From the Messenger at the Crossroads to an Initiation into the Fraternity of Worshippers of Earth: Esu to Ogboni in an Appointment with Destiny: Photography and Life Mapping in an Osogbo/Osun Forest Pilgrimage

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

From the Messenger at the Crossroads                                      to an

 Initiation into the Fraternity of Worshippers 

                            of Earth

 Esu to Ogboni in an Appointment with

                             Destiny

       Photography and Life Mapping 

                              in an 

         Osogbo/Osun Forest Pilgrimage

           Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                        Compcros

                            Abstract

This essay explores the interwoven narratives of spirituality, art, and personal destiny through the lens of photography and pilgrimage within and beyond Yoruba spirituality,  actualized in a transformative journey to Osogbo, Nigeria, in July 2025.

Drawing upon the pioneering work of Susanne Wenger and Ulli Beier in documenting and preserving Yoruba sacred arts, the author traces his own path from early encounter with their seminal 1975 text The Return of the Gods through multiple life phases to an unexpected opportunity to photograph an Ogboni initiation ceremony, an experience resonating with similar photography by Beier in that book of what may be Wenger's Ogboni initiation.

The narrative weaves together themes of destiny and chance (embodied in the Orisa Esu), the role of sacred geography in spiritual transformation, and the complex interplay between documentation and participation in esoteric traditions.

Through analysis of photographic parallels separated by decades, the essay examines how individual spiritual journeys intersect with broader cultural preservation efforts, while reflecting on the metaphysical implications of synchronicity and the relationship between material and spiritual dimensions of experience. 

These explorations culminate in the use of the  metaphor of tree architectures in illustrating the interconnectedness of individual experiences, environmental spaces, and cosmic order, particularly within the the Oro Grove in the sacred 

Osun forest in Osogbo. 

Ultimately, the essay delves into the profound relationship between human aspiration, the mysterious depths of nature, and the continuous unfolding of existence.

The work contributes to scholarship on contemporary African spirituality, visual anthropology, and the phenomenology of pilgrimage while offering a deeply personal meditation on the nature of spiritual seeking across cultural boundaries.

An Iconic Picture 

There is an iconic picture of the great Yoruba origin Orisa spirituality artist, theologian and African culture catalyst Susanne Wenger, standing with members of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order  in Yorubaland, perhaps in Osogbo, in Ulli Beier's The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger (Cambridge University Press,  1975).

   Susanne Wenger with Ogboni Members 

Picture possibly taken by Ulli Beier and perhaps first published in his The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger. Downloaded from Tom Bender on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/qibender/13671246825

Wenger seems to be glowing,  her eyes translucent, her face luminous, her skin radiant, as if she had just gone through a uniquely inspiring experience.

The Ogboni members, all men, are marked by  a sense of gravitas, particularly a figure of commanding presence standing next to Wenger on her left, as two of the men  hold their hands in the  fist on fist symbolic  gesture of  Ogboni.

The sense of a unique occasion as suggested by the associative force of the figures' body language and facial expressions makes me think the picture is likely to be of Wenger's initiation into Ogboni, although I am not aware of its being  so stated anywhere.

The picture telescopes for me the adventurousness of seekers, across time and space, in seeking spiritual knowledge and well being, as the Austrian woman  travelled all the way from her home country to what was most likely a then semi-rural area of Nigeria where she immersed herself in the community's spirituality,  even becoming a member of one of its most esoteric groups, a group often associated in the general Nigerian understanding with the negatively uncanny, the forbidding dimension of classical African spiritualities, the rich though slim body of scholarship on its philosophical, spiritual and artistic depths unknown to most people. 

The Return of the Gods in Relation to My Personal History

I reverence the book in which that photograph appears as one of the best in classical Yoruba spirituality and art. My ownership of that text has marked various stages  of my spiritual/philosophical and general life journey. 

I might have burnt my first copy of the book along with other books in my wide ranging collection of non-Christian spiritual literature when I formally became a Born Again Pentecostal Christian in the early 90s, as part of the process of freeing myself from the outcomes of immersion in various spiritualities,  efforts bearing fruit in ways I did not know how to manage.  

But, how does one exorcise one's own spirit, the driving force of your being which inexorably propels you in particular directions,  a hunger for the mysterious depths of existence which you seek through learning from other seekers widely dispersed in time and space, fellow voyagers on humanity's perennial voyage?

Having gained sufficient stability and confidence, I later returned to my path of eclectic spirituality and bought another copy of the book at Oba Market in Benin-City, at a stall besides fruit and vegetable stands, on a path that became muddy when it rained, a 100 naira purchase I consider one of the highlights of my book collecting career, given the priceless character of the book and the amazingly cheap price at which I got it.

I would later see a copy of the same volume kept in a glass fronted, closed bookcase at an Oxfam bookshop in Cambridge, UK, as a special book, alongside such a work as the first edition of Salman Rushdie's famously controversial Satanic Verses, my copy of which I had also burnt along with my Return of the Gods, on the advice of my then Christian spiritual guide who saw the presence of  "Satanic" in the title of Rushdie's book as indicating a literal Satanic connection, all vestiges of related nefarious spiritual connections my guide described me as needing to be freed from through a deliverance\exorcism  process which included burning all my non-Christian literature. 

The copy of The Return of the Gods I later bought was destroyed by insects on account of inadequate storage in the context of the shipping of my library to Nigeria in 2016 after my UK educational pilgrimage.

 My current awareness of the  book is that it is currently publicly available only from Western booksellers at  $100 dollars at least, with some copies selling for double that and others for even  more. 

That book, and Ulli Beier's inimitable pictures inside it, have profoundly configured my inward topography in relation to Yoruba spirituality, in particular, and it's associated arts, and in connection with spirituality, philosophy and the arts in general. 

The fortunes of my copies of the book emblematize the map of my life's journey as represented by particular climatic points in that life.

Walking in Wenger and Beier's Footsteps 

I could not have known that I, too, would one day walk the same path as Wenger and Beier, her complementary African culture catalyst, a process marked by my taking my own version of that iconic picture, this time  at the conclusion of the Ogboni  initiation of another woman from the West, the also fair skinned, African American woman Nina who had travelled to Osogbo for the initiation, at the Iledi Ontoto Ogboni sacred meeting  house on  the 12th of July 2025.

Post-Initiation Photograph of Ogboni Initiate Nina with Members of the Iledi Ontoto Ogboni Shrine House,  Osogbo, where she was initiated.

July 12, 2025.

Picture taken by me.

 Nina is the fair skinned woman in white at the centre. On her right is the Oluwo, the head of the shrine house community and next to him is the Apena of the shrine house.

 Great thanks to Ogunrati ( man in white, second from right) for letting me use his camera after mine had gone off and sending me the pictures on the same day.

Esu and the Intersections of Fortune

A cycle has been consummated. Sparks of meaning arise from the matrixial conjunctions. Where may the emerging raditions lead? 

The Orisa/deity of chance, the unexpected, the unanticipatedly disruptive or creative is called Esu, represented by the crossroads, of possibility, of dimensions, of intersections between various forms of being and modes of knowledge,  between matter and spirit, between humans and spirits,  between conventional understanding and oracular wisdom.

Esu is described as the son of the goddess Osun to whom Wenger was particularly dedicated and to whom I set up a shrine in the room I occupied in my pilgrimage to Osogbo from 30th June to 14th July 2025, a pilgrimage inspired by Wenger's example and occasioned by my attending the Toyin Falola Conference at the Osun State University in Osogbo on the 1-3rd of July, 2025.

The pilgrimage was blessed with very richly creative coincidences, one of those being the chance occurrence that led me to the Ogboni initiation where I took my own version of the iconic Wenger photograph.

      Meeting Anigbajumo Ogun and the

      Oluwo Ataoja

This occurrence was my meeting Anigbajumo Ogun at the Esu shrine at the beginning of the road into the Osun forest the visual force and prestige of which vegetative space are amplified by the art of Susanne Wenger and her collaborators in creating sculptures and shrine architectures in the forest constituting a visual map of an approach to Orisa cosmology, resonating with exquisitely artistically shaped walls running the length of the forest and some of its side roads.

Running into Anigbajumo near the Esu shrine, a location which is a  compelling attraction for me on account of its dramatic force, its sense of unfolding mystery locked within the mute power of the sculptural constellation at the entrance to a majestic complex of forest, art and architecture,  he explained to me his understanding of the sculptural complex and of the sections of forest and art reached through the doorway at the back of the sculptural tableau, and took me into the Ogboni grove where the Ogboni meeting house is and also enabled a meeting with the Oluwo Ataoja, the head of the Ogboni shrine house located in the Ataoja, the grounds of an  earlier palace of the Ataoja, king of Osogbo. 

         The Moment of Opportunity 

By Saturday the 12th I had forgotten that the Oluwo had invited me to a ceremony at the Ogboni shrine house on that Saturday on behalf of a visiting American. 

Anigbajumo again met me at the Esu shrine complex as he passed by, since I visited it almost eveyday of my Osogbo visit and reminded me of the invitation. 

I showed up at the Ogboni shrine house, enjoyed myself and recorded the festivities before and after the initiation, at which point it occurred to me that I had reached a conjunction between my history and that of Wenger and Beier and might have the opportunity to enact my own version of the Beier image, an opportunity I contemplated with anticipation and agitation because my phone the camera of which I had been using for hours, had shut down and my second phone was about to wind down,  their depleted batteries possibly depriving me of the opportunity for my own version of that iconic image.

Luckily,  Ogunrati, a member of the Ogboni shrine house, lent me his phone when mine went off. 

Pictures having been taken by Ogboni members, they were dispersing when I, mindful of the Beier \Wenger photography precedent and the TOFAC group pictures which memorialized the camaraderie at the conference, suggested a group photograph comprising the new initiate and the Ogboni shrine community. 

Someone suggested using the shrine house as a backdrop. And I took my shot.

The picture showed the new initiate and her initiator and other Ogboni members present,  in front of a building defined by verandah posts of the same style as in the Beier image, the posts in both pictures carved by artists of Wenger's New Sacred Arts collective.

Enigmatic Intersections 

Does destiny exist? Is there anything beyond an accidental relationship between the providential encounters I have had on the Osogbo/Osun Forest pilgrimage and my setting up an Osun shrine where I daily approach the goddess using the work of Osogbo sculptors Olujide Adesina and Afolabi Esuleke which I bought from their workshop and gallery I stumbled upon as I walked to the forest on the 4th of July, the beginning in earnest of my pilgrimage?

Auspicious Wisdom: Texts and Traditions of Hindu Sri Vidya Sakta Tantrism is a title of one of Douglas Renfrew Brooks' books on the Hindu Goddess Tripurasundari. 

Aghor Pir, in his now defunct blog Musings of a Tantric Sorcerer, describes that auspiciousness in terms of good fortune in the endeavours of a devotee of the Goddess. 

John McCall in "Making Peace with Agwu" depicts various fortuitous happenings relevant to his initiation into Igbo dibia.

I won't pretend to have a definitive opinion on the nexus between spiritual activity, aspiration and creative coincidences. fueling those conjunctions. 

However,  I salute the nexus of being and becoming, of the unanticipated and the anticipated, of chance and opportunity.

A number of West African spiritualities centralise the question of relationships between fate and free will. Yoruba and perhaps Kalabari  thought privilege the idea of a self chosen predestination which may be modified through divination.

Igbo thought is described in terms of a tension between free will and circumstance, a tension in which free will is dominant, a balance Chinua Achebe explores with excruciating sensitivity in his novels Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. Wole Soyinka, responding to the Yoruba example, speaks of "destinity as self destination ".

The journey to my own version of the Beier\Wenger photograph began with discovering their work through Beier's book in 1980s Benin, writing on her work with that book as a central source in studies in England in the early 2000s, and continues to the fortuitous meetings with Ogunrati at the Esu shrine in the Osun forest in July 2025 and the outcomes from those encounters.

Tree Architectures as Metaphorical Conjunctions Between Individual Interpersonal, Environmental and Cosmic Mapping

Various paths intersect in the movement of people across the surface of the Earth as mine have conjuncted with those of various people leading to the creation of the Ogboni initiation photograph taken by me on July 12,2025. 

These spatio-temporal correlations  may suggest the network of possibilities constituting existence.

These conjunctions may be evoked by the  intertwining networks of a tree, the conjunctions of its roots, trunk, branches and leaves an archetypal cosmographic image unifying terrestrial and cosmic configurations.

The convoluted structures of the tree pictured directly below, a vertical trunk and twisting, root like formations entwining the central, upward thrust of the trunk, the whole radiant with richly sombre colours,  demonstrates this archetypal image with particular force. 

The spiralling,  knotted forms constituting this tree from the Oro Grove in the Osun forest are akin to the structural dynamism of Yggdrasil, the Norse cosmic tree, each branch constituting a world, the totality being the complete network of cosmos. 

   Tree in the Oro Grove in the Osun Forest

                     Picture by Myself 

                         July 2025

The twisting formations of the Osun forest tree, its balance of vertical, horizontal and spiral dynamism, may also suggest the similarly constituted Kabbalistic Tree of Life, in which  conjunctions between aspects of existence are symbolized by relationships between numbers.

0, in this configuration,  stands  for the unknowable source of the cosmos,  akin to the nourishing darkness of the Earth in which a tree is rooted.

The Kabbalistic number 10 represents  the material universe which ultimately issues from this transcendent plenitude, and is suggested by the crown of a tree.

The relationships between the sequence of  numbers beginning in 0 and culminating in 10 configure the complex unity of cosmos as an expression of the creator of the universe.

Each number and each point of conjunction between the numbers embodies a quality expressing the ultimate creator, who is both transcendent and immanent, hidden from understanding in the darkness that is Ain Soph, dark because it is inscrutable, akin to the darkness of earth nourishing the roots of a tree.

These correlations between the mapping of human experience,  the mapping of cosmos and tree architectures is also suggested by the tree of sixteen branches big as houses under which the disciples of the Yoruba god of wisdom Orunmila found him after he disappeared from the Earth,  a tree evoking the wisdom of the sixteen odu ifa, the organizational categories and spirits of Ifa, invisible sentient agents who represent all possibilities of existence, actual and potential,  abstract and concrete, from the stars to grains of sand, from celebrations to conflict,  from love to hate, in the Ifa knowledge system taught by Orunmila, as described in a personal communication by Joseph Ohomina and as partially elaborated upon by Akomolafe Wande in " Understanding the Four Cardinal Odus", https://www.facebook.com/share/p/197r4rGNy2/

The Oro Grove 

Standing in the Oro Grove, accessible through the doorway leading from the Esu shrine complex, a panoramic view of the vegetative configuration constituting that grove opens up, a view possible only from that vantage point as the cathedral spires of trees ascend to the sky, glowing with the translucent force of reflected light from the sun projecting the brilliance of their colours as leaf and branch constellations, vegetative towers, carpet the view of the sky from the forest floor from which one is watching.

The space shimmers with the sense of something both uncanny and sublime,  eldritch and compelling, grounded in a universe of its own, older than humanity but constellating the most lofty inspirations to human sensitivity to rhythms of colour and shape, of space and form, of silence and meaning, as one is transported simply by silently placing oneself in that space, into something beyond human construction, something testifying to the glorious structurations constituting existence, kin to the most exquisite geometric of Islamic, Tantric and other visual structurations through which humanity tries to construct the cosmos. 

"Who are you?" I ask of the identity that seems to shimmer between the large trees framing the entrance to this section of the forest, sacred to the Yoruba spiritual and cultural institution Oro, and decribed by Anigbajumo Ogun as out of bounds to women and non-initiates of that institution although depicted by another informed source as accessible to men generally while confirming the description of the place as dedicated to Oro and as inaccessible to women,  that description of the place having emboldened me to explore it, upon which it hooked me, compelling subsequent visits even after encountering Ogun's account of its being taboo for non-initiates to enter it.

This sense of something unusually potent in its complex of stillness and beauty emerges from an environment that precedes Osogbo but the entry of humans into this forest led to their ascribing cultural values to it.

The space is defined by a suffusion of majesty emergent from the vegetative constellation but not fully explainable through its material properties, something which I stumbled upon even before knowing of the significance of the place in Osogbo culture. 

What is the source of this majesty?

Is it a purely material quality or an expression of something more, an entity constituted by the vegetative space but going beyond it?

To what degree is the cosmos a product of its internal dynamism and to what degree us it a construct of or suffused by or shaped by something beyond it?

I hope, one day, through appreciating nature's beauty, to penetrating  into a perception of forest identities as dialogical partners, the naturespace as composed by what can be seen and what cannot ordinarily be seen, a cosmos of identities opening out into cosmos as forest, a constellation of possibilities in constant formation, a great story in which I have become involved by coming into existence, adapting Frodo's experience in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, looking into the mirror of Galadriel, where what is, what was and what may be are perceived.