The Origin of Ifa: The Tree of Sixteen Branches Big as Houses: An Approach to Self-Initiation into Ifa
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
The Origin of Ifa
The Tree of Sixteen Branches Big as Houses
An Approach to Self-Initiation into Ifa
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
''Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
A self-initiation into the Ifa system of knowledge and divination through a literary and contemplative approach involving the retelling and expansion of an ese ifa, a story from the Ifa tradition, and the construction of contemplative techniques inspired by the story.
This method provides a more individualistic orientation to Ifa than the priest led and community fed traditional strategy. Here the goal is to relate with the foundational alignments of Ifa on one’s own, as one constructs engagements with the spiritual culture, understood as an instrument used by the devotee, rather than an overarching force to which the devotee submits, even as one recognizes the pervasive presence of the Unknown, responsible for life and its possibilities.
This technique may also complement the traditional approach by helping the traditional initiate reflect on what they have committed themselves to, as they engage with a text depicting, though in a different way from how they encountered it, the foundations of the system into which they have entered. Beyond the uses of this text as a means of relating oneself to a spiritual tradition, one could simply enjoy its imaginative character as demonstrated by the stories and their images, and the pictures, as well as the account of how these imaginative forms were constructed.
All images, except the picture of a Batabwa sculpture of an ancestor from William Buller Fagg and Margaret Plass’ African Sculpture: An Anthology, 1964, were generated by Meta AI.
Dedication
Dedicated to Moyo Okediji and Olobe Yoyon, whose novel Ifa initiatives in Ifa Tuntun and Neo-Ifaism, respectively, have unlocked slumbering creativities.
May you fly ever higher.
Contents
Abstract
Dedication
Introduction
Image and Text: Majestic Baobab, Meeting Place of Worlds
The Quest of the Students of Orunmila
Meditation: Your Own Quest
Image and Text: Orunmila, the Forest Ascetic
Commentary on the Poem
Image and Text: Orunmila, the Forest Ascetic
Commentary on the Meditation
Image and Text: Orunmila, the Forest Ascetic
Image and Text: Ancestral Resonance
Introduction
This is my second text of self-initiation into Ifa. The first one was largely composed when I started my Ifa journey in Benin more than thirty years ago and employs techniques of Western magic fed by knowledge of Ifa in intersection with my reading in the larger culture of Yoruba origin spirituality within which Ifa is best known and exposure to Benin/Edo and other spiritualities. I updated it in more recent years and placed it on the document archive site academia.edu for free download. This one will also be made freely available.
Why am I developing this new approach? One may construct as many points of entry into a spirituality as one wishes, each reflecting a different way of organizing strategic information about that body of knowledge and action.
When I crafted my first Ifa self-initiation, I did not know of Margaret Thompson Drewal’s work in her book Yoruba Ritual, on itefa, initiation into Ifa through entry into and exit from Igbodu, the grove or forest of Odu, understood as the wife of Orunmila and known as the name for the organizational categories of Ifa.
The Igbodu image suggests immense associative possibilities to do with the numinous and transformative powers of forests, which I experienced first-hand through the Ogba Forest in Benin-City, one of my primary encounters with the divine, in the ineffable presence that pervaded the vegetative space, described as the spirit of the river that broke ground in the forest after a long journey.
At this stage of my life, I no longer employ the physically dynamic rituals I learnt from Israel Regardie’s The Tree of Life: A Study in Magic, reinforced by his edited Rituals of the Golden Dawn, the latter of which I still need to study adequately and learn from in terms of practice, as one of the greatest books in history, in my view.
My current practices are more contemplative, as learnt from other techniques of Western esotericism, Buddhism, Hinduism and my own experiments.
Why should I adapt such techniques to a spirituality where the methods of relating with spirit are different?
I think contemplation is unavoidable for spiritual and mental growth, contemplation understood as a focus on the workings of one’s own mind, in relation to itself and in relation to the world beyond itself.
If one is not sensitive to oneself, can appreciation of external factors replace such interior awareness, can it make up for the grounding in the self as a means of orientation to that self and to the universe, a pivot on which one’s existence revolves?
There are increasingly developing various perspectives on Yoruba origin spiritualities. One describes the orisha, the deities, as aspects of the human self. Another perceives them as aspects of the cosmos. The correlation of both approaches is priceless.
For myself, as an explorer of spirituality, I know myself as a person trying to make his way in a dark room, the darkness constituted by my ignorance, and who is willing to accept only limited help, preferring to rely largely on his own efforts in trying to see better in the dark, and to navigate the dimly seen space, images depicting how I understand spirituality, seeing various spiritual systems as means to help one see better in the darkness as one steers through the dimly lit space that is the universe, dim to our partially awakened sight or understanding.
Orunmila, Odu, Eshu, who may be described as the three primary divinities of Ifa, are the Yoruba instantiations of ideas the human race has long recognised or constructed in efforts to make meaning of existence, as Ifa is also the African expression of an impulse to totalistic knowledge that is perennially constructed by the human being, even as each of these efforts is unique while sharing fundamental similarities.
I hope people will find useful this Ifa initiation technique that is contemplative rather than externally ritualistic, building on an ese ifa, an Ifa literary form, as I also hope to find it so, only just developing it and aspiring to use it soon. This self-initiation technique is not designed to deliver such information as I understand is made available at traditional Ifa initiation, such as one’s odu, the organizational form of Ifa that corresponds to one. It is not constructed to reveal an individual’s orisha or deity, another thrust of Yoruba spirituality. I don’t know how to do any of these and have not had them done for me, preferring to work on my own.
The method described here is focused on the development of self-knowledge by oneself, the manner in which Orunmila’s disciples in the story in the initiation text that follows this introduction underwent various transformations of self in their search for their teacher, a progression that is itself a parable of the journey of the seeker.
Do Orunmila and the Odu Ifa exist as entities a person may relate with and through such a contemplative process as that described here?
I think so.
In what form do they exist, as independent of the human mind or as creations of the mind?
I suspect a combination of both, being products of the human mind’s efforts to make sense of dimply understood realities which respond as the mind reaches out to them, using traditional or newer approaches such as are presented here.
Happy explorations.
11th February 2025.
The Quest of the Students of Orunmila
How do you search for something if you do not know that it is lost?
Owe lesin oro, toro ba sonu owe lafi wa
when understanding goes astray, when thought is mangled, we seek them through knots of paradox
that which cannot be gazed upon by the naked eye
is approached through looking sideways
were the ones who cast Ifa for the students of Orunmila
as they sought their teacher who had disappeared from Earth
gazing within the Bowl of Eternity
the Calabash of the Timeless
the intersection of possibilities
of free will and circumstance
from which each moment is born
seeking to guide the pupils of the Ancient Wisdom who was nowhere to be found
as the earth groaned in turmoil
you will offer a calabash of repentance
a bowl of penitence
your self you will dedicate to ultimate service
as long as space abides
as long as the world abides
so long shall you abide
destroying the sufferings of the world
there is no other road to finding the Departed One
the verdict came
seven painful years of quest
the snake shedding its skin over and over
the self remade through experience
repeatedly dying to be born afresh
babini ko to ka tura eni bi being born is not as important as giving birth to oneself anew
travelling that way the disciples at last found themselves in a forest
at the base of a massive tree
of mind-bending width
its branches akin to sixteen houses of incredible size
coiling this way and that like sixteen awesome dragons
radiating frightening power
a force field repellent
they dared not approach
at the foot of this behemoth
calmly seated
they saw the little man of Igeti hill
the short man with a head full of wisdom
the one of whom it is whispered that the Supreme Fount of Thought sought his counsel at the time of creation
Agboniregun, he who teaches calmly, like a slowly moving brook, parching thirst
Father, they addressed him
we took you for granted when you were with us
your disappearance led to turmoil in the world
we did not know you existed among us as a balancing force between the manifest and the unmanifest
the chaos that emerged when you left opened our eyes
return with us
not possible, he responded
where we are now
is neither in the world you left behind
nor in the world I come from
we are in the abyss of transition
between being and becoming
between life, death and rebirth
between the sun, journey and eternity
between the starry heavens above and the world within
the zone you will henceforth dedicate yourselves to exploring as my disciples
the zone represented by the empty centre of the opon ifa
overlooked by the face of the one who is everything and nothing
too small to look into the cooking pot
standing up his head hits the roof
my companion Eshu, now your companion
guide to unravelling how a stone thrown today
hits an object yesterday
wherever you call my name
the zone appears
you will return to aye, your world
with seeds from the branches of this tree
with these seeds you will replace me
I will speak to you through the patterns formed by these nuts
ikin, black death in the palm
life rising from insight
he handed them the sixteen seeds
after which he rose and walked into the tree
the tree swallowed him and disappeared
to be seen no more.
It is said that the disciples planted those seeds
the ancestors of all ikin and opele nuts to this day
the foundations of knowledge reaching to all the corners of the Earth.
Image Above
Orunmila, the forest ascetic, lean from living in strict frugality, in quest of ultimate wisdom, seated at the foot of the tree that was his teacher, absorbing the wisdom of nature from its gargantuan presence, O master, admit us to your presence beatific as you seek the conjunction of the one and the all, the passion that drives us also.
Meditation
Your Own Quest
Imagine yourself walking through a forest, using light falling to the forest floor through gaps in the gigantic tree canopy above.
What are you searching for?
Where are you going?
You are pulled forward by a compelling force emanating from deep in the forest, a light invisible to conventional sight, but seeming to pour from a constellation of trees in the distance.
This force calls to a hunger inside you, a restlessness that nothing can satisfy, nothing can fulfil, making you out of place in the world as known to most people.
This force emanating from the trees seems to resonate with that force within you that will not let you rest.
As you approach the location in the forest, the density of the atmosphere escalates, something palpable, but invisible, something compelling but unseen, is concentrated at this spot.
Pushing through the sense of transgressing on something beyond your understanding, you at last enter into the place where the force is strongest, where it emanates from.
Before you is a tree the size of which you have never seen. It seems to touch the sky even as its branches coil in wondrous shapes, sixteen massive protuberances that seem alive, with a mind of their own.
You sense the scintillating intelligence of the tree, palpating within the fastness of living wood yet reaching far beyond that location where its form is rooted in Earth.
Dare you go nearer? Will you survive if you do?
As you stand in puzzlement and fascination, perplexity and desire, you notice there is a person seated at the base of the tree, a small bodied man, who beckons you to come closer.
You proceed cautiously. As you near him, he invites you to seat near him. You do so. His presence is soothing. Slowly the restlessness that had defined your life falls away. You feel you have arrived at a centre where all possibilities come together.
He stands up, holds your hand and asks you to follow him as he walks towards the massive tree trunk.
You do so as he keeps walking and enters the tree, taking you with him as you both vanish into the colossal form.
When eventually you again find yourself outside the tree, in the same space, you eventually learn that sixteen years have passed and you had been given up for dead.
“What happened to you?”, people ask.
You do not know how to explain.
‘’How does one describe the instruction into the convergence of one and sixteen, of the grain of sand and the stars, the teachings by
“The Twisted Wooden Stump Which Crosses the Road in a Crooked Manner’’,
by “No man, No Matter how Wise, Can Tie Water into a Knot in his pocket’’,
by “The Cotton Wool on the Other Side of the River Bank that Opens its White Teeth Smiling Joyfully’’,
by “The Broken Ant Hill that Retains Water’’,
by “Sudden as the Snapping of Leather String, Leather String Snaps’’,
by “The Two Halves of the Buttocks are Enough Support for One to Sit Upon’’,
by ‘’When Fire Dies, it Covers Itself with Ashes, When the Moon Dies, it Leaves the Stars Behind, Few are the Stars who Shine with the Moon’’,
by “The Stone Breaks Suddenly but it Does not Bleed’’,
by “The Fast Moving but Powerless One’’,
by “He Who Dashed Suddenly Across the Road’’,
by ‘’Pomu-Pomu-Sigi-Sigi- Pomu-Pomu’’,
by ‘’The Paaka Masquerader with a Lump on the Back’’,
by “The Very Tall Door”?
masters and mistresses of hidden and potent arts, whose names may not be mentioned, except in parables, the summation of whose instruction was to be reborn by fire, as, seated at the centre of the endless space within the tree of sixteen massive branches, I was consumed by flame, becoming one with past, present and future, the sixteen fold division of the tree becoming myself, as I was reduced to a grain of sand that spread out to become all the sand on the shores of all oceans on Earth, and then again became myself, but not the same person as before but that one who is now the embodiment of the 1, the 16 and its 256 permutations, cosmic being and becoming organized into a form the human mind can manage.
Image Above
Orunmila, the forest ascetic, his body toughened by exercise, all the better to support the mind as it seeks to scale the heights of infinity.
Let us join you in the forest clearing, O resolute one, joining your strength to ours in seeking where time and the timeless, eternity and finitude conjoin.
Commentary on the Poem
What is this?
The title is ‘’The Origin of Ifa: The Tree of Sixteen Branches Big as Houses’’. What is the source of the story?
Why is it being presented as explaining the origin of the Ifa system of knowledge and divination, in terms of references that are part of that tradition-Orunmila, the orisha or deity of ultimate wisdom; ikin and opele, the two major Ifa divination instruments, and alluding to the sixteen major organizational structures of Ifa, the sixteen odu ifa?
The story is a work of fiction, like its primary source, a story in Wande Abimbola’s An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus, is also fictional. The version here expands upon the older Ifa narrative by drawing elements from various sources-Yoruba proverbs, oriki, descriptive poetry, of Orunmila, the Buddhist writer Santideva, the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, descriptions of the symbolism of the spiral in Nigerian Cross River Nsibidi, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, a Yoruba theory of proverbs discussed by Rowland Abiodun in Yoruba Art and Language, all shaped within an adaptation of standard ese ifa structure, ifa literature, from Yorubaland as different from that which might be from Benin.
Why did I compose this poem, this morning, the 10th of February, 2025, the complete unanticipated text this inspiration gave birth to reaching completion on the morning of the next day, 11th February 2025?
I did it because its one of my favourite Ifa stories in its symbolic wealth, as well as in order to demonstrate the point I have long been making ( as in “Recreating a Scriptural Tradition : Constructing New Ese Ifa: Questions And Vision”, 2020) and did with my recently published essay yesterday about the creative possibilities of ese ifa, “Composing New Ese Ifa: A Great Literary Corpus and it's Boundless Opportunities” (Facebook; Linkedin; Ifa Student and Teacher blog; academia.edu, 2025).
This version of the Ifa story developed in this work draws out possibilities latent within the original narrative. In its brevity, the original story is a template rich with an ocean of possibilities which my version begins to bring to the surface, growing seamlessly out of the soil of the original.
I shall now do a stanza-by-stanza commentary on the new poem I have composed, based on the original Ifa text.
Stanza One
This stanza plays upon the possibilities of the Yoruba expression owe lesin ọ̀rọ̀, toro ba sonu owe lafi wa, which may be expansively translated as “Proverbs are the steeds of discourse; when understanding is lost, when thought goes astray, when confusion reigns in the world of knowledge, we use proverbs in seeking it out’’.
The stanza plays on the idea of the paradox of using something indirect, something that itself may not be fully transparent to immediate understanding, a proverb, in seeking to unravel confusion, since proverbs are a form of puzzle, to put it in a basic manner.
The stanza also draws upon Rowland Abiodun’s theory of discourse in Yoruba Art and Language which explores the work of an unnamed Ifa philosopher who employs the narrative force of ese ifa in expanding the traditional understanding of ‘’ ọ̀rọ̀’’, which may be translated as ‘’discourse’’ or ‘’subject of discussion or reflective attention’’.
This narrative thinker does this in terms of a correlation between human reflective and expressive powers represented by ‘’ọ̀rọ̀’’ and the ultimate wisdom embodied by the creator of the universe, a wisdom depicted as the final source of human reflective and expressive capacity.
The narrative poem concludes in depicting ‘’ ọ̀rọ̀’’ as a divine identity that roams the world naked, hence its forbidden to gaze at it with the naked eye, but must be approached through the indirect expressive power of ‘’ “òwe’’, conventionally translated as ‘’proverbs’’ but which Abiodun renders as imaginative expression in general, in the magnificent first chapter of that book.
Those ideational coordinates are employed in the poem here within the standard opening format of Yoruba ese ifa as described by Wande Abimbola in Ifa Divination Poetry and An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus, represented by imaginative names for the babalawo-adepts in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa- who consult Ifa in relation to the subject presented in the body of the poem.
Temporal inversion is at play in this instance, as in some Ifa poetry, because the poem presents an account of the origin of Ifa, yet Ifa is being consulted by those whose efforts inadvertently lead to the founding of Ifa, a technique underscoring the fundamental quality of imaginative play that defines ese ifa.
Stanza Two
This stanza adapts interpretations of the concept ‘’Odu’’ central to Ifa, in particular, and to ‘’Olodumare’’, the creator of the universe in Yoruba origin cosmologies, as presented in Bolaji Idowu’s Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief and Shloma Rosenberg’s website Mystic Curio, all these ultimately unified by their resemblance to the divinatory instrument the Mirror of Galadriel in The Shadow of the Ring, book one of English novelist J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
The ‘’bowl’’ and ‘’calabash’’ references derive from Idowu’s analysis of the ‘’odu’’ in “Olodumare’’ as possibly referring to a large bowl or calabash, or pods in a board of the Yoruba game ayo, suggesting the probabilities evident in Ifa divination, one could add, while Rosenberg describes
''Olodumare [as referring to] God in His/Her aspect as architect of continuous creation. The name describes the repository of possibility and circumstance from which each moment is born. Olodumare is the receptacle for Odu, which are the constellations of possibilities that contain all events past, present and future.''
The image sequence resonates with the opon ifa, the Ifa divination template, as suggesting, through the constellation of the symbolic patterns of the divination instruments on its empty centre when cast in divination, the calabash or pot indicated by Idowu, in its similarity to the “receptacle’’ referenced by Rosenberg, ideas correlative with the concept of a womb of time, of being and becoming, which the diviner seeks to peer into through the divinatory process.
Stanza Three
This stanza plays upon the standard procedure in ese ifa of indicating sacrifices to be performed in order for the desires of the person seeking help to be fulfilled. These sacrifices are almost always of objects or animals. A mental state is used as the sacrificial form here because this story is constructed in terms of a quest for relationship with an embodiment of ultimate knowledge and wisdom, in which the cultivation of particular attitudes, of particular psychological conditions, is paramount.
This approach of offering abstractions instead of something concrete may be associated with the Christian Catholic form of penance after confession to a priest, in which the devotee may be asked to say a particular prayer as their penance, and with the Hindu Sri Devil Khadgamala Stotram ritual, in which offerings are made of imagined objects rather than physical objects. The lines on self dedication are from Santideva’s famous summation of a Buddhist ideal, the Boddhisatva vision, in the Boddhicaryavatara.
Central to these abstract styles of making offerings is the focus on intention of the offering in relation to its form.
Stanza Six
I have passed over stanzas four and five because they don’t need commentary.
Stanza six describes the quest for Orunmila in terms of the image of a snake shedding its skin and in relation to a Yoruba proverb about rebirth, suggesting that the seekers went through such recreative processes, in terms of growth through experience, enabling them to at last find what they sought. The maxim from Western esotericism sums this up “when the student is ready, the master will appear’’.
Stanza Seven
This stanza expands the image of the tree at the base of which the students find Orunmila. The original story describes the tree as made up of “sixteen hut like branches’’ clearly deriving from when huts may have been the largest architectural units in Yorubaland, the image used in suggesting the equivalent of what is now understood as a house.
I add the image of dragons to the picture of houses, thereby drawing from Chinese aesthetics and Western alternative reality literature, also called fantasy literature, in which dragons evoke awesome creative and destructive power, an image signalling an understanding of the sixteen major organizational categories of Ifa, the odu ifa, as being sentient beings, spirits , entities unlimited by their material forms as well as divinities, spirits of unusual power, as depicted in Abimbola’s An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus, and more expansively described by babalawo Joseph Ohomina in conversation as “spirits whose origin we not know, the names of all possibilities of existence, from the concrete to the abstract, from stars to rocks, from conflict to celebrations , from love to hate’’, and which I discuss in “Cosmological Permutations: Joseph Ohomina’s Ifa Philosophy and the Quest for the Unity of Being’’ ( Linkedin, USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google Group).
I also amplify the mystique of the tree by drawing upon the convergence of my experience of some trees in Benin City, particularly sacred trees, and German philosopher of religion Rudolph Otto’s concept of the numinous from his Idea of the Holy, “an invisible but majestic presence that inspires both dread ad fascination and constitutes the non-rational element in vital religion’’ as this term is defined in Websters Third New International Dictionary of the English Language.
Stanza Eight
This stanza adapts descriptions of Orunmila from the Yoruba oral tradition as well as from Wole Soyinka’s Credo of Being and Nothingness, the seven stanza poem at the end, later published separately as The Signposts of Existence, the best short summation of Yoruba origin Orisha cosmology known to me.
The stanza is completed by a line inspired by, though different from the invocation of Ifa in the Ifa poem ‘’The Importance of Ori’’ from Abimbola’s Sixteen Great Poems of Ifa, and online at African Poems.
Stanza Nine
This stanza presents the depiction in the original poem of the outcome of Orunmila’s leaving the Earth in displeasure with his students. The description of the reason for this disastrous outcome in terms of his functions while on Earth is adapted from English esotericist Dion Fortune’s Cosmic Doctrine on the role played by particular entities in the cosmic scheme.
Stanza Eleven
Stanza ten does not need commentary.
Stanza eleven depicts the meeting between Orunmila and his students as occurring in a liminal space, a zone between various possibilities, a space the exploration of which will henceforth become the occupation of the babalawo, the adept in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa, as well as of students of Ifa generally, Ifa being the knowledge system that shall be born through the encounter in this space, a space which will from this time be evoked through Ifa initiation involving entry into Igbodu, the forest or grove of Odu.
The forest image is used here in inducing a sense of mystery, in a zone removed from conventional human experience, a location where wonderful things may happen, a habitat where various forms of being converge, the vegetative, the aquatic, the animal, the human and the spiritual, a microcosm of the cosmos, as Abiola Irele describes in “Tradition and the Yoruba Writer’’, of the vision of Ijala, Yoruba poetry of hunters and adapted by Yoruba writers D.O. Fagunwa and Amos Tutuola and Wole Soyinka, the last being in A Dance in the Forests; in the accounts of the traditional Urhobo world view in Ochuko Tonukari’s “Sacred Groves and Tree Worship among the Urhobo” and Perkins Foss edited Where Gods and Mortals Meet, ideas resonant with forest images in various continents.
This liminal space is depicted as “the abyss of transition’’, Soyinka’s expression from such works as Myth, Literature and the African World and Death and the King’s Horseman, , subsequently described here in terms of the meaning of this abyss, and inspired by Margareth Thompson Drewal’s use of the image of the spiral in representing this aspect of continuity across dimensions in Yoruba thought in Yoruba Ritual. The 8th line use the words describing the spiral motif in Cross River Nsibidi symbolism as reflected in the work of Victor Ekpuk and explained at the website of the Smithsonian exhibition, Inscribing Meaning.
The last line of this stanza comes from the closing paragraph of German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, where he reflects on time and eternity, mortality and immortality, the same family of ideas the Soyinka, Yoruba and Nsibidi references address, Kant doing this in terms of relationships between the human mind and the stars.
Stanza Twelve
This stanza conjoins the image of the liminal zone where the meeting between Orunmila and his students takes place with the empty centre of the opon ifa, the divination template and cosmological symbol of Ifa, overlooking which is always carved the face of the orisha or deity Eshu, as guide to the wisdom of Orunmila. This liminal zone is described as evoked anytime Orunmila is called upon.
Stanzas Twelve to Fifteen
These stanzas build on descriptions of ikin, particularly, and opele, Ifa divination instruments, as described in Abiodun’s Yoruba Art and Language.
What are the Implications of this Effort?
The Ifa oral tradition remains the fundamental repository of its knowledge. The oral tradition is embodied, performative and communal, in a manner that cannot be adequately represented in writing.
At the same time, however, the ese ifa, the literary texts the Ifa oral tradition has painstakingly preserved across centuries, demonstrate awesome potential that cannot be released if they are not liberated from being treated as texts beyond modification or expansion, even though the original templates remain in their original form for traditional use and for study as well as comparison with other, later, examples such as the poem in this essay.
Image Above
Orunmila, the forest ascetic, in meditation as he seeks the point where worlds intersect.
Where you are, we wish to be, o seeker supreme, your power energizing us, as we seek to climb the ladder to the point where all worlds meet.
Commentary on the Meditation
The meditation unexpectedly emerged after completing the poem and its commentary and is the fruit of my aspiration to develop an initiatory meditation into Ifa.
Such a meditation involves an imaginative and contemplative encounter with central symbols of the tradition.
In this context, the tree of sixteen branches is evoked in terms of not only Ifa organizational structure, the sixteen odu ifa, but in terms of cosmic structure and dynamism, correlative with Ohomina’s understanding of odu ifa earlier quoted. A mystical experience is described, in which a person enters into union with the universe understood as a conjunction between the small and the large, expressed in terms of numbers, 1 to 16 to 256, the organizational sequence of odu ifa, here depicted as an effort of the human mind to encapsulate cosmic structure and dynamism in a manner understandable by the finite human mind.
Inspirational contexts for this meditation are Margareth Thompson Drewal’s account of Ifa initiation as movement to and from Igbodu, the forest or grove of Odu, if I recall correctly, in Yoruba Ritual, Moyra Caldecott’s story of a meeting with an ascetic in a mountain range suggesting the Himalayas in her novelistic cycle Guardians of the Tall Stones and my own experience of the Ogba forest in Benin before it was decimated to make way for houses; Dante Alighieri’s description, in the Divine Comedy, of a mystical encounter with the unity of forms constituting the universe, “all this I saw as one simple flame’’, Mazisi Kunene’s account of the Zulu ideal of knowledge of the unity of all possibilities of existence in his introduction to Anthem of the Decades.
The experience of disappearing from the world through supernatural agency and reappearing years after is the plot of the US folk tale Rip Van Winkle but in the form it appears here, is closer to the accounts in Nigerian folklore of being taken away by spiritual agents and returning with uncommon herbal or spiritual knowledge, as is said in Benin/Edo lore to be done by Aziza, the spirit of the whirlwind.
The names of those who trained the initiate in the hidden world into which the initiate is transported are taken from imaginative ways of naming diviners in ese ifa in Abimbola’s Ifa Divination Poetry although the approach of describing spiritual teachers in terms of names different from their conventional names is also fed by the use of that approach at the opening of the Sri Devi Khadgamala, where adepts of the Sri Vidya school to which the ritual is central are saluted in terms of identification with cosmic realities, having become people who achieved union with the source of existence through veneration of the Goddess Tripurasundari whom the ritual celebrates.
What is the Goal of the Meditation?
The purpose of the meditation is developing a mind centred approach to relating with ideas and spiritual powers at the foundation of Ifa, bonding with them through contemplation, rather than through traditional ritual approaches. The traditional methods work for many people, but would be inadequate for people like myself who prefer solitary and mind centred rather than group oriented activity and external rituals.
How effective is this approach? I’m just developing it and am yet to employ it myself but I expect the imagistic force and dramatic power of the meditation should prove helpful in identifying with Ifa ideas in terms of cosmic unity and dynamism.
Image Above
Ancestral Resonance
Batabwa figure from African Sculpture by William Fagg and Margaret Plass who describe it in terms of the sense of both familiarity and gravitas that is represented in some African ancestor figures.
It could also be related to the sense of what James Joyce, in another context, called the "jocoserious", which is central to the communicative ethos of Ifa, where, as Susanne Wenger observes, and is evident in Idowu's work on the subject, Olodumare, the author of existence, is depicted as a kindly grandfather figure and yet is also understood as the ground of being, so distant from human perception that he can not be directly approached
Along similar lines, Orunmila, understood as the divine source of the Ifa system, who gave counsel to Olodumare at the creation of the universe, is described in the same spirit of geniality as the "old man with a head full of wisdom".
The fixed gaze, resonating in the stance, firm yet not rigid or stiff, as suggested by the flexed slightly bent knees, communicates a resoluteness of bearing The leonine head standing on a militarily erect neck that is large for the scale of the rest of the limbs, suggesting muscularity and strength, complemented by the resolute squaring of the shoulders, physical characteristics that evoke firmness of character and purpose.
Lines in the face converge inwards to centre on the outward projecting grooves of the eyes, suggestive of the rugged power of stones, yet a refined smoothness, framed by the flow of a mane of hair, the entire face a microcosm of concentrated force that is yet suggestive of an evenness of temper, suggesting the Hermetic ideal indicated in the Golden Dawn’s injunction that “unbalanced severity is cruelty and the barrenness of mind”.
The naked breast, the elongated, tobular form of the midsection, the stylization of the arms, which are long for the proportions of the figure, the dwarf legs, short and stout, elements that combine the almost comic with the powerful, the establishing of the figure on a platform that evokes stability of positioning both physical and psychological, complete the image of relaxed power communicated by the figural proportions and facial expression.. The sense of underlying majesty makes the delineation of clothing superfluous. One of the functions of clothing being to preserve dignity, the figure demonstrates a palpable aura of gravitas that makes its depiction in relation to that convention unnecessary. The entire figure suggests a representative of an uncommon knowledge who is yet a participant in the world embodied by the familiar and gentler concerns of human society. Like the contemplative who, to adapt words of Thomas Merton, is yet active in the world of action.
What kind of knowledge is he privy to, what kind of character does he embody? Is it that represented by Damfo in Armah’s The Healers who demonstrates the integration of self embodied by the perception of one’s multiple selves, leading to the understanding of “which self [is] deep, and which selves would merely float on the surface for a passing season and then disappear”?
Does he embody Abimbola’s characterization of the Ifa priest as a “well informed, well-travelled and highly disciplined individual”, possibly one whose understanding of the possibilities of human existence represented by the encyclopedic scope of Ifa have made him both perceptive of human possibility and accommodating of human character?
Does he exemplify the Hermetic injunction in the Golden Dawn to the would be adept to “establish yourself firmly in the Equilibrium of Forces, in the centre of the cross of the elements, from whose centre issued the creative word at the birth of the dawning universe”?
The elements being understood to correspond to qualities of character, the latter expression is evocative of relationships between cosmic and human creativity. The power of speech becomes synecdochal for the ability to shape reality. One aspect of this power is understood as the capacity of speech to shape perceptions of the self by oneself and others . He may be ourselves as we could aspire to be, strong without being brutal, active while anchored in a centre of strength, self respecting yet capable of laughing at ourselves and so escaping fanaticism and self centeredness, the strength and wisdom for combat and the love of life of Gandalf in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Part of the greatness of Tolkien’s work derives from its being a definitive dramatization of nature spirituality and esoteric traditions, which, even though they are rooted in European culture, have a universal, and certainly an African resonance.
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