Orunmila and the Imposing, Naked Woman : Engaging With the Arcane Feminine in the Context of Yoruba Iyami Aje Spirituality

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

 

                                                                   Orunmila and the Imposing, Naked Woman

                              

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Engaging With the Arcane Feminine in the Context of Yoruba

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Iyami Aje Spirituality

                                                                       Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                        Compcros

                                                               Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

                                                  "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

                                                                                     Abstract

This essay develops one of my favourite images of the arcane feminine, an imposing naked woman encountered by a Yoruba orisa, the deity Orunmila, in the depths of a forest in the heart of night. The story conjoins three great motifs in human expression and thought, the picture of a naked woman and images of forest depth and density of darkness, this uncanny trinity reinforced by the commanding build of the female encountered in this unusual and potentially fearsome context. The fascinatingly bizarre situation is made even more potent by the fact that it has been created to enable access to hidden understanding of the workings of the world held by the strange figure whose power and awesome otherness, human and yet not fully assimilatable to the human, is indicated by the imperious force of her nakedness and the uniqueness of the location where she may be engaged with as well as the manner in which she may be invited to that spot.

The essay consists of the story and a commentary on it, accompanied by images from Yoruba art, most of them sculpture of the Ogboni esoteric order, centred in the veneration of Ile, Earth, this art being the most powerful Yoruba artistic form known to me in depicting women in terms of occult force, incidentally complementing the imposing naked woman Orunmila encounters in the story presented here.

The narrative is a slight adaptation of an ese ifa, a literary genre from the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge and divination, accessed on 16th July 2016 from a post of 8 January 2015 in the Regla de Osha/Ifa in the Midwest Facebook page.

                                                          

A bearded woman holding her breasts, an edan ogboni from Babatunde Lawal's "Ayagbo Ayato : New Perspectives in Edan Ogboni", a symbol of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order centred in the veneration of Ile, Earth, the primal mother. The beard indicates masculine force and occult power, the breasts nurturing potency and its associated spiritual strength. The concentric circles configured round her form may suggest eternity. The facial expression in relation to the quietly expressive gesture projects a contemplative poise constellated within varied but correlative evocations of power.

The Story

"The Great Importance...

Ogbe Otura speaks of the revelation of the secret of the world. Ifa says in this ese Ifa that one day Orunmila observed many strange things happening in the world. He saw some people happy while others were sad. Some people were wealthy while others were poor. Some people were loved while others were loathed. Some people had spouses while others were lonely. Curious to know why the situation was that way, he approached some of his students for Ifa consultation: would he be able to know the secret of the world? Would he be able to determine what caused those disparities in the world? Would he be able to use the knowledge, if acquired, to his advantage and those of his followers? What must he do for all these to happen?

The awo, the student of the mysteries at the foundation of existence, told Orunmila that he was about to find out something that had been baffling everybody for so long. He was assured that he would be able to discover it and that the knowledge would assist him in the understanding of his work.

He was then advised to offer a sacrifice using one mature goat. All the internal organs of the goat were to be used to perform rituals to the witches. He was advised to carry the ritual materials to the deepest part of a forest and stay within sight of the sacrifice until the following day.

He complied, hiding himself in the dense vegetation after placing the sacrifice on the forest floor.

At the deepest point of the night, at around two or three o'clock in the morning, Orunmila saw a very imposing, completely naked woman coming towards where he had placed the ritual materials. She got to the spot, sat down and began to eat the food. After consuming the food, she called on Orunmila to come out. He was shocked, taken aback that the woman was all along aware of his presence.

When he reached where she sat, she told him that women are the secrets of the world; the success or failure of any person rests on women; the love or hatred of any person rest on a woman; the happiness or sadness of any person rest on women; the honor or disgrace of any person rests on women. He was then advised never to underestimate any woman, no matter how small or unimportant the woman may seem to be.

Women are the most powerful force in the world, she said. What other entity can carry its offspring in its stomach, growing there for nine months, and bring it forth alive into the light of day?The flow of blood that testifies to this power links orun and aye, the world of primal origins and the Earth, within the lunar rhythms, she stated. The kneeling that delivers the child [ one source describes women as kneeling to give birth in traditional Yoruba culture] is as the configuration of the space that brings all into existence, she declared. The sky is void yet protects the Earth. The womb is the space where ultimate possibility emerges in the complexity of cells, of bone and flesh, of body and brain, of the two legged creature who speaks, whose languages shapes the world, she concluded.

Orunmila returned home with this knowledge and used it to his advantage. He became wealthy, successful, famous and honorable. He was so happy in his life. It is said that the meeting with the woman enabled for Orunmila the knowledge of Odu at the core of Ifa. He therefore gave praise to Olodumare, the creator of the cosmos and to his awo who had cast Ifa for him".

                                                                 

A horned woman, her hands assuming the Ogboni hand insignia, from "Ayagbo Ayato : New Perspectives in Edan Ogboni". A quet monumentality and sense of contained power is projected through the balance between the overall scale of the figure and the relationships between its various parts, in relation to the highlting of sections of particular zones in the form.

Commentary

    Narrative Dynamics

The central image of this story is compelling in its elemental force, its depiction of a particular woman in a manner that is both individualistic, evoking a person at a point in space and time, and meta-individualistic, suggesting a force that is more than individual. I get this impression from the image on account of the complementary associations generated by the environment in which the woman appears, the wild vegetative space in which such a secret and portentous encounter as described in the story takes place, a dense forest, as well as the time of the encounter, in the depths of night, night being the ultimate temporal zone the conception of which frees the imagination to engage with all kinds of wonders, often at the borders of the benign and the dangerous, of ideations and images representing the freedom of the mind from the constraints of comforting logic and the safety of what can be easily reconciled with conventional forms of order.

Within this spatio-temporal nexus, itself already reverberant with profoundly reconstructive and disturbing possibilities, is introduced the primal expression of material form on earth, human physicality, specifically female human physicality, which is even more resonant on account of its generative mysteries, a form represented in the story by the appearance of an imposingly built, naked woman in the forest.

The force of her nakedness, amplified by her forceful build and persona, transform the darkness of the dense forest from an arena of mysterious forms, in their essential nature alien to humanity in spite of the scope of human understanding of their material character, as may be made evident by visiting a forest at night to experience its mysterious majestic otherness, into a space engaged with by conceptions that bear some relationship with the efforts of human beings to make meaning out of the mysterious, as represented by the figure being described as appearing in a human form, her nakedness, however, removing her from the conventional space represented by human society.

She feasts on the sacrifice of uncooked animal entrails as an animal would do, suggesting that she embodies something of the primal, elemental character of nature represented by animals in their wildness, outside human domestication and beyond the transformation of nature for human ends represented by the act of cooking food for eating.

Orunmila, who has brought the sacrifice, is hidden in the forest but she is nevertheless aware of his presence and calls out to him to receive the answer to the query on behalf of which he has offered the sacrifice, further amplifying the suggestion that something far beyond conventional humanity and its circumscription within particular cognitive parameters is at play. Something powerful and wild, yet human but not human as humanity is conventionally understood. The erotic implications of her nakedness pulsing in the foreground of her depiction never come to the fore but are subsumed into the matrix of the alluring and the deadly, the compelling and even monstrous that she seems to embody by her form and actions, projecting this balance of incongruities in a manner even more forceful for its freedom from anything more overt than the quiet activity of eating, which all animal forms, human and non-human, engage in, the numinous in this context being evoked purely by the form of the one who eats, what she is eating and where and when she is eating.

   Relating the Story to Iyami Aje Yoruba Origin Female Centred Spirituality

This is the best evocation I know about a dimension of the feminine in Orisa cosmology of which Ifa is a part, an evocation of the feminine centred in a depiction of wild, unhuman power. This force is both dreaded and supplicated, described as both maternal and deadly. In its maternal aspect, going by interpretation of the literature I have read on it, it is known as Iyami Osoronga. Iyami, meaning My or Our Mothers. I am not sure of what ‘Osoronga’ means but it has to do with the arcane, I expect,a magical mystery. In its dreaded aspect it is known as aje.

Responding to the profound potential of this conception, two approaches have arisen to explore it , one primarily scholarly, the other both scholarly and practical. The scholarly is represented by efforts to study and document the beliefs about this concept, the most prominent writer in English in this field known to me being Teresa Washington, in Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts : Manifestations of Aje in Africana Literature and The Architects of Existence, along with Babatunde Lawal on Gelede and on Ogboni in “Ayagbo Ayato: New Perspectives in Edan Ogboni”, since Ile, Earth, a focus of Ogboni devotion, is central to all aspects of the feminine in Orisa cosmology as Lawal demonstrates in The Gelede Spectacle, along with and Henry and Margaret Drewal, as represented by their book Gelede. Other work of Gelede and Iyami and Aje exist, in English and possibly Yoruba and other languages in use by students and practitioners of the Orisa tradition.

The practical angle is represented by efforts to develop a spirituality in relation to these beliefs, as demonstrated most admirably by Mercedes Morgana Cordova and her work on Facebook in English and Spanish, promoting the Iyami Aje Temple of America and Iyami Aje Temple Worldwide.

Pierre Verger’s magnificent Ewe : The Uses of Plants in Yoruba Society, presents a simple, do-it-yourself of ritual, involving bathing with particular leaves while chanting an incantation which one may undertake in order to become a member of this group. It would be enlightening for someone to experiment with the ritual and give a public report.

Iyami Aje spirituality is very rich and ramifies in the integration of the feminine in every aspect of Orisa cosmology, from the role of Ile in the Ogboni esoteric order, to that of Odu in Ifa to the entire galaxy of feminine goddesses in that cosmology.

The wealth of conceptions as well as the creative and destructive powers ascribed to the Iyami Aje, which includes the ability to traverse space without mechanical instruments and to work with spiritual powers in nature, such as holding meetings in trees or forests, are ideas and practices that call out for further exploration than has been done so far, particularly in the geographical origin of these ideas, locations of vegetative density and pristine nature, replete with ancient trees, radiating immense presence, inspiring transformations of consciousness of the kind that underlie the belief in the ability to establish an inter-dimensional portal within or through which people can move between dimensions, one way of explaining the idea of meeting in the forest or on trees without being there physically.

These explorations would advance human well being, particularly if developed into a system that can be safely practiced and its mode of operation shared with the public as another unfolding of human potential, as Gerald Gardner did with the founding of Wicca in England, thereby rolling back centuries of denigration of ideas about witchcraft and of spiritualities that centralise the feminine and nature, world views that had been subjugated by Christianity.

I see witchcraft, Aje/Iyami, in the Yoruba context, the framework I am better informed about, as containing the seeds of a feminine centred spirituality, a possibility already developed by devotees outside Nigeria, such as Mercedes Bonila and the Iyami Aje Temple.

The points of conjunction between the Yoruba conceptions, the little I learnt in Benin, my personal experience of spiritual practise and the relationship of all these to various non- African spiritualities and philosophies, particularly modern Western witchcraft, convinces me that a coherent theory of witchcraft can be developed from the Yoruba/Benin contexts, enabling one map its positive and negative possibilities, providing suggestions on how to relate to both.

I refer to Benin beceause my experience with Benin nature spirituality has given me direct experience of the relationship referred to in Benin lore between the Benin azen, witchcraft concept, and nature, such as the idea that azen hold meetings in trees and use woods and forests as runways for travelling in spirit.I am integrating these ideas in developing a theory of witchcraft that is relevant for both Yoruba and Benin thought.

The human aje are also believed to originate from pre-terrestrial entities who came to earth with the deities or orisa, a goddess like status also suggested by the view of the Isekhure, the chief priest of Benin, when I discussed this subject with him.The ese ifa, literature of the Yoruba origin Ifa system, often depicts aje in very negative terms.I want to disentangle the various ideas on aje, and contribute to building a definitive spirituality sensitive to both the positive and negative possibilities of the concept.

                                        

Male and female edan, united by vows of secrecy suggested by the finger to the lips of the male figure, as children of the same mother symbolised by the woman holding a human figure, as the bareness of fashioning of their forms, in harmony with the evocative character of the chain that links them in their solemnity of features and gravity of stance, generates a sense of the quiet celebration of a mysterious reality.

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