Orunmila, the Àjẹ́ and the Meeting at Igbo Odu: Tales from Ifa Tuntun

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

                                                     

                                                                  

                                                      Orunmila, the Àjẹ́ and the Meeting at Igbo Odu

                                                                       Tales from Ifa Tuntun

                                                                                      

                                                          

                                                     Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                         Compcros

                                             Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
                                  ''Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge

                                                                              Abstract

 

              A quest for knowledge within and beyond the human species in relation to a mysterious tree

I was about to land on the top of the tree as I returned from a journey when I noticed a human form far below, at the base of the gargantuan formation, the complex on which I was about to descend, a structure so lofty its  top was wreathed in clouds.

What could a human being be doing here, in this zone which even the hardiest of hunters avoided, repelled by the atmosphere of the place, seemingly enveloped in a darkness unnatural even for the depths of the forest where the tree is located, projecting a sense of something unsafe to try to look further into?

Yet, one of the two legged creatures was calmly seated at the base of our sanctuary which had successfully repulsed them since they began to wander after having learned to walk, while we moved in and out of various zones on the planet and beyond through locations like this one with the appearance of a tree when looked at by human eyes.

An unusual creature that quietly seated individual must be.

We ignored it. Too much to get done to devote energy to addressing something of no particular significance in the scheme of things. After all, those creatures were not the most insightful, struggling to remain alive as they had to ingest air on a second by second basis, their brain shutting down if the air intake was interrupted beyond a very short span, the pumping of blood suspended and the creature breaking down to be terminated, a precarious existence contributing to slow cognitive processing and a life dedicated to short term existence, there being no other option when the time of final  breakdown is unknown and the time of entry into this particular coordinate of material form orbiting the tiny star is also unknown.

As we came and went over a long period of time, time measured in terms of much larger coordinates than that of the two legged inhabitants of the planet,  since we exist within a different relationship to space, the creature at the tree's base remained.

''Does it ever evacuate?" I asked, that being another challenge of their constitution, regular manual waste evacuation loaded with  significant health challenges which a significant number of their populations were still struggling to master.

''The creature does evacuate'' I was informed, ''but since the ingestion is minimal, evacuation is also minimal.''

Clearly an odd one.

The planet had completed one orbit round its sun, and yet this creature remained at the spot it had chosen. ''Should we not look into this oddity?'' it was beginning to be asked. 

The unit of time represented by how long the creature had spent at the tree's base is very significant in the reckoning of its fellow two legged walkers, even more since,  in their own continuum, time  is purely linear, not traversible backward, to experience  what has transpired, nor forwardly immersive, to encounter what may occur but is yet to happen, nor can it be bisected at the intersection of past, present and future so as to engage with what  does not exist within the totality of possibilities enabled by a particular temporal flow, enabling new probabilities to be introduced into the linear progression. Living under such constraints must be terrible, but the best we could do was observe them as they carried about the luggage they understood as life.

It was at last agreed that the creature should be looked into. It was to be observed from a distance, no contact, to avoid any possibility of its losing control of its mind because of such interaction, even if only for the briefest of seconds by its own reckoning.

A probe was initiated, vision extended to the creature's location and expanded to make it seem one was  present at that spot, observing at close quarters.

The creature was doing nothing, simply positioned on its nether regions, gazing into space. It looked alert. It moved only to evacuate or take a walk around the area, studying immobile life forms and eating those it could. Mobile entities avoided the place, so the creature was safe from the destructive appetites of those others moving largely on four legs.

Another orbit round the energy centre of the planetary constellation was completed long after this first observation, and yet the creature remained. 

It was now resolved to initiate contact, but would the creature survive such interaction? We could not communicate  with it as they do with each other, making sounds travelling from the elongations on which their central processing system is located, projecting those sounds through cavities in the sphere at the top of their vertical frame, because we are not structured in the same way.

Even a gentle probe into its mind to establish contact in the only way possible, through pure awareness, could be destructive to the creature. Its mental network  might not be able to accommodate the new information and could shut down in overload or  self defense. Its entire cognitive coordinates constituted by brain and body could shatter into splinters, breaking down or burning under unmanageable stress, carrying a load beyond its capacity,   its nervous system incinerated, beyond reconstitution, trying to process information exceeding its processing range.

After much deliberation, it was agreed the effort should be made. After all, the creature wanted something and that need should be investigated. Who knows, its wants could even be relevant to us. It had been argued that these creatures might not be as limited as we saw them.

Very slowly, with the tenacity of  hair growing on a human skull, the progression of a blade of grass from soil, the patience of a mote of dust borne along by currents of air, the maturing of seed into blood and bones  in a human womb,  the contact process commenced.

It took another revolution of the planet round the systemic core before the process was established, but it was worth it.

We learnt some things about the creature and helped it recognize our presence as different from the varied impulses making up its own mind.

The creature had found its way to the tree because it needed something it was sure it would get there and was ready to age and die at that spot in the process of this quest even though it did not know any other way of pursuing its goal except to sit at the base of the tree.

How had it learnt about this location?

From tales by hunters, reluctant to speak about the place but compelled to do so by the uncanny power of the environment.

The creature had done everything to find what it needed, without success, and so had appealed to a hunter to bring it near the location, point out the area and leave it to find its way.

''What do you want?'' it was asked.

''I want to share a small fraction of your knowledge and power'', it responded. 

''Really?

'What is the length of a wall according to an ant?', Ramanujan, the human student of relationships between numbers and shapes was later to state.

Can a grain of sand measure itself against the immensity of the ocean, extending into distances beyond sight, seemingly into infinity?'', these images being our way of translating into terms understandable by the creatures the figure represented what it's comments meant to us.

It struggled to formulate and communicate what it wanted. After a lifetime of quest, the creature had amassed what it understood as knowledge spanning all possibilities of existence, which it had distilled into  numbers, but it needed help to take this knowledge beyond a lifeless form into a means of contact with the constellation of possibilities from which each moment is born, within the embrace of eternity.

It wanted to develop a method to escape from the grip of time as experienced by itself and the other two legged entities of the planet. It wanted a method to move freely across the time stream and enter into and emerge from eternity at will.

''Really?'', we may be imagined as responding. ''So, what will you and those you share the knowledge  with do with all that power?''

''Have mercy. You must understand the bondage to time that we endure. I seek only to build a method that will help alleviate that dungeon'', he responded.

What could we do? After all, they are our younger brethren. Where they are now, we once were, until with time and help from those who had gone before, we grew slowly to what we are now and are growing still, into possibilities unforeseeable.

We granted the creature's wish.

It slept off and rose from sleep at daybreak ripe with the knowledge it wanted. It would take the rest of its life to adequately digest even part of the knowledge it had gained and to access the power that knowledge enabled. The rest of the knowledge would have to wait for later generations to assimilate and comprehend. 

Note from the Editor 

Susanne Voss, studying similarities between divination and cosmological systems across the world, is convinced this story might not be a myth, as some scholars believe.

She holds that the narrative is reflected in oral accounts of relationships between creatures known as  àjẹ́  in Yoruba lore, and  Orunmila, understood as the founder of the Ifa system of knowledge and divination. 

She argues that the story of Orunmila giving  àjẹ́  a ride in his stomach in his journey from orun, the zone of ultimate origins, to aye, Earth, is a much garbled evocation of the same story, the actual occurrence which the Ifa narrative confusedly mirrors.

In the Ifa narrative,  the  àjẹ́  are described as destructively  feeding on Orunmila's intestines during that journey. Voss describes that Ifa tale as an unintentional  parody of the efforts of the mind transcendent creatures in the actual incident to reach into the seeker's mind and enlighten the seeker without the destruction of the being's mental processes in the creature's inability to  adequately assimilate the contact.

She further postulates that the intelligence which C.G. Jung claimed to discern on divining using the Chinese  I Ching; the understanding of the odu ifa, the organizational categories of Ifa, as divinities; the description of the paths or branches of the Judaic Kabbalistic Tree of Life, an image of the cosmos as a tree, as identified with angels, all these being knowledge systems understood as embodying divine intelligences, are allusions to the reverberations of power and knowledge distilled into these systems, all of which are descended from the efforts of the desperate seeker in the forest, variations of the knowledge he had gained and shared with others, those others using this knowledge as they understood it, even as precise memory of its origins was lost over millennia,  leaving only mutilated accounts represented by stories at various levels of distance from the truth.

The Ifa initiation practice of journey into and out of Igbodu, the grove or forest of Odu, she argues, is likely inspired by the primordial event at the source of the knowledge system, the desperate encounter of the seeker with the barely understood entities in a forest in a time lost to history.

The significance of withdrawal into such a spiritually charged space in order to lay foundations for transformation of the self in itefa, Ifa initiation, is so great that the grove or forest is even simulated in urban regions, when such natural vegetative spaces are not available.

I dont fully understand the implications of what I am about to do

but I will do it anyway

because I have no other choice

was the one who sought the wisdom of Ifa

for Orunmila

as he went into the forest

in search of what he did not know

The lines directly above are  the opening stanza in  an ese ifa,Ifa literature, those lines being the closest evocation in ese ifa to what actually happened in that fateful encounter.  That evocation, however, is treated as an imaginative abstraction, an element of creative play, and no more, by the composer, a state of mind being personified as an entity, an imaginative staple of some Ifa opening stanzas, given that the truth that inspired that poetic segment is unknown even to the composer, its factuality dissipating into the mists of pre-history as it was passed down across the centuries, till it became no more than an imaginary account to those who heard it.

Cover Image

 

How do people interpret what they do not understand? In Yoruba origin spiritualities and in Tibetan Buddhism, there are accounts of a mysterious kind of female entity, the àjẹ́ of Orisa spirituality and the dakini of Tibetan Buddhism, both being ''travellers in space'', to adapt the title of Judith Campbell's book on the subject in Tibetan Buddhism.

Campbell discusses the dakini  in relation to ideas of the feminine in Tibetan culture. Teresa Washington in The Architects of Existence and Our Mothers, and Our Mothers, Powers, Our Texts,  and other writers, explore ideas of  relationship between human women and the àjẹ́ in Orisha thought and practice. 

Entities able to move across space without biological or mechanical enablements, is a description unifying the àjẹ́ and the dakini, yet they are neither divinities nor fully associated with the human.

Is it possible that these conceptions are efforts to understand entities of the kind that interacted with the person in the forest in the story earlier told?

''Eleye'', associated with birds or bird like powers, is how they are described in Orisha thought. Travellers in physical and metaphysical space, is the Tibetan Buddhist description of them.

                                 

Nigerian-American artist Victor Ekpuk, in the cover painting, incidentally evokes such correlations with remarkable power.

Avian elevation from an inscriptive network embraced by a semi-circle of intense green evocative of Earth, a bird ascending from one symbol curuscation into another, from one complex of meaning into another, semantic networks dense and obscure, richly buzzing with strange significations, hieroglyphs of value indecipherable by human understanding, except enabled by unusual circumstances like that of the beings who assisted the seeker in the story. 

What is This?

     Seeding

This is a composition inspired by an unexpected event I underwent while seated at my shrine,  a chair under a Sri Yantra, a Hindu image of the complex unity of the cosmos visualized in terms of intersecting geometric forms, embodying the masculine and feminine potencies, represented by the God Shiva and the female divine identity Shakti, in union. This primary symbol of the shrine is flanked by images of the ritual art of the Nigerians secular artist Bruce Onobrakpeya and the priestly artist David Ebengho.

I regularly pray there in terms of Orisha spirituality, that being my most active spirituality in terms of any particular religion. I also observed that when I sit there, I experience an  unusual sense of inner centring and calm, and at times, inspiration, fueling my writing.

I spent a short time there meditating on the words of my Ifa teacher, babalawo-adept in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa-Joseph Ohomomina, on odu ifa, the organizational categories of Ifa,  as ''spirits whose origin we do not know. We understand only a small fraction of their significance. They are the power behind the efficacy of whatever we prepare. They are the names of all possibilities of existence, actual and potential, abstract and concrete, from the stars to grains of sand, from celebrations to conflicts, love to hate, all represented in spiritual terms by the various odu'', as he may be presented. I wonder if that meditation had an effect on the unanticipated outcome of my visualization at the shrine, leading to this piece of writing.

            Germination

Seated at the shrine, I tried to imagine Orunmila seated under a massive tree representing the Ifa system of knowledge he would henceforth teach to his students who found him under that behemoth,  having long sought for him, as goes a story in Wande Abinmbola's An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus.

Something unexpected happened, however, as I initiated my visual meditation. I tried seeing myself mentally as seated in front of Orunmila, my standard practice in Guru Yoga as learnt from Bernard Bromage's Tibetan Yoga, the better to identify myself with the teacher, and perhaps imagine myself as merging with both the teacher and the tree that taught him, as embodiments of cosmic unity, as I described that tree from my story before this one.

Instead of imagining myself seated in front of Orunmila at the foot of the tree, I  saw myself instead looking down  from a great height at the figure of Orunmila at the base of the tree. 

I experienced myself imaginatively as  moving in to land on the tree's top, a fantastic distance from the base, but from which I could nevertheless see the human figure at the bottom.

''The human figure?'' was I different from the humanity of that personage?

I had surrendered myself to the imaginative scenario unfolding in my mind with minimal effort on my part, in the spirit depicted by French poet Arthur Rimbaud, "I am present at the birth of my thought. I look and I listen''.

I observed the visual sequence  open out in my mind, emerging almost spontaneously as I had closed my eyes to visualize something else. My imagination had seized control of the  visualization process, adapting the images in the visualization-Orunmila, the tree and myself-to its own ends, while I tagged along, realizing a more creative product would emerge this way than trying to force my imagination to behave exactly as I wanted, feeding on possibilities already known to me rather than allowing it to guide me into unsuspected potential.

Even intellectual creativity, at its best, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant suggests, is not fully enabled  by the conscious, intellectually directed mind, under the control of the thinker, but is significantly empowered by powers  akin to life force in its uncreatable character, forces the essential nature of which are unknown to humanity, enabling the gestation of ideas or of links between ideas in ways even the mind giving birth to those ideas does not fully comprehend (" The Architectonic of Pure Reason'' in Critique of Pure Reason).

Returning to the visual meditation at various times after that day found the parameters that had been established  increasingly reinforced, with no effort on my part. In the visualization, I remained an identity at the top of the tree who had just arrived from a journey to see a human form patiently seated at the base of the tree a great distance from my location at the tree's top.

Who was I within this imagistic tableau? I could not see my body, if I had any, and the meditation did not include any sensation of having a body or of having spatial contours that could suggest a body. My consciousness, however, was localized within a specific identity about which there was very little information.Thus, the meditation unfolded, taking on a life of its own, beyond my anticipations.

           Blossoming 

Having established these basic outlines of an imaginative scenario unfolding in my mind with minimal effort on my part, I decided to start writing on the morning of the 15th of February 2025, a few days after the imaginative coordinates had taken shape, and see what would happen.

The story filled out as I wrote, the rest of the imaginative encounter developing in the way evident in the completed story, generating its own momentum, merging influences from my reading in various contexts, my exposure to Yoruba àjẹ́ and Benin/Edo azen lore, which may be described as forms of witchcraft belief, my memory of beliefs about trees in Benin spirituality, and my own visionary encounters with trees, to arrive at the story as it now stands.

What May be the Significance of this Story, its Commentary and the Processes through Which they Came to be Written?

For me, the narrative series to which the story belongs is my way of returning to more consistent and systematic study and practice of the Yoruba origin Orisha tradition, in general, and Ifa, in particular, in relation to a broad context of Yoruba culture and history, the diasporic influences of these and their global and multidisciplinary conjunctions.

The use of storytelling helps  fulfill my dream of employing the imaginative fluidity and expressive freedom of literature in exploring ideas and their relationship with people, using ese ifa, a literary tradition I identify with and have a significant foundation in, even as I grow in knowledge of it.

What could be the value of these efforts for others?

I hope my explorations are both entertaining and informative, refusing to be pigeon holed into easy categories of belief, using the Orisha cosmology and its personalities as  exploratory instruments within the matrix of faith, rather than as pillars of unscrutinized belief, the kind of creatively anarchic orientation  ese ifa  culture suggests to me, the picture projected by its narratives.

What is Ifa Tuntun, New Ifa?

Ifa Tuntun is an opportunity to engage, in whatever way one finds inspiring, with the Ifa system of knowledge and divination in a manner suggestive of the creative spirit in which it was founded, an inventively irreverent engagement with the universe in relation to Yoruba origin Orisha cosmology, exploring issues of being and becoming.

The term was developed by Moyo Okediji in a Facebook post in December 2024 but I understand it as open to adaptation by anyone who identifies with it.

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[Dr. Oohay]

How (without using a WHAT or the EQUAL sign) do you “identify” or “define” or “espouse” INTELLIGIBLY the phenomena within or around and beyond the “mysterious tree” in question? 

Oohay

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