteries of the unity of life, which is entirely animated by Se, the primordial sacred Force, itself an aspect of God the Creator.
“Magnificent. Particularly in an agrarian and hunting civilization as the Yoruba and those other African societies you referenced were for a long time. But with the eventual development of high levels of urbanization, do such ideas have practical value?"
Susanne Wenger, Ogboni philosopher
Image Above
Susanne Wenger, Ogboni philosopher, as described in part 2 of this series.
“Earth existed before the orisa, and the Ògbóni cult before kingship.”-Peter Morton-Williams, “The Yoruba Ogboni Cult in Oyo”.
Susanne Wenger, Ogboni philosopher, as described in part 2 of this series.
“Earth existed before the orisa, and the Ògbóni cult before kingship.”-Peter Morton-Williams, “The Yoruba Ogboni Cult in Oyo”.
“Here I am, one with the water: I think and feel like the river, my blood flows like the river, to the rhythm of its waves, otherwise the trees and the animals would not be such allies.
I am here in the trees, in the river, in my creative phase, not only when I am here physically but forever-even when I happen to be travelling-hidden beyond time and suffering, in the spiritual entities, which, because they are real in many ways, present ever new features.
I feel sheltered by them-in them-because I am so very fond of trees and running water-and all the gods of the world are trees and animals long, long before they entrusted their sacrosanct magnificence to a human figure.”
Susanne Wenger in Adunni: A Portrait of Susanne Wenger by Rolf Brockman and Gerd Hotter
From the Forest to the City
“They do. The forest is then transposed in terms of the everyday world, the cosmos constituted by the office and the school, the crossing of traffic lights and the buying of food in the market, the movements in space and the navigations of individual and social reality that constitute the modern world.”
“How is that possible?”
“One thinker puts it this way. ‘People walk through the forest. They see leaves, trees, insects, sometimes a small animal, perhaps a snake. They see many things. But they see little. They hear many forest sounds. But they hear little.”
“Rich.”
“ 'In the universe there are so many signs', this thinker continues. 'A few we understand, the way farmers know what clouds mean, and fishermen understand the stars. But most signs mean nothing to us because we aren’t prepared to understand them,' spoken by the healer Damfo in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Healers, which Armah described to me in an email as adapted from ideas from the Akan of Ghana, a civilization emerging from forest like the Yoruba of Nigeria and neighboring countries.”
“Really? So, how does this style of thinking move from signs in nature to signs in social life?”
“This understanding of learning is based on the view that the experiential context of human life, a context that is both human and non-human, continuously provides opportunities for learning.”
“That makes sense. Please continue.”
“Good. This style of thinking sees these human life situations as embodying possibilities of interpretation through which people shape their lives.”
“Okay.”
“This relevance emerges at various levels of inclusiveness, from signs that enable one cross the street safely to the personal significance of particular spatial and social contexts to aspects of the life of the individual or group that indicate the general orientation of that social entity.”
“Hmmm…”
“Within this perspective of active learning, human life is seen as a theatre of understanding where the self is developed.”
“Intriguing. So, how is this development described as taking place?”
“The self is seen as growing through interpreting its experiences as demonstrations of the working out in the phenomenal universe of the metaphysical structure and dynamism of the cosmos.”
"Really?"
"Yes"
“Bold. But what are the specific contexts in which this working out takes place?”
“In the psychological, social and material frameworks of human existence.”
“Truly?”
“Yes. These are seen as learning situations through which the individual is presented with challenges that facilitate their perception of themselves and the universe.”
“Interesting.”
“Through such sensitivity, they are better positioned to self consciously work towards an understanding of self and cosmos that is more self consciously realized and accurate than derivative and illusory.”
Sculptural complex centred in the human male and female couple, central symbols of humanity in Ogboni iconography, its visual symbolism
Ògbóni Magic of Earth and the Quest for Meaning
“Challenging. Potentially inspiring. But how does this relate to the general correlation of Ògbóni with magical powers? What role have such philosophies to do with the more immediate concerns of magic?”
“Ògbóni magic is focused on making life meaningful through relationship with Earth.”
“How does that work?”
“The power of Earth as mother is called upon to strengthen and guide the Ògbóni initiate on their journey.”
“How is this done?”
“Through veneration of the great mother, Ile, Earth, through spending time in her company in inspiring natural locations, through forms and images representing her, calling her power into such forms, filtering that potency into the human being, to act as conduits of her immense presence, images known traditionally as edan ògbóni as well as those visual evocations referring directly to Ile."
“Edan Ògbóni?”
Onile, feminine, tenderly holding her breasts, evoking her maternal, nurturing capacities, yet demonstrating masculine qualities, suggested by the beard, indicating strength and occult power
The Universal Resonance of Ògbóni Ritual Art
“Yes, often magnificent works of art. What is known as edan ògbóni, or other depictions of Ile, however, may be expanded in the light of the universal resonance of Ògbóni, coming into being at the emergence of matter and energy, waiting through the aeons for recognition through the development of consciousness, now known to us through this name, Ògbóni, a name resonating with other recognitions across time and space."
"Intriguing."
"The identification of edan ògbóni and of other evocations of Ile, as a material embodiment of the presence of she, our mother, the Earth, may also be adapted to various evocations, outside the Ògbóni or even Yoruba or African contexts, of the one on whom we tread, who holds us aloft in space, who nourishes us in rain, through earth, water, air and fire, the celestial configuration that is terra firma, ‘vibrations from the deep,’ Earth, Ogere, the great pot that rolls on and on without breaking, vagina of abundant pubic hair that suffocates like dry yam in the throat, who enables our existence in this place beneath the stars, the reference to the stars adapting J.R.R. Tolkien’s celebration of her many forms in The Lord of the Rings,complementing the previous salutations drawn from Babatunde Lawal’s The Gelede Spectacle.”
Image Above
Collage by myself depicting Wole Soyinka, philosopher of Ogboni, as described in part 2 of this series, in dialogue with “Shrine Set,” a multi-media sculpture by philosopher of Ogboni, Bruce Onobrakpeya.
Collage by myself depicting Wole Soyinka, philosopher of Ogboni, as described in part 2 of this series, in dialogue with “Shrine Set,” a multi-media sculpture by philosopher of Ogboni, Bruce Onobrakpeya.
“[Celebrating deity and]animal and plant life…the essence and relationships of growing things and the insights of man into the secrets of the universe.”
From Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World.
Between Classical and Post-Classical Ògbóni
“Interesting. But the ideas you presented earlier are essentially intellectual. Yet you are now combining the intellectual with the spiritual.”
“Which comes first, the pot or the space inside it?” asks Susanne Wenger, in A Life with the Gods in their Yoruba Homeland. “Which is prior, relationship with the patient immensity of earth, adapting Soyinka's words on cosmic immensity in Myth, or efforts to think through how to live from day to day on this globe in the course of a lifespan and the several lifespans of various generations?”
“Hmmm…”
“The origins of the relationships between Ògbóni philosophy, Ògbóni spirituality, Ògbóni ritual and Ògbóni art are lost in the roots of time.”
“Really?”
“Yes. The best one can do now is build on the ancient foundations.”
“Interesting. How much of what you have told me is your own building on those foundations and how much represents the views of that foundation as you understand them?”
“That Ògbóni venerate Earth is known to scholars of Ògbóni. The symbolism of edanand art of Onile has also been studied. I examine the implications of Ògbóni philosophy in its intrinsic character, in its self contained nature, without reference to ideas drawn from other contexts.
I then build upon these intrinsic values in developing a philosophy of relationships between nature and humanity. I do this by constellating ideas from various philosophies and religious and scientific cosmologies and their artistic and technological correlates.
I unify these ideas around conceptions drawn from classical Ògbóni philosophy. I conclude by demonstrating the convergence of these varied but complementary perspectives in the intersection of ideas of cosmic energy in Yoruba and Hindu thought, as I did in my essay “Ogboni: From Myth to Physics: Yoruba Esotericism at the Intersection of Disciplines.”
“Interesting. What do you call this style of Ògbóni you are developing?’
“I call it the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality.”
“Why ‘universal’?”
“Universal because it organizes a global constellation of ideas, some of which are briefly presented here, around Ògbóni and its roots in classical Yoruba philosophy and spirituality.”
Edan ogboni, the human male and female couple, as embodiment of Ile, Earth, Universal Mother
Becoming Onile
From the Intrinsic to the Universal
"Intriguing. Such a vast scope of ideas, from the kneeling figure of Onile in her glorious nakedness to wandering around the cosmos, seeking its secrets."
"Of course. Onile embraces all. Is she not the globe enabling our material existence, the central existence we know, facilitating our journeys seeking understanding?"
"So, for you, Ògbóni imagery integrates all these associations you have worked out?"
"Of course."
The Self as Ilédi, Ògbóni Ritual Space
"Beyond Ògbóni ritual, do you see any practical application of these ideas?"
"Certainly."
"How?"
"The human being may assume the quietly contemplative, inward looking stance of Onile demonstrated in Ògbóni art."
"Truly?'
"Yes. A contemplative stance evocative of the silence of earth, luminous within an inward darkness, alive with fires of material transformations, of life giving nourishings, yet quiet and still in her form as Earth on which we walk, the humble but potent soil constituting the immense majesty that is the solidity of the terrestrial globe."
"Intriguing."
Onile and the Ultimate Secret
"You assume that stance in silence. The silence at the centre of which throbs the ultimate secret, the secret at the centre of all secrets, the secret that can be told, can be described, but can only be understood by each in their own way. The secret that may be evoked by the thumb hidden within the fist of Onile, the open secret that unveils itself only with daily, reverential attention to its glowing core."
"Wow. What could that secret be?"
"Look outside yourself. Look inside yourself. Who is the person looking? The answer to that question is the secret."
" But who I am, who anyone is, is no secret."
"Really?"
"Sure. I am a person born at such and such a time, bearing such a such a name, having particular parents, journeying a particular path through life which can be traced by others with enough information, a person composed of a particular collection of qualities, attitudes, styles of seeing things and of behaviour."
"Underneath that person you know yourself to be, there is someone else."
"Really? Who could that be?"
"Someone who enables the existence of the person who bears your name, your history and your personality."
"Hmmm."
"That foundational identity is your awareness of yourself. That core through which you know yourself as different from other people and other things, from the objects around you, from the trees in the street and from your friends."
"Self consciousness?"
"Yes"
"But self consciousness is a fundamental quality in the more highly developed animate creatures. Is there anything secret about it?"
"How well do we understand it? A rock, a luminous rock upon which the world of the individual is built, but what are the foundations of this rock?"
"Can there be anything beyond that foundation?"
" Various schools of thought claim there is."
"How may one investigate that claim?"
"Through the potent silence of Onile. Looking within in silence. Listening. Distinguishing between the various voices clamouring for attention in the mind, the streams of ideas, images and emotions intersecting within it."
Image Above
Denis Williams, philosopher of Ogboni, as described in part 2 of this series, first presenter of the symbol complex I name the Ogboni cosmogram, signifying humanity within its terrestrial and cosmic context.
Denis Williams, philosopher of Ogboni, as described in part 2 of this series, first presenter of the symbol complex I name the Ogboni cosmogram, signifying humanity within its terrestrial and cosmic context.
“…in the Yoruba Ogboni cult, lIle-the Earth Principle-is localised, buried in the inner sanctuary, indwelling in such substances as chalk, mud, camwood, charcoal and the skulls of various animal sacrifices.
These are the ultimate determinants of the sanctification of the shrine[ symbolizing] the four elements in the Ogboni system-Olorun [Owner of Orun, the zone of ultimate origins, symbolized by the sky in its seeming infinity, depth and translucent beauty], Ille (Earth), blood (judgement),and human being, respectively represented by powdered chalk, pure black mud from the river, powdered camwood, and powdered charcoal collected from fires on which food has been cooked for members of the cult. These substances are gathered together in four calabashes previously used by members.”
From Denis Williams, “The Iconology of the Yoruba Edan Ogboni”
From Denis Williams, “The Iconology of the Yoruba Edan Ogboni”
"Hmmm."
"Within that silence may be found great peace and inspiration and better understanding of the various layers that make up oneself, various strata akin to the various layers of soil of earth."
"Interesting metaphor. You think, then, that beneath all the other layers of the self, its influence perhaps suffusing those layers like the earth's gravity emanates from its core, pulling everything on its surface inward and thereby keeping those forms on its surface from flying off into space, that there is an unperceived core to the self, like the earth's molten core?"
"I identify with the idea. Why is the wall constituted by awareness of oneself opaque? Why can we not go beyond that rock of awareness on which all our awareness rests?"
"Why go to all that trouble? Why not simply accept the fact of self awareness and proceed from there?"
"We are homo sapiens sapiens. The one who knows. Who knows that he knows. Who is capable of examining his own knowing. Cogito ergo sum, 'I think, therefore I am' French philosopher Rene Descartes insightfully put it on resolving to uncover the foundations of knowledge. Underlying thought is something more primal than thought. We should investigate that. The Cartesian cogito our starting point.”
"So, perhaps you would want to rephrase Descartes words as, 'I reflect, I ponder, I engage my awareness, therefore I am aware that I am'? "
"Exactly. I want to mediate between Hindu philosopher Ramana Maharshi as described in Paul Brunton's A Search in Secret India, Descartes in his Meditations and Armah in The Healers."
"How do these influences on your thinking relate to Ògbóni?"
"I am operating between thought as affirmation of existence, as asserted by Descartes."
"Okay..."
"Between that affirmation and the various constituents of the mind that thought enables, as depicted by Armah."
"Okay..."
"Between all these and the foundation of thought, self awareness"
"Okay..."
"Searching beyond this foundation, penetrating beyond the luminous rock, beyond the radiant wall enclosing the fire of self awareness...seeking for the source of that which enables us, as urged by Maharshi.”
"Interesting.”
"Probing beyond the fire of consciousness akin to the transformative flames from which emerge the charcoal dust of the Ògbóni ritual structure, the radiance of white light evoked by the powdered chalk in the Ògbóni configuration, animating the union of water and solids that is my body, akin to the mixture of water and earth of the mud of the Ògbóni constellation, empowered by the nourishing fluid of blood, symbolized in the Ògbóni system by red camwood dust."
"Beautiful."
Edan ogboni
"I am thus an Ilédi Ògbóni, an Ògbóni ritual space, the human expression of the Ògbóni consecrations of space in terms of the union of humanity and earth, of human cultural forms and the great mother who predates and possibly outlives humanity, within an existence that evokes the question, within this sphere of action across space and time, is there an ultimate foundation, an ultimate nexus of possibility within which all being converges, a question seeming to recede infinitely the farther the human being grows, flakes of white falling to earth evoking both mystery and beauty, completing the Ògbóni configuration in terms of the whiteness of chalk standing for what Ògbóni initiate Susanne Wenger describes as Axiom Paradoxon, Beginning and Consequence,[1] Olodumare, the ultimacy which is yet embodied by Earth, Ìyá Àgbà, the venerable aged woman surrounded by her four calabashes of chalk, camwood, charcoal and mud in her home under the earth?[2]"
"Really?"
" Truly. Replacing the blood and flesh of the animals sacrificed and buried in the Ilédi and around which are placed the chalk, charcoal, camwood and mud are my own body and blood.
The life force released by those sacrifices, enhancing and diffusing the presence of the cosmic force of àse, in the Ògbóni ritual, becomes my own life force, even more potent in being embodied in my living form, activated and directed by my thought."
"Striking. I see though, that, your adaptation of Ògbóni ideas in the meditation you have just described interprets a contemplative practice that is not originally Ògbóni in Ògbóni terms."
"True."
Ogboni rattle
The Self as Onile
"That meditation may be described as particularly close to Hindu and Buddhist strategies in relation to Yoga as it suffuses both religions. That inward gaze on the self is employed without identification with any religious figure or further symbolism and at times it is. Are you able to take this adaptation further, bringing it closer to a version of the actual practice of embedding objects in the soil to represent Ile, Earth, in Ògbóni ritual?"
"Certainly."
"How?"
"A further development of the idea of the human being as an Ilédi. Identification of self, not only with symbolic transpositions of Ilédi ritual space, but in terms of Ilé, as she is visualized in Ògbóni art."
"Interesting. How would you do that?"
"I am adapting to my Ògbóni practice a meditation technique known in Western magic as the 'Assumption of God Form' and in Hinduism and Buddhism as 'Deity Yoga'. "
"Okay. Is it related to the understanding of Yoga as meaning 'union'?”
"Yes. Union with a deity, in this sense. One imagines oneself as united with the deity so as to facilitate the deeper integration of self with what the deity represents and perhaps one day experience the deity."
Image Above
Ulli Beier, philosopher of Ogboni, as described in part 2 of this series.
“I had never seen anything like it,a magnificent Ògbóni brass figure about some 30 cm long. [ I ] had no idea what it meant or where it came from but was overwhelmed by a feeling of awe as I held in my hand the heavy object, emanating so much power and ancient wisdom.”
Ulli Beier, “In a Colonial University” ( Iwalewa Haus, University of Bayreuth, 1993, 1-24.6).
Creating Deity
"Interesting. A version of the Yoruba expression, 'Eniyan o si, imale [or orisa] ko si', translated by Adeleke Adeeko in a discussion on his Facebook wall as 'No humanity, no orisa [ deities]'."
"Exactly. Soyinka represents the same idea in his poem the Seven Signposts of Existence in A Credo of Being and Nothingnessas 'Without the knowing of divinity by man, can deity survive?' "
"Beautifully put. Karin Barber describes an aspect of the practical demonstration of this philosophy in terms of the use of language in 'How Man Makes God in West Africa: Yoruba Attitudes Towards the Orisa.’”
“Precisely. Barber’s observations are reinforced by Rowland Abíọ́dún’s Yoruba Art and Language, on language and being in Yoruba visual and verbal art.”
"Beautiful. I expect these are the same orientations explored through ritual by Susanne Wenger in A Life with the Gods?"
"Of course. They also resonate with Nimi Wariboko on the making and unmaking of deity in the related Kalabari spirituality in his The Split God: Pentecostalism and Critical Theory."
"Interesting. Are these not similar to practices of making and umaking deity Chinua Achebe imaginatively explores in the Igbo context in his novel Arrow of God? "
"They are. Whatever the mode of existence of deity might be, it has to be recognized and integrated within human interpretation to make meaning for people."
"What of the idea of creating deity?"
"Of course. Some spiritualities, African and Western esoteric systems, for example, understand that the human being can create deities."
"Why create deities instead of relying on oneself?"
“ In such contexts, the deity may be seen as an amplification of
human potential, like computers and forms of artificial intelligence. They could also be understood as integrations of human and extra-human possibility shaped into particular forms by human creativity."
Image Above
Collage by myself showing Wole Soyinka, philosopher of Ogboni, as described in part 2 of this series, in dialogue with ""In the Beginning" top and “Our Journey" centre, art by Obiora Udechukwu evoking cosmic birth and progression, incidentally correlative with Soyinka’s insights into what he names the Abyss of Transition, the transformative process between terrestrial life, transition from that life and rebirth into it, a passage both mysterious and illuminating, correlative with Ogboni conceptions of existence in terms of a spiral of recreation in terms of motion between dimensions of possibility within terrestrial life and between birth, death and rebirth
Becoming Deity
"How do you adapt these ideas in the Ògbóni meditation you are describing?"
"Does Ile, Earth, exist? Yes. Can the Earth be personified? Yes. Is the Earth conscious and open to communication with humans? It is, in terms of entities centred in particular locations, invisible but whose presence could be palpable in the atmosphere.
As for the Earth as a whole, a unification of diverse possibilities, I don’t know if the Earth is conscious and open to communication with humans, but I find the idea inspiring and thus am inspired to adapt it within a meditation based on Ògbóni symbolism."
"How do you do that?"
" I imagine my favourite image of Ile, elegant, quietly explicit in erotic terms, evoking wild but controlled power through the horns rising from her head."
"Okay"
"I imagine her in front of me in the crouching pose of the sculpture. I take in her contemplative gaze, her alert calm."
"Hmmmm"
"After some time in that fellowship, I imagine her within me, pulsating within my body, her head within my head, her chest within my chest, her legs within mine."
" Hmmmm"
" I maintain that visualization in a relaxed manner, without struggling to recall all the details of her figure."
"Intriguing."
"I then relax even more and stop trying to recall the figure, satisfied that the image of unity with the figure of Ile is established in my mind."
" Interesting."
"I remain in silence in that relaxed state."
"What has been your experience with this meditation?"
" A sense of calm. Of inward concentration. Possibly contributing to expansion of ideas in my work on Ògbóni."
"Do you expect more?”
" Not sure. The meditation can be elaborated upon in various ways that could contribute to more vivid outcomes but taking it slowly might help with better understanding of its effect on one's mind."
"Thanks for the discussion"
"You are welcome."
[2] The image of Odu/Iya Agaba and her four calabashes comes from an ese ifá, a story from the Yorùbá origin Ifá system of knowledge that correlates the two Yorùbá institutions of Ògbóni and Ifá through parallels in symbolism between the story and the Ògbóni cosmogram.
Ogboni philosopher, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, in reflection in nature space
An Invitation to Donate to this Project
You can contribute materially to this project, facilitating research and publication in Ogboni Studies, consolidating the subject and providing foundations for the unified study of African esoteric systems, bodies of thought and action defined by secrecy in the exploration of knowledge.
Click here to donate at Ogboni Explorations blog.
__,_._,___
OLAYINKA AGBETUYI
Oct 13, 2020, 6:05:49 PM10/13/20
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Are you quoting Rowland Abiodun correctly?
I have never heard of oríkì and òwe being non- verbal.
OAA
Mr.President you took an oath to rule according to the Constitution.
Where are the schools to promote teaching of the country's lingua francas?
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: 13/10/2020 09:49 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Yoruba Affairs - The Cosmos in a Staff : The Glory of Ọpa Ọsanyin : An Understudied Example of Great Yoruba Art : Part 2 : Interpretive Contexts [Edited]
I can't say it any better than Alagba OOA has stated it. I should let Toyin Adepoju ponder over the response.
MOA
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CALUsqTQSZFg-WkMiCKOSM3iXxbdYqChrOpj__JCFpx%3DYyyn2mw%40mail.gmail.com.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/2020468056.10408.1602572562752%40mail.yahoo.com.
OLAYINKA AGBETUYI
Oct 13, 2020, 6:05:49 PM10/13/20
to usaafric...@googlegroups.com
You say linear and non linear aspects are mutually illuminating in òrò. Why not just say òrò has several referents: word and discourse. A lexical item having different meanings depending on contexts.
A third meaning is ghomid which is totally different from the two above. This is how a native speaker understands the three.
OAA.
Mr. President you took an oath to rule according to the Constitution.
Where are the schools to promote the teaching of the country's lingua francas?
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: 13/10/2020 09:49 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Yoruba Affairs - The Cosmos in a Staff : The Glory of Ọpa Ọsanyin : An Understudied Example of Great Yoruba Art : Part 2 : Interpretive Contexts [Edited]
I can't say it any better than Alagba OOA has stated it. I should let Toyin Adepoju ponder over the response.
MOA
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CALUsqTQSZFg-WkMiCKOSM3iXxbdYqChrOpj__JCFpx%3DYyyn2mw%40mail.gmail.com.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/2020468056.10408.1602572562752%40mail.yahoo.com.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Oct 15, 2020, 11:39:15 AM10/15/20
to usaafricadialogue
Thanks OAA.
Unity of Verbal, Visual and Performative Discourse in Yoruba Thought
I have never heard of oríkì and òwe being non- verbal.
OAA
Thanks for your question incidentally highlighting the scope of Yoruba discourse as has been championed by Rowland Abiodun and Olabiyi Yai.
Abiodun introduces that understanding of
òwe in ''Verbal and Visual Metaphors : Mythical Allusions in Yoruba Ritualistic Art of Ori'' in Word and Image, Vol.3. No.3.1987.252-270, later integrated with a slight but significant reworking in Yoruba Art and Language-
Selections from ''Verbal and Visual Metaphors''-
On page 255
On page 270
Yai develop that perspective on oriki in ''In Praise of Metonymy: The Concepts of Tradition and Creativity in the
Transmission of Yoruba Artistry over Time and Space (1993) 29-37-page 35
''Thus, the essence of art is universal bifurcation. Yoruba verbal art,
oríkì, abundantly display this bifurcation ethos as do visual arts which, as we now know, are modalities of
oríkì. '
p 36
This is because the oral and visual
oríkì
are essentially vocative discourse in which dialogue is a constitutive ingredient.''
Abiodun on oríkì in Yoruba Art and Language (2014),
drawing from Yai and thinkers in the endogenous context
-
p 5
The aim of this study is to look at Yoruba art as an expression of oríkì, which I believe is fundamental to the study, understanding, and
aesthetic appreciation of Yoruba art. While oríkì has been generally translated as “praise poetry” or “citation poetry ,” broadly speaking, all verbal and visual invocations qualify as oríkì in Yoruba culture . Oríkì affirm the identity of almost everything in existence. Thus, oríkì extend beyond our traditional categories of two- and three-dimensional arts and color.
aesthetic appreciation of Yoruba art. While oríkì has been generally translated as “praise poetry” or “citation poetry ,” broadly speaking, all verbal and visual invocations qualify as oríkì in Yoruba culture . Oríkì affirm the identity of almost everything in existence. Thus, oríkì extend beyond our traditional categories of two- and three-dimensional arts and color.
They include architectural space, dress, music, dance, the performed word, mime, ritual, food, and smell, engaging virtually all
the senses.
More important, oríkì energize, prepare, and summon their subject into action. Put differently, Yoruba art, like most African art forms, is
more like an active “verb” than a static “noun.” Irrespective of whether they are sculpture, shrine paintings, poetry, or performance, Yoruba art forms are affective – they cause, they influence and transform.
more like an active “verb” than a static “noun.” Irrespective of whether they are sculpture, shrine paintings, poetry, or performance, Yoruba art forms are affective – they cause, they influence and transform.
Many things happen, not just what one can see, hear, or comprehend at one time. Quite often, they are mnemonic devices, transformer-carriers intended to facilitate free communication between this world and the otherworld thereby providing valuable insights into Yoruba metaphysical systems, myths, lore, and thought patterns.
15
The Aláayè of Ìkèrin impressed upon me the need to understand Ifá divination arts as oríkì in 1974. And in 1994, twenty years later, Olábíyì Yai confirmed that same notion from his perspective as a Yoruba language scholar. Yai’s exhortation to Yoruba art scholars could not have been timelier. He writes, “When approaching Yoruba art, an intellectual orientation . . . consonant with Yoruba traditions of scholarship would be to consider each individual Yoruba art work and the entire corpus as oríkì .” The Yoruba concept of oríkì as artistic phenomenon is not limited to things we touch, smell, and taste but extends to experiences of trance and spirit possession.
Additionally, this expanded understanding of oríkì would, in fact, be immensely useful in solving many complex theoretical issues confronting African and especially, Yoruba art scholarship today.
Abiodun correlating oríkì and
òwe
in Yoruba Art and Language -
Abiodun makes the following point on p. 252 of ''Verbal and Visual Metaphors''
He reworks the same point on p. 26 of Yoruba Art and Language-
''Hòò -r ò or Òrò
Yoruba verbal and visual oríkì are suffused with òwe , generally translated as “proverbs,” but which idiomatically are figures of speech or metaphor.
It is important to point out, however, that while oríkì may contain òwe, not all ò we are necessarily oríkì. I explore what they both share and embody, namely, a more pure and more active essence called òrò – a concept that exists before the object and the word. This Òrò is not the same as the “spoken word,” which is its more common meaning. Rather, it means a matter, something that is the subject of discussion, concern, or action. So, it is in this sense that Òrò is used in this discussion.
50
In this chapter, I have shown how òwe as visual and verbal oríkì constitutes a means or esin (horse) by which Orí as Òrò can descend to the human level and humans can make a spiritual ascent to Orí . This twoway communication through Òwe is mutually beneficial to both
òrìsà who are in the otherworld and humans who are on this material plane of existence – in this world. ''
Òrò as Superordinate Discursive Form
Abiodun's interpretation lends credence to the interpretation of
òrò as discourse, of which words are one vehicle.
My experience of native speaker use of the òrò concept agrees with Abiodun's and is reinforced by Adesanmi's interpretation.
My experience of native speaker use of the òrò concept agrees with Abiodun's and is reinforced by Adesanmi's interpretation.
Within these frameworks,
òrò is integrative of verbal and non-verbal discourse.
In terms of verbal expression, Yoruba theory of discourse diferentiates between
òwe, imaginative expression, which, on account of its associative and evocative character, I describe as non-linear.
By implication, Yoruba theory of discourse also distinguishes expressions that are different from
òwe, not needing imagintive skills to interpret, a conventional relationship between signifier and signified I describe as linear.
thanks
toyin
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DB6PR04MB298277FA158A22F34BB845FFA6040%40DB6PR04MB2982.eurprd04.prod.outlook.com.
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages