[ With Images: 5th Expanded and Further Illustrated Edition ] Imaginative Matrices and the Multifarious Universe of Knowledge: The Toyin Falola Cosmos and the Inspiration of Iya Lekuleja, the Magical Herbalist Part 3
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Fifth Expanded and Further Illustrated Edition
Part 3
Collage by myself of a picture of an old woman smoking,
juxtaposed with the Ghanaian Adinkra symbol Adinkrahene.
The old woman stands for Iya Lekuleja and the concentric circles for the scope of immediate and associative meanings of her store of herbal and magical implements. It represents the vast interpretive potential of the massively loaded store, in correlation with their enigmatically intriguing owner, often seen inside the store, smoking a pipe, as Toyin Falola describes her in his autobiographies A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth: An African Teenager's Story.
The Adinkra symbol is used here in suggesting exploratory range, evoked by Lekuleja's vast pharmacological and spiritual resources, itself echoed by Toyin Falola's multidisciplinary scholarly and writerly prolificity, as these creativities resonate with ideas of infinity, projected by the expanding and contracting structure of the concentric circles.
This suggestion of vast creative rhythms is further grounded in the associations of the colour black in the Ghanaian Akan culture from which Adinkra comes. In the symbolism of Kente cloth, the symbolic range of black is interpretable as suggesting depths of inscrutability represented by puzzling but enduring aspects of existence, the human exploration of these numinous zones and the power and wisdom emerging from such cognitive journeying.
This Adinkra symbol, therefore, projects here the idea of infinitely expanding and contracting rhythms, moving beyond the individual creative generating the expressive values they represent to touch others across space and time, and contracting again into their creator only to expand outward once more, a process of recurrent internalisation and expression.
The symbol conjoins the dramatization of the idea of ceaseless centrifugal and centripetal motion, motion away from and towards a centre, with relationships between the evocative and the inscrutable, the
expressive and the inexhaustible, the enigmatic and the compelling,
paradoxical qualities Falola's account of Iya Lekuleja shares with Adinkra, adapting
Sylvester James Gates and Michael Faux's description of this philosophical
artistic form in naming their mathematical language after the older visual
system-
''The use of symbols to connote ideas and conceptions which
defy simple verbalization is perhaps one of the oldest of human traditions. The
Asante people of West Africa have long been accustomed to using simple yet
elegant motifs known as adinkra symbols, to serve just this purpose.’’
(''Adinkras: A Graphical Technology for Supersymmetric
Representation Theory'', Physical Review D 71, 065002; 1-21;1, 2005)
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
Abstract
This essay presents the image of Iya Lekuleja, the childhood and early teenage years mentor of writer and scholar Toyin Falola, from his autobiographical A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth, exploring the implications of the image for unifying Falola's multidisciplinary creativity and for configuring further interdisciplinary synthesis.
Contents
Image and Text: Iya
Lekuleja and the Infinity Constellations
Essay Motivation and Structure
An Inspiring but Enigmatic Figure
Image and Text: Ascetic Dedicates
Text/Image Dialogue
The Exile and the River
The Storyteller
Between Episodic Construction and System Building
Seeking Unifying Logics in Diverse Creativities
Image Creation and Contemplative Visualization as Cognitive Tools
Image, Information, the Infinite
Image and
Text: The Pleasure of Existence
Mapping the Falola Cosmos
Forms of Imagination
The Unifying Image of Iya Lekuleja
A Surprising Encounter
Mysteries of the Known
Image and Text: Ogboni Arcana
A Great Knowledge System and its Mysterious Practitioner
Image and Text: Nature
Arcana
The Self Transcendence of the Adept
Enquiries into Strange Knowledges
Image and Text: Endless Depth and Infinite
Circumference
The Transformative Encounter
Image and Text:
Transformations through Feminine Spaces
Further Adventures with the Magical Herbalist
Image and Text: Journey's Beginning
Mistress of Ancient Communication Systems
Image and Text: Between Symbols and Expression
The Final Departure of the Adept and the Consummating Initiation of the Acolyte
Image and Text: To Leave and to Remain
A Magnificent Contribution to Accounts of Masters in Classical African Spiritualities
Reverberations of Possibility in the Acolyte after the Departure of the Adept
Mapping Cognitive Networks
Metaphoric Matrices
Leku's Room and Store as Metaphoric of Falola's Hermeneutic Universe
From Herbalogy and Magic to Prolific Intellectual and Artistic Multidisciplinarity
Image and Text: Hunger
Pluriversal and Transdisciplinary Windows in Falola Scholarship
Between Pluriversality and Transdisciplinarity
Image and Text: Integration, Dispersion, Integration
Transdisciplinary Navigations
Defining
Transdisciplinarity
Transdisciplinarity and the Mystical
Pluriversalist and Transdisciplinary Paradigms
Nimi Wariboko's Void
Toyin Falola's Ritual Archives
The Dihlīz Threshold of Al-Ghazali and Ebrahim Moosa
Laura Marks' Enfolding-Unfolding
Aesthetics
Bavine Nasser on Islamic Architecture
Image and Text: Structures of Knowledge and Cognitive Networks
The Multi-Cognitive Fascinations of Toyin Falola's Image of Leku
Knowledge and Self Transcendence
Between Knowing and Sharing
Image and Text: Synthesizing Rhythms
An Image Both Individual and Cosmic
Between Organic and Inorganic Knowledge Systems
Image and Text : Speculative Progression
From Cognitive History to Intersections of Medicine and Philosophy
Positioning in Relation to Diverse Forms of Healing
Exploring Intersections Between Philosophies of Healing and
Philosophies of Healers
Image and Text: The Silence at Forest Core
Further Metaphysical Possibilities of the Image of the Adept
Mutualities of Inner and Outer Space, of Inner and Outer Shrines, between the Finite and the Infinite
Leku's Store and Room as Symbolic Forms
Image
and Text: Intersections and Reconfigurations
Inspiration by Fictional and Historical Exemplary Figures
Image and Text: Synthesis of Inner and Outer Universes
Logic and
Examples of Guru Yoga
Image and Text: Communications Networks
Deification of the Adept, the Acolyte and their Divine Progenitor
Image and Text: Spaces of Emergence
''Áwo'', ''Èèwọ̀'', the Spiritually Mysterious and that Which May Not be Spoken, Yoruba Esotericism and its Broader Correlates Demonstrated by the Relationship Between the Adept and the Acolyte
Image and Text: Leku and the Circles of Infinity
Smoking as Sacred Activity
Navigation of Cognitive Zones
The Arrow and the Spiral
Historical Figure and Metaphoric Matrix
Image and Text: Spiral of Possibilities
From Leku to African
and Global Cognitive History
Summative, Inspirational Text
The Tree of Knowledge
I was terribly scared when I first saw her in the early hours of the first morning at Ode Aje. She was short, about my height at over four feet but less than five. She had tied a wrapper around her waist, exposing her upper body. Her breasts were flat and so unnoticeable.
The smell from her tobacco pipe was very strong, stronger than the cigarette smoke that I associated with the big boys who smoked in hideouts, afraid of being caught by parents or other adults.
I greeted her, half prostrated, but she returned a casual greeting and went to the backyard where the bathroom and toilet were located.
She was different from any woman I had ever seen. Right away I told myself that I had seen an iwin, a spirit in human skin. She fit perfectly well into the many descriptions of an iwin that I had heard or read about.
The school books were full of stories of spirits and ghosts. Not only did I know many of the stories, but I was living among those who believed that the stories were true. Adults presented iwin as living beings with powers greater than theirs. Iwin could appear all of a sudden, from nowhere. The woman walked in my direction on that morning, but I had no idea where she had come from. She was definitely not a ghost. I had had an encounter with a ghost some four years earlier. That was also in the early hours of the day. I saw a man wearing a white gown. I told Mama One and others that I had seen my father, since that’s who I thought the man was.
I was bombarded with many questions, each person urging me to describe what I had seen and heard. I must have told them what they themselves had told me about my father. I was probably using the photograph in my head to answer the questions they posed. As I spoke, they all concluded that I must have seen the ghost of my father.
It was not I who reached this conclusion, but adults said that the man I saw was a ghost and I accepted it as true. I confirmed the story of Mama One that she, too, had seen the ghost a few times, in the same spot. It was another confirmation that the dead man was not far from the house and could appear at any time to those he loved. They wanted to be sure that the ghost had not given me a message to relay to them or even an instruction they must obey.
But what I saw on that morning at Ode Aje was no ghost. All moonlight stories portrayed an iwin as smallish and pipe smoking. I had seen one. An iwin could look ragged, naked, half-dressed. This woman was scantily dressed, with just a small wrapper tied around her body. There was not enough light for me to see her fully, to describe all her features.
An iwin revealed only small parts of itself and only in a short appearance so that no one would be able to capture the full picture. The woman spoke little; actually, she mumbled her response, as spirits did in their world. As she had appeared from nowhere, and the main door had been locked (I checked the door twice), I told myself that the woman was one of those iwin that came from the underworld. In moonlight stories and school books, spirits inhabit the forest, caves, tree hollows, the sky, and the underworld. I was fascinated by spirit stories, and the narrators, whether school teachers or adults, always made them sound believable.
In Ode Aje and many other parts of the city, many people, including the educated ones, did not see spirit stories as fantasies, the imaginative creations of fertile minds, but as events, episodes, histories, and reality.
Adults and children used objects to seal oaths, asking ghosts, spirits, and the underworld to punish them if they betrayed anyone. Iwin were among those unseen forces that overwhelmed the living, but they were not included in the list of beings and spirits to be worshiped.
Iwin were not like ghosts who could be venerated or the dead who appeared once a year as masquerades. Iwin were not part of the invisible essence of self, unlike the spirit that dominated the emere or abiku. No one worshiped an iwin, as one did a god or goddess, but they were dreaded beings. An iwin could be so evil that to see it could mean the end of one’s life. One iwin in a popular storybook was after one’s blood, the food she relied upon for survival.
Not all iwin were evil: many actually led one onto the path of success and wealth; others simply gave advice or wisdom. The one I saw did nothing; she simply walked away, not even removing the pipe from her mouth.
I chose to keep the discovery of the iwin to myself. When I had seen a ghost, I had been bombarded with too many questions, many of which I could not answer. I could only describe what I saw. I did not know whether this iwin was evil or good, and she did nothing to me.
In the stories, while many iwin walked away as this one had done, others engaged in a short conversation, even giving instructions. What I saw was big; what I had to say was small. Then again, I was new; I was yet to meet my new friends at school. I knew only a few folk in the household, and my friendship with Kola, my age mate, was only beginning.
The discovery of an iwin was my second research project in life, the first being the pursuit of rail lines and trains. The search for the train ended in my insertion into a mythical worldview, with the train turning me into an emere. The search for an iwin moved me far deeper into cosmology, the internalization of ideas bigger than the self, and an eye-opener to the world beyond. My wings began to grow, but my legs were too big to allow me to fly.
The next day I woke up early. I cannot say that I woke up at the same time since I was not using a clock to determine when to go to bed and wake up. No iwin showed up. Another two days passed, and nothing showed up. I was right: what I had seen was an iwin. This was true to type; like ghosts, iwin revealed themselves in their own time, without notice.
Then I told Kola, with whom I had developed a close friendship in less than a week. Kola said that I had made a big mistake in not asking the iwin for a wish. As far as he was concerned, he needed only a one minute encounter with an iwin.
We began to draw up a request list. Kola wanted the gift of invisibility, to be able to move around without being seen. With this power, he would turn into thin air to fight, take the best clothes from the Indian stores in the new city, watch the movies that I had told him about for free, and even perch on people’s heads and release his faeces on those who had offended him.
He would become a hawk and use his beak to pluck an eye or two from his enemies. When I told Kola about my wish, which was for the iwin to return me to Agbokojo, he heaped a series of insults on me, saying that the iwin already knew that I had nothing tangible to say, which was why she refused to speak to me.
He himself could deliver me to Agbokojo, he assured me, adding that if I paid him a small fee he would carry me on his shoulders so that the whole world could see me. I was convinced, and I revised my wish list: I needed the ability to fly, like birds and airplanes. Airplanes fascinated me, and no one had been able to explain the science of planes to me.
My father’s first son, Adewale, had become a hero due to his decision to travel to the United Kingdom and become a pilot. Kola was not convinced that the ability to fly was enough. “What would happen if you were trapped in a net?” he asked. I was preoccupied with revising my wish list, as I did other things at home and school.
She appeared again, like before, with the pipe and the smoke following her in the morning. Rather than even tying her wrapper around her waist she had simply thrown it over her shoulders, covering only half of her body. This time around, she did not even speak to me or reply to my customary greetings.
She walked away, toward the backyard. I was curious, and I hid behind a door waiting for her to walk back. As she did, still smoking her pipe, she entered a room. From the inside courtyard, facing the front entrance, the room was to the right.
I felt sorry for the occupant of the room, receiving a guest from the underworld so suddenly. Perhaps there was trouble. I hurried to wake up Kola and told him what I had seen. Half awake, he followed me so that I could show him the room. Kola hissed, pushing me so hard that I hit a wall, and said, “You did not see an iwin; you saw Leku, Iya Lekuleja.”
I had seen a human being, not a spirit! It was the word Iya (elderly woman) in his sentence that gave me an instant clue. I must have confused the knowledge in the books and stories with the reality of life, moving too fast between the realm of the underworld and the living, confusing the shells of peanuts with coffins.
Even then, I had no immediate idea what he meant by Leku. As Kola and I went about our ways and chores, I had to wait till after school to talk more. Had I jumped into a river without knowing how to swim? As far as Kola was concerned, everyone knew that the woman was mysterious, but I was the first to associate her with the underworld. I had not noticed her room, the first to the left on entering the house, as it was always locked.
Her room was well located, with windows opening onto the front veranda and the side yard. I never saw the windows open, and until the woman entered the room that morning I never saw the room open either.
Mysteries of the Known
The full discovery of Leku led me to the mysterious world of herbs and magic, secrecy and healing. She actually was an iwin [''a spirit in human skin''] but not of the kind described in the literature. Indeed, no literature, then or now, has been able to record, capture, and analyze the women in Leku’s category. And half of what I later found out I cannot reveal.
By the time I could seek her permission to reveal her essence and quote her, she was long dead. And each time I feel like revealing the full essence I am tormented by an overpowering feeling of awe and danger.
The first time I mentioned a small part of her secret at a seminar at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ibadan, I had a nightmare in which I was pursued by a tiger that would have killed me if I had not awakened in time. Most of my misfortunes, all my negative feelings, and my anticipation of troubles I attribute to a part of me that desires to unlock what I know about Leku. Perhaps I will, but not today, not even tomorrow. Nobody tells all he knows.
Who is writing this?
One of the most prolific writers in the world, in command of multiple expressive forms, registers and styles of expression, from poetry to prose, from narrative to exposition and analysis, a master of proverb discourse, a scholar deeply grounded in the imperatives of self expression as fundamental to the illumination and transmission of civilization, a historian dedicated to deep exploration of the past to clarify the present and shape the future, a consummate writer on Yorba spirituality and philosophy in its arcane palpitations and ideational configurations, unable to articulate understanding of one person, describing himself as locked into silence by a sense of something beyond his full comprehension, something awesome, something numinous, ''inspiring both dread and fascination [constituting] the non-rational element of vital religion'', as Rudolph Otto's term from The Idea of the Holy is clarified in Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, the esoteric, áwo, as understood in Yoruba thought, as these values are embodied for him by the herbalist Leku.
The best visual projection known to me of such correlations of the numinous and the feminine as Falola develops in his account of Leku is in the metal art of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order, centred on veneration of Ile, Earth, uniquely striking even within the global constellation of images of feminine potency. Ogboni art combines stillness and power, the arcane and the human, the masculine, the feminine and the strange.
The female figure in the edan ogboni image below holds her breasts in acknowledgement of their biological and spiritual implications, their nurturing quality an expression of the nurturant role of Ile, Earth, in relation to humanity represented by the couple.
Measure silence as equal to speech, nurturing powers no less potent than the milk of a woman's breasts but as potentially destructive as poison fed to a child from diseased mammaries. Austere dignity, grandly contemplative, regal, aloof, almost transcendental in bearing, ascetic gravitas, evocative of knowledge and power embodied through great sensitivity to creative and destructive possibilities of arcane knowledge, the hidden byways and pathways of knowing into which I travel.
The delicate beauty of zones of generation, humanity's most intimate participation in the creativity of nature, from the stars to insects.
The female figure's genitals are sculpted in delicate beauty like that of the man's, prominently but delicately portrayed to suggest their creative power. Adeyinka Bello's salutation, from within Yoruba ideations, to the evocative power of such visual expressions, complements this art:
'' Iba oko t'o d'ori kodo ti o ro!
Iba obo t'o dori kodo ti o s'eje!
Paying homage to my ancestors
I pay homage to the penis that is hung without bringing sperm;
I pay homage to the vagina that has stopped menstruating.
Paying homage to our elders who have used these organs to bring life and are old now or who are gone but whose contributions can never be forgotten."
Adeyinka Bello from ''Classical Yoruba Aesthetics and Philosophy of the Erotic'' in Cosmos of World Art and Correlative Cultural Forms on Facebook.
Image above: Edan Ogboni couple from the Brune website. All sites accessed 5.5.2023.
She had a successful store on a streetcorner about six miles from the house. This was the most famous store for herbs, ingredients for all diseases and ailments, and mixtures and materials for all kinds of charms, both for good and for evil. Kola took me to the store, and we did not have to disguise ourselves. We walked in and sat down, and she continued to smoke her pipe and attend to customers.
I would visit this store many times in seven years, in part because I became fascinated with her and also because of the knowledge offered by Leku and her store. I doubt if Leku herself could have known the number of items in the store.
Arranged in a way known only to her, they comprised an assortment of all known herbs, dried leaves, roots of many kinds of trees and shrubs, fresh and dead plants, bones of various animals (including tigers, leopards, and hyenas), skulls of various animals, dried rats, rodents, other animals, dry and living insects such as millipedes and centipedes, reptiles (including parts of snakes, lizards, and alligators), rocks and soils, and ritual lamps and pots. Tortoises, snails, and small cats walked around, and they, too, were for sale.
Dangerous scorpions in bottles, as well as snakes in cages, were waiting for food and ready to bite. It was from these various objects, as I came to learn from Kola and others, that she got her name of Iya Lekuleja ( the seller of assorted charms and medicine ). Leku was just an abbreviation, used mainly behind her back; it is shorter, but it cuts off the dignified word, Iya (elderly mother).
Leku was an iya, but she had no children, so this was not a motherhood label. She was superior to all of us, men and women alike. Leku was a man, as they often referred to her as “Kabiyesi,” a title that can be rendered as “Excellency” and is reserved for male kings, or as “Baba Nla,” the great father. Still in the same skin, she was a woman to others, but not as an obinrin (the Yoruba name for women), but as an iya, a superior elder. When men wanted something from her, they would lie down flat on the floor until she gestured to them to stand up. There were women like her, with knowledge and skills that gave them prestige and definitions beyond the association of women with motherhood.
Some among the women had the skill to combine herbal knowledge with incantations to make their charms and medicines work, as in the apetebi. They were the powerful members of the “Club of Sixteen” [ ''since they referred to themselves as Eerindinlogun, which in Yoruba means sixteen...They were female diviners who used sixteen cowries as their main device on the divination tray'' and] who engaged in rituals. Leku knew how to perform rituals, and many could be caught whispering that Leku could kill anyone, but by what means I did not know.
Leku was never home during the day—she left at dawn and returned at dusk. She cooked no food, hardly spoke to anybody in the house, smoked her pipe in silence, and kept to herself in her overcrowded room full of dead plants and insects.
The plants and insects were not objects of dirt, but clusters of valuable materials and knowledge, which required research to reveal their meanings. There was electricity, but she never touched the knob to switch it on. Rather, she used her lamp, multi-eyed with cotton wicks and palm oil.
As Leku poured more oil into the lamp, she would also put in seeds, uttering strange words only she could understand. The words empowered the lamp and fire, providing more than just light.
Leku kept no friends, had no children, and had relatives who revered her but only spoke to her about their diseases or good health. She listened to them, told them what to do, and stopped talking. They thanked her, women kneeling down, men prostrating, both moving on, knowing full well that Leku would not engage in redundant conversations.
She must return to her pipe, to inhale the nicotine that gave her limitless energy, to puff out the smoke that would ward off evil spirits. Wandering spirits, we all believed, hated nothing more than the smell of tobacco and would keep their distance, as far as three miles away. The smell provoked them to flight, but also to insulting human beings, not because smoking was a vice, but because humans were a nuisance to the spirits, not leaving them alone to roam the streets and do their damage.
There were times when, on reaching the house, she would stop and say some words to herself, as if uttering powerful prayers, before entering. Even mysterious were the days when she would enter the house backward, as if she must not see certain people or objects.
[ On being sent on an errand to see Leku and take a message from her ] When I reached Ojagbo, the city ward where Leku’s store was located, she was not to be found. Her store was closed, but not locked.
Leku never locked her store; she would only close it to indicate to her customers and visitors that she had gone for the day. Even the rascally would not dare enter Leku’s store with all the myths surrounding it and its owner.
To threaten to push a boy into Leku’s store was enough to frighten him, as boys all believed that it was full of live scorpions and snakes, sorcerers and witches, and other agents of death.
Leku’s store was her life. Yet women in adjacent and opposite stores said that she had not been seen for days.There were no traces of her. In the case of most other women traders, emissaries would have been sent to their houses to find out why they were absent from work, usually due to an illness that had befallen them, their husbands, or their children, or some emergency, all calling for the expression of sympathy.
However, Leku was not in their league, she did not relate to them, and none would even nurse a desire to find out why she was not at her store. At best, they would say “a a ri iya” (we did not see the elderly woman) and return to their businesses, gesturing to indicate that they were not supposed to know her movements or even bother to find out about her.
Leku was not the kind of woman who could be declared missing. Who would steal a burden, carrying a woman who could become a dangerous scorpion, bite you, and then escape?
The talk about Leku was always closer to truth than fiction [closer to fiction than truth?]—when everyone was complaining of cold, she was hot; and when they were hot, she was cold; when they were hungry, she was full; and when they were full, she was hungry. She reversed the order of existence, a master of her own rules.
When city officials were asking the women around her to buy licenses for their small stores and checking their husbands’ tax receipts in front of their wives, they ran past Leku’s store. Men who had paid no taxes could just sit around her, and the most powerful tax collectors became powerless, as they were so afraid to come near her, lest their fingers should wither away.
Image and Text: Nature Arcana
My spirit roams across various zones of space and time, though grounded in earth, as I go from home to work, work to home, a person who has seen the designs of the universe and whose self has become nothing within that immensity, peering into the womb of time to understand the flowering of its seeds before their maturation, multifarious forms emerging from darkness taking shape from a cosmogonic zone, a cosmic synthesis from dinosaurs to birds, fish to humans, plants to abstract symbols, vast temporal and naturalistic breadth in relation to forms of human creativity, the spiral and the solar luminary, the continuity of existence across all forms of being, the sun, journey and eternity.
Living in the world, but not of it, active in the body of flesh and blood, but attuned to the unity of body with earth while walking the earth and after giving it back to earth, journeying from birth to the beyond even as I exist within infinity.
How did my journey begin? It began through my hearing the voice in the grass, the whisper of power rippling through nature, a sound the source of which I sought through many years, a path leading from my doorstep to horizons unknown, gradually moving from the world as known by everyone to the world as known to few, ablaze with light both radiant and dark, the joyous and the grave, the sombre and the uplifting, darkness empowering, light illuminating.
Image above: Joseph Eze's What an Adult Sees, a Child Cannot See
Image source:Pinterest
Even more wondrous, the amazing cosmos of organic and inorganic forms evident in her store is internalised by Leku, not only in terms of its contents, but also as regarding their uses individually and in combination, a creative power all the more astonishing on account of the spirit of self denying, abstemious service in which it is employed, an image of self sacrificing power:
Leku knew three things, two of which were public knowledge and the third a secret known to only a few.
To start with what was obvious, she was knowledgeable about all items used to cure diseases, that is, she was a trader in herbs and all ingredients for charms and medicine. Her knowledge of traditional pharmacology was deep.
She had not gone to school and had memorized all the items. Even the smaller items, the visible dried leaves, and the wrapped ground leaves ran to over a thousand types. The bone pieces ran to another thousand. Even the various types of clay lamps were many. Leku could produce an object in a split second, pointing to where a customer should go and get it when she was not in the mood to get up.
Leku’s second strength was a source of mystery: she knew the combinations of plants and other objects needed to cure all common diseases, and she could provide advice for the more complicated ailments.
Leku operated in a less than commercial manner. If the babalawo [diviners from the Ifa knowledge system] and herbalists charged for consultations, Leku did not, charging only token fees for her herbs and charms. If the babalawo and herbalists explained the illnesses and diseases and how they wanted to cure them, Leku offered no explanation.
She was recirculating her profits to buy more items for the store rather than for herself. Her only passion was the store, not as a space in which to make money but one in which to make herbs and medicine available to whoever wanted them. She was certainly not counting on riches.
I witnessed her method many times. A woman would walk in complaining that her son was suffering from prolonged stomach pain. Leku would listen to the story. As she picked one herb from one part of the store, she would pose a question, and the answer would prompt her to drop one leaf and take another. When she was done, she would simply instruct, “Grind them together, cook in a boiling pot, and give to your son for two days.”
No more questions, no more explanation. She mentioned her price; the woman paid and left. Leku would not even check the money or touch it, only pointing the client in the direction of a bowl in which to drop it and from which to take the change, which she also never checked. If the woman had no money, Leku would still give her the medicine and refused to reply or respond to the long statement of gratitude. It was not that the gratitude was wasted or the beneficiary should not thank her; it was as if she were saying that her help was rendered on behalf of some higher forces.
When Leku had no answer to a medical problem, she referred the client to another herbalist or babalawo. One day when she saw a very deep wound on my right leg, which left a scar that remains noticeable even today, she advised me to go to Adeoyo, which was a facility for Western medicine. She gave no explanation, just a single sentence.
This combination of inexplicable scope of knowledge and profound asceticism provokes questions as to its source, with a wonderful story emerging about how such an unusual personage came to be:
[ Her ] knowledge impressed even the most talented person. My headmaster once used her in a school sermon, saying that what the teachers wanted us to learn was nothing compared to what Leku knew. This was true, although we were dealing with different kinds of knowledge. Because she knew so much, she became an object of discussions on knowledge.
As the story goes, a powerful tornado had occurred many years before, and she was a victim of it. Carried by the tornado to a distant land, she was suspended in air for over seven years. It was there that she was able to observe the earth and all of its contents, knowing not just the name but the purpose of each item. Suspended without food or water, she could endure hardship, and her body was tiny so she would not need much food to survive. Other than her nonstop smoking, not many saw Leku when she cooked or ate. Even when I saw her cooking pot, it was so small that I could have eaten the entire contents as an appetizer.
The lessons on what to do with all plants, insects, animals, and other objects were given to Leku by heavenly bodies. As the story goes, she signed a pact with the heavenly bodies not to reveal the sources of her knowledge but to constantly renew her vow. As Leku did not transmit this knowledge directly to others, people believed the story. She had no apprentice, no one interested in inheriting the store or learning the herbs. Indeed, when she died her death meant the end of the store and her knowledge, the loss of an entire laboratory and library.
Image and Text: Endless Depth and Infinite Circumference
All knowledge is about relationships. Relationships between
the knower and the known. Knowledge aspiring to be as the calabash in its depth
and circumference, its depth unfathomable, its circumference endless.
I have
dedicated my life to understanding animal, plant and human life and the life of the inert, which most do not see, the essences
and relationships of growing things and with other existents, revealing the secrets of the universe.
Hence the knowledge I relate with is of the particulars, the depths and networks of things, each dynamic in its own way, each fulfilling its purpose in a scheme bottomless in its unknowable fullness, perceiving them from as broad a
range of angles as possible, a many sided diamond continually revealing new
sides of itself, hence I don’t talk much
because what is commonplace speech beside the constellations of knowing constantly unfolding before my eyes?
Image above: Joseph Eze's Embodiment Of
Image source: Pinterest
A climatic point of Falola's relationship with the enigmatic yet darkly illuminating figure of Leku is described:
It was Leku’s third type of knowledge that bound us in secrecy and actually made me the most informed about her. A simple act led to some bonding, which in turn led to greater interaction. It started casually, without any thought on my part.
[ He narrates how he helped Leku carry her luggage, leading to friendship between them, but the secrecy and knowledge referenced above are not elaborated on, only stated in general but tantalizing terms, without mapping their contents]
I walked into a deadly trap, like the restless feet walking into a snake pit. Nothing had prepared my mind for it. No warning came in a dream. No clue was visible.
Saturday came quickly, and all the boys gathered at school. We had decided to ignore Leku’s instruction that not all of us should come to the store. We all decided to go, but the rest would stay out of Leku’s reach and sight. One boy said that Leku could not see beyond five feet, which was why people did not move closer to her, so that she could not put them on her list of whom to kill or roast for medication.
...everybody was afraid of Leku for various reasons. Sali told me that he had heard a rumor that Leku could turn a client into a snake and that the skulls in the store were not those of animals but of human beings. According to Sali, several small boys had gone there to buy herbs and never returned, as Leku had converted them into ingredients to make powerful charms. According to Sali, Leku only ate one meal a year, usually around June, and she needed only small snacks for the next twelve months.
[ Sali insisted to Falola that ] “You are alive because Iya Lekuleja’s stomach is full.” [ He] explained that her annual big meal comprised human flesh and blood. In any case, I needed to help him [ since Falola was close to Leku ] .
I was to grab the medication and rush out. In contrast to visiting other places and people, one did not have to rehearse what to say, what words and sentences to avoid, and how long to speak. Leku would not speak anyway.
I had nothing to fear. She had always welcomed me to her store, gesturing for me to sit down, and removing her pipe to signal “bye bye” when I decided to leave. I even took fruits from the store without seeking permission to do so. I would peel bananas and oranges and leave the skins on the ground. Leku would pick them up, sun dry them, and store them for reasons that I did not know. She had in store dried skins of many nuts and fruits, including those that did not even grow in Western Nigeria where the Yoruba are located.
Sali and the rest of his advisory board [ those schoolboys helping Sali with his plans to gain Risi's friendship ] walked jubilantly toward the store [ expecting success for Sali's mission ]. As we approached the site, the boys stopped, leaving me to cross the street while they looked on from a distance.
As I walked in, I was grabbed by two fierce-looking adults and pushed to the back of the store. Two women quickly held up a long piece of blue cloth to create a curtain so that no one could see the inside of the store. Without the curtain, the entire store could be seen from the roadside by onlookers.
Then I saw my mother, my mother’s mother, my mother’s father, and some other faces, about twelve or so. I could not count.
Events were moving too fast for me. They must have been hiding and suddenly appeared when I showed up. I was held on the ground, so firmly that I could hardly breathe. Within two minutes, my entire head was shaved with a sharp knife. I protested once, but when I saw blood I gave up.
Then Leku came with a new blade and made over a hundred incisions on my head. She opened a small container and rubbed a dark-looking powder on the small cuts, speaking in tongues as she did. The words and lines were archaic, too fast for me to grasp. I know the chorus, which was a prayer to cast evil out of my brain.
Then a more frightening part followed, too much for me to bear then and even now as I write. Leku took a dried rat, mixed it with some ingredients in a bowl and stirred it many times. As she prepared my mind for the fact that I would drink the mixture, she removed her cloth, and stood naked for all to see.
She moved in circles many times, uttering archaic words in rapid succession. Then she knelt over the bowl and washed her breasts and vagina into its contents. I very much doubt that anyone paid attention to her nakedness, only to her performance. No one but me was shocked about the short and dirty bath that I witnessed. When she said something they would reply “ase” (amen). Only Leku could ever repeat what she said. For someone who was always quiet, the rapidity of her speech and its esotericism were astounding. One line was repeated many times: “May he not die at the hands of a woman.”
When she finished, she lifted the bowl and asked me to drink. I refused. I was probably telling myself that this could not have been intended for a human being; even if thrown to the ground as a waste product, one should take care not to step in it. I was hit by the two men who had originally grabbed me, ordering me to drink. I did, remembering the saying that we had used in reference to the schoolteachers several times: an oppressor that one cannot stand up to should be committed to God.
I became like an accused man who proclaimed his guilt quickly in order to avoid staying too long on his knees. As I drank the medication slowly, I wanted to throw up. “If you vomit, you will lick all of it with your tongue,” said Leku. I looked around for sympathy, but I realized that I was a cockroach in a court of fowls. It was only my will that kept the dangerous liquid inside me.
The experience stayed with me for a long time; I had to close my eyes before I could swallow any medication. The ceremony was over within a few minutes. Leku returned to her chair; now dressed, she lit her pipe, ordered that the temporary screen be removed, and pretended nothing had happened.
She was so calm that no one would ever associate her with the leadership of the ritual that had just occurred. I was asked to sit down. Everybody departed, saying nothing other than thanking Leku for “removing evil from his head” and “saving his life.” No one was ready to challenge Leku, but they probably knew what they were doing—even one who is feebleminded knows the location of his house.
I stayed in the store for the rest of the day, speechless. I did not even think of the boys who had followed me. I am sure they took to their heels when they saw the screen held up. When the store closed, as darkness came, Leku closed the door.
I noticed that she did not lock it, only putting an assortment of charms in three pots outside it. Neither did she bother to take the money from the bowl. Kola had told me that even if Leku’s money fell on the ground, no one would pick it up for fear of contracting smallpox.
On that evening, everybody I knew was bad. I had committed no offense to deserve their punishment. Even if I had, I told myself that there must be guilt in innocence, just as there is innocence in guilt. I did not understand their willingness to collaborate with Leku if they departed so quickly. To me, all the adults were like the cane that was used to kill a snake but was not invited to share the meal when the animal was roasted.
I carried Leku’s loads, walking side by side for the entire journey. She walked too slowly for me, like the moon that travels slowly as he crosses the city. I could not push her, shout, or walk faster, as I would have done with Sali and my other friends. I was the termite in Leku’s rock: a termite can do nothing to a rock but lick it. I had already licked too much. If the heart is sad, tears will flow like a stream, but I knew that Leku had no eyes to see, and if she did she would say that my eyes smelled. I could do nothing, not even talk or yawn: for the mouse to laugh in the presence of a cat, there must be a hole close by.
I dropped her loads without even caring to look at her room. I went into my own room, without even asking for food. I noticed that no one wanted to speak with me, including Kola, who had gone into hiding: well, he who derided the unfortunate person should carry no blame; it was the fate of the ridiculed that was at fault.
Friends and relatives had become detractors, so I believed, and I had to make sure that they did not damage my destiny. I had become a broken chain that could not regain its wholeness.
I told myself that they were all talking about me, reminding myself of many famous lines in which the disreputable person thinks that people are speaking of him; the wicked are full of suspicion.
As I lay down, I was plotting revenge in my head, thinking of how I would obtain the power to make them eat cow dung. I agreed with what I had heard, that it is better to spend the night in anger than in repentance. I fell asleep, but my sleep must have been short.
Early the next morning, Baba Olopa instructed me to wake up. Since he only woke me up when I was in trouble, I immediately knew that he was calling a dog with a whip in his hand. Leku was ready for me.
On Sunday and Monday, I repeated the journey with Leku, staying with her for three days in her store, and eating only minimally, notably fruits and bean cake. I missed school on Monday and was disconnected from all my friends. I was not allowed to bathe or clean my head or face so that the concoction would not be washed off. I ate and drank little so that the medicine would stay in my body for some time.
I understood Leku a little bit more. When she was not smoking her pipe, she was talking to unseen strangers, appealing to gods, cursing witches, praising herbs, and begging the gods. Too strange for me to understand, she was obsessed with appealing to the gods and all universal forces not to make impotent the plants, roots, bones, and other items in her store. The Yoruba she used to communicate, to talk to herself, and to say all these strange things was not the language we used at home or school.
Leku was so strange that I began to believe Sali, who claimed that the woman had twenty-four eyes. When I thought she was dozing off, she was quick to welcome a customer to her store. I paid attention to what the customers wanted, much of which sounded curious and strange. Some needed medicine to ward off bad dreams, and Leku would give them powders to apply to their eyelashes or to drink dissolved in water. The regular customers said nothing, just collecting their routine medication. A few men came for mixtures to treat sexually transmitted diseases, and Leku asked one of them to show her his penis, using a short stick to examine it.
I did not understand the purpose of the magic involved in incising my head and forcing a powerful concoction down my throat. I could not have understood it. I knew that they had performed elaborate magic on me, casting out some spell but returning some forces to create a balance. They believed that I was evil, based on only one piece of evidence: I wanted to procure the medicine to help a friend.
Could they have had other evidence unknown to me? I was not the one who was after Risi. It had never occurred to me to have a girlfriend. I had had a wife or even several in dramas in which I acted the role of a successful man or a chief, but I did not turn these dramas into dreams.
No one had ever discussed sex with me. It was not one of those topics that came up in any discussions among us: talking about soccer and bicycle rides had greater priority. The big boys used to talk of girls, but not of sex. Sali wanted Risi, but he never fully explained to us what he wanted her for. I was further confused about their fear that I would be destroyed by a woman, necessitating the use of magic to prevent it. I could not understand Leku’s intent since I was not Sali.
Were they saying that I should stay away from all women or some women? Was the magic about overcoming the power of the naked body, fully revealed in the aging nakedness of Leku? Could it be that the love of a woman would not undermine [ would undermine?] my masculinity, sap my energy, damage my brain?
Would I be saved from the influence of men like Sali and the members of his advisory board? Could it be that evil and women were associated and had to be disconnected? Did I drink enough of the hidden contents of breast and vagina that I would no longer desire them? Did I drink the breast and vagina juice to make me scared of their excesses? Or was the medication to assert manliness over femininity or to prevent a possible perpetual subordination to a woman? To one who is ignorant, a small garden is a forest.
By the time I could seriously demand answers, Leku had completely overwhelmed me, showing me her other side, which was more secretive, more frightening, more threatening, and more powerful. I became like a person who, because he is bored to death at a meeting with the king and his chiefs, decides to put a lot of salt in his mouth: it is impossible to spit out the salt and also impossible to swallow the saliva. I couldn’t [ could?] learn but not talk, see but not admit.
As I learned more about Leku, without all the details of what she did, I worried no more about my own rituals and experience. Eventually, I was able to claim, and even then only privately, that I fully understood her essence, her representation in the realm of the living and the underworld. I never said that I understood her power or its sources. I could only know bits and pieces: but for the reality of death, even diviners and herbalists could claim to be God.
Whenever I read the literature or listen to speeches claiming that African women lack power, I repeat quietly “Leku, Leku, Leku,” to remind myself that the picture has never been fully revealed. A mouth that turns into a knife will cut its own lips. The full picture will not be revealed until many more people discover an iwin who will either grant their requests or torment them. Even then, the experience of the last person to die will be hard to imagine.
Image and Text: Transformations through Feminine Spaces
Through the waters of my breast and secret place, I
blessed him with the empowerments of nurturing and regeneration. We are
at times forced to encounter the sacred mystery, stumbling into knowing through
paths unanticipated, as my apprentice came to me on that fateful day where we
met as I moved to perform my morning rituals of cleaning the body.
What Falola underwent at the hands of Leku may be seen as a version of rituals in various spiritual cultures in which female entities, their powers focused through their breasts and vagina, are invoked as enablers of spiritual cleansing, empowerment and transformation, possibilities also foregrounded by the scope of ideas associated with feminine personalities in classical Yoruba thought, as I describe in Developing Universal Ogboni Philosophy and Spirituality: My Journey, using various sources, in relation to Ogboni symbolism, where female breast and vagina visibility is central.
A more explicitly actualized form of the kind of ritual to which Falola was subjected
is the story from Tibetan Buddhism of Guru Rinpoche's encounter with a dakini, a female spirit entity who guides seekers of spiritual wisdom. The dakini Sangwa Yeshe is a spiritually potent female figure, as Leku is, humanly embodied, like Leku, but non-human, unlike her, although resonant with the uncanny associations evoked in people by Leku's overwhelming spirituality.
In the story of Rinpoche's meeting with Sangwa Yeshe, powers associated with the female form, in general, and the vagina, in particular, of a spiritually potent female figure, are invoked as a means of spiritual regeneration of a male personage, a willing supplicant, unlike Falola, painfully forced into the situation.
Rinpoche's encounter with Sangwa Yeshe is surreal and transformative, an experience that would be evocative of terror in an unprepared mind, a recreative process in which external and inward processes of the kind Falola undergoes are experienced with the totalistic force of inwardness.
Falola's own experience moves from the external to the internal. He is first exposed to Leku's nakedness, seeing her naked form. The externality represented by the physical form which that nakedness projects stamps his mind through the psychological impact of being forcefully and suddenly exposed to that taboo sight.
That inward, psychological reconfiguration is reinforced by his being forced to drink a concoction into which Leku's breasts and vagina have been washed, a fantastic situation the phantasmagoric character of which is amplified by the physically and auditorily dynamic atmosphere she generates, moving rapidly in circles round the child as she speedily chants words from Yoruba, the language she shares with the unwilling initiate, but the sounds of which are alien to him, an esoteric dialect.
Along similar, but much more intense lines, Rinpoche invites
Sangwa Yeshe to bless him, upon which she responds with a combination of physical and verbal reconfigurations of Rinpoche, sacred sound and human form conjoining in remaking the human being as he passess through immersion within the utmost penetralia of that female figure, remade within the waters of her uniquely feminine physicality:
''When Guru [ title of a spiritual teacher] Rinpoche entered
the palace of the Queen Dakini [ a female spirit entity who guides seekers of spiritual wisdom], Sangwa Yeshe…she was seated on a throne of sun
and moon discs [ symbols of power as traversing the celestial range evoked by the two primary expressions of day and night, the sun and the moon], dressed in charnel ground ornaments [
ceremonial objects worn on the body for use in rituals at cremation grounds and therefore
evoking transcendence of earthly life] and holding a skull-cup [ a skull may symbolize physical embodiment and its enabling of knowledge of the unity of spirit and matter as well as the transcendence of focus on the material world as self sufficient unto itself. Drinking from a skull could therefore indicate identification with this vision of reality] and wooden drum [ the
drum may suggest processes initiated through sacred sound].
Guru Rinpoche
approached her with the appropriate offerings, prostrations, and
circumambulations, requesting the outer, inner, and secret empowerments
[various, interwoven aspects of spiritual enablement and enlightenment].
She responded by
transforming him into the seed syllable HUM [ a mantra, a particularly concentrated form of sacred speech which may embody the essence of a divine personality] and conferring on him these three
empowerments with her body: first, she took the HUM on her lips; then she
swallowed him and he received abhiseka [immersive consecration represented by bathing] in her stomach; next she empowered him
in her secret place [ most likely, her vagina, a central image of the unity of consciousness and generation of life in Tantric Hinduism and Buddhism, an orientation in those religions emphasizing the unity of spirt and matter, of ultimate reality and its material expressions, a context in which the vagina's enabling of sexual pleasure and generation of life are understood in relation to consciousness, as expressed through the senses, and to the generation of life as cosmic processes, these two possibilities conjoined in the idea of the vagina as enabling or representing processes and sites of cosmic birth and of the spiritual rebirth of the initiate].
Finally, she passed him through her secret lotus [ the lotus, the radiant beauty of the careful structuring of its petals rising above muddy water, is a central symbol of spiritual unfolding in Buddhism and Hinduism] her
vagina [ the vagina, in its enablement of pleasure and new life, associated therefore with sensation as an aspect of consciousness and generation of life as a cosmic quality ( The Yoni Tantra, trans. Mike Magee, shivashakti.com) is a crucial form in Tantra, a strain in Hinduism and Buddhism emphasizing the mutuality of the material and spiritual worlds (David Gordon White, ''Introduction'', Tantra in Practice, ed. David Gordon White, 2000) ] , and with these blessings his body, speech, and mind were purified of
defilements.
These constituted the outer, inner, and secret empowerments he
sought, purifying the three obscurations [ obstacles to spiritual
enlightenment and power constituted by the limitations of human nature].
Through this blessing and others, he came to be known as Thotreng Tsal, or
"strength of the rosary of skulls'' [ a rosary of skulls, like the circlet
of severed human heads images of her show as worn by the female Hindu deity
Kali (The Sword and the Flute:Kali and Krsna: Dark Visions of the Terrible
and the Sublime in Hindu Mythology-David Kinsley) may suggest
embodiment of transcendence of the limitations of material existence
represented by the human physical body, particularly as symbolized by the human
head].
From Dakini's Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism, Judith Simmer Brown, 2002, 254. Similar symbolism, carefully interpreted, emerges in the account of Padma Sambhava's encounter with a dakini in Sardar Laden et al (trans) and Evans-Wentz' edited The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1968, 132-133.
Poro society initiates of the Senufo
of Côte d'Ivoire and neighbouring countries crawl through a hole in the body of a sculpture symbolizing the
Ancient Mother, the female aspect of the supreme deity, a space representing the vagina and the womb as generative
spaces, in this instance as zones of rebirth in a cognitive sense,
images of the Ancient Mother also showing her as feeding a child from her
breast, giving both biological nourishment and the milk of knowledge.
( Stiched together from Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, ''Senufo Arts and Poro Initiation in Northern Côte d’Ivoire", Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Kathy Curnow, The Bright Continent: African Art History}
''A statue of Ancient Mother is shown to novices during the Poro
learning process, in part as an indication that beyond the obvious lies the
hidden, an idea also exemplified by the
secret language learned by novices.
Initiation begins with boys being taken
from their biological mothers to enter a period of dislocation in the compound
of Ancient Mother and under her care. Ancient Mother absorbs the young novices,
who are not yet seen as human.
She will symbolically give birth to them many
years later, after their initiation is complete. New initiates undergo a
symbolic death through such rituals as crawling through a muddy tunnel. They
are reduced to a kind of emptiness, a liminal or in-between status.
Over the
long course of their initiation, they confess their breaches of acceptable
behavior, and undergo intensive instruction in the male arts of living and in
the Poro language and other lore. They submit to numerous ordeals and tests, including
small cuts inflicted by Ancient Mother's "leopard."
At one point,
they pass through a narrow opening called "the old woman's vagina" to
enter a symbolic womb. At the end of the process, tutors lead graduating
initiates out through an actual door, signaling their rebirth as issues of
Ancient Mother.
Now fully socialized men and complete human beings, they have
been nourished by the "milk of knowledge" at their Mother's breast,
as is keyed in the carving's iconography. Only superficially a biological nursing
mother, then, an image of Ancient Mother is a veiled and rather abstract sign
of the systematic body of knowledge acquired by Poro initiates''.
From ''African Maternity Figures'' at Rand African Art, as distilled from Roy Sieber and Roslyn Adele Walker's African Art in the Cycle of Life and The National Museum of African Art. Accessed 5th May 2023.
Image above: Yoruba Ogboni sculpture, most likely depicting
Onile, Owner of Earth and Owner of Home, the latter as represented by the Ogboni meeting
house, a microcosm of society and ritual dramatizer of humanity's existence as children of Earth.
The female figure is naked, triumphantly poised as she holds her breasts, as well as displaying her vulva, strategeic markers in Ogboni symbolism of human biological generation and nurturing.
Further Adventures with the Magical Herbalist
Falola's experience with Leku continues with his interaction with her in the context of her hidden involvement in South-Western Nigerian politics as a consultant and a spiritual specialist, as described in Counting the Tiger's Teeth. His errand to find her and take a message from her leads to his discovering her role in the South-West Nigerian peasant rebellion known as the Agbekoya Revolt, prosecuted by the rebels through both material and spiritual weapons:
...after a long walk, we reached the village of Kusela, which had been deserted as people were talking about an impending war. I knew the village, and I was surprised that we were coming here. We passed by the empty houses and reached the farms. There she was! I could now collect whatever message I had to take from Leku and head back to Akanran which I missed so much.
Leku had been at work, perhaps overworked for a person of her age and smallish stature. She was frailer than the last time I had seen her, and she looked tired as well. She could no longer stand fully erect. She was moving more slowly than before, and her words came too slowly.
She was at center stage, directing a large number of people to grind various herbs and mix them with other ingredients. These were for medicine, charms, and rituals. The wet ground plants and seeds were the visible components, but the most potent were the words, the incantations she chanted over those items which transformed ordinary leaves to something else. Memorize and repeat what Leku said to those plants, you would not be able to produce the effects that she was able to produce with her own incantations! Hers were the ogidi ogede, “concentrated incantations” with potency.
Those incantations, which I heard at different times in various forms, when written down sometimes looked like biblical psalms. The words communicated magical meanings, capable of turning ordinary-looking pouches of leather into power. These pouches were all over the place, in hundreds, ranging from small ones that could hold a few cowries to larger ones that could take more objects. The smaller pouches were put in pockets or sewn on shirts; the bigger ones could be worn around the neck or waist, or tied to the arms. There were no leather workers around, so I figured that the pouches had been brought to this hidden farm.
Leku had left the city to become part of a large team of herbal and charm makers, working together at a secret location. Only those behind closed doors knew what went on inside. She must have left the city days before to come to Kusela. No one could come to the farm without secret codes, without being led there by the gate keeper, a man believed to be capable of seeing the “very inside” of human beings, to know their contents and what they were actually thinking—their intentions and level of wickedness and goodness.
The gathering at Kusela [ was] mainly [ of ] herbalists and diviners (babalawo) and their apprentices. They spoke various Yoruba dialects, and they were from all over the land—from Ijebu-Igbo in the south, Owo in the east, Ikare in the north, Ilaro in the west. I did not know what to call them: a diocesan council of eminences or a conclave of priests? They called themselves “Awo Osan,” that is, the “cult of daylight,” which might mean that there could be an awo oru (cult of the night) or an awo asale/awo irole (cult of the evening). Or does awo osan refer to the good and awo oru refer to the evil?
They were working together like a team: The fingers may look different, one short, the other long, and a thumb may look sideways, but all must cooperate to get any work done.
In that long-gone past, the babalawo had a role in selecting a king for them, interpreting the course of life, changing a bad destiny to good, performing midwifery, telling people what to do, and even more so what not to do.
Leku was more of a healer than a diviner. She knew about the power of herbs and dead bones, roots and tree bark, seeds and skins, and all their various limitless combinations needed to treat a host of diseases. She was not a babalawo, but, on October 19 and on the days thereafter, she was among them, directing them on what to grind, and the ingredients to combine. To me, she was like a resource person but to them, a superhuman whose words carried divine weight.
She was so quick to anger, and making a mistake near her was a mistake in itself: Her body language would communicate displeasure, especially her eyes, which would turn wicked. She was a commanding presence, as if even those who divined already knew from their divination trays that Leku was untouchable and could harm them.
The apprentices were always terrified, trembling when they moved closer to her, treading carefully, bowing almost to the point of never even seeing her face to take her instructions. As I stood erect observing her, panic-stricken men signaled to me to bend, not to look at her; I would stand, disobedient, rude, untamable, rotten, and raw, as far as they were concerned.
The space was active, with one task or another performed with little communication. People prepared herbal concoctions, half explained as preventive charms; the other half were stuffed in pouches without any explanation. People came to bring plants, corn, beans, powder, and pouches. People left to take with them concoctions and bags of herbs and leather pouches.
I was now an active observer of a complicated knowledge assembly, moving from one babalawo to another—listening, hearing, and looking. I could report what I saw, but the meanings were never clear to me. Both their process and its outcome were vague, appearing disconnected. They divided themselves into groups undertaking different tasks and missions. Some were preparing fortification medicine and rituals, preparing ingredients of wholeness and health that people could take in anticipation of health problems, to prevent a host of diseases, and to cure fatigue and fever.
The herbal concoctions for diseases were made for many purposes. They expected malaria attacks, and they put many herbal liquids in bottles. I was asked to prepare labels, writing iba (fever) on pieces of paper, each glued to a bottle with liquefied cassava starch. The bottles were available to anyone for free.
Men collected as many as they wanted for their wives and children to drink, whether they had fever or not. The preparation of the herbal medicine was also dependent on a large number of children and women who kept visiting with baskets of plants on their heads. I did not know where they were coming from, or who was organizing them. They dropped the baskets and were ordered to leave, which they did without questions. Once in a while, a few were asked to stay behind to work with pestles and mortars to pound the herbs to pulp.
I saw the workers combining the plants in various ways, changing them according to the diseases they were intended to cure, but the most common medicines were for dysentery and malaria. The use of the preparations varied: Some were put into caps and hats, and many rags were soaked in herbal preparations. Those on caps and hats were expected to blend with the fabric and then be worn. I did not know what diseases they would cure or how; and they appeared too dirty to me to put on my head or to be good for human consumption.
Image and Text: Journey's Beginning
I began the journey in quest of the mysteries of plants, animals and humans as a child, learning from my mother and later venturing into the forest to cultivate relationships with nature, the plants, animals and presences there becoming my teachers through the beauty of silence, knowledge gained through nakedness of spirit, as I opened myself to their sublime influences while being also sensitive to the sinister even within those spaces.
Nature speaks in her own language if one is ready to hear, projects deep meaning to eyes opended to see, hearing and seeing that the natural world herself enables through companionship with her.
The miniscule and the expressive conjoin forcefully in concentration of form enhanced by nakedness as the elegant face is composed, concentrated, holding a bowl in a votive act, the pointed chin leading from the inverted triangle constituted by the face, and the rest of the bodily structure, seeming to converge at the body’s center, the chest, evoking a sense of totalistic focus.
Beauty dramatized by the exquisite face, elegant coiffure and carefully proportioned total body. Power evoked by ascetic concentration, in the combination of nakedness and votive activity.
Image above: Sculpture from the Baoule of Côte d'Ivoire
African Arts Gallery
Accessed May 2023
Mistress of Ancient Communication Systems
The message Falola takes back from
Leku demonstrates her mastery of aroko, another aspect of the classical Yoruba knowledge system:
In the very middle of the night on October 29, Leku woke me up. [ She ] walked me through the hallway and led me to the front of the house. I was confused as to what she was up to. As quiet as she was, she was full of tricks and surprises.
She did not know that I had made up my mind to leave. For me to announce my exit or now ask her where she was leading me was to open the mouth of a cobra to see its teeth. Did Leku know my mind, and was she now leading me to the beehive to disturb the nest and release the bees in hundreds to sting me?
My mind was instantly clouded. As she walked too slowly, I clenched my teeth and tried to walk like a snail behind her. Both of us were now engaged in an affair without a nose.
When we reached the front of the house, the women who had been keeping vigil outside came forward. When they saw Leku, they dispersed. She crossed the road to the other side. It was dark, and the light from her lamp was not strong.
There was probably now a message to give to others, but certainly not a careless one: Her tongue had now arrived to sew things together, although Leku’s tongue would never spread beyond her mouth. Leku did not have a yellow mouth, as those with yellow mouths communicate unreliable words, and they must be ignored.
Since she did not greet me or ask how I had endured for so long [ while waiting for this message], how the pinch from the shoe tormented my foot, surely Leku must have been ready to give me a package for Pasitor. But Leku had no package, did not tie any to her wrapper, and the only thing she had on her was the lamp.
Where then was the package that I had been waiting for all along? Blood rushed to my veins, but Leku could not see it. Divining cowries were fighting one another: The crisis was so great that the matter could no longer be resolved by the gods. I kept quiet, not aiming at walking about town with my belly, a foolish kind of behavior.
Then came the very low voice with which Leku spoke, asking me to deliver a package of words, not of objects. I must tell Pasitor the following:
1.) The moon and the sun do not hold a meeting; one is not available during the day and the other must
work at night;
2.) The cat, the tiger, and the lion are family members; all cherish raw meat; and
3.) In the rivulet of blood, a spoonful collected cannot tell us whose blood it is; in the house of Death, fresh and dry skulls litter the ground for Death to walk over.
Leku then placed her right hand on my head, said some meaningless words and phrases, and concluded that the message was forever sealed in my memory. Indeed, it has been sealed there, word for word.
We crossed the road back to the house; she handed over the lamp to me and asked me to leave immediately. I wanted to leave anyway, but now my departure was official, sanctioned, and the mission, although it had taken many more days than expected, was successful. Patience had now given birth to a baby: success.
When I wanted to move to the left of the house, she asked me to go to the right and told me never to make any left turn unless that was the only option open to me. When I asked how I would avoid a left turn, she said to make a right turn in a circle, and then walk backwards to the left, then turn. I did not understand the reasons behind any of her words or her instruction to avoid left turns.
The message reaches those it is meant for:
When the joy of seeing me subsided, Pasitor took me out of the church to the very compound where my journey had begun. I was eager to deliver the message, but Pasitor asked me not to, saying that the message required more than two eyes and ears to receive it. If I was an elephant capable of carrying its load, Pasitor was not big enough to receive it from me. All my rivulets had now become a large river that many wanted to swim in. Pasitor and the others had been waiting for the rain with the big drops. I saw myself as a star, competing with the moon in importance. Leku’s words had turned me into a rich boy, a live reed stuck in the mud.
Unlike before, I was allowed to enter the house, where Pasitor joined many other men in a crowded room. Their “chairman,” wearing an agbada (a large, free-flowing garment), thanked me for assisting them and asked me to deliver the message, telling me neither to add nor subtract, change the order, or forget anything. This was quite easy since I had memorized the strange words and recited them to myself times without number. Whether it was Leku’s hand placed on my head or my ability to remember things learned by rote, I delivered the words as they were originally rendered. Line by line; not a word more, not a word less.
Panic struck all the faces. Elephant hunters are mobilized with only one word: unite! They were now united in sorrow as they looked at me, the elephant with the big message. Raised heads were lowered as if someone just died, jaws were widely opened, and flies would have an easy passage all the way to the throat.
All eyes stared at me. A messenger has no malice; malice is the one who sent him. The king has excreted in public; you want to run away from the smell, but doing so without permission will bring trouble. Someone has to clean up and collect the feces. My job was done, turning my riches into a mist that evaporated in the twinkle of an eye.
The man who broke the silence added to my confusion with his explanation: “Iru aroko buruku wo leyi?” (What kind of bad aroko is this?). Aroko was a coded message. As Pasitor later told me, it was a way of communicating in code between two parties. Code words included names of people, animals, food items, and the like. They could be given in combination with objects to express messages of peace, war, reconciliation, and much more. A few among those present who understood the words began to interpret the messages:
1) Many of us would die;
2) The death could not be prevented and would include both the young and old;
3) Enemies would never be reconciled; and
4) Friends would betray one another; trust would be broken.
The mood was gloomy. They had been expecting a message of comfort or a solution to their problem. What they got did not make them happy. The house of a rich man is always beautiful from the outside to strangers who do not know about the strife within. The powerful were inside, as those outside would be thinking, but it was a house of sorrow.
I understood what an aroko was, how coded words could be decoded by those who understood. I became fascinated by aroko and requested Pasitor to introduce me to those men who explained Leku’s message in ways that others accepted. No one had ever mentioned aroko to me in school; perhaps the schoolteachers did not know about it either. As I came to understand aroko, I realized that objects and words opened a library of meaning.
Perhaps Leku had sent an object preceding my words so that the objects were then combined with the words to reach the gloomy conclusion. Aroko delivered communications, and replies were offered also in a symbolic manner so that if you sent words and embers of fire to me to indicate trouble and war, I could send a calabash full of water to you to indicate that I had the means to quench your fire; or I could send you additional firewood to say that we should keep fighting.
To receive a string of six cowries was being asked to visit the sender; ten in a string meant that this visitation was urgent. If your reply was to send a string of two cowries, you were rejecting the offer of visitation and announcing that you were no longer on good terms. If two were sent to you without prior conversation, you would expect bad news: Your father or mother was probably dead. When other objects were added to those strings of cowries, the contents of the message changed: Add the red tail feather of a parrot to a string of six cowries, and you would be telling the person that he had outstayed his welcome; change the feather to that of a guinea fowl, and the message would change to one of goodwill.
“Baba Chairman,” as the head of this gathering was called, adjourned the meeting with a very sad face and in a dejected voice. When someone asked him to make an effort to call a babalawo to make sacrifices, he dismissed him as an ignorant man who did not know that Leku did not talk lightly and knew more than any babalawo in the land. “Awon aye lo ran an si wa”; Leku sent them a message she had received from powerful forces that no sacrifices could change. He told everyone to double all their energies, to commission more charms, and to watch out for evil forces.
Image and Text: Between Symbols and Expression
At the core of communication is understanding, the understanding of the communicator directed at developing understanding in the person being communicated with.
Can the scope of the ability to communicate ever match the range of understanding one has?
How may I share the awareness reached through my relationship with nature, in which, in looking at a leaf, I see its networked beauty, patterns of veins amidst green splendour taking my mind to the branch on which it has grown, the branch to the tree, the tree to the roots, the roots to the soil they draw nourishment from, the soil to the water that feeds it, those roots nurturing the tree as its draws in sunlight to mix with water in feeding that leaf, water which is part of the liquiditiess of ocean and river, rain and clouds, under the earth and in human and animal forms, sunlight taking my mind to the solar luminary, from that to other stars and celestial bodies?
Understanding a leaf in its fullness implies understanding its physical nature, the ultimate source of that nature in the source of the universe and the relationships generated by those identities, relationships involving an expanding network of associations covering all possibilities perceptible from one's own standpoint, possiblities grasped in a partially unique way by oneself, leaving aside the vantange points of other humans or even of animals, who may also perceive the leaf,
other vantage points only partially accessible or totally inaccessible.
If understanding the universe implies perceiving it from various perspectives, is a totalistic grasp of all possible perspectives possible? The ability to reach beyond what is naturally possible to conceive what is perhaps even impossible, a central quality of the creature who is not defined by what is immediately possible.
In the midst of such sensitivities, I therefore prefer silence to speech, the most abbreviated symbolic forms to words, conciseness to efforts to unfold in sounds what cannot be fully unfurled.
When I do speak, I prefer Ọ̀rọ̀ to ọ̀rọ̀, primal sound to everyday speech, the naked potency of the rhythms encapsulating the creativity at the heart of everything that exists, rather than their diminished forms expressed as the sounds made in everyday conversation, as I try to traverse the space between these possibilities, the primal and the everyday, the in-between space of careful articulation, since one cannot exist at the highest levels at all times, except in solitude, instead making each expression a dialogue between the fleeting and the permanent, between the names underlying all possibilities of existence and their expressions in human life, between odù and ayé.
Image Above
As a young woman seeking arcane knowledge and power, I
had myself tattooed with symbols of the understanding and potencies I sought,
the better to assimilate their meanings by contemplating them on my own form.
"How will you get any man to marry you with
all these strange images on your body?" my mother would scream when she
saw my tatoos. I could not see why the concerns of a prospective husband
should define how I pursued my ultimate goals, so I kept my peace and continued
as I wanted.
The men came and went, seeking the flame of the nubile
young woman, but my mind was elsewhere, though I did drink of the sweet waters.
Eventually, the allure of
youth and the mature beauty enabled by time faded, and I became to others both woman and man, woman by gender, man by
prestige.
I embody, however, all the women I have always been. The child fascinated by the unknown. The youth, hungry for the the curative and the arcane. The mature woman, in hot pursuit of healing powers and mysterious knowdge and skill. The old woman steeped in the creative and the occult.
Image Sources
Left-7 Chakra tatoo from Bodhi Tree Tatoo Studio on Pinterest; middle- Chakra Alignment from I Am JoeInk; right-Tattoos by Lord Yatta at ‘’Linguist Staff Symbols: Their Meaning and Use Among Akan Speaking People’’ from Earth Metropolis African Art. All accessed May 2023.
The Final Departure of the Adept and the Consummating Initiation of the Acolyte
Falola's concluding encounter with Leku is climatic in its mysterious drama:
I lived with Leku [ “ my ‘godmother’] at Ode Aje from 1963 to 1965, for most days of the year … I cannot thank her enough, and our relationship requires a separate book.
....
On Friday, December 12, 1969, Leku sent for me. Her first statement was a blow: “My time is up: I want to go home!”
People of her age, according to a strong belief, actually knew when to die. They would begin to communicate it as a premonition. Sometimes, they would be conversing with their dead relatives. Or, we would accuse them of losing their coherence and memory. The phrase “eating the tongue” could be used to describe their meaningless statements.
When you gave them food, they would eat little and say they were saving the rest for the journey they were embarking upon. They would ask you whether you saw the woman who died three years ago. When the elderly began to “eat the tongue,” you needed to look at your savings and start to make funeral arrangements. If you needed blessings, this was the time to collect them. If you needed to stake a claim on a piece of land, this was the time to let the elderly transfer it to you, as there were no written wills.
Then Leku told me that I was the only one she wanted to tell. For a woman who did not like to talk, she gave a long speech, almost an hour nonstop—telling an incredible autobiography; the time is not yet ripe enough to retell it. She punctuated her speech by puffing and putting more tobacco in her pipe. She gave me the pipe and asked me to inhale it three times. I did. She held on firmly to my head, asking me to swallow the smoke instead of releasing it. I did. She said certain things that I will always remember. She told me what to do with her stuff and stores.
She asked me to take some soap and go to the stream with flowing water to wash with it, in the early hours of the morning. I must do so within twenty-four hours of her death. She told me the reason for this, a reason I will share in later years.
Finally, she licked an agbalumo seed, asked me to open my mouth, put it in my mouth as if it were a kiss, but not the kiss of two lips touching in a romance, and asked me to lick it. The agbalumo is a seed that grows inside a pod, much smaller than a cocoa pod. In looking for an English word for it, I found that agbalumo is called the “white star apple.” The tree on which it grows carries the Latin name of Chrysophyllum albidum, which has several varieties that do well in tropical weather.
Like cocoa, the seed has a creamy taste, and when licked, it is revealed as a very beautiful, hard seed that one can play with. Schoolchildren used it to practice counting numbers, among other things. After seven days, I was instructed, I must go and bury the seed at a location she specified. I still know the location and what I should not do with the site.
Then she recited incantations that would allow me always to overcome all adversities, so that no matter how hard the struggle, the other person would lose. She gave me a long list of instructions about key aspects of life.
Then, she brought out three bowls whose contents I did not recognize. She asked me to choose one. I did, and she said that my fate was sealed, irrevocable. She did not tell me the details of the fate, but she told me the ultimate punishment for attempting to deviate from it. There is a dreadful component, tormenting even to remember. She warned that what I would later call mistakes and accidents would be part of the journey, as those mistakes and accidents were built into the fate, in part to ward off negative forces and people.
She asked me to look away from her and told me I must never see her again, must never attend her funeral, and must never see her grave. And she uttered her last words, slowly as a command:
Ohun ti o ba se di asegbe
Any act that you execute is sealed, unassailable
This concluded her speech and rituals, ending with those powerful words telling me that whatever I do, which she never specified, is unquestionable, permanently irreversible. I could even wear a grass robe and move new fire.
The next day, Leku died at dawn. Farewell, Iya Leku. I await Leku’s permission to say more. The time will come.
The Iya-hun of many mysteries
Odor of smoke and of the numinous fire
Enclosed in a closet of snakes and scorpions
Dark leather belts on minuscule buttocks.
Closed eyes that see far beyond common sight
Weak limbs that run faster than a hunted hare
Feeble fingers that cut like knives
The wisdom of the deep jungle and of the township
The tempting grain that even a fowl must not dare to swallow.
A tall tree once attempted to fall and crush Iya-hun
Ka-ka, it cracked, and crashed almost, then . . . it stopped mid-way
Iya-hun, the crafty smith, turned the tree into an umbrella
That protects and secures the eye of the earth.
Where the three knuckles of time meet
The solo sun that beats cowardly men and their manhoods!
The mindboggling moon, daughter of the wild spirit
The restless One that shuttles between
The crypts of heaven and earth.
When Iya-hun arrived on earth,
She had ten heads, twenty starry eyes
And with them, she sees the four corners of the earth, at once
Holds dialogue with heaven and earth at once
Eats with one mouth, drinks with another,
And vomits all she had in her womb with the tenth mouth.
Her small body is resting in a corner,
But her heads sleep in a dozen other places:
Today at the foot of a mighty rock
Tomorrow at the ocean’s deep
Ten big heads balanced on the frail body
Of a chameleon that leaps and never sleeps.
Iya-hun carries the bag of the world’s wisdom with her left hand
With her right hand she holds the calabash of life.
The only being that inhabits the sky in company of birds;
In the waters she makes her abode with crocodiles and whales;
A tether that enters the ground not once, and not twice, but at will!
In the sky, Iya-hun is fed by the birds; in the waters by the whales;
And underneath [in] the ground by half-human, half-animal gnomes.
That I no longer can see Leku does not mean that she cannot see me.
My tears are invisible, like the cries and tears of the fish hidden by the water in which it lives.
I should stop crying in the rain and wait for a drier season.
I was now a few days short of turning seventeen—on January 1, 1970.
Image and Text: To Leave and to Remain
When the sun dies, it leaves the stars behind, bearing fruit in the lives of people one will never know. I am not able to leave the details of my knowledge behind, but a seed, the nucleus of that knowledge, has been planted in the child who is so fascinated by me, the hunger for knowledge and for service, the same hunger that drives me.
Will he be able to penetrate into the arcane realms I inhabit, the zone around which all knowledge constellates, the bottomless potentiality that enables existence? Will he be able to travel from the outskirts, the circumference, of those possibilities, to its centre?
Image Above
The circumference and centre of the calabash, empty centre and structured form, space and concreteness fusing, empowered by freedom from space and time, transmutation by fire into a centre of force between the manifest and the unmanifest, drawing upward sparks of aspiration and inspiring fires of desire for the ultimate.
A fruit is ripended by the sun-fire. The body is ripended by the blood-fire. The mind is ripended by the life-fire. The self is transmusted by the transition-fire. Fire matures things, changes them, translates them to a higher order which is the capacity to nourish phenomena other than themselves. Ripeness, an outcome of a slow burning process. The highest cosmic idea, the interdependedence within all living phenomena.
(Second paragraph-Mazisi Kunene on fire, inspired by Zulu thought, in Anthem of the Decades. ''The self is transmuted by the transition-fire'' is an addition to Kunene's lines).
Image source: The Rosicrucian Heritage, No.2. 2011, from AMORC, The Ancient Mystical Order of
the Rosy Cross