The Osogbo Matrix and the Mystical Vision 3: Warriors of the Spirit: A Pilgrimage to Ground Zero

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

   The Osogbo Matrix and the Mystical 

                        Vision 3

              Warriors of the Spirit

         A Pilgrimage to Ground Zero

         

Selfie taken by my favourite tree in the Oro Grove in the Osun forest.

            Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju 

                          Compcros

Abstract

This essay explores the Osun Sacred Forest of Osogbo, Nigeria, as a site of pilgrimage,  interreligious encounter, and mystical reflection, exploring the tension between structured religion and immersive, primal spirituality.

Inspired by sculptures, natural forms, and personal encounters, the narrative explores how prayer emerges at the intersection of silence, memory, and sacred environment, dramatizing a tension between verbal expression and silent immersion, and how spiritual traditions intersect in sacred space.

The essay situates the Osun forest within Yoruba cosmology, where sculptural guardians, shrines, and living trees embody àse—the generative force of life.

At the same time, the forest opens into a wider spiritual conversation. Prayers voiced in the name of Jesus Christ, memories of Qur’anic imagery of divine light, and echoes of Buddhist contemplative texts converge with Yoruba ritual sensibilities. 

Through encounters with sculpture, rain, and light, the forest emerges as a site that exemplifies  the raw, "ground zero" of ancient sacred spaces, where the distinctions between faiths dissolve, revealing a universal, unnamed Ground of Existence that speaks directly to the seeker's soul.

 

Warriors and Seekers

"Warriors, warriors we call ourselves. Why are we called warriors?"

"We fight for splendid virtue, for high endeavor, for sublime wisdom, therefore we call ourselves warriors" -Aunguttara Nikaya,   Buddhist scripture.

 

 At the Threshold of Mystery

I returned to the Oro Grove in the Osun Forest in Osogbo after experiencing the tension between prayer as expression of ideas and prayer as silent immersion in sacred space, between speech and listening, an immersion in the galvanizing powers of what the ancients preserved as a space of mystery.

This return marked not merely a revisitation, but a deeper descent into the mysteries that had called me back.

At the threshold, I began by communing with the sculptural tableau guarding the entrance to this vegetative sanctuary.

I placed my hand on the broad shoulders of  the sculpture of the awo, the image of the Initiate of the Mysteries overlooking the sculptural complex, unmoving, yet symbolizing a companion for me, soliciting his presence on the journey I was embarking upon.

Looking closely at the various sculptures and wall designs in the tableau, I understood them better than before, each figure emerging from stone to speak its particular truth.

I observed that one of the figures,  holding its hands in the fist on fist symbolic gesture of Ogboni,  represented the Ogboni esoteric order, venerators of Earth as universal mother, whose grove is one of those reached beyond this shrine in the deeper forest, a mother possibly suggested by a figure holding in a tender embrace the other one demonstrating Ogboni symbolism.

I studied more closely  the wall designs as  opening pathways into esoteric associations; forms that spoke of lineages and invisible powers. 

Standing at the entrance leading to the network of groves beyond the artistic configurations, I saluted them before turning away from them to enter the path leading to the grove sequence. 

A Deeper Awakening

Why was I now engaging in ritual activity I had not demonstrated in my previous visits?

Perhaps I was becoming more sensitive. Perhaps Anigbajumo Ogun's example of entering these spaces as he chanted salutations and prayers to its invisible presences had touched me. 

Perhaps I was also moved by the example of the woman who swept some of the shrines in the area and who would call upon the spirits of the forest to bless me anytime I gave her money. 

Perhaps I was entering into deeper immersion in my pilgrimage, relating to the space more and more on its own terms, as a cosmos inhabited by compelling but mysterious powers, unseen but potent, drawing me to themselves through the force of the wonder they inspired, by the unique beauty of their visible environment, visibility yet  enfolding an invisible dimension which vibrated beyond its envelope to impinge on my sensibilities. 

An Unexpected Invocation: Prayer in the Name Most Intimate

As I entered the pathway into the forest, silent prayer began to flow from me. I prayed for a friend facing serious health challenges, a person whose work was central to my spiritual and philosophical explorations, a person who had laboured all his working life to clarify some of the values driving explorations of the kind I was engaged in.

A particular tree called to me in its majestic formations, its trunk bifurcated into large arcs entering the ground to root the mighty form.  I touched the tree in appreciation.

Prayer at Ground Zero: Christ in the Forest of Osun

In whose name did I pray?

Jesus Christ.

What has Jesus got to do with a forest dedicated to the goddess Osun, a central figure in Yoruba cosmology?

Why did my spontaneous prayers flow out in terms of a spirituality that is most native to me, in terms of which I grew up, which I am most informed about its beliefs and history, comprising a body of believers to whom I have belonged most intensely in fellowship with?

In entering into this secluded forest path, surrounded by awesome natural forms recalling creation in its naked state, its raw power largely untamed by human hands,  I had entered an existential ground zero, where what is deepest in the self comes to the surface. 

The utmost embodiment of the idea of the creator of the universe as a universal parent, guide and healer known to me is the man of Galilee, so my mind spontaneously called to him.

It called to him across the chasm of the demonization of sacred spaces such as the forest that was drawing profound responses from me.

It called to him across the vilification of such spaces by those of his followers who saw his message as absolute and all other insights as mistaken at best, demonic at worst, spirituality like that of the Osun forest having suffered greatly from such exclusiveness.

At ground zero, however, all considerations of anyone possessing absolute truth are meaningless. All that is valid is T.S. Eliot's summation " You are here only to kneel where prayer has been valid ", in a space made holy through processes unknown yo you or your fellow humans, who are yet compelled to recognize a glory within the space, hence declaring it sacred.

Companions in the Sacred Quest

The man of Galiliee thereby became my companion as I walked within this magnificent mystery, a fellow traveler in realms of the sacred, a companion distant in time and space but present as I enacted, in my own way, the quest towards the heart of ultimate mystery that must have also moved him. 

Was he not known for withdrawal to lonely places, seeking the Ultimate, immersing himself in a mission that captured him body and soul in relation to that of whom his later follower Augustine declared "O Beauty, so ancient and so new, late have I loved You!".

Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, the sonorous  Latin title of a book  by another Jesus disciple, Bonaventura's Journey of the Mind in God, parallels this exploration of the Osun forest with Jesus as companion.

"In my work, I want to be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere" declared the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, invoking a version of the understanding of the Ultimate as pervading existence but subsisting beyond it, a vision that moved such thinkers as Bonaventura to understand nature as a portal to God.

I therefore entered the forest, not alone, but in the company of countless seekers who had sought as I did, immersing themselves in the Sublime visible to them, sensitizing them to that not encapsulated by the senses, called Osun by those who associate the forest with the goddess; called various names by the diverse processions of humanity as they testify to nature's mysteriously uplifting power.

Light Upon Light: Immersion: Rain, Light, and the Unnameable Ground

Entering the Oro Grove, resting against my favourite tree, the rain that had been presaged by the darkening of the afternoon light began to fall, immersing me further in the elements.

In this triumphant drenching by what John Mbiti describes as the sensitivity in African thought to the falling of rain as evoking infinity, the cycle of perpetual recurrence represented by the life sustaining fluid, nourishing the trees and other plants around me as they glistened with the cleansing by the descending liquid, the dew falling to Earth at the beginning of the world enabling existence and unity amongst its creatures, as described in the Yoruba poem "Ayajo Asuwada", prayer flowed once more, prayer for myself in relation to perplexities and yearnings representing going beyond the horizon of my current existence to roads opening up into brilliant new beginnings, prayer not to any name but to the Unnameable Ground of Existence described as dwelling within each person,  in the cosmos and beyond it,  the entire space vibrating with "àse", the life force issuing from the creator of the universe and suffusing all things, as understood in Yoruba thought.

Light dazzled from gaps in the forest canopy as the rain withdrew. Light upon light.  A lamp hid in a rock, lit by an oil neither of the East nor of the West, the light a glittering star, the light of the creator of the universe. Allah is light, light upon light, so may the Koranic lines be paraphrased, evoking the pervasive, inscrutable illumination of the Creator.

The Congregation of Masters

Timehin, the hunter described as encountering Osun at the location that eventually became the Osogbo community, Muhammed's encounter with an angel while praying in solitude, Jesus' withdrawals to lonely places to confront his mission and his God, was I not entering into the world of these masters, "I, even I", as the Italian poet Dante describes his visualization of himself in the company of the great masters of antiquity.

How may I learn from this congregation of masters, Muhammad, Jesus, the unnamed African seers who first understood the sanctity of such zones as the Osun forest, preserving them untouched across generations?

Thanksgiving: Exit and Integration

Exiting the grove, I held on to the doorway into the Esu scuptural complex and gave thanks, to all forms of existence in this place and to those who nurture it, making it freely accessible to people like me.

In this space where warriors of the spirit gather—fighting for splendid virtue, high endeavor, sublime wisdom—the boundaries between traditions dissolve into the deeper unity that calls all seekers home.