Shrines and Shrine Masters: Chief Dr. D. O. Ebengho and the Inscrutable Wonder of his Cosmological Shrine Part 1
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Part 1
A College of Chief Dr. D.O. Ebengho and Examples of his Installation and Ephemeral Ritual Art
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
Using verbal text and pictures
and videos taken by myself in early November 2022, this essay explores the variety, technical accomplishment and aesthetic and spiritual
significance of the shrine art of Chief Dr. D. O. Ebengho, represented
by shrines to diverse deities in his shrine complex at 2nd Cemetery
Road, Benin-City, examining it as an achievement of global
proportions, its power evident even without understanding the theological
context of his art, appreciation amplified by sensitivity to his distinctive development of expressive rhythms within the artistic and religious traditions in which he works.
I frame the art in terms of an interpretation of Chinyere Okafor's concept of inscrutable wonder, in relation to Immanuel Kant on the Sublime, Rudolph Otto on the numinous, Rowland Abiodun on the Youba concept àṣẹ and Bruce Onobrakpeya on magic emerging from the creative integration of material forms, ideas integrating the fascinating and the mysterious, ideationally catalytic and yet cognitively inexhaustible, the compelling and the ultimately impenetrable, my impressions of Ebengho's art.
This essay is part of a series describing my exploration of sacred vegetative spaces in Benin-City and Ile-Ife in visits to these cities running from 5th October 2022 to 9th November 2022, and thus also presents images from findings on sacred trees and groves in Benin, suggesting aspects of the environmental and theological framework of Ebengho's work.
The essay continues from ''Ọkha, Ikhinmwin and Iroko: Intersections Between Beliefs in the Spirituality of Trees and in Witchcraft in Benin Thought: Realities, Questions, Prospects'', parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 where I first present my observations of Ebengho's shrine in part 3. It also builds upon my very brief photo notes on the priest/artist and his shrine on Facebook, ''Seeking the Sacred in Benin-City: Shrines and Shrine Masters: Chief Dr D O Ebengho and the Mammy Water Section of his Richly Complex and Intricately Harmonious Shrine, a Powerful Artistic Assemblage Developed Over a Lifetime'', ''Mystic Trees in Benin-City: Iroko and the Powers of the Night'' and the Facebook photo and video album ''Magnificent Shrine and Fellowship of Chief Ebengho in Benin-City''.
''You should see the chief at 2nd Cemetery Road'', the Ezomo of Benin, Chief James Okponmwense, told me at one of our meetings between October and November 2022. ''In your curiosity about the esoteric depths of Benin spirituality, particularly its connection with the enigmatic powers who travel between diverse zones of existence using trees as interdimensional portals, the chief would be invaluable,'' the Ezomo concluded.
Music to my ears. I had stumbled into the fulfillment of a long held dream, finding myself again in Benin-City, a centre of intense spirituality, exploring its culture of sacred trees and the network of beliefs and practices within which this nature spirituality is embedded.
There exists a lot of literature on traditional African spiritualities, deeply grounded in nature. What is the scope, however, of discussion of its nature orientations, and particularly, its contexts of vegetative space, and even more particularly, trees?
Has African witchcraft thought moved beyond lore to theory, from unsubstantiated beliefs to carefully constructed ideas, from unproven notions about witchcraft practices to systems of thought and action built and presented by known thinkers and practitioners, as with the rapidly growing witchcraft disciplines in the West?
Collage of Some Sacred Trees and Groves in Benin-City
Top Left: Magnificent Sacred Ikhimwin Tree at the Entrance to the Palace of the Oba of Benin. Middle: The Sacred Grove at Use. Bottom Right: Sacred Grove at Ikpoba Slope.
On account of my inspiring experiences with nature and particularly tree spirituality in Benin-City, in relation to beliefs about witchcraft, I had resolved to build upon these experiences, exploring Benin and other Nigerian and perhaps African nature and particularly tree spiritualities, possibly contributing to developing a modern African witchcraft theory and practice, as Gerald Gardner has done with initiating modern Western witchcraft.
I intend to unify the mystical aspirations that brought me into contact with tree spiritualities, trying to penetrate to the source of existence through admiration of and relationship with trees, and the cultivation of expanded perception akin to accounts of witchcraft in Southern Nigeria which I had experienced in the process, unifying the mystical and the occult, understanding them as demonstrations of latent human possibility, innate to humanity, catalyzed by nature, but not part of the lives of most people because they are outside contemporarily dominant systems of knowledge.
2nd Cemetery Road was on the way back to Koosa Hotel on Ehaekpen Street where I was staying, a most providential location for navigating Benin's complex of shrines and specialists in the sacred, from the Ezomo's compound with its sacred iroko and ikhimwin trees and ancestral shrine a ten minute walk at Ekenwan Road to the Oba's palace, a network of shrines and sacred trees, about a 45 minute walk away at the centre of Benin, near which is the majestic Emotan Shrine, to the sacred grove and striking traditional Benin architecture of the palace of the Edigin N'Use at Use, less than an hour's drive from the hotel, and the sacred grove at Ikpoba Slope, not up to an hour's ride away, all connected through cheap bus transport on good roads, and now, the shrine of the adept to which I was being directed, about a five minute walk from the hotel.
Meeting a distinguished looking and very mature man wearing the distinctive hair style of a Benin chief, seated with another man in front of a compound with a relatively small tree and a small shrine in front, I asked if that was the chief's compound.
Ebengho's living space is at the top storey, while a smaller house, likely a residential space, in the Benin traditional colours of red and white, stands beside it. Flanking the smaller house are three figurines within a small shrine complex,''the three wise ones'', representing the spirit guardians of the shrine.
The Three Wise Ones and Ogun
''The three wise ones'' are one woman, flanked by two men, one of the men holding a club, the woman standing before an elevated votive bowl, reflecting other votive bowls on the floor, while behind the figures are positioned brooms tucked between them and the wall of the smaller house.
The club suggests a weapon while the brooms, which may be the brooms for sweeping the compound, keeping it always clean in keeping with the emphasis on beauty, cleanliness and order within magnificent variety that defines the shrine, also evoke the Southern Nigerian belief in a form of magic that compels a thief to commence sweeping the place they had intended to steal from rather than carrying out their nefarious act, the sweeping continuing until the owner of the space the thief intended to despoil counteracts the influence of the spell, by which time the thief's mission would have been known to all onlookers.
The assorted metal objects in front of
the figurines suggest the presence of Ogun, pathfinder of
the gods, who, using a metal implement, possibly a machete, cut the way from orun, the world of primal origins, to aye,
Earth, as these are named in Yoruba spirituality, which often dovetails
with that of Benin, Ogun thereby enabling the deities to descend to Earth, the pathfinder thereafter becoming a warrior, embodying the potency of all
who work with metal, as this complex of mythic narrative and values are summed up, among other sources, by Wole Soyinka, the supreme celebrator of Ogun known to me outside the world of the traditional literature that inspires him, as represented by the stanza on Ogun in his poem ''Signposts of Existence'' from his Credo of Being and Nothingness, by his Myth, Literature and the African World, particularly the chapter titled ''The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origins of Yoruba Tragedy'', his poem ''Idanre'' and the poem Ogun Abibiman, explorations distilled into other literary journeys in which the mythic inspiration is subsumed rather than explicit.
Ogun's fierce implacability, his relentless force, his very being incinerating all
forms of injustice, hence he is called upon in the most grave forms of
oath taking and quests for equity, make him an ideal guardian, qualities
invoked by the following superb quote of an oriki Ogun, a poem invoking Ogun's
essence, posted by Obafemi Origunwa at the Orisa Lifestyle Academy on Facebook from
John Pemberton's ''The Dreadful God and the Divine King'' in Sandra Barnes' edited Africa's Ogun: Old World and New, 1997, 105-146. Punctuation and stanza breaks slightly edited by me:
Atoto! Arere!
Silence! Stillness!
Let no one talk; let not one utensil touch another
We are here
Let nobody pound new yam
Let no one grind a single thing
Do not let me hear any crying children
Let every woman breastfeed her child!
On the day Ogun descended from the hilltop, he wore a bright red tunic, a cloth of blood!
He caused many a man to burn his penis
He caused many a woman to slash open her vagina
The owner of iron!
The enraged orisa who bites himself!
The fire that drives thieves away, that changes the color of iron and devours the wicked.
Do not harm me!
He was taken to Póngà
He ruined Póngà!
He was taken to Àkò Ire
He ruined Àkò Ire!
We took Ogun to the river
He divided the river in half
The terrible one, who strikes fear in the hearts of men!
Ogun of Ogboro eats dogs and we give him dogs
Ogun of Onire needs blood
Ogun Molamola eats mashed beans
Ogun, who controls razors, eats hair
Ogun, who controls circumcision, feeds on snails
Ogun, who controls carvers, feeds on wood!
Suminiwa, Ajokeopo
Oh! I am afraid of Ogun!
Ogun, whose long hands can save children from the abyss
Save me!
Demonstrating the imaginative flexibility, the fluidity of registers, the oscillation between veneration and jocularity, that characterizes the Orisa literature, the literature of the religious tradition within which Ogun is prominent, another story goes that Ogun is not associated with metal, particularly iron, because of the creative and transformative capacities represented by his pathfinding use of iron implements and his employment of them in his mastery of combat, but on account of an unfortunate incident in which he was transformed into an iron object by the father of a woman who had annoyed him as he was courting her, provoking Ogun to try to strike her, upon which her father intervened to protect his daughter, immobilizing Ogun by changing him into a metallic object which he henceforth became, as narrated in a volume of Benin babalawo, adept in the esoteric knowledge of the Ifa system of knowledge, Cromwell Osamaro Ibie's multi-volume ese ifa, Ifa literature collection, Ifisim, a story I retell in ''Themes in Ese Ifa, Ifa Literature: Courting Women 2: The Exquisite Woman at Iwo.'' ( USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google group; Ese Ifa blog; Facebook).
To Be Continued