From Osogbo to the Cosmos: Developing Osun Forest Spirituality and Philosophies
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
From Osogbo to the Cosmos
Developing Osun Forest Spirituality and Philosophies
Iledi Ontoto, Shrine House of the Ogboni, Venerators of Earth as Universal Mother, in the Osun Forest, Osogbo.
Constructed by Susanne Wenger and her Osogbo collaborators and thereafter restored but in need of constant maintenance.
This structure is perhaps the most ambitious architectural form created by the school of New Sacred Art, and perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of the correlation of human creativity and nature space in that forest.
Picture by me.
Abstract
This essay explores Osun forest spirituality and the cosmological imagination catalyzed by this sacred space in Osogbo, Nigeria.
Drawing from literary, mystical, and philosophical influences—from Yoruba cosmology to Romantic poetry, Western esotericism to Fulani myth—this personal meditation traces a journey through the forest as both a physical place and a numinous symbol of ultimate reality.
The narrative follows the author’s pilgrimage to Osogbo, deepened by prior visionary encounters with nature and catalyzed by foundational questions about being, cosmos, and consciousness.
Blending autobiography with cosmological reflection, and mythic vision with philosophical inquiry, these intersections of enquiry become liminal spaces—thresholds between worlds—pathways to confronting ultimate questions of existence, where the search for meaning is simultaneously an inward pilgrimage and a cosmic dialogue.
The Osun forest emerges as as a living archive of animistic mysticism, a dynamic sanctuary where the numinous, the ecological, and the artistic intertwine, inviting seekers to witness the "sublime" that eludes rational capture yet animates the seeker's quest, a site where the forest is not merely backdrop but teacher, as the work asks how forests, rivers, and sacred groves might serve as revelatory instruments—living sanctuaries through which the deeper currents of the universe unveil themselves to receptive consciousness.
In this light, the Osun Forest is not only a sacred geography but a cosmological threshold: a space where human cultural constructs meet transcendent natural forces, prompting profound meditations on the nature of existence, the architecture of consciousness, and our place within the vast unfolding of the cosmos.
The Place
Osun forest spiritualities and philosophies are spiritual and philosophical orientations developed in relation to the Osun forest in Osogbo, Nigeria.
The forest has been structured through the synergy between human intervention and nature space in creating a magnificent opportunity for safe immersion in the wild beauty of nature, in dialogue with sculptural, architectural and ritual forms inspired by the forest understood as a point of convergence of Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology, as demonstrated through the art of Susanne Wenger and her Osun forest collective, the school of New Sacred Art.
Beyond the specificities of the Orisa universe that has made the forest famous, however, the forest dramatizes the primeval power of nature, as transcendent of human structuring as the stars, as resistant to encapsulation by the human mind as the sweep of cosmos, describable, mappable, to some degree accessible to human need, but ultimately beyond human initiative as something that precedes humanity, enabling the human race's continued existence through ecological nutrients.
What Led Me to the Osun Forest
I was led to Osogbo and its Osun forest and river by the books of Susanne Wenger and Ulli Beier, interpreting the forest in terms of the ecological frameworks of Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology.
I am a nature mystic, a person who seeks to penetrate to the essence of existence through appreciating the beauty of nature.
My guiding influences include the nature magic of the English novelist J. R.R. Tolkien, evoking "trees like towers in forests long ago"; the animist metaphysics of Western esotericism, "the mind side of nature", referenced by Dion Fortune; the nature spirituality of Western Romanticism, " a sense sublime/Of something../Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns/...and in the mind of man:/A motion and a spirit, that impels/All thinking things, all objects of all thought/And rolls through all things", as testified to by Willliam Wordsworth; Western Symbolism, "nature as a temple of living pillars within which the human being walks as through a forest of symbols as strange, familiar eyes gaze at him from the leaves above", in Charles Baudelaire's words; Wole Soyinka, on "animal and plant life, the relationships of living things and the insights of man into secrets of the universe" and Abiola Irele, on forest as cosmic metaphor, both referring to Yoruba thought; Ulli Beier and Susanne Wenger, bringing the Yoruba cosmos uniquely alive within the context of the Osun forest and its river, "all the gods of the world were trees and animals, long, long before they entrusted their sacrosanct magnificence to a human figure", as Wenger declares.
Those textual encounters fired my imagination, further catalyzed by the nature rich environment of Benin-City and its environs, amplified by Benin traditional spirituality's profound sensitivity to the sacred in the natural world, values significantly defining the cityspace up till when I left there in 2003.
Seeking Ultimate Reality through Nature
Ignited by these inspirations, I sought to pierce through the beauty of vegetative nature to its ultimate essence, leading to my growing awareness of a universe within nature open only to the sensitive eye, a senstivity reaching its height in relation to the numinous atmosphere of the Ogba river in Benin-City as it rose above ground in a forest after a long subterranean journey, "an invisible but majestic presence that inspires both dread and fascination, and constitutes the non-rational element of vital religion", as Webster's dictionary defines Rudolph Otto's concept, the "numinous".
This experience led to a visionary encounter reinforcing the idea of a divine identity associated with a river and it's forest location, as with Osun and the Osun forest.
Questions of Ultimate Meaning
Within the context of my hunger with the idea of reaching ultimate reality through nature, cosmological questions define my approach to existence.
Is the universe finite in time and space?
Does it have a beginning?
Will it have an end?
What are its limits, if any?
Is it infinite?
What is the ultimate significance of the cosmos?
Why is there Something, the universe, instead of Nothing?
What is the ultimate relationship between its parts, the Many, and the One, the cosmos?
Is the cosmos materially constituted or a combination of the material and the abstract, as represented by the human body and mind?
Is mind purely a quality of animate beings or may it also be demonstrated by inanimate forms?
Is there an ultimate source of existence one may reach through the material universe?
Why are we here?
Where are coming from and where are we going?
How should we live in sensitivity to the mystery defining our existence?
To what degree can explorations of nature lead to answering such questions, explorations from the scientific to the aesthetic, from intellectual investigation to appreciation of nature's beauty, from secular identification to spiritual correlation-may these assist in unfolding insights into such ultimate questions of cosmic constitution, structure and value, in the spirit of the Urhobo concept "Akporode", "the vast and mysterious universe", a glorious complexity Bruce Onobrakpeya visualizes in his installation of magnificent pillars in dialogue with powerfully evocative textual forms suggesting the human drive towards symbolic interpretation and recording of the great story, the cosmic narrative, in which the human person has found himself involved?- adapting English novelist J.R. R. Tolkien.
The Wandering Seeker of Ultlmate Knowledge
Kaidara, the bent and decrepit old man, his lice infested rags concealing the fire burning within a personage who is a "beam of light from the hearth of Gueno, creator of the universe", as Ahmadou Hampate Ba describes this figure from Fulani cosmology, sums up for me both the fascination and the tantalizing, ever receding character of those haunting questions about ultimate reality.
Kaidara represents both the limits of human understanding and the effort to expand those limits, as attested to by his endless journeying, his everlasting wanderings, trekking from place to place seeking people ready for his transformative understanding as the god of gold and knowledge, embodiment of the material and social constitution of the world and it's anchor in divine reality.
Return to Osogbo and the Osun Forest
It was in this spirit of perpetual wandering, seeking ultimate realities, galvanised by fundamental questions, that I arrived in Osogbo on a pilgrimage to the Osun forest and river in July 2025, my first presence there in more than twenty years, in the interval of which I had invested much energy in interpreting and writing about my earlier encounters with that vegetal zone.
I therefore returned as a friend come to see an old friend grown less familiar with time, my sensitivity to the mystery embodied by the forest having deepened with sustained reflection in the distance from physical encounter.
Between the Non-Human and the Human
Visiting the city and immesing myself in the forest, I became sensitive to a paradox.
Keeping company with massive trees in spaces without human visibility, where the sounds of human activity were absent, I concluded that the association of the river that flows through the forest with a divine identity, the goddess Osun, and the correlation of the forest itself with the unified complex of orisa, the deities of Yoruba cosmology, was likely a response to the human encounter with something older than and beyond human cultural constructs, something beyond the weaving of images and narratives in constituting cosmological systems and their mythic expressions, something pre-human, something transcendent of humanity.
I concluded that I had entered a space representing humanity's oldest relationship with what it later tried to fix in terms of spiritualities and religions, something I too had lived through in my explorations in Benin-City, with my apexical formation through such animistic presences being my confrontation by the mysteriously powerful eloquence of the presence, invisible but palpabale, unseen but keenly sensed, immaterial but alive to senses beyond the material, at the Ogba river.
In relating with the Osun forest and river, I might not so readily encounter such animations as in the more acute sensitivities of my younger years when I struggled to cope with such raw awareness of that which opended to my amazed eyes beyond the immediately visible.
I might not necessarily be gifted with such an awesome consummation as the poet persona's journey in Christopher Okigbo's poetic cycle Labyrinths, in which, from cleansing and offering himself at the banks of the river understood as the dwelling of Idoto, the goddess of the river of his village in Nigeria's Igboland, the goddess responds with flashes of fire and rain "dark waters of the beginning/rainbow on far side/arced like boar bent to kill/foreshadows the fire that is dreamed of/...foreshadows the rain that is dreamed of", as he, a "young bird at the passage", is led downward into aquatic abysses and upward into cosmogonic heights, culminating in the cry of the goddess as he at last approaches her underwater domain, walking along her "fevered, solitary shores", to that "sanctuary at the earth's molten bowel"-"come into my cavern, let your ear listen, my voice calls from a cavern."
Even if one is not readily or ever granted such a transformative encounter, or even the equivalent of Wenger's account of "travelling, hidden beyond time and suffering", in the timeless dimension of trees, animals and running water, the primal dimension from which the holy bleeds into human experience to bear a human form, one would at least commence the journey to one's own distinctive encounters with the Sublime, that which humbles one through its majesty, as Kant puts it, and yet elevates one through a sense akin to St Augustine's declaration "at the apex of the mind, I beheld something unchanging, in a momentary flash".
The forest and its energising art were all I anticipated and more.
The intimately majestic, the grandly glorious, the dynamic beyond-human, of river, forest and sky, of art and space, of silence and matter, converged on me as I walked in solitude in that forest.
Will I encounter the flow of that river, both forbidding and compelling as I watched it from the bridge that created both the protection of distance and the intimacy of presence, as "the water spirit that nurtures all creation?" as Okigbo describes his summative vision of Idoto, from village river goddess to cosmic creatrix and totalistic nurturer?
Will I enter into the awareness that "the immortal spirit that lives in water, the immortal spirit that lives in air, the immortal spirit that lives in breath, the immortal spirit that lives in human seed, are one and the same, meeting in the lotus unfolding in the human heart, the little space where stars, planets, cosmos converge- that is immortality, that is life, that is all", as the Indian Upanishads declare?
Will I experience a fulfillment of my quest as an animistic mystic, an approach to non-human and non-animal forms, such as rivers, trees, groves and forests as possessing life and consciousness and the human being aspiring to or describing themself as merging with or perceiving the source of existence through those forms?
Will I be able to assimilate such awareness if it is granted me?
I don't know.
Recollections Bridging Time and Space
Having returned from repeated immersion in the Osun forest, I fly above it in imagination, following the twisting beauty of the walls running the length of its central road, peering at locations of sculptural and architectural beauty, responding to the unique presences of the various groves, the diverse tree clusters unified to constitute the vegetative immensity, even as each congregation of trees is a school of its own, a place of gathering of our arboreal brethren, generating unique atmospheric identities, synergies of branches, roots and trunks through which shimmer mysterious, barely definable, non-visible personas, as we walk through those collonades, temples of living pillars we navigate as forests of symbols, strange familiar eyes, gaze at us from the leaves above, a universal sense of strange and yet compelling companionship where forest silence becomes a living presence, as uniquely captured by Baudelaire.
Acknowledgements
I give thanks to all who contributed to my July 2025 Osogbo pilgrimage. Without them, it could not have been so successful.
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