Angela Voss and Her Collaborators at the Intersection of Theory and Practice in Western Esotericism​ Compared with East-West Synergies ​and Africana Thought:​ An Autobiographical Exploration

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

              

                                                            

    Angela Voss and Her Collaborators at the Intersection of Theory and Practice in Western Esotericism

                                     Compared with  East-West Synergies and Africana Thought

                                                           An Autobiographical Exploration 

 

                                                          

                                                        

                                                                          Angela Voss

                                                                         Image Source

                                                             Faculty of Astrological Studies

                                                             Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                         Compcros

                                                 Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

                                       Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge

                                                                        Abstract

An exploration of the work of UK Western divination practitioner and academic scholar Angela Voss and her  collaborators  in relation to related developments in the US and correlative initiatives in the study of  classical African knowledge systems, as understood through the prism of my own engagements with these bodies of knowledge. 

Contents

Angela Voss

The Module in the Cultural Study of Cosmology and Divination at the University of Kent

Expanding the Study of Classical African Knowledge Systems, Particularly Ifa

Creating a Critical Mass of Knowledge in Kent Studies in Cosmology and Divination

Further Developments in Kent Studies in Cosmology and Divination

Developing My Mystical Vocation through My Studies at Kent

Intercultural Synergies in the Study of Marginalized Knowledge Systems

Financial and Institutional Enablement of Studies of Marginalized Knowledge Systems

Summation on My Kent Experience

Initiatives in Holistic Education and in Marginalized Knowledge Systems in the US and Nigeria

My Journey So Far and the Way Forward

Angela Voss

The English astrologer, tarot reader, musician, scholar and institution builder Angela Voss is for me one of those people whose presence time will never erase no matter how short the period one spends with them.

I met her in 2003 when I was an MA student at the University of Kent. I have not interacted with her much after that nor have I seen her since then, although I have followed her career to some extent.

The Kent experience decisively launched my physical journey through the global crossroads of knowledge. Opportunities barely dreamt about in preceding years were now within my reach. Those books, books being my most important possessions, which I had only previously read about but had never seen, were now mine for the having, enabling me roam across Asia, the Americas, Europe, Africa and elsewhere through the words of thinkers resonating from those spheres, a cognitively hungry person on an educational pilgrimage from the periphery of the global knowledge system in his African country, Nigeria, to one of it's centres, the UK, in a desperate hurry to learn as much as possible and create as much as possible as quickly as possible.

I eventually added a SOAS MA to my ongoing Kent MA, and later added UCL as a PhD destination, velocities that did not leave much time for taking stock of the larger or finer contexts of the journey.

Having returned to Nigeria, where the journey began, the pace of my progression more coordinated, as I map the distillations of time, signposts on the journey become clearer, their luminosity radiating across the years.

I am now better able to understand Angela Voss not simply as an impressive teacher but as a visionary I was fortunate to encounter at a stage of her life when her pedagogical vision was being planted to mature in later years. 

Palpitations of spirit, energy overflowing from words and actions, a meteor blazing across space and time, briefly crossing one's path, two travellers proceeding in different but ultimately convergent destinations, her quietly dynamic presence reverberates in my mind's eye, an individualistic template permanently registered below the level of my daily consciousness but rising to prominence as I write this.

Her thought visited me recently, perhaps prompted by recent experiences suggesting the strategic value of her vision and struggle in the light of global efforts to rethink dominant learning systems, developing pluralistic cognitive methods fully responding to the scope of what it is to be human.

Voss' memory remains indelible for me for her graciousness, her scholarly vision at the cutting edge of systems of knowledge and the passion with which she has pursued that vision across decades, at the University of Kent and later at Canterbury Christ Church University.

She is a diviner, an astrologer and a tarot reader, astrology and tarot being the premier divination systems of Western culture. She is also a scholar of Western esotericism, of marginalized systems of philosophy and spirituality in Western civilization which uniquely engage obvious as well as less readily accessible human cognitive faculties. In this context, Voss is also an explorer of the intersection of images and intellect as engines of knowledge.

She is an educator committed to expanding the scope of educational systems beyond purely intellectual and abstract forms which divorce intellectual understanding from lived experience, sunder intellect from imagination and from the full range of human cognitive potential, from intuition to dreams. She has devoted her career to developing systems for cultivating the full scope of human capacity for awareness within a context both imaginatively sensitive and critically engaged.

The Module in the Cultural Study of Cosmology and Divination at the University of Kent

 

The module in the Cultural Study of Cosmology and Divination, organized and run by  Voss, within the magnificent MA in the Study of Mysticism and Religious Experience, convened by the intellectually effervescent and genial Leon Schlamm  and the cerebrally refined and humane Peter Moore, had either just begun at the University of Kent when I arrived or it was still in it's early years. 

 

The cosmology and divination module was  funded by the Sophia Trust, a charity created to ''advance the scholarly study of astrology and cultural astronomy in British Institutions of higher education''. This support enabled Voss to bring in a steady stream of guest lecturers, such as the astrologers and astrology scholars Maggie Hyde and Patrick Curry, Curry and Hyde later becoming lecturers on the program.

 

Voss and Geoffrey Cornelius, an illustrious member of the UK astrological community and it's academic outreach, further empowered the program by running a non-credit awarding course for students who wanted to learn more about divination than was taught in the more formal module, a context in which Chinese I Ching divination was taught through exposure to texts and guidance in practice on at least one occasion. 

 

Further suggesting the cultural scope of the investigations on the program, we were also introduced to Henry Corbin's construction of the concept of the "mundus imaginalis", his description of Islamic thinker Ibn Arabi's understanding of imagination as a nexus between spiritual realities and the human mind.

Immersing myself in a scholarly environment in which people studied the theories, practices and history of divination, with practicing diviners who were also scholars, was equivalent to going to heaven for me.   That experience exposed me to better understanding of how cognitive universes  shape systems of knowledge and to the possibility of integrating scholarly and practical exploration in a manner engaging the totality of human cognitive capacities.

The module was a rich exploration of forms of divination, particularly astrology, in Western culture, and of the development of the metaphysical and epistemic theories, ideas of the nature and structure of existence and how to learn about it, that inform divination in Western history, as well as the personalities shaping those dynamisms. Voss also taught classes on the role of images in the development of knowledge, visual imagery being central to a good number of divinatory systems.

Expanding the Study of Classical African Knowledge Systems, Particularly Ifa

Currently thinking through how to expand the study of classical African knowledge systems, particularly Ifa, a multi-disciplinary framework organized round a divinatory core, engaging the full scope of the potential of these cognitive configurations, my mind goes to Voss and her pioneering efforts at Kent and later initiatives at Canterbury Christ Church University.

''Towards an Isese, Classical Yoruba Spirituality and Classical African Spirituality Renaissance: Lessons from the Ilorin Saga'', Part 1 and Part 2, are two essays I wrote  about a week ago, in response to challenges faced in Nigeria by classical Yoruba spiritualities, to which Ifa belongs.

These challenges reminded me of the efforts of Voss and her Kent colleagues at complementing the dominant Western learning systems by drawing from marginalized cognitive cultures within Western civilization, particularly divination.

Ifa, a Yoruba divination system, is marginalized within Nigeria by the Abrahamic religions Christianity and Islam and by Western modernity. These are  similar forces, with the exception of Islam,  as those which have segregated Western esoteric systems, including their divinatory cultures.

While working on developing and raising the profiles of classical African cognitive structures, however, I suggest the distillation of values from the intersection of cultures within which the marginalized Western esoteric systems and the classical African cognitive  forms have become decentred. This is the convergence of the secular culture of Western modernity and the influence of Christianity, and in Africa, the addition of Islam.

The West is most unlikely to  return to the uncritical employment of any of its various spiritualities as a dominant culture. Western modernity is stronger for the ongoing integration of its rationalistic, secular and spiritual values.

Along similar lines, I think classical African knowledge systems need to be critically engaged by adapting the critical culture championed by Western modernity in alliance with insights derived from other spiritualities, thereby creating a powerful distillation of ancient essences reshaped in new forms more alive to the modern world in all its aspects.

One should note, however, that a good number of adepts in classical African cognitive systems, being of a generation much older than the present, are not fluent in or literate in languages other than their native languages. Some might not be literate even in their native languages since they grew up within oral cultures. These people, however, are among the deepest resources for these knowledge systems.

In adapting these knowledge systems in terms of engagements not native to these culture bearers but fed by orientations from other cultures, it is vital to continue to cultivate the traditional, oral ways of developing and sustaining knowledge in those systems.

This is vital particularly since the oral tradition embodies social, metaphysical and epistemic values, as discussed for example, in Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language and Ahmadou Hampate Ba's ''The Living Tradition'' in the UNESCO General History of Africa Vol. 1. These are values that cannot be adequately exported to other languages or even fully realized in writing in any language, but can only be developed afresh in those languages as new creativities of the same ideas.

The achievement of Voss and her co-explorers represent for me an example of the convergence of the critical and the empathetic, the scholarly and practice led orientations I understand as needing greater integration in the study and practice of classical African cognitive systems, with spiritualities being understood as forms of knowledge, approaches to knowledge about the universe and presentations of the understanding thereby developed. 

Creating a Critical Mass of Knowledge in Kent Studies in Cosmology and Divination

 

Demonstrating various approaches to creating a critical mass of knowledge and of institutional continuity in their recreative vision, Voss and her Kent colleagues successfully organized four conferences on divination and on inspirational forms of knowledge beyond the intellectual, involving scholars from the UK and the US in various disciplines.

I know three books to have emerged from those conferences,  The Imaginal Cosmos:Astrology, Divination and the Sacred, edited by Angela Voss and Jean Hinson Lall, with an introduction by Geoffrey Cornelius; Seeing with Different Eyes: Essays on Astrology and Divination, edited by Patrick Curry and Angela Voss and Daimonic Imagination: Uncanny Intelligence, edited by William Rowlandson and Angela Voss. 

A fuller discussion of the achievements of Voss and her co-explorers would engage their rich body of published books, essays and presentations in various media. For Voss, this would include her studies and work in music, these artistic, divinatory and scholarly creativities partly evident on her Canterbury Christ Church University website page, at her Linkedin account, and her academia.edu page, which, along with essays and a video ''Introduction to the students' work on the MA in Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred at Canterbury Christ Church University'', has her career summary and CV.

Patrick Curry's wide ranging publications, as shown on his website, in relation to his statement of vision, writings, some of which are critically analyzed on his Wikipedia page, engage divination and a complex of subjects related to efforts to understand the multidimensionality of the universe, its interpenetration  of the material and zones beyond but implicating  materiality.

This is a vision, which, incidentally, is central to classical African cosmologies and other pre-modern civilizations, indicating the value of Curry’s work for exploring expansive cosmologies and epistemologies in various cultures.

Cornelius shared his book, The Moment of Astrology: Origins in Divination, when I was a student at Kent. He has also published others. Hyde and Cornelius had earlier co-written Introducing Astrology . Hyde is active in writing for various publications and in workshop presentations. Demonstrating her psychoanalytic research,  particularly on Jung, whose work is deeply congenial to esoteric and other spiritual thought, including astrology, on which he worked, she had earlier  published Introducing Jung: A Graphic Guide and Jung and Astrology.

Indicating their commitment to scholarly training in relation to their divinatory expertise, Voss and Curry had PhDs, while Hyde and Cornelius were undergoing their PhD programs. Further discussion of the creativities of these scholar/diviners, however, could wait for another day as I travel farther into their work.

Further Developments in Kent Studies in Cosmology and Divination

The Kent cosmology and divination module was later expanded in 2006 into an MA, combining intellectual study with self-exploration, in which students were encouraged to engage critically with theory and history as well as record and explore their responses to what they were studying, including keeping a journal of their psychological reactions to the material.

The lecturers on the program were also open to training PhD students within the context of the Department of Religious Studies. The cosmology and divination MA , however,  did not survive on account of funding issues, as Voss prefigures in a moving piece seeking help for the program,  summing up  its vision and curriculum. 

Voss, Cornelius, Curry and Hyde had to take their visions to new destinations, where they continued to explore their goal of expanding learning cultures through insights from the conjunction of intellectual, imaginative, intuitive and other cognitive strategies.

Voss and Cornelius moved to Canterbury Christ Church University,  where Cornelius lectured while Voss  became Senior Lecturer and Programme Director of the MA in Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred from 2014-2020 and is currently a co-director of the Centre for Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred. She describes  the vision, inspiration and methods of the Centre's  MA in Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred in ''Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred: Transformative Learning as the Bridge Between Worlds''. Cornelius, writing on the site of the Faculty of Astrological Studies, also presents  the goal, logic and strategies  of the  same MA in a shorter summation, in relation to the Kent cosmology and divination MA and similar initiatives in the UK.

Curry is now a Tutor in the Sophia  Centre  for the Study of Cosmology in Culture  at  the University  of Trinity Saint David.  As indicated at her website, Hyde continued as director of the teaching body the  Company of Astrologers, which she co-founded. Cornelius' personal website and his page on the Christ Church website demonstrates the scope of his engagement with astrology, philosophy and divination.

Developing My Mystical Vocation through My Studies at Kent

The MA in the Study of Mysticism and Religious Experience had the atmosphere of a scholarly festival, a spirit of discovery, of penetrating uncharted waters, of venturing into an enchanted forest, the lecturers electric with enthusiasm about their subjects, unfailingly diligent, meticulously time conscious in giving lectures, ebullient with the life of the subjects they discussed. 

The Religion MA complemented superbly the MA in European and Comparative Literary Studies I had been offered a place to study at Kent. The Study of Mysticism and Religious Studies MA meant that I could indulge my love of mysticism, the theory and practice of union with or perception of ultimate reality, an aspiration to vanish into the fire at the heart of the cosmos, which gives heat and light to the rest of existence or to see with one's own spiritual eyes this glorious blaze, the ultimate goal human beings may aspire to, in my view.

The program meant I could enjoy the intellectual exploration of this quest  in history and theory of mysticism within the context of my love of religion and spirituality, engaging these in terms of their intellectual  contexts across time and space, joys equivalent to letting a child loose in a toy shop with unlimited funds to purchase anything they wanted. These wonderful pleasures were set within the MA in European and Comparative Literary Studies like a jewel fixed within a frame.

The combination of freedom and guidance in the literature program unleashed me to explore what before then did not even exist in my thought world as fantasies, possibilities below the level of awareness bubbling within a mind that had outgrown the opportunities offered by my university in Nigeria, the University of Benin, which had given me a solid undergraduate and postgraduate training in English and literature but could not take me beyond that.

The BA and MA there were focused in the study of literature, in it's artistic  character and in relation to ideational and social contexts directly implicated in the oral or written literary experience, as well as in English linguistics, it's structural and ideational frameworks.We were also thoroughly groomed in written composition, how to organize and express ideas in writing.

I needed a more vigorous construction of relationships between literature and my other passions, the visual arts, philosophy and spirituality, passions that Kent enabled me  give birth to beyond private writings, even as I built on my training at the University of Benin on the aesthetic core of literature and it's ideational values in pursuing those synergies.

I had taken electives in history during the BA at the University of Benin. The BA was rich in the investigation of the philosophical, social and historical contexts of  English, African, and to a lesser degree, African-American, American and European literature, but I needed more than those already rich offerings.

I needed a means of feeding my hunger for issues of ultimate meaning, the lost traveller seeking to make sense of a journey on which he finds himself but the logic, beginning and destination of which are unknown  to him, that being my understanding of human existence between birth and death, a crisis of ignorance defining human life, with most human beings choosing to simply focus on the journey while ignoring it's contradictions, while others identify with various views presented as to the logic, beginning and progression of the journey, views known as philosophies and religions, none of which are demonstrable as completely factual.

If there is a way of clearly understanding the rationale, beginning and destination of this journey, I need to find it, a vision leading me into mysticism, the effort to experience the mind of God, if God exists, to see things as God sees them, as far as such awareness is possible for " the time bound human mind seeking to perceive eternity with the eye of God", in the words of Michael David Knowles on St. Augustine of Hippo in the Encyclopedia Britannica 1971.

Kent was thus a wondrous opportunity to fuse interests I had had to suspend in entering the University of Benin in order to pass through the thorough and expansive, but, for me, still overly focused curriculum.

I had been a dutiful student, and later a largely conscientious lecturer, but one whose inner self, his most intimate passions, his deepest hungers in the quest for knowledge, were mostly  concealed,  there being no adequate environment where they could be shared.

Those deepest interests, my life's central driving force, is the construction of a kaleidoscope of knowledge through which I  approach the celestial intelligence as a lesser mind to the greater mind that enables it, seeking to reflect it's ungraspable immensity in the little mirror constituted by my mind, all human knowledge being akin to a drop of water beside an ocean compared to that immensity, but that drop may merge with the ocean, and if only for a moment at least, experience the rushing flow of its tumultuous depths, one with the myriad organisms inhabiting that glorious ecosystem, images unifying Buddhist mystical thought  and that of the Christian mystic St. John of the Cross.

The Kent program did not teach the practice of mysticism, only it's theories and histories. Voss's course did not teach divination outside the informal classes she ran with Cornelius. 

But the intellectual contexts provided by those courses facilitated exposure to possibilities of integrating theory and practice, intellectual study and the full range of spiritual techniques, aesthetic, intuitive, faith directed and practical, an opportunity I fully embraced through my work from that point.

These intellectual explorations were guided in a spirit of pastoral and intellectual sensitivity by lecturers in the two Kent MA programs I took part in by lecturers of marked psychological maturity, of a robust and yet unegotistic sense of their identities as teachers in the best sense of the teacher as guide and midwife of the embryonic maturings of those under their care.

Intercultural Synergies in the Study of Marginalized Knowledge Systems

Toyin Falola writes in "Ritual Archives" about the necessity of critically studying African systems of thought within universities in order to contribute more robustly to the pluriversality of knowledge, the rainbow of epistemologies, of ways of knowing demonstrating homo sapiens' efforts to make meaning of existence.

Focusing on Ifa, he suggests study at the level of theory and the use of these epistemologies, developed within a critical framework, as forms of exploration in academic contexts.

In making these suggestions about theory and practice, about the investigation of the informing ideations of classical African systems of thought and adapting their epistemologies to scholarly explorations, Falola is incidentally following in the footsteps of such pioneers as Voss and her collaborators, as well as  of her UK academic colleague Susan Greenwood, who taught courses at the University of Sussex in  Shamanic Consciousness and Altered States of Consciousness "aimed to expand students' knowledge of alternate modes of consciousness through practical application and analytical study’’, as she states on her page at her publisher's website, Routledge. 

These orientations are also correlative with South American thinkers such as Javier Collado Ruano, as described at the Wikipedia article on transdisciplinarity and on his website,  on the convergence of endogenous epistemologies and intellectual study, critically unifying ways of knowing privileged within non-Western contexts and those centralized in the globally dominant Western educational system.

This is a vision also alive within Western culture itself, through people like Voss, grounded in marginalized forms of knowledge in Western culture, and, through their academic training, also deeply schooled in the intellectual

strains the culture's educational system privileges.

The achievement of Voss and her collaborators is one of both individual accomplishments, represented by their books, essays and other productions, the work each has done individually, but also one of group actualization, amplifying the impact of each of them by working in an educational team, creating or collaborating in developing curricula and learning systems in which people can be guided through the knowledge and skills these esoteric thinkers have developed.

Financial and Institutional Enablement of Studies of Marginalized Knowledge Systems

These cohesions of thinkers in generating learning outcomes beyond what they each could achieve alone is enabled by organizations that have funded their work from outside traditional academic environments, such as the Sophia Trust and the Urania Trust,  providing funding for academic programs at Kent and Christ Church, the latter described by Cornelius in his report.

These collaborative efforts are  also empowered  by academic institutions, integrating those programs within their own systems, such as at the University of Kent or the University of Wales at Trinity St. David, which houses the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture.  The Centre runs the Sophia Project for the Study of Cosmology in Culture  and its MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology.

Summation on My Kent Experience

I would complete the Kent program, the best schooling I have ever had on account of the quality of the programs I took part in and the unforgettable student care of the university within magnificent landscape in a city both cosy and cosmopolitan, indelibly imprinted by that experience I was most fortunate to have as my entry into education outside Nigeria where I had lived all my life before then.

Some of my most important essays, my most significant contributions to knowledge, were written for my programs at Kent. All the scholarship I have done since then is shaped by that experience of freedom and creativity within empowering and creatively flexible structures, expanding and pulsating according to the rhythms of the creative spirit, that guide who cannot be fully understood, perpetually unfolding new possibilities, opening doorways to unanticipated vistas, as the seeker travels "beyond the skyline,  where the great roads go down" in the words of English occultist Dion Fortune, one of the catalyctic forces of my cognitive journey.

Initiatives in Holistic Education and in  Marginalized Knowledge Systems in the US and Nigeria

Other initiatives in what what one might describe as holistic or integral learning, adapting the name of the next institution I will mention, are represented by entire academic or less formal institutions devoted to such initiatives, such as the California Institute of Integral Studies, dedicated to the development of mind, body and spirit through the synthesis of Asian and Western thought, as described at the university’s Wikipedia page and the school's website.

The website describes the combination of visionary initiatives and strategic funding from business  people and its creative use that has enabled the university flourish for more than fifty years.

The closest CIIS has to the UK programs I've been discussing are the MA and PhD run by the Department of Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness. The CIIS offerings may be understood as different from, but complementary to the UK programs, adding US philosophy and Asian and Africana thought to a related complex of subjects studied by the UK institutions.

CIIS also has a Centre for Black and Indigenous Praxis, ''where the power of scholarship meets the wisdom of lived experience. Where the work of knowing meets the work of doing'' as the Centre is described on its webpage, a general vision of CIIS resonating with the practice/scholarship unity the UK practitioner/scholars also cultivate.

The Centre was founded by African-American CIIS alumnus and scholar Adeeba Deterville, also founder of the university's Black Psychology Project. Her scholarship focuses on ''Africentric psychology and spirituality, cultural identity development, and Africentric perspectives.  ''Her groundbreaking research on Sankofa Praxis [ ''An Africentric Meta-Theory of Sankofa and Jegnaship—As a Reclamation of Africentric Episteme, Psychology, Spiritness, and Personhood : A Scholarly Personal Narrative of Cultural Retrieval, Alignment, and Actualization'' her PhD thesis] provided the imaginal space necessary to envision the Center, and her guiding strength brought it into being'', it is stated.

The Centre's director is Preston Vargas, CIIS alumnus, an ''Ifa practitioner, animistic healer, and Reclaiming tradition community ritualist, a storyteller and oracular artist''. Vargas' extensive academic and professional history is challenging to sum up, but may be basically described as that of a community activist bringing his academic education to bear on nurturing communities, perfect for CIIS’ commitment to individually embodied and communally and globally engaged scholarship. 

Vargas' ''bio-heritage'', it is stated, '' is African American, Cape Verdean, Wampanoag, Irish, West Indian, and much more. Yet he actively resists colonial structures of blood-quantum. Instead, he co-creates his bio-cultural identities through his relationships with his communities.''

Vargas' practice as an Ifa practitioner in the US brings to my mind other US Ifa practitioners, such as Obafemi Origunwa and his School of Orisa Studies, striking for the exquisite organization of its online presentations, the scope of vision it projects, as well as his moving  YouTube and Facebook accounts of the challenges of exporting Yoruba spirituality and philosophy to the US, where he seems to have acclimatized it superbly, particularly in relation to the distinctive challenges of Black people there.

Vargas' example also suggests to me  Ayele Kumari  and her co-founding, with Baba Okikifa, of  ASHE Soul Global Village and Ori Institute, learning and counselling institutions, integrating a community of priest/teachers, centred in African and particularly Yoruba origin spiritualites, emphasizing Ifa, the premier classical Yoruba knowledge system. 

Particularly striking for me is her course on African Female Mysteries, specifically her rethinking of the aspects of Yoruba spirituality known as Iyami Mi-Our (Arcane) Mothers- and aje, a mysterious characterization unifying human and spiritual female persons, but characterized by contradictions between negative and positive depictions of the feminine, and often negatively perceived in the public mind.

This is a contradictory, complex and rich body of ideas which Western, specifically African-American and UK devotees of the tradition are taking the lead in its reworking into a coherent, female empowering spirituality, in a similar manner as the image of the witch has been reworked in modern Western witchcraft. Kumari’s work is a creatively bold example of this process.

Kumari's initiative incidentally  complements UK practitioner Aminat Oladipo's Iyami Tarot, which adapts the flexibility of tarot in developing an image of Iyami in terms of Western Neo-Paganism's interpretation of the female life cycle imaged by maiden, mother and crone. She builds on that template from Western esotericism using this in unifying Yoruba orishsa cosmology through exquisitely painted cards commissioned from various artists  and accompanied by a verbally evocative guide book.

In Nigeria, Wande Abimbola's Ifa Heritage Institute is a pioneering institution centred in the study of Ifa.  I wonder if Abimbola, a foundational scholar of Ifa in the Western academic tradition in Nigeria, hopes  to recreate the level of scholarly culture in which he was trained at the University of Lagos and in terms of which the then University of Ife excelled when he was a leading force in its Institute of African Studies, the Institute being a globally magnetic centre for scholars from various parts of the world  up till  the 70s and 80s,  their efforts strategic to creating what is now known as Yoruba Studies.

The US also has Ketus Ifa Academy , which, as stated on  their Facebook page, their primary online presence, trains people as awo, adepts in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa. Particularly striking for the sense of clarity and ambition suggested by its website, is Ifa University, also based in the US, which describes itself as providing the ''world’s only bachelor’s degrees in Ifá Studies, Òrìṣà Studies and Òrìṣà Herbalogy'', providing three and four year bachelor degree programs in those three fields.

Orisa Spiritual Assembly, also based in the US, also displays a striking website, its contents suggesting an orientation towards both teens and adults. Ifa University and Orisa Spiritual Assembly both demonstrate the presence of Kola Abimbola, Wande Abimbola’s son, suggesting the younger Yoruba Studies scholar is taking his Father’s educational vision forward in online contexts from his US base, since those institutions are located online, while his father pursues the vision through a physical institution in Nigeria.

Kumari and Origunwa are academically trained, with graduate degrees,  while Kola Abimbola is not only academically trained but, like Kumari, has a PhD, as well  being an academic, these orientations indicating these culture bearers as going out of their way to empower themselves and their work through a fusion of cognitive systems and cultures, classical Yoruba and Western.

Another initiative I find striking in the study of holistic and marginalized spiritualities and philosophies is the Grey School of Wizardry, its history, inspiration, learning framework and values succinctly described on  its Wikipedia page and elaborated upon on its website. The school combines the traditional methods of face to face and correspondence course training in schools of practice in Western esotericism with the academic structure of modern Western schooling for children, teens and adults, framed in terms of a university.

I find particularly moving its integration of critical philosophy and magical practice and theory, a philosophical culture cultivating the critiquing of the philosophical foundations of the school's project and of all knowledge claims, such reflexivity described as critical for the magician, a seeker of knowledge rather than a person who understands faith as a resting point, the school not being affiliated with any religious standpoint. This critical culture, integrating intellectual analysis with explorations beyond the intellectual, is one of the strengths of Western esotericism, particularly since its 19th to 20th century resurgence and ongoing reinvigoration.

These educational systems and institutions discussed in this essay use either online teaching or a blend of online and offline work or are purely offline, creating flexibility  accommodating different kinds of learners.  

My Journey So Far and the Way Forward

The Kent MA,  the SOAS MA, the uncompleted UCL PhD,  and the period of independent scholarship from then till the present galvanized by those academic engagements, have significantly fueled  my further studies in Yoruba and African knowledge systems.

The Kent MA,  the SOAS MA, the uncompleted UCL PhD,  and the period of independent scholarship from then till the present galvanized by those academic engagements,has fueled significantly  my further studies in Yoruba and African knowledge systems.




They have enabled me lay foundations in the rethinking of Yoruba philosophy and spirituality, in general, and Ifa in particular. Those programs facilitated my efforts in contributing to developing the educational significance of classical Yoruba philosophy, of Ifa's mystical potential, of its capacities as a tool for autobiographical hermeneutics, the theory and practice of autobiographical writing and interpretation and for artistic analysis.

These are represented by essays written for the Kent and SOAS programs or essays developing related ideas after completing those programs. In this way, I have explored the  value of Yoruba  philosophy  for spatial hermeneutics, the theory and practice of interpreting space. My approaches in these engagements actualize the universal significance, beyond their cultural contexts, of  knowledge systems sourced from Yoruba culture.

Along with other work I have done in Ifa and Yoruba philosophy and spirituality, in other African philosophical and spiritual systems, in African art,  in Hindu Sri Vidya and Western philosophy represented by Immanuel Kant, I intend to integrate all these efforts into a series of interrelated explorations of the creative potential of knowledge systems as adaptable within and beyond beyond their cultural contexts as one moves towards the Inconceivable Immensity.

 

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Apologies for this resending  in order to effect a slight but significant change in the essay. 

The name of Aminat Oladipo's card based divination system has been changed to its correct name of Iyami Oracle Deck, as opposed to the earlier used name Iyami Oracle Tarot.

Nothing else, apart from a comma,  has been altered  in the essay.

Great thanks.

toyin

Kumari's initiative incidentally  complements UK practitioner Aminat Oladipo's Iyami Oracle Deck, which adapts the flexibility of tarot in developing an image of Iyami in terms of Western Neo-Paganism's interpretation of the female life cycle imaged by maiden, mother and crone. She builds on that template from Western esotericism, using this in unifying Yoruba orishsa cosmology through exquisitely painted cards commissioned from various artists  and accompanied by a verbally evocative guide book.