USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fact and Speculation in Historical Narrative Part 3 : Akinwumi Ogundiran’s The Yorùbá: A New History: Yorùbá History as a Quest for Meaning [Edited]
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Fact and Speculation in Historical Narrative
Part 3
Akinwumi
Ogundiran’s The Yorùbá: A New History
Yorùbá
History as a Quest for Meaning
Sculptures by Lamidi Fakeye of representative figures from classical Yoruba civilization in the Yemisi Shyllon Museum,
Lagos, juxtaposed with a detail from a picture of Moyo Okediji's rendering of the graphic representations of the odu ifa,
the organizational system and active agents of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge.
The individual and social possibilities of human existence represented by the sculptures are dramatized in odu ifa in terms
of a rich corpus of poetry and stories, ese ifa, themselves organized into units represented by binary graphic forms, the
visual expressions of the odu ifa, shown in the background in the image above.
Odu ifa binary structure is used as a means of combining ideas from various odu ifa as these emerge in the divinatory
process. This binary order also bears a general relationship to ideas of gender complementarity in Yoruba thought, which
resonates with various aspects of Ifa symbolism.
Picture of sculptures by myself.
Picture of Moyo Okediji odu ifa rendition by Okediji.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
A presentation of my understanding of the limitations of Akinwumi Ogundiran's otherwise compelling account of the development at Ile-Ife of the definitive systematization of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge, a subject relating to the intersection of politics, religion and philosophy, intersections I further develop through comparison with developments in other cultures.
Ogundiran's Presentation of the Image of Orisa as Mirrors of Infinity Imaginatively and Ideationally Rich but Metaphysically Reductive
Since I find Ogundiran’s description of orisa cosmology in terms of the image of mirrors of the infinity of human social existence so meaningful and inspiring, as stated in the second part of this essay, why do I not find this description adequately fulfilling?
I am concerned that Ogundiran’s account reduces Orisa cosmology to an intellectual construct, devoid of its spiritual essence, as I understand it.
Beyond Ideas to Forms of Life and Self Consciousness
The orisa are not conceived by their devotees as purely ideational constructs, as Ogundiran presents the cosmology, but as spirits, sentient entities capable of acting beyond the limitations of physical forms.
Intellectual constructs and ideas, in the way Ogundiran describes them-an important qualification because Yorùbá animism may understand ideas and abstract forms in terms of life and sentience as with the odu ifa-are neither alive nor conscious but the orisa are understood as alive, self-conscious and expressive of individual identities.
They are believed to represent a state of being more intense and more expansive than the human. One perspective understands them as integrating human and non-human nature in their identity field, enabling each orisa to correspond to particular colors, plants and other natural forms, as represented by the significance of these elements in their worship, as described by Ulli Beier in The Return of the Gods.
Orisa may be deified people, as Ilésanmí argues. They are conceptual constructs, as Ogundiran rightly describes and as Soyinka masterfully demonstrates in The Stanzas of Existence.
But
subsuming all these possibilities is the understanding of orisa as forms of life and consciousness
that human beings may relate and communicate with and who can fulfill human
requests within the context of the roles of the orisa in the terrestrial and cosmic
scheme.
Conjuncting Image of Orisa as Mirrors of Historical Infinity with Idea of Orisa as Sentient Entities Integrating and Transcending Materiality
How
may one marry the Ogundiran image with this fact of Orisa cosmology as centred
in an approach to consciousness?
How may one correlate the image of orisa as mirrors of the infinity of human social possibilities to the idea of orisa as grounded in relationships between
human consciousness
and
non-human consciousness
represented by the orisa?
The orisa are understood by some views as deliberate deifications created by people in order to function as interlocutors with those who created them and with their descendants in the same community of practice.
What
are the implications of deliberately creating deity?
May such considerations help
to round off such a picture as Ogundiran’s?
Integrating these diverse perspectives enables the understanding that the intellectual and imaginative processes described by Ogundiran, in harmony with ritual processes, is capable of generating or enabling a deity, understood by its devotees as a sentient entity with power superior to that of a human being and who with time comes to be seen as a cosmic force.
Correlating the Political, Philosophical and Spiritual Implications of Ife Centric Ifa
Along similar
lines, I am impressed by Ogundiran’s description of the Yoruba origin Ifa system
of knowledge as an instrument through which the Ife thinkers restructured Orisa cosmology in creating social and political
unity in the Yorùbá community of practice, centred on Ife, thereby generating economic, political power
and prestige for the city.
His account of their motives, though deeply logical, seem quite limited in terms of
plausibility, with implications for the
book’s account of the philosophical, spiritual and physical significance of
their achievement:
Ilé-Ifè became the reference point for the cosmogonic and intellectual resources that sustained the Yorùbá community of practice in part because it was a coalescence of multiple theogonic traditions that originated elsewhere.
The vast “army” of priest-intellectuals and statesmen in Ilé-Ifè was confronted by two challenges during the Classical period. One was to create an ideology of unity for the political factions at home. The other was to create an ideology that would raise the profile of Ilé-Ifè and supplant the older centers of power, some of which were resisting the ascendancy of Ilé-Ifè.
These priest-intellectuals and statesmen achieved both. First, they harmonized the pre-Classical ancestors of the different Houses and factions in Ilé-Ifè into a network of interacting and intersecting pantheons from whom the ooni [ the ruler of Ife] received his divine power to rule.
Second, they created and standardized the template of òrìsà myths and universalized them for the broader region.
In other words, the various local myths of origin and relationships circulating in the region were reworked into accommodative and integrationist narratives; the pre-Classical deities were redefined to fit into the new sociopolitical agenda; and new deities were created to manage new experiences.
Many of the deities and myths in these traditions were actually part of regional archetypes that could not easily be traced to one place of origin (135, paragraphing modified for ease of reading online).
I wish his account were richer, though, more evocative of the obvious scope of epistemic ambition, metaphysical sensibilities and spiritual sensitivities demonstrated by Ifa.
The level of spiritual ambition, metaphysical invention, imaginative structuring and literary and sculptural creativity dramatizing the convergence of compression and expansion over a vast scope of symbolizations represented by Ifa in the definitive form that Ogundiran describes it needs something more powerful to generate than such rather mundane aspirations, relevant as they could be.
Ogundiran describes compellingly the attractive power and social influence of the knowledge and institutionalization of Ifa, but limits his discussion of how this feat was achieved to the desire to centralise Orisa cosmology and Ifa in Ife in order to create unity within the Yoruba community of practice, an aspiration that seems motivated more by politics and commerce than anything else.
Issues of aspiration to philosophical and spiritual enquiry and exploration, and the drive, behind some of the most powerful examples of human thought, to create cosmic maps unifying material and spiritual universes, Earth and cosmos, and to direct human activity through the insights and powers thus developed, qualities evident in Ifa in its Ife centric phase of development explored by Ogundiran, are not discussed, as far as I can see.
Comparisons with the Convergence of Politics, Spirituality and Philosophy in Christianity
A relevant comparison could be with describing the complexity and scope of Roman Catholic theology as constructed primarily in the name of privileging Rome and the Pope as the centre of Christendom.
Such political initiatives are
certainly significant in the pre-schism church and have some value even after
the Reformation, in the Counter-Reformation and later developments, but it
would be rather reductionist to describe the magnificent synthesis of
such figures as St. Thomas Aquinas, and the earlier theological
strategies of such thinkers as St. Augustine of Hippo as defined
primarily by church politics.
This remains true even though
Augustine was central in the struggle for the church against rival
interpretations of Christianity, and his The City of God is a
defense of Christianity against rival schools of thought. The City of God, however develops
a richl teleological vision within that defense, described by Nisbet in The Social Philosophers as the first effort to perceive humanity as a single identity.
One of the world's greatest mystical poems is Italian poet Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, yet the work is significantly framed in terms of the political vision it also advances. That vision, however, cannot subsume its spiritual and philosophical orientation, its probing of questions of relationships between free will and fate, in the context of the tension between the divine and the human, issues also central to Ifa within its Orisa cosmology and explored by Dante at the intersection of Christian and secular thought.
The political motivations
Ogundiran privileges in the development of Ife centric Ifa in its systematization of Orisa cosmology are significant considerations but how realistic it to
understand them as the full or essential picture?
A complex question.
A Comparison with Hebrew Spirituality and its Religious Politics
How
did the Biblical Hebrews arrive at their theory that they were the chosen race of God?
Did they reach this conclusion through
divine revelation, within the context of the relationship between claims of divine revelation and the biases of the human mind or through the political manipulations of ethnic supremacist priests?
How does one disentangle the logically unrealistic idea of divine election of one ethnicity by God from the numinous elements, the spiritual potency, of their religious vision, a vision often resonating with the deepest human aspirations towards the divine, though it comes a from a view of the divine that privileges a particular people?
How best may one respond to these paradoxes?
By acknowledging their existence and the fact that they are perhaps impossible to disentangle?
Perhaps the story of the relationship between Ife, Ifa and Orisa cosmology at the time referenced by Ogundiran may also be more richly told with a sensitivity to such tensions, tensions constituting the wealth of human aspiration towards the divine in the midst of individual and social realities within space and time.
The Question of the Scope of Motivations for Cosmologising the Ife Landscape
Ogundiran's observations could also be further empowered
by a sensitivity to the
significance of the ensuing sacralization of the Ife landscape through the
siting of various shrines of the orisa across the city.
Whatever the full scope of motivations for this, it may be understood as a cosmologising strategy, a method of developing a cosmology through a
correspondence between mythology and landscape.
Naturally occurring sacred space recognised as such by humans, rather than
created by human effort, as well as
humanly created sacred space, could be mobilized in service of such a
cosmologising process.
The cosmology thereby developed is thus constructed in terms of a union of the relatively abstract character of mythic images, narratives and ideas and the concreteness of landscape.
This
process of sacralizing city space is well developed in Asia, and well studied
in that context. Jacob Olupona discusses the rich Western scholarship on sacred space in The City of 201 Gods: Ilé-Ifè in Time, Space, and the Imagination. I explore the cosmologising of the Osun forest through the art of the school of Susanne Wenger in "Cosmogeographic Explorations: Metaphysical Mapping of the Osun Forest and Glastonbury."
The
range of creative possibilities involved in the sacralisation of space is so
rich that I expect that the sacralization of the Ife cityscape was motivated
by more than political aspirations to centralize Ife in the Yoruba religious
and spiritual imagination.
My Exploratory Journey with Akinwumi Ogundiran's The Yoruba : A New History
Inspirational book description from Call For Papers from Yoruba Studies Review journal
General Summations
On Specific Themes
" Convergence and Divergence of Politics and Spirituality in the Yoruba Origin Ifa System of Knowledge: A Dilemma Emerging from Conflicts Between Akin Ogundiran as Scholarly Book Author and Social Media Contributor"
"Ifa Divination as Historiographic Paradigm: Between
the Sacred and the Secular, Politics and Spirit in Akin Ogundiran's The
Yoruba: A New History on Yoruba History as a Quest for Meaning : Part 2 : Very
Short Reflection" [ With a discussion at this link]
Close Reading
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From where this project comes.
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Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Fact and Speculation in Historical Narrative
Part 3
Akinwumi
Ogundiran’s The Yorùbá: A New History
Yorùbá
History as a Quest for Meaning
Sculptures by Lamidi Fakeye of representative figures from classical Yoruba civilization in the Yemisi Shyllon Museum,
Lagos, juxtaposed with a detail from a picture of Moyo Okediji's rendering of the the graphic representations of the odu ifa,
the organizational system and active agents of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge.
The individual and social possibilities of human existence represented by the sculptures are dramatized in odu ifa in terms
of a rich corpus of poetry and stories, ese ifa, themselves organized into units represented by binary graphic forms, the
visual expressions of the odu ifa, shown in the background in the image above.
Odu ifa binary structure is used as a means of combining ideas from various odu ifa as these emerge in the divinatory
process. This binary order also bears a general relationship to ideas of gender complementarity in Yoruba thought, which
resonates with various aspects of Ifa symbolism.
Picture of sculptures by myself.
Picture of Moyo Okediji odu ifa rendition by Okediji.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
A presentation of my understanding of the limitations of Akinwumi Ogundiran's otherwise compelling account of the development at Ille-Ife of the definitive systematization of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge, a subject relating to the intersection of politics, religion and philosophy, intersections I further develop through comparison with developments in other cultures.
Ogundiran's Presentation of Image of Orisa as Mirrors of Infinity Imaginatively and Ideationally Rich but Metaphysically Reductive
Since I find Ogundiran’s description of orisa cosmology image so meaningful and inspiring, as stated in the second part of this essay, why am I not finding it sufficiently fulfilling?
I am concerned that Ogundiran’s account reduces Orisa cosmology to an intellectual construct, devoid of its spiritual essence, as I understand it.
Beyond Ideas to Forms of Life and Self Consciousness
The orisa are not conceived by their devotees as purely ideational constructs, as Ogundiran presents the cosmology, but as spirits, sentient entities capable of acting beyond the limitations of physical forms.
Intellectual constructs and ideas, in the way Ogundiran describes them-an important qualification because Yorùbá animism may understand ideas and abstract forms in terms of life and sentience as with the odu ifa-are neither alive nor conscious but the orisa are understood as alive, self-conscious and expressive of individual identities.
They are believed to represent a state of being more intense and more expansive than the human. One perspective understands them as integrating human and non-human nature in their identity field, enabling each orisa to correspond to particular colors, plants and other natural forms, as represented by the significance of these elements in their worship, as described by Ulli Beier in The Return of the Gods.
Orisa may be deified people, as Ilésanmí argues. They are conceptual constructs, as Ogundiran rightly describes and as Soyinka masterfully demonstrates in The Stanzas of Existence.
But subsuming all these possibilities, is the understanding of orisa as forms of life and consciousness that human beings may relate with, may communicate with and who can fulfill human requests within the context of the roles of the orisa in the terrestrial and cosmic scheme.
Conjuncting Image of Orisa as Mirrors of Historical Infinity with Idea of Orisa as Sentient Entities Integrating and Transcending Materiality
How may one marry the Ogundiran image with this fact of Orisa cosmology as centred in an approach to consciousness
?
How may one correlate the image of orisa as mirrors of the infinity of human history to the idea of orisa as grounded in relationships between non-human consciousness
represented by the orisa and human consciousness?
The orisa are understood by some views as deliberate deifications created by people in order to function as interlocutors with those who created them and their descendants in the same community of practice.
What are the implications of deliberately creating deity? May such considerations help to round off such a picture as Ogundiran’s?
Integrating these diverse perspectives enables the understanding that the intellectual and imaginative process described by Ogundiran, in harmony with ritual process, is capable of generating or enabling a deity, understood by its devotees as a sentient entity with power superior to that of a human being and who with time comes to be seen as a cosmic force.
Correlating the Political, Philosophical and Spiritual Implications of Ife Centric Ifa
Along similar
lines, I am impressed by Ogundiran’s description of the Yoruba origin Ifa system
of knowledge as an instrument through which the Ife thinkers restructured Orisa cosmology in creating social and political
unity in the Yorùbá community of practice, centred on Ife, thereby generating economic, political power
and prestige for the city.
His account of their motives, though deeply logical, seem quite limited in terms of plausibility, with implications for the book’s account of the philosophical, spiritual and physical significance of their achievement-
Ilé-Ifè became the reference point for the cosmogonic and intellec-tual resources that sustained the Yorùbá community of practice in part because it was a coalescence of multiple theogonic traditions that originated elsewhere.
The vast “army” of priest-intellectuals and statesmen in Ilé-Ifè was confronted by two challenges during the Classical period. One was to create an ideology of unity for the political factions at home. The other was to create an ideology that would raise the profile of Ilé-Ifè and supplant the older centers of power, some of which were resisting the ascendancy of Ilé-Ifè.
These priest-intellectuals and statesmen achieved both. First, they harmonized the pre-Classical ancestors of the different Houses and factions in Ilé-Ifè into a network of interacting and intersecting pantheons from whom the oo`ni received his divine power to rule.
Second, they created and standardized the template of òrìsà myths and universalized them for the broader region.
In other words, the various local myths of origin and relationships circulating in the region were reworked into accommodative and integrationist narratives; the pre-Classical deities were redefined to fit into the new sociopolitical agenda; and new deities were created to manage new experiences.
Many of the deities and myths in these traditions were actually part of regional archetypes that could not easily be traced to one place of origin (135, paragraphing modified for ease of reading online).
I wish his account were richer, though, more evocative of the obvious scope of epistemic ambition, metaphysical sensibilities and spiritual sensitivities demonstrated by Ifa.
The level of spiritual ambition, metaphysical invention, imaginative structuring and literary and sculptural creativity dramatizing the convergence of compression and expansion over a vast scope of symbolizations represented by Ifa in the definitive form that Ogundiran describes it needs something more powerful to generate than such rather mundane aspirations, relevant as they could be to a degree.
Ogundiran describes compellingly the attractive power and social influence of the knowledge and institutionalization of Ifa, but limits his discussion of how this feat was achieved to the wish to centralise Orisa cosmology and Ifa in Ife in order to create unity within the Yoruba community of practice, an aspiration that seems motivated more by politics and commerce than anything else.
Issues of aspiration to philosophical and spiritual enquiry and exploration, and the drive, behind some of the most powerful examples of human thought, to create cosmic maps unifying material and spiritual universes, Earth and cosmos, evident in Ifa in its Ife centric phase of development discussed by Ogundiran, are not discussed, as far as I can see.
Comparisons with the Convergence of Politics, Spirituality and Philosophy in Christianity
A relevant comparison could be with describing the complexity and scope of Roman Catholic theology as constructed primarily in the name of privileging Rome and the Pope as the centre of Christendom.
Such political initiatives are
certainly significant in the pre-schism church and have some value even after
the Reformation, in the Counter-Reformation and later developments, but it
would be rather reductionist to describe the magnificent synthesis of
such figures as St. Thomas Aquinas, and the earlier theological
strategies of such thinkers as St. Augustine of Hippo as defined
primarily by church politics.
This remains true even though
Augustine was central in the struggle for the church against rival
interpretations of Christianity, and his The City of God is a
defense of Christianity against rival schools of thought. The City of God develops
a powerful vision of the nature of humanity within that defense.
One of the world's greatest mystical poems is Italian poet Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, yet the work is significantly framed in terms of the political vision it also advances. That vision, however, cannot not subsume its spiritual and philosophical orientation, its probing of questions of relationships between free will and fate, in the context of the tension between the divine and the human, issues also central to Ifa within its Orisa cosmology and explored by Dante at the intersection of Christian and secular thought.
The political motivations
Ogundiran privileges in the development of Ife centric Ifa in its systematisation of Orisa cosmology are significant considerations but how realistic it to
understand them as the full or essential picture?
A complex question.
A Comparison with Hebrew Spirituality and Religious Politics
How
did the Biblical Hebrews arrive at their theory that they were the chosen race of God?
Did they reach this conclusion through
divine revelation, within the context of the relationship between claims of divine revelation and the biases of the human mind or through the political manipulations of ethnic supremacist priests?
How does one disentangle the logically unrealistic idea of divine election of one ethnicity by God from the numinous elements, the spiritual potency, of their religious vision, a vision often resonating with the deepest human aspirations towards the divine, though it comes a from a view of the divine that privileges a particular people?
How best may one respond to these paradoxes?
By acknowledging their existence and the fact that they are perhaps impossible to disentangle?
Perhaps the story of the relationship between Ife, Ifa and Orisa cosmology at the time referenced by Ogundiran may also be more richly told with a sensitivity to such tensions, tensions constituting the wealth of human aspiration towards the divine in the midst of individual and social realities within space and time.
The Question of the Scope of Motivations for Cosmologising the Ife Landscape
His observations could also be further empowered by a sensitivity to the significance of the ensuing sacralization of the Ife landscape through the siting of various shrines of the orisa across the city.
Whatever the full scope of motivations for this, it may be understood as a cosmologising strategy, a method of developing a cosmology through a
correspondence between mythology and landscape.
Naturally occurring sacred space recognised as such by humans, rather than
created by human effort, as well as
humanly created sacred space, could be mobilized in service of such a
cosmologising process.
The cosmology thereby developed is thus constructed in terms of a union of the relatively abstract character of mythic images, narratives and ideas and the concreteness of landscape.
This process of sacralizing city space is well developed in Asia, and well studied in that context. Jacob Olupona discusses the rich Western scholarship on sacred space in The City of 201 Gods: Ilé-Ifè in Time, Space, and the Imagination. I explore the cosmologising of the Osun forest through the art of the school of Susanne Wenger in "Cosmogeographic Explorations: Metaphysical Mapping of the Osun Forest and Glastonbury." I expect that the sacralization of the Ife cityscape was motivated by more than political aspirations to centralize Ife in the Yoruba religious and spiritual imagination.