Cosmological Intersections: Rowland Abiodun’s Convergence of Divergent Priesthoods at the Converegence of Dimensions : Yoruba Spiritualities, Philosophies and Arts Scholarship and Christian Science
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Cosmological Intersections
Rowland Abiodun’s Convergence of Divergent Priesthoods at the Intersection of Dimensions
Yoruba Spiritualities, Philosophies and Arts Scholarship
and
Christian Science
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
''Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge''
“Master, I have hidden myself well”, King Arthur declares to his spiritual teacher and political adviser Merlin, when they both find themselves flung across time and space, from the European Middle Ages to twentieth century England, Arthur, a king in his time and place of origination, concealing himself in the identity of a Metropolitan police officer, his much storied wife Guinevere, becoming his assistant in the police force, and Merlin, emerging as a tramp whose presence in a ditch Arthur is called upon to investigate in his duties as a policeman.
The sight of the tramp triggers his momentary recollection of who he and the destitute man really are, until the power of Merlin's spell which had engineered this displacement of space, time and identity again shuts the windows of memory and Merlin and himself both return to being conventional people in contemporary society, a shielding of self knowledge protecting Arthur, Guinevere and Merlin from discovery by Mordred, who, in various Arthurian narratives, visualised in this story as various possibilities of a variable historical encounter, wages a war in which he kills Arthur, an outcome Merlin was determined to prevent by transporting himself, the king's magician, and the king, Arthur, to the 21st century, further securing their concealment by drastically altering their social identities, even concealing from their own selves their knowledge of their own true natures, this awareness henceforth emerging only in moments of privileged insight.
Through concealment in time, in space, in ignorance of their own fundamental identities, ignorance enmeshed in a surface social persona, the king, Merlin and Guinivere are thereby protected from the roving eyes of Mordred as he searches time and space for his opponents, as depicted in Deepak Chopra's retelling of the Arthurian saga in The Return of Merlin, a retelling adapting the centuries old pan-European Arthurian narratives to theories of selfhood in relation to space and time likely derived from Chopra's grounding in Indian and other Asian and particularly Hindu thought worlds.
Along tangentially related lines, the scholar and priest of multiple spiritualities, Rowland Abiodun, has hidden himself well.
Master of ancient Yoruba spiritualities, priest and theologian of Christian Science thought and practice, keeping concealed his identity as devotee and adept in relation to forces understood in these spiritualities as uniting spirit and matter, he is known to most simply as a scholar of Yoruba and African art, his work vivified through profound sensitivity to it's spiritual and philosophical possibilities, but looking closer, may one not observe a remarkable depth of passion, an unusually acute sensitivity, a particularly piercing insight into penetralia and convolutions of thought inaccessible unless at the intersection of privileged insight and what is generally known, a convergence where rare awareness bubbles to the surface, fermenting in unique springs of cognitive metamorphoses?
The struggle to win legitimacy for traditional African thought within the globally dominant Western academy in terms of which most bodies of knowledge have had to legitimize themselves began before the emergence of sensitivity to the cultural, subjective and other framings and filterings of knowledge in the Western academy, the cognitive universe into which Abiodun was projected from his childhood immersion in Yoruba cognitive universes.
Thus, Abiodun, immersed as he was in intellectually unencapsulable essences of Yoruba spirituality and philosophy and their embodiments in art, alive, through intimate personal experience, gained through embodied encounter beyond the intellectual analyses and framings enabled by scholarship, to the convergence of Yoruba thought with other cognitive universes representing what Wole Soyinka, in another context, describes as the " essences and relationships of growing things and the insights of man into the secrets of the universe", conceals himself in the identity of an art history scholar in the traditional sense of distance between self and subject, between the scholar and their field of investigation.
The sonorities to which he had been exposed from the depths of Yoruba cognitive universes are carefully presented in terms of identifications in which the author's commitments to the metaphysical, epistemological and spiritual engagements where he and the adepts in Yoruba thought he had studied with converged in spirit could be discerned only through particularly careful, enquiring and empathetic reading.
How else, he must have thought, in the now distant depths of the 70s and 80s, when he laid the groundwork of his career, well before the intellectual currents represented by post-modernism, relativistic hermeneutics, auto-ethnography and epistemic decolonization, before the pervasive influence of Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer and Foucault, before such classics as David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous, scholarly reorientations of the Western tradition conjoining critical rigour and individual subjectivity, in which explorations such as John Mcall's studies of Igbo dibia, as in ''Making Peace with Agwu'', led to his initiation into that esoteric guild and his public account of the experience as part of the critical remit of his scholarship, could he, Abiodun, establish the intellectual integrity of Yoruba thought, it's rationalistic definability, it's ideational coordinates?
He kept at a distance it's liminal realities, though echoing them in his heroic efforts at defining and explicating his understanding of " àṣẹ", the idea of life force, pervasive yet individualistic, which he describes as centring Yoruba cosmology, an idea subtle, evasive and yet structurally unifying.
Going again and again through his writings, most of which I have read, comparing what I observe thereby, the unfolding assertions of insights into subtle, hidden realities, to aesthetic identities beyond, though grounded in the material world, comparing these with his account of his growth in Yoruba knowledge systems in the autobiographical preface of the forthcoming second edition of his Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art I have been privileged to see as the editor of that volume, correlating this with my own explorations of the intersections between various philosophies, spiritualities and arts, I conclude that something vital is missing.
Abiodun is careful to occlude his own subjectivity, at times projecting it as a description of almost objective reality, perhaps in the name of emphasizing critical rigour in his work. How, though, are his assertions of the reality of the concept of ''àṣẹ'' to be understood? Are they to be seen as the use of a scholarly convention of seeming to assert the reality of ideas one is exploring, in the name, perhaps of narrative vividness in one's writing?
How may such passages in his book be interpreted?:
When activated, àṣẹ can evoke the power and presence of òrìsà, humans, animals, and virtually everything that exists.
Àṣẹ inhabits and energizes the awe-inspiring space of the òrìsà, their altars (ojú-ìbo), objects, utensils, and offerings, including the air around them.
In summary, àṣẹ is the religio-aesthetic essence in which physical materials as visual oríkì and verbal oríkì support and empower each other to activate, actualize, and direct socio-political, religious, and artistic processes and experiences. Àṣẹ also fundamentally informs the Yoruba aesthetic.
Àṣẹ is affective; it triggers a powerful response even when its workings may not be fully and immediately comprehended. Egúngún performances, sculpture, costumes with their attachments of medicinal gourds, hand-held animal horns filled with oògùn, smells, oral performances, music, dance, movement, touch, and food – all are potentially oríkì that can and often do imbue sound, space, and matter with àṣẹ, the energy that restructures existence, transforms and controls the physical and the metaphysical worlds.
A strategic philosophical position is being asserted here. The author, however, does not elaborate on his position. He does not explain why he gives credence to this idea. Has he experienced the phenomenon he describes? If so, how did he arrive at the movement from encounter with the phenomenon in the localisations represented by its activation or its presence in artistic forms and performances and the conception of its cosmic character?
There is a need for greater boldness among post-classical, what some call modern, African thinkers, going by my admittedly quite limited exposure to these thinkers across various disciplines. The foundations of thought, the most seminal insights of various disciplines, come from bold summations on the nature of reality.
What is understood as àṣẹ in Yoruba thought and its relationship with similar ideas in the African Diaspora is similar to the German Geist which has been so powerfully developed by German thinkers, reaching an expositional climax in Hegel's handling of the subject, an effort empowered by Hegel's grounding in Christian theology and its philosophical correlates, orientations which he develops at the intersection of religious faith and intellectual rethinking.
Abiodun is also deeply committed to Christianity but is
careful to say little about that in public, except for his account of his cure
from life threatening leukemia through Christian Science principles at the
beginning of his scholarly career leading to his becoming a healer himself in
Joan Taylor's ''Reaching Across Continents''in the May 2008
edition of the Christian Science Journal.
The article, however, is dismissive of
traditional African spiritualities which constitute Abiodun's cultural
background, referring to Abiodun as ''Born into an African tradition where the mesmerism of
mystical beliefs and witchcraft run deep'' and stating of Abiodun after he had
emigrated to the US, ''as he tells it, although he left one form of mesmerism
(witchcraft) behind in his homeland, he says he's confronted a different form
of mesmerism here in North America... 'The huge emphasis on material means for healing'
''.
The Abiodun being referenced there, if any actual Abiodun
is truly being referenced, is certainly not the same Abiodun as the one
who published in 1989, '' Woman
in Yoruba Religious Images'', a revised
and updated version of which was published with the title “Hidden Power:
Òsun, the Seventeenth Odù” in Osun across the Waters, edited
by Joseph M. Murphy and Mei-Mei Sanford, 2001, and which respectfully references the understanding of
women in Yoruba thought in terms of ambiguous spiritual power correlative
with conceptions of witchcraft in the development of that concept in Western
thought, the Yoruba understanding of female centred power, aje,
embodying creative and destructive capacities, a conception understood
across a spectrum of interpretations from the misogynistic to the valoristic,
linking the goddess Osun and all human women, as summed up in the
expression ''Osun is aje as all women are aje''.
Clearly, a split exists between the two spiritual and philosophical universes Abiodun inhabits. It would be wonderful to read an effort to unify these universes in terms of an enquiry into the nature of reality. Àṣẹ is a primary quality in spiritual activity in Yoruba culture, an idea also employed by Christian spiritual churches of Youba origin such as Aladura. Abiodun is or has been a healer in Christian Science. What other conjunctions may exist between these spiritual cultures?