Seeker of Mysteries: A Journey of Twenty Years from Benin-City to Ijebu Ode in Search of Sacred Space: Part 6
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Abstract
An exploration of sacred spaces, within an autobiographical context, in Ijebu-Ode, particularly those of the classical African spirituality of the Yoruba, in relation to Islam and Christianity in Ijebu-Ode and pre-Christian nature spirituality in England.
Nature is strategic to the animistic philosophies of classical African spiritualities, habitats in which the beauty and power of existence are experienced in their primal form, environments which human beings can only try to emulate but never fully succeed in evoking the sublimity of the sacred.
Animism may have its roots in experiences with nature testifying to the idea so eloquently expressed by French poet Charles Baudelaire in ''Correspondences'', of ''nature as a temple of living pillars, emitting words little understood, a forest of symbols through which the human being passes, as strange, familiar eyes observe him from the leaves above, echoes that emerge from afar in a mysterious and profound unity, vast as night and bright as day, scents, colors, and sounds correspond, expanding into infinity''.
The palpitating life of that natural dynamism may demonstrate what English poet William Wordsworth describes in ''Tintern Abbey'' as ''a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky, 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'', borrowings from Western Symbolist and Romantic poetry convergent with the voices of African thinkers, as expressed by Chinua Achebe, in ''The Igbo World and its Art'', on Igbo thought as recognizing ''ike, energy, as the essence of all things, human, spiritual, animate and inanimate'', generating ''a dynamic world of movement and of flux'', ''an arena for the interplay of forces''.
Image Above
Tree near Olorisha junction in Ijebu Ode. Wole Soyinka's summations on the unity of humanity and Earth in relation to Orisa cosmology are relevant to the dynamism suggested by the tree's roots and the shelter they give to the sleeping person in these pictures I was fortunate to take on my trip:
''Honour to the Ancestors. If blood flows in you, tears run, bile courses, if the soft planet of brain pulses with thought and sensing, and earth consumes you in the end, then you, with your ancestors, are one with the fluid elements.
If the beast knows what herbs of the forest are his friends, what plea shall man make that boasts superior knowledge, yet knows no empathy with moisture of the air he breathes, the juice of leaves, the sap in his roots to earth, or the waters that nourish his being? Man may speak Oya, Osun, Orisa-Oko [orisa or deities of nature]…yet mind and spirit encompass more than a mere litany of names. Knowledge is Orisa.''