The Blazing Darkness: A Mystical Initiation into the Heart of Igbo Cosmology
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
The Blazing Darkness
A Mystical Initiation into the Heart of Igbo Cosmology
The story below is translated from the Nsibidi text inscribed on animal skins, shown above. Nsibidi is a communication system employed by various ethnic groups, including the Igbo, in Nigeria's Cross-River, particularly by the Ekpe/Mgbe esoteric order, to which the writer of the story belongs. The skins and translations were recently shared with the world by Ekpe scholars in the name of developing more public knowledge of the society.
Image Source: Jordan Williams.
This
essay is a work of philosophical and literary mysticism rooted in Odinani, the
indigenous Igbo spiritual system. It is a reflective narrative and
philosophical exploration of consciousness through the framework of Agwu,
the deity of inspiration and divination in Odinani.
Mysticism is understood in this essay as the theory or practice of perceiving or uniting with ultimate reality, or a description of such an experience.
The first part of the essay is a narrative. The second part is an analysis of the narrative. The first part is centred on the idea of the translation of a text written by an anonymous author in Nsibidi, the semi-esoteric language of the Ekpe/Mgbe esoteric order in Nigeria's multi-ethnic Cross-River region. The text employs Nsibidi in narrating a mystical experience described as occurring during an Afa divination session, Afa being an Igbo divination system among the Afa/Ifa/Fa/Oguega family of West African divination systems which share fundamental similarities of structure and method while resonating with the Chinese I Ching. The writer of the text, being steeped in Igbo culture, as a dibia, an Afa spiritual expert and diviner, proceeds to interpret the experience in terms of Igbo cosmology.
The second part of the paper reflects on the narrative, examining its implications for the development of mystical theory and practice in relation to indigenous African systems of thought. It does this by pursuing the idea of its contribution to the development of a more interiorized and philosophically articulated understanding of classical African knowledge systems.
In doing this, the analysis engages with the significance of the parallels between the story and African and non-African spiritual and philosophical thought, from Igbo centred texts to Hindu Trika and Western esotericism.
The
essay argues that indigenous African spiritual systems contain rich, largely
undeveloped mystical resources, and that recovering and elaborating their inner
dimensions—their accounts of consciousness, ultimate reality, and the human
aspiration toward unity with the source of existence—is both philosophically
urgent and spiritually transformative.
I added images of a dibia and of art by Victor Ekpuk, deeply influenced by Nsibidi, of art by Obiora Udechukwu, shaped by the correlative Uli symbolism, in amplifying the communicative drive of this piece.
The work is the second in a literary-philosophical series exploring Igbo spirituality as a living instrument for navigating the mystery of existence.
The first essay is "Anyanwụ Rising: The Invocation of Truth: The Dibia's Prayer Against the Maze of Lies : Adapting a Masterpiece of Igbo Spiritual Literature for Personal Use by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju and the AI Collective".
In discussing Nsibidi, particularly in relation to mysticism, this essay is also correlative with my Nsibidi/Ekpuk Philosophy and Mysticism: Research and Publication Project.
''How can we hope to capture inspiration if we don’t pause to pen down God’s silent voice during our prayers? Divine whispers are often fleeting; they are like lightning bugs in the dark—brilliant for a moment, but gone if you don't reach out to catch them.
This is why writers are always urged to keep a pen and notepad close by, ready to anchor whatever flashes across their minds before it drifts away. It is all part of the sacred rhythm of prayer—those golden, divine moments where we truly embrace wisdom.''
Akin Solanke.
Image and Text: Animal Skin Nsibidi
Abstract
The Story
Image and Text: Dibia Nwandu Divining
Image and Text: From Cosmos to Cosmos: Victor Ekpuk
Analysis of the Story
Who is the Writer?
The Mystery of Animal Skin vs Paper
The Mystery of Openness vs Secrecy
Intertextual Parallels
With Igbo Thought
Within and Beyond the Igbo Cosmos
The Calabash of Possibilities
Darkness and Voidness in Conceptions of Ultimate
Reality
The Nsibidi and Uli Spirals
Image and Text: Obiora Udechukwu, Our Journey.
Image and Text: Ekpe Spatial Symbolism and the Journey to the Centre
Image and Text: Sri Yantra
Implications
If I were not alive, could I be conscious of anything?
If I were alive but were not aware of that fact, could I know anything?
The rising of my awareness as the sun begins its movement from night to day as the Earth revolves on its axis, as it also orbits the sun, a cycle completed in 365 days, is my own fundamental truth, the primary truth of every person, on which all awareness stands.
These reflections mutated in my mind as I attended to my client, a woman unaware of the palpitations of my thoughts, as the divination instruments I was using rose and fell in patterns of insight.
''Nwandu, a Dibia in Ebenebe, Demonstrating How He Performs Igbo Afa Divination''
Were these reflections on consciousness the outcome of Agwu, in action, I wondered about the deity who guides the diviner.
Was this a further development of Ekwerem Agwu, the process that I underwent in becoming an Afa diviner, the ritual of alignment with Agwu?
Was I being initiated into a better understanding of the relationship between Agwu and chi, the immortal self embodying a person's ultimate potential?
Was I being directed into the conjunctions between these aspects of myself and the ultimate reality, Chi-Ukwu?
I was in the midst of an ocean of blazing light. The latter, I knew, is the primeval stuff out of which worlds are created, the first state of matter. It stretched away into infinite space, incredibly alive.
Afa symbol patterns blazed in the space around me and within me. They were me and I was them. The permutations of human and cosmic possibility, between past, present and future, opened up within me. I had become one with the calabash of possibilities from which each moment is born.
At last. The entry into Agwu, the universal mind that oversees knowledge, learning, and transformation
in all things, including humans, animals, inanimate nature and spirits, had arrived at last.
''Be prepared. No one knows when it can come,'' I had been told by my initiators.
Suddenly, the incredible light exploded into a blaze of darkness, as if all the suns in the cosmos collided in a cataclysm so fierce, the resulting blaze shattered all possibilities of vision, as sight collapses into darkness.
I knew nothing. I became nothing.
Gradually, I returned to the confines of my shrine. In body, I had never left. But my mind had travelled beyond space and time.
Only a second had passed. I was still divining, but the Afa divination symbols were no longer simply patterns that triggered awareness in me.
They had become my own self, radiating outward and converging inward,expressions of the foundations of being and becoming, existence and change.
I would never be the same again.
The waters receded from the shore. But like flood waters nourishing soil before withdrawing, the soil of my self had been energised as never before.
See truth come riding on the rays of the sun.
From that day, my relationship with Agwu, chi and ikenga, central coordinates of the nature of the self in Odinani became increasingly internal as well as external.
I still retained my Agwu, chi and ikenga shrines but my veneration increasingly became sensitive to their inward dimensions.
I would, after that experience, begin the day with silence, looking within myself, listening to myself.
What is the essence of chi, the spark of identity, the essence of being derived from the creator of the universe, Chi-Ukwu, the Ultimate Chi, if not the sense of self awareness?
What is the root of that self awareness?
What is the soil from which the slender but all-powerful shoot of awareness rises, the fundamental source of nourishment, if not that darkness into which I had earlier disappeared, the abyss beyond human conception but which is the ultimate source of all?
What is the essence of Agwu, if not one's creative drive?
What is ikenga, the strength of movement, the place of strength, the strength of a person's hand — the sacred source from which one's personal power, courage, determination, and ambition rise, the spiritual force that empowers a person to pursue their goals and actualize their divine potential on Earth, integrating chi ( one's personal god), ndichie (ancestors), and ike (power) as well as spiritual activation through prayer and sacrifice, if not the integration of one's creative totality, the unity of one's possibilities in terms of a person's will to succeed, the concretization of that will in the outcomes of a person's efforts, a demonstration of personal activity and the continuation of a line of achievement stretching across generations in a biological and aspirational lineage?
Why relate to these idea in spiritual terms if not because one recognizes the human person and the universe as expressions of a creative intelligence that infuses and yet transcends the cosmos, an identity manifest in all aspects of existence?
Was what I had undergone not a demonstration of the injunction by my initiators- ''We have initiated you, but Agwu must also initiate you by itself, in successive initiations that will take you further and further into an ever receding centre. A journey of knowledge that never ends, that continues even after you leave this world''.
Wonder upon wonder.
My Agwu shrine still called to me, embodying my understanding and aspirations- a carved wooden staff, symbol of Agwu’s authority; sacred white chalk evoking purity; symbols of the four elements-earth, water, fire, air; and offerings such as kola nuts and palm wine, but the shrine began increasingly to exist within me along with being outside me.
I would visualize this structure of objects as being inside me, stationed at the perimeters of a circle, and manipulate them with my imagination.
In the centre of the constellation of objects, a fire burns, the fire of my essence, embodying my creative drive, embodying the unity of chi, Agwu, and ikenga.
Recognizing this flame as my own expression of ike, energy,
the essence of all things human, spiritual, animate and inanimate, everything having its own unique energy which must be acknowledged and given its due, recognizing that ike di na awaja na awaja, “Power runs in many channels’’, implying the necessity of onye na nkie, onye na nkie— “everyone
and his own”, I became free of killing animals in the name of feeding my spiritual practice. My own energy, in circulation within the life blood of the cosmos, was all I needed.
As an embodiment of Agwu, as all beings also are, at various levels of intensity, the members of Agwu's household became aspects of my own imaginative universe.
I would withdraw within myself, seeking wisdom, like Ulu Mgbekwu, the Tortoise, withdrawing within his shell, his personal universe.
I cultivate continuous quest for knowledge, akin to the constant movement of Ulili, the small forest rodent, its cautious reexamination of its motions as it stops to examine its trail, reflected in my continual examination of my varied paths as I explore diverse possibilities of learning and expression.
In study and reflection, I become like Udene, to me an eagle, rather than a vulture as traditionally understood, flying high over the landscape of being and becoming, seeking understanding of its permutations, its patterns and ultimate destination, seeking how to shape this dynamism of possibilities, that being the task of the dibia Afa.
I
would try to go beyond even this network of human, terrestrial and cosmic
dynamism to its ultimate source, the originating darkness, the emptiness that
is yet full, empty beceause we cannot see into it, cannot fully grasp
it, yet full beceause from it emerges all possibilities.
From Cosmos to Cosmos
Rising from One Constellation of Knowledge into Another
From a cognitive network symbolized by a richly coloured and complex network of signs, within the green of Earth, into another, broader knowledge space, as Victor Ekpuk's Nsibidi inspired art may be interpreted.
Analysis of the Story
Who is the Writer?
Even though the name of the writer of the story was not disclosed by his fellow Ekpe members in the name of emphasizing the knowledge expressed by the text as an individual demonstration of a collective patrimony, analyzing the text reveals a clue as to the writer. The reference to the revolutions of the Earth on its axis and its orbit of the sun places the writer in the 19th century and beyond, as a person with the level of access to Western education that would have gained him that knowledge, which reached Igboland with Western culture.
The Mystery of Animal Skin vs Paper
That being so, why did he choose to write in Nsibidi rather than in English, the language of Western education in Igboland? Why, also, did he use animal skins instead of paper, the medium of writing the books in which that education was presented?
An effort to maintain Ekpe esotericism, being a highly structured epistemic system, with access to knowledge organized into grades, the higher grades perhap enabling access to the kind of cosmological range and depth the text represents?
The Mystery of Openness vs Secrecy
If so, why has the text now been made available to the public, currently in the archives of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and the translation shared with the world? A push for greater access to the intricacy of Ekpe knowledge by scholars amongst its members, scholarship emerging steadily, even if slowly in recent times?
Ekpe and Nsibidi have gained global visibility through the art of Victor Ekpuk, in particular, amidst other artists, such as Joseph Eze, and the scholarship of Ekpe initiate Jordan Fenton, among others, within a scholarly network in which it is closely aligned with the Igbo Uli artistic system made famous by the Nsukka art school initiated by Uche Okeke ( as discussed in detail in The Nsukka Artists and Nigerian Contemporary Art. ed. Simon Ottenberg) .
Beyond academia, independent Nsibidi enthusiasts are richly active. These include Jordan Williams, Ndukwe Prosper, Okey Anthony Chira and more, developing the potential of Nsibidi.
Could this efflorescence have motivated the Ekpe society to contribute directly to enriching this public escalation of knowledge by sharing with the world the mystical Nsibidi manuscript in question?
Intertextual Parallels
With Igbo Thought
The poetic prayer that structures the story is identical to one translated by Romanus Egudu in Black Orpheu, titled ''An Igbo Diviner Invokes Truth Before Consulting his Bones [divinatory instruments]. The Agwu conceptualization is similar to Idenze Eme's description of Agwu in "Agwu: The Heart of Igbo Spirituality", Oma in "Agwu As The Divine Guide Within Igbo Spirituality'' and Dibianwanyi Ugocharacha's ''Agwu:The Arushi of The Divine Mind''.
Those conceptions align with those of John Annenchukwu Umeh's After God is Dibia: Igbo Cosmology, Divination and Sacred Science in Nigeria (2 Vols) the first volume of which engages various perspectives on Agwu, emphasizing the validity of the elevated perspective of the kind Eme, Oma and
Ugocharacha present. It remains clear, however, that Agwu represents a complex network of ideas, with various perspectives attempting to synthesize this network in various ways.
The description of Agwu's household is also close to that of Angulu Onwuejeogwu's Afa Symbolism and Phenomenology in Nri Kingdom and Hegemony: An African Philosophy of Social Action. The presentation of ike, energy, is close to that in Chinua Achebe's ''The Igbo World and its Art'' ( Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos, Chike Anikor and Herbert Cole; Achebe, Hopes and Impediments). The description of ikenga is similar to that by Sunanda K. Sanyal on Khan Academy and those on Wikipedia and Ugo Institute. The depiction of Agwu's shrine also recalls that at the Ugo Institute.
Within and Beyond the Igbo Cosmos
The story also demonstrates striking similarities with mystical texts beyond the cultural contexts of the writer. The correlation between Agwu and chi in terms of an expansion into awareness of the essence of self as grounded in the source of cosmos is similar to the thought of the Indian Hindu mystic Ramana Maharshi's technique of self exploration and Paul Brunton's description of following that process in A Search in Secret India.The paragraph describing the experience in terms of perceiving an ocean of living light is very close to Brunton's narrative of his encounter in that book.
The Calabash of Possibilities
The calabash metapor as suggesting generative power, specifically with reference to the womb, also exists in Igbo thought, as well as occurring in other African contexts ( Obianuju Umeji, ''Igbo Art Corpus: Women's Contribution'', Nigerian Heritage, Vol.2.1993).
The extension of this motif into cosmic generation, however, the ''calabash of possibilities from which each moment is born'', recalls the development of such ideas in Ifa, the Yoruba variant of the knowledge system to which Afa belongs ( Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, ''Space of Becoming: The Feminine as Metaphysical Matrix in Classical African thought Exemplified by the Orisa Tradition'').
Odu, the organisational matrix of the Ifa system, is visualized in terms of the continuum of metaphors related to a container, in general, and the womb in particular ( Bolaji Idowu, Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief). In fact, the expression the ''calabash of possibilities from which each moment is born'' is identical with Shloma Rosenberg's summation on the meaning of the ''odu'' in Olodumare, an aspect of the supreme creator in Lukumi, a diaspora version of indigenous Yoruba spirituality, as stated at ''Olorun, God in the Yoruba Faith''.
Agwu, described as ''the universal mind that oversees knowledge, learning, and transformation in all things, including humans, animals, inanimate nature and spirits'' is correlative with babalawo-Ifa adept-Joseph Ohomina's description of Odu as the ''names of all possibilities of existence'', as discussed by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju in "Cosmological Permutations : Joseph Ohomina’s Ifa Philosophy and the Quest for the Unity of Being".
Mazisi Kunene's account of Zulu cosmology in Anthem of the Decades takes the calabash motif further, along similar lines, in describing it as symbolizing the unity of existence and of possibilities of knowledge, unifying the universal and the particular, all these being images that cohere with that of the Ekpe Nsibidi writer.
Imagistic and ideational parallels between indigenous African systems of thought, amplifying each other in projecting the cosmicizing vision of these systems as parts of a single, overarching system, actualized in various ways by diverse peoples? Conjunctions between African and non-African thought suggesting humanity's striving after the infinite as parts of a huge jigsaw?
Darkness and Voidness in Conceptions of Ultimate Reality
The paragraph depicting the movement from light to darkness in the visionary experience told in the Nsibidi manuscript is also similar to Western esotericist Aleister Crowley's account, in Magick, Liber ABA, Book 4 , of a level of mental expansion in Yoga, the system of mental and physical discipline shaping Indian origin spiritualities.
The conception of ultimacy depicted there uses the same image of colliding suns generating darkness as Crowley does. This idea resonates with ideas from various schools of thought on the cognitive transcendence represented by ultimate reality, including K. Chukwulozie Anyanwu’s description of ultimate reality in Igbo thought as ''Amacha-Amacha, the known-unknown'', as ''Chukwu be n'elu na uwa'', the ultimate creator who lives on high and in the world, suffusing the universe and is yet beyond it and Emmanuel Anizoba's reinforcing description of ''Amaamaamachaamacha, the Great God, the Unknown Godhead ( Anyanwu, Ultimate Reality and Meaning 7 (2):84-101 (1984); Anizoba, Odinani: The Igbo Religion).
The description of deities in terms of aspects of ultimate reality also resonates with various spiritualities, particularly Hinduism and Jewish/Western esoteric Kabbalah.
What do these parallels imply? To what degree could they be accidental and to what degree could they evidence the writer's reading range? However, Nsibidi, as a pan-ethnic matrix, and Igbo thought, in general, contain ideas and images as profound and far reaching as those used by the Ekpe writer in communicating his experience.
The Nsibidi and Uli Spirals
The
spiral in Nsibidi is described as possibly signifying the sun, journey and
eternity while the spiral in Uli could suggest the coiled bodies of reptiles
and the unity of all things ( Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in Africa Art, Smithsonian; The Legendary Uli Women of Nigeria: Their Life Stories in Signs, Symbols, and Motifs, Robin Sanders).
These are ideas and images of cosmic scope, as referenced by ideas of eternity and totalistic unity, yet
grounded in human existence, as suggested by the ''sun'' and ''journey''
indicating humanity's progression through terrestrial life, enabled by
the illumination and nourishment of the sun, understood both literally and metaphorically, and by elaborations on the significance of the Uli spiral:
Uli spirals are characterized by fluid, curvilinear lines, often drawn as simple, elegant, and bold shapes, emphasizing the winding, unfolding, and ever-returning, yet never repeating, nature of existence. The spiral is frequently associated with the Eke (python) or Agwọlagwọ (snake/serpent) motif, which symbolizes the python as a messenger of the Earth Goddess (Ala) and a symbol of fertility and sacred power.
The spiral represents the journey of life, personal, and spiritual development. It is often used to symbolize fertility, joy, and the continuity of the family lineage as evoked by the sacred feminine Ala—whose grace (represented by the majestic body and sinuous movements of the Royal Python—Eke) emphasizes the role of the feminine force in Igbo cosmology as the foundation without which all the components of cultural life become impossible. (Google AI and Sylvester Okwunedo Ogbechie, ''Ndidi Dike, ''New Beginnings")
Emmanuel Item concretizes this range of meanings:
The [ Uli ] spiral is a profound symbol representing growth, evolution, and the cyclical nature of life. It embodies the journey inward to our core and outward to the universe, symbolizing personal and spiritual development. Right-spinning spirals often signify expansion, growth, and the flow of energy from the center outward, symbolizing extroversion and external exploration. In contrast, left-spinning spirals represent introspection, inward focus, and the journey to inner wisdom, symbolizing introversion and internal discovery.
These ideas in the Igbo context resonate powerfully with the global matrix of spiral symbolism, as demonstrated for example, by Jill Purce's The Mystic Spiral: Journey of the Soul. They also resonate powerfully with the spiral symbolism of the sacred feminine represented by Starhwak's seminal The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess, one of the most influential books on Earth based and female centred spiritualities in the Western context.
Exposure to such ideas, even in the Igbo context alone, which would have been the case with the Ekpe/Nsibidi writer, suggests an orientation towards conceptions of such loftiness as demonstrated in his text, even though the spiral image is not evident in his writing.
Obiora Udechukwu's majestic spiral, Our Journey, inspired by the Uli/Nsibidi nexus, dramatizes a progressional dynamic, an image of unfolding and constellating unity correlative with the Ekpe/Nsibidi writer's visionary and reflective account:
Obiora Udechukwu, Our Journey.
Picture by Melissa Chemam, ''Insight into 'Nigerian Modernism' ''. Nigerian Modernism Exhibition at Tate Modern, 2025.
What
could be the nature of the journey undergone by Udechukwu's spiral?
What may be suggested by the associations between the vastness of abstract,
variedly luminous spaces shaped by enigmatic forms the spiral traverses in
its unfolding? The unfolding of the cosmos across time? Also implying the human
mind seeking to engage with this dynamic immensity?
Ekpe Spatial Symbolism and the Journey to the Centre
The Ekpe meeting house, as schematized below by Jordan Williams, is both a physical structure and a symbolic space, a simulacrum of the cognitive journey of the Ekpe initiate, a motion from the edges of knowledge, symbolized by the outer precincts of the lodge to its centre, representing the core of the Order's knowledge, an idea that may be adapted to the Ekpe/Nsibidi writer's account of a progression into ''an ever receding centre... A journey of knowledge that never ends..''
Ekpe symbolism is not much revealed to the world but this geometric symbol and cognitive associations resonates powerfully with the geometric symbolism of the Hindu Sri Yantra, in terms of inward progression towards increasing understanding of cosmic unity, as described by such sources as the Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram ritual which navigates the yantra, and Douglas Renfrew Brooks' Texts and Traditions of Sri Vidya Sakta Tantrism in South India and The Secret of the Three Cities: An Introduction to Hindu Sakta Tantrism along with a premier book on similar geometric symbolism in Hinduism, Maddhu Khanna's Yantra: The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity.
Implications
What is the significance of this Odinani/Nsibidi text which has recently come to light?
It contributes to developing the philosophical and mystical possibilities of classical African knowledge systems.
These systems are in need of approaches further demonstrating their identities as instruments of human management of existence in its puzzling, inspiring and awesome character, rather than as traditions fixed in dogmatic loyalty to ancestral dictates or spiritual powers. Such freedom would make them more useful.
The mystical dimension is one of the one of the richest aspects of existence, demonstrating perhaps the highest peak of human aspiration, the desire to see into the essence of being, to experience or perceive reality from the perspective of that essence or to consciously become one with the source of all that is, ''a dew drop slipping into the shining sea'' , as one image puts it, and yet retaining one's individual identity while experiencing unity with the universe.
This aspiration, transcending all other human possibilities that the human race has ever conceived, is richly evident in Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and Western esotericism but is little visible in the literature on indigenous African spiritualities and philosophies. As an African and a mystic deeply shaped by various mystical traditions, I am elated by this contribution to changing that picture.
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