Nature, Sculpture, Architecture in the Osun Forest, Part 2: Atmospheric Potency and Sacred Synergy : The Doorway of Transformation

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Nature, Sculpture, Architecture in the Osun Forest, Part 2

 Atmospheric Potency and Sacred Synergy 

        The  Doorway of Transformation

           Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju 

                           Abstract

This essay examines the Doorway of Transformation, a sacred threshold in Nigeria’s Osun Forest, Osogbo, leading from the Esu shrine complex to the Oro Grove, the Irunmole Conclave, and the Ogboni Grove.

The doorway symbolizes a portal through which the self is reshaped by encounters with the forest’s majestic trees, sculptural forms, and spiritual resonance. 

This transformative experience, framed as an Esu initiation, bridges human consciousness with cosmic mysteries, illuminating the interplay of choice, existence, and interconnectedness at the crossroads of being.

All pictures are by myself. 

       

Doorway from Esu Shrine Complex to Grove Network 

I declare that this doorway is my symbol, that this mysteriously lonely, compellingly inviting and forbidden entranceway is my ancestral door, that Soyinka and Abiodun,  Wenger and Onobrakpeya, Yeats and Abhinavagupta have passed through there.

This doorway is the  door from the Esu shrine complex into the section of the Osun forest in Osogbo, Nigeria,  constituted by the Oro Grove, the Irunmole Conclave and the Ogboni Grove.

The picture above shows it from outside, looking at the forest path it leads into.

External view of Doorway of Transformation showing part of the sculptural tableau, the Esu shrine complex, that immediately precedes it.

Cognitive Concentrations through Solitude

People are hardly seen there. Tourists do not visit. Likely because the space is consecrated to particular esoteric traditions, Oro and Ogboni, of the Yoruba origin Orisa spirituality the forest is associated with and therefore perhaps not open to the public.

A US embassy dignitary and her large entourage were once taken through there in my presence as part of a speedy tour of the forest and its artistic wonders,  its balance of vegetative wildness and human nature culturing, but this section of the vegetative zone is best appreciated in contemplative solitude.

Such a context exposes one to  the  atmospheric density of something that predates humanity, something existing in its own universe apart from the human world, something not open to being subsumed by human vision, something ancient and mysterious that envelops you as you stand or move in silence in that space.

Such an environment helps you better appreciate the immensity into which, by being born into the world, you have been thrown as a person entering the vast and mysterious universe, as depicted in the Urhobo Akporode concept, visualized by the artist Bruce Onobrakpeya in terms of glorious pillars emblazoned with symbols.

Onobrakpeya's Akporode installation, in adapting the majestic verticality of trees as evoked by the Urhobo pillar symbol of  aspiration to Oghene,  the creator of the universe, incidentally evokes the mentally expansive encounter with such spatial regions as this section of the Osun forest, constituted by magnificent trees, vegetal clusters inspiring the effort to make sense of existence though symbols dramatising mystery, awe and the scope and limitations of the understanding gained.

Transformative Configurations 

      Questions of Perception

In a fundamental way, I never emerge  through this door leading to this section of the forest as exactly the same person who passed through it to explore the wonders it leads into.

Those glories are the tree constellations of the Oro Grove and the vegetative womb that is the Ogboni Grove. 

Those magnificences also include the sculptural encapsulations of the Irunmole Conclave, complementing the sublimity of the Ogboni shrine house and  the scuptural matrix of the Esu Shrine Complex from which one passes through that doorway leading into those varied majesties.

The Oro Grove, the most uniquely compelling of the natural wonders of this place, is a relatively small space, its size ironic given its sense of spatial expanse generated by the cumulative force of the upward thrust of trees and the image of a complex network constituting a plant universe,  seeming to cohere into something beyond the material configuration actualized  by the plant world as perceptible to the eye, something that seems to shimmer at the entrance to the grove, out of the range of corporeal vision but palpable enough to be sensed by the attentive person, something akin to an invisible identity constituted by the relationships between the trees at its entrance, an unseeable web of radiance beyond the spectrum of human sight but glowing in a manner that touches sight without revealing itself, like the heat of the sun on the eyelids of a blind person,  who is thereby able to sense the existence of the solar power but cannot see it.

Is this enigmatic presence related to the Yoruba concept "ase", which Rowland Abiodun describes William Fagg as inadvertently referencing, a useful idea if we adapt the term "tribal" in Fagg's description in a creative way?:

"Tribal cultures tend to conceive things as four-dimensional objects in which the fourth or time dimension is dominant and in which matter is only the vehicle, or the outward and visible expression, of energy or life force. Thus it is energy and not matter, dynamic and not static being, which is the true nature of things".  ".

Is it possible to see what is sensed in that magnificent forest space?

Could such perception constitute " oju inu" , the inward eye, the Yoruba understanding of perception beyond the conventional range of the senses, as Babatunde Lawal states,  perception into what is sensed but not seen in such a place as the Oro grove,  opening one into participation in a universe of which the visible dimension of the forest is a limited expression, akin to Wole Soyinka's account of Yoruba Ijala poetry as celebrating "deity [as well as ] animal and plant life, the essence and relationships of growing things and the insights of man into the secrets of the universe"? 

Each tree a message from pre- human intelligences who planted them as a message to humanity as these figures left the Earth, contemplating which idea the tree that inspired it suddenly becoming enclosed in a cloud, invisible put potent,  from which flashes the understanding that I am about to experience something beyond any previous conception I have had, this being a description of a long ago encounter of mine with a tree in Benin-City, an awesome experience sensitizing me to the mystery of trees, their capacity as catalysts for knowledge beyond the boundaries of the mind.

I am suspended in a network of questions, marvels overflowing one's brain as one struggles with a version of Rudolph Otto's "numinous", "an invisible but majestic presence that inspires both dread and fascination and constitutes the non-rational element of vital religion".

Her eyes closed, she contemplates the universe within herself. Opening her eyes, she gives birth to the universe from within herself,  a universe rooted in herself.

Abhinavagupta 's account of how the Hindu Goddess Kali creates the cosmos from within mirrors the forest’s ability to awaken a mental universe, contributory to perceiving and shaping the external world.

Looking up at the soaring trees constituting the Oro grove, a sense of an expanse akin to the limitless unfolding of the sky emerges,  ablaze with stars spread over immense distances, as the watching consciousness is humbled and yet cocooned, minisculized yet uplifted by this glorious capsuling, existing within time yet seeming to enter into something beyond time through walking in silence into a grove in the Osun forest. 

Soyinka incidentally further projects the force of my experience of this vegetative zone as inspiring a senstivity to "the patient, eternal,  immovable immensity that surrounds [the human person] an undented vastness [evoking] a realm of infinity  [suggesting] the profound, elusive phenomenon of being and non-being..the bewildering phenomenon of the cosmic location of [the] human [person]".

Who are those who designated this place as a zone of esoteric power, possibly making it out of bounds to the general public outside initiates of Orisa esoterica? 

What did they observe in this subsumation of trees, as different from others, that led to that conclusion?

Why does my sense of the place as special, arrived at before learning of its particular sacred designation, converge with that of the cultural designators of this place?

To what degree are those people and I responding to something inherent to the space or to qualities attributed to it by ourselves,  triggered by what we see and sense there?

"All the gods of the world were trees and animals,  long, long before they entrusted their sancrosanct magnificence to a human figure", declares Susanne Wenger, the primary architect of the current recognition of the sacred identity of the Osun forest.

Can that be true? 

Nature is likely to be humanity's first encounter with the sacred.

        The Doorway of Transformation 

Something deep in me is touched by those explorations enabled  by the doorway into the forest. The structure of my consciousness is subtly reconfigured. 

Through reverberations  reaching deep into the self, blossoming  in moments of reflection, I am reshaped in ways beyond my full understanding.

Hence I refer to the doorway into this zone as the Doorway of Transformation and that entrace space as my ancestral door,  through which have passed figures representing some of the greatest influences in my quest for the meaning of cosmos, of the place of the human being in the magnificent journey that began when the universe came into being, exploding into existence in a cataclysm  the resonance of which continues to reverberate through the constellation of matter and energy, of principles of order and dynamism thereby generated.

Through the inspirational effects of those spaces I reach greater clarity on my history.

My mind is both elevated and better enlightened about my life as shaped by my quest for understanding. 

I am guided about my efforts in trying to penetrate the infinitely unfolding mystery that is existence.

I therefore undergo an Esu initiation anytime I explore this section of the forest. I experience the transformations represented by Esu, the orisa or deity  associated with the  recreative possibilities of choices symbolized by the crossroads of existence, the orisa enabling connections between forms of being and modes of knowledge,  between humans and spirits,  between human intelligence and spiritual wisdom, and even, as a more radical view puts it, the orisa enabling consciousness of self as different from the world as well as awareness of connectivity with the world,  the orisa to whom is dedicated the shrine complex through which one passes to the network of groves.

 

Note

This essay is a work in progress by a writer whose primary communication medium is social media. 

The further development of the essay requires a social media platform with more robust essay writing capacities than Gmail and Facebook the easiest to use on a phone, where the essay is being composed.

This richer social media system would be LinkedIn which supports rich image integration into the body of the essay beyond the few images allowed into a Google group. 

Facebook enables more images but they can't be integrated into the body of the essay since Facebook Notes were scrapped, leaving only Facebook updates and image albums as the publishing media there.

References and Inspirations

  Inspirations

The presentation of the  motif of the ancestral entranceway  in the opening paragraph of the main body of the essay adapts Irish poet W.B. Yeats in his "Dialogue Between Self and Soul".

The inspirational sequence of names in that first paragraph are not all explicitly reflected in the essay, some of them inspiring sections of the piece without being mentioned. 

I might include reference to them through the expanded image integration of the second edition of the essay.

   References 

Wole Soyinka,  Myth, Literature and the African World.

Bruce Onobrakpeya,  Akporode, Onobrak Arts Centre,  Agbarha-Otor.

Rowland Abiodun, Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art.

Babatunde Lawal, " Aworan: Representing the Self and its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art".

Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy.

Abhinavagupta, The Tantraloka, Light on the Tantras. English translation by Mark Dyczkowski.

Hotter and Bruckman, Adunni: A Portrait of Susanne Wenger.

Awo Faolokun Fatumnbi, Esu-Elegba: Ifa and the Divine Messenger.

Henry Louis Gates Jr, The Signifying Monkey.

Ayodele Ogundipe, "Retention and Survival of Yoruba Traditional Religion in the Diaspora: Esu in Brazil and Benin Republic" in Ivie: Nigerian Journal of Arts and Culture, Vol.1.No.1, 1986.