[ 2nd Expansion and Editing] Shrines and Shrine Masters: David Ebengho and the Inscrutable Wonder of his Cosmological Shrine : Part 2: Iroko Trees as Cosmological Coordinates
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Part 2
Iroko Trees as Cosmological Coordinates
2nd Expansion and Editing
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
This essay explores the aesthetic power and evocative force of the shrine installations and performance art of Ifa babalawo-adept in the esoteric knowledge of the Ifa system of knowledge and divination, multi-deity priest and shrine and performance artist David Ebengho.
It does this in terms of relationships between the referential range, variety of forms, technical accomplishment, structural rhythms and the spiritual, philosophical and cosmological significance of Ebengho's shrine installations and the performance art of his spiritual fellowship, the Arale Temple.
Using verbal text, complemented by pictures and videos taken by myself, by his acolyte Enoyogiere Iyen, the Facebook photos of his daughter Vanessa David, and other sources I could discover as the project proceeds, I examine Ebengho's shrines to various deities in his shrine complex at 2nd Cemetery Road, Benin-City, as well as ritual and artistic performances at the shrine, as an achievement of global proportions, its power evident even without understanding the theological context of his art, appreciation amplified by sensitivity to his distinctive development of expressive configurations within the artistic and religious traditions in which he works, in the context of his growth as a specialist of the sacred.
Contents
Inspirational Contexts
Descriptive and Interpretive Method
Cognitive and Contemplative Rationale
Structure of Essay Series
Essay Series Progression
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Ebengho's Shrine as a Cosmological Structure
Ebengho's Shrine as Dramatizing an Animistic, Architectural, Mythic, Artistic and Spiritual Cosmology
Ebengho's Shrine as Projecting Ifa Cosmology
Shrine Exterior
Iroko Trees as Cosmological Coordinates
Visual Presences
Image: Iroko Tree for Relating with Osanodoze in Front of Ebengho's Shrine
Image: Iroko Tree at the Back of the Shrine for Calling Upon the Powers of the Night
Between Totality and Immediacy
Image and Text: Arcane Tree and Arcane Feminine
Between the Macrocosm and the Microcosm
Journeying Across Being and Becoming
Cosmological Vision between Ifa Hermeneutics and Shrine Construction
Image and Text: Abstraction of Ebengho's Shrine Complex
Universal Resonance of Tree Symbolism
Image and Text: Eloquently Beautiful Mystery of Trees
From the Norse Yggdrasil to the Judaic Origin and Western Esoteric Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the Biblical Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Hindu Gita Tree of Life
Yggdrasil
The Kabbalistic Tree of Life
Expressive Range between Judaic and Western Esoteric Kabbalah
Some Strategic Texts in Kabbalah
The Biblical Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil
The Hindu Gita Tree of Life
The Ifa Tree of Existence and Knowledge
Between Cosmology and Epistemology, Between Structure and Knowledge
From Organic to Animistic Life
Intercultural Subsummations
The Need for Comprehensive Synthesis in Ifa
Complementary Binaries of Odu Ifa and the Tree Coordinates of Ebengho's Shrine
Image and Text: Emergence from the Matrixial Centre
Between Self and Cosmos in Eji Ogbe
Image and Text: Two Met in a Forest
Eji Ogbe as Cosmological Foundationality
Image and Text: Eji Ogbe Inscribed on an Opon Ifa, an Ifa Cosmological Symbol and Divination Tray
Image and Text: The Emergence of Totality: Eji Ogbe
Correlating Eji Ogbe with Cosmogonic Ese Ifa
Image and Text: The Mirror of Primal Possibility: Oyeku Meji
Cosmologies of Life Force and Cosmologies of Text
Cosmologies of Life Force
Cosmologies of Text
Religious and Philosophical Perspectives
From the Scientific to the Philosophical and Religious
Integration of Self and Shrine
Philosophical Questions and Mystical Consummations
Integration of Cosmologies of Life Force and Cosmologies of Text
in Ebengho's Shrine Complex in Relation to the Ifa Tree of Existence and Knowledge
Part 4
Eshu as Cosmological Mediator in the Ifa System of Knowledge and Divination
The Human Being as Spiritual and Cosmological Nexus
Ifa Divination
Ifa as Cosmological Integrator and Multi-Expressive System
Internal Networks in Ifa Divination
Reverberations Through the Unity of Beauty and Meaning
Inspirational Contexts
My response to Ebengho's art is inspired by my encounter with the power of his work as well as by its resonance with a global range of forms and ideas in spirituality and philosophy, a reverberation underlying my interpretation of the symbolic possibilities of his art. Kabbalistic ideas of cosmogenetic splintering and cosmic unification, Hindu yantra conceptions of relationships between microcosm and macrocosm, expressed in abstract forms mapping an entire cosmology, are among the structures feeding my appreciation of Ebengho's work, even when they are not explicitly mentioned.
At the background of my mental universe as stimulated by his creativity are also such such
sensitivities as Chinyere Okafor's concept of inscrutable wonder,
Immanuel Kant on the Sublime, Rudolph Otto on the numinous, Rowland Abiodun on
the Yoruba concept àṣẹ and Bruce Onobrakpeya on
magic emerging from the creative integration of material forms, ideas unifying
the fascinating and the mysterious, ideationally catalytic and yet
cognitively inexhaustible, the compelling and the ultimately
impenetrable, my impressions of Ebengho's art. Toyin Falola's ''Ritual
Archives'' provides a rich contextualisation in what may be described as theory
of shrines.
Descriptive and Interpretive Method
The essay is both a description and an interpretation of Ebengho’s shrine. It is descriptive in presenting both visual images and verbal descriptions of the shrine as well as accounts of the significance of the shrine by Ebengho and his associates. It is interpretive in developing evocative possibilities of the shrine built upon those foundational terms of reference but going beyond them.
I approach the project as a work of
scholarship and of practical spiritual action, moving between scholarship and
spiritual activity. It is an effort of ethnographic enquiry and of
artistic interpretation exploring the aesthetic, philosophical and spiritual
significance of the shrine. It is also a template I employ as part of my own
effort to understand the meaning of existence in theoretical and practical
terms. Along with studying practices and the ideas associated with them,
I suggest how these ideas and practices could be further
explored through meditation, contemplative initiatives implicitly and
explicitly feeding the project. Ebengho’s shrine is thus presented
as both a subject of intellectual study and an inspiration
for contemplative action.
Cognitive and Contemplative Rationale
What could be the purpose of such reflections?
Cognitive recreation, pleasure from reflecting on various ways in which
people conceive reality, trying to penetrate into aspects of existence beyond
definitive human knowledge?
Curiosity, eagerness to see how homo sapiens exercises the cognitive powers
that makes it a unique kind of animal, reflecting on self and cosmos, seeing
them in terms of each other?
Cognitive hunger, human thought trying to expand the boundaries of its possibilities, mobilizing the entire range of its creative abilities, from imagination to intellect, in imagery, narrative and conceptualization, provoking questions about relationships between the unknown and the unknowable?
Philosophical reflection, trying to understand for oneself what is real as opposed to what is purely speculative or imagined, within varieties of reality, between the subjective, the objective and their intertwining?
Mystical yearning, compelled by the need to penetrate beyond imagination
and intellect, beyond myth and science, into depths of possibility imaged by
myth, studied but inadequately grasped by science, celebrated by spirituality, dramatised in the arts,
analyzed by philosophy but which have to be explored in ways intimate to each
person, piercing into ultimate realities of which much is attested but beyond
definitive confirmation?
All these possibilities are explored, in this context, through African systems of
knowledge, which are relatively new to being studied in terms of written text,
with the achievement of Ebengho and his temple, wonderful as it, is
unreferenced by anyone, to the best of my knowledge.
Structure of Essay Series
Part 1 of this essay is ''Shrines and Shrine Masters: Chief Dr. D. O. Ebengho and the Inscrutable Wonder of his Cosmological Shrine : Part 1''.
Part 2 of the essay is ''Shrines and Shrine Masters: Chief Dr.
D. O. Ebengho and the Inscrutable Wonder of his Cosmological Shrine: Part 2: Iroko Trees as Cosmological
Coordinates''.
The first expanded version of part 2 is ''[
Expanded and Edited] Shrines and Shrine Masters: Chief Dr.
D. O. Ebengho and the Inscrutable Wonder of his Cosmological Shrine: Part 2: Iroko Trees as Cosmological
Coordinates''.
This is a further expanded version of part 2,
on the iroko trees in Ebengho's shrine as cosmological
coordinates. It takes further the correlations between the iroko trees shaping
Ebengho's shrine and tree symbolism in various cultures. It also further
develops the associative possibilities of the shrine in terms of Ifa symbolism,
represented by what I name the Ifa Tree of Existence and Knowledge, in relation
to the odu ifa, the primary organizational forms of Ifa, all these expansions
conducted through the complementarity of text and images. All
pictures of the shrine in this part of the essay were taken by myself in early
November 2022.
Essay Series Progression
This essay is part of a series describing my exploration of the aesthetic, philosophical and spiritual significance of vegetative spaces in Benin-City and Ile-Ife in visits to those cities running from 5th October 2022 to 9th November 2022, and thus also presents images from findings on sacred trees and groves in Benin, suggesting aspects of the environmental and theological framework of Ebengho's work.
The
essay continues from ''Ọkha, Ikhinmwin and
Iroko: Intersections Between Beliefs in the Spirituality of Trees and in
Witchcraft in Benin Thought: Realities, Questions, Prospects'', parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, where I first
present my observations of Ebengho's shrine in part 3.
It also builds upon my very brief photo essays on the priest/artist and
his shrine on Facebook, ''Seeking the Sacred in Benin-City:
Shrines and Shrine Masters: Chief Dr D O Ebengho and the Mammy Water Section of
his Richly Complex and Intricately Harmonious Shrine, a Powerful Artistic
Assemblage Developed Over a Lifetime'', ''Mystic Trees in Benin-City: Iroko and
the Powers of the Night'' and the Facebook photo and video
album ''Magnificent Shrine and Fellowship of
Chief Ebengho in Benin-City''.
I provide a brief but visually and ideationally rich overview of Ebengho's shrine, in relation to the shrine art of Bruce Onobrakpeya, in ''Shrines and Shrine Masters: D.O. Ebengho and Bruce Onobrakpeya: Brief Comparative Photo Essay and Research Funding Quest'', parts 1, 2 , 3, 4, 5 and 6.
The abstract and list of
contents of this essay series evolve into greater detail as the series
progresses through understanding gained while in the process of
composition. New sections may be added to the list of contents and
subsequently published even after the series has supposedly moved past
those sections. The numbering of sections in the list of contents might also
not correspond with that of the titles of the sections of the essays on account
of such changes. As with this essay, for example, ''Iroko Trees as Cosmological
Coordinates'', which is titled part 2 for ready correlation with the earlier
versions of the essay but which has been moved to part 3 in the list of
contents.
Dedication
This essay is dedicated to the Ezomo of Benin,
Chief James Okponmwense, without whose explicit
recommendation I might never have learnt of Ebengho and his shrine,
on account of its location on a nondescript street, 2nd Cemetery Road, off
Ehaekpen Street, though only five minutes from my hotel in Benin when
I visited. Ebengho and his shrine also do not have a visibility near that
of Osemwegie Ebohon, a Benin priest established for decades as a nationally and
internationally resonant voice for classical Benin spirituality, his shrine
also rich in artistic forms and sacred trees, offering a contrastive but
complementary orientation to Ebengho's own style of spiritual practice, public
presence and shrine construction. The essay is aso dedicated to
Ebengho and his compatriots, who have been so helpful, even after I left Benin.
Acknowledgements
I thank my fellow travellers in the Benin expedition, Jane Ineritei, imaginative companion, from her Port Harcourt base, on the journey to Benin, Honourable Benjamin Omuemu, the librarian of the palace of the Oba of Benin, unfailingly informative in his love for Benin civilization, Osaigbovo Juliana, a plant seeking the life giving sunlight of traditional Benin sacred culture, companion on my quests in Benin and Mr. Jackson Agbonifi, insightful and informative on the faith of his ancestors, and donors and clients who made the trip possible.
Ebengho's shrine complex may be understood in terms of a cosmological structure even though he did not describe it explicitly to me in that way. This understanding is reinforced by his description of the relationship of his spiritual practice to the ultimate reality and transcendental, superordinate moral values embodied by Osanodoze, a Benin name for the creator and sustainer of the universe. Such an account could suggest the integration of the scope of the deities his shrine represents and of his spiritual practices within the embrace of the cosmological unity of the creator and sustainer of the cosmos.
''I maintain these shrines at no cost to their owners, as a duty to Osandoze, the creator of the universe,'' Ebengho's words on the shrines to Orunmila, the deity of ultimate wisdom at the centre of the Ifa system of knowledge and divination, shrines seen here behind and beside Ebengho as he sits in the open space fronting his shrine complex. His divination instruments, the opele, for consulting the wisdom of Orunmila, are visible under the red cloth on top of the white table backing the shrine to Mami Wata, feminine deity of waters and wealth.
I discuss the artistry and symbolism of these sections of the shrine in part 2 of ''Shrines and Shrine Masters: D.O. Ebengho and Bruce Onobrakpeya: Brief Comparative Photo Essay and Research Funding Quest''.
Ebengho's Shrine Complex as Dramatizing an Animistic, Architectural, Mythic, Artistic and Spiritual Cosmology
A cosmology is understood in this essay as a depiction of the essence, structure and dynamism of the cosmos. Ebengho's shrine complex may be interpreted in terms of an animistic, architectural, mythic, artistic and spiritual cosmology. This is dramatised by the symbolic values of various shrines in his shrine complex, their interrelationship as a network of mutually referential structures, the symbolism of the spaces they occupy and of the relationships between the shrines and the spaces they inhabit.
In this cosmology, the organic, inanimate forms represented by trees, the physical structure of the space housing the shrine complex, the evocative force of the artistic constructs in terms of which the shrines are composed, the deity concepts the shrines evoke, the activities taking place within the shrine formation and the people engaged in these activities, may all be understood as coming together to suggest ideas about cosmic structure and dynamism and the role of the human being within this scheme.
This cohesion of physical forms and human activities may be interpreted as evoking ideas of ultimate origination, of cosmic multiplicity and dynamism, of unity in diversity. These could be further perceived as emerging within a creative matrix in which the human being participates as co-creator, as devotee of deity and creator of deity forms, thereby generating interpersonal relations between visible and invisible human people and visible and invisible non-human beings, as these categories of being are understood within this spiritual cosmology, dramatizing an understanding of the cosmos as alive with meaning and mobile with diverse sentient agencies, meaning and sentience complementing the material forms and natural laws of the cosmos in shaping a holistic universe.
Ebengho's Shrine as Projecting Ifa Cosmology
The possibility of interpreting Ebengho's shrine in terms of a cosmographic system is also strengthened by the correlation of the shrine with Ifa cosmology by Chief Obaseki, to whom Ebengho introduced me to help respond to my questions, Obaseki being a better English speaker than himself, in contrast to the Benin language in which they are both proficient while I am not, being limited to English in communicating with them.
Obaseki describes Ebengho as a babalawo, an adept in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa, a system of interpretation of reality centred in divination and grounded in Yoruba cosmology, but also used in Benin. Obaseki sees Ebengho’s shrine as expressing the cosmology of Ifa, a perspective interpretable in terms of the unification of Yoruba and Benin cosmologies the shrine demonstrates, an exemplar of Benin cosmology as the convergence of both thought systems, a cosmology that includes deities it shares with Yoruba thought and those it does not share with it, as well as its own larger structure of ideas making up the facets of the cosmologies and philosophies developed in Benin.
Iroko Tree for Relating with Osanodoze in Front of Ebengho's Shrine
Iroko Tree at the Back of the Shrine for Calling Upon the Powers of the Night
The iroko tree at the back of the shrine, on the other hand, is partly covered in the dramatic colours of a stark red fabric enveloping the top section of a brilliant white cloth, the central symbolic colour binary in Benin culture, evident in such surfaces as clothing and architecture. The dramatic force of this colour juxtaposition is amplified by the brilliant red of blood running on the white of the cloth, the blood of animal sacrifices, contrasting with the more benign ritual context and consequent appearance of the iroko tree in front of the shrine, used in entreating the attention of Osanodoze, the creator of the universe.
The more dramatic appearance of the tree employed for supplicating the Powers of the Night, contrasting with the milder character of the iroko in front of the shrine, dedicated to engagement with the creator of the cosmos, thereby demonstrates a stronger visual identity generated by the starkly contrastive primary colours of the fabrics with which the tree is covered, colours highlighted by the red of blood vividly colouring the pure white of the cloth in stark contrast.
Between Totality and Immediacy
The richer animation of character of this tree may perhaps suggest a greater immediacy of action in relation to the vicissitudes of human existence represented by the Powers of the Night, in contrast with the cosmic breadth of the identity and activity of Osanodoze, the creator of the universe.
Demonstrating the immediacies of human life, in contrast with, though subsumed by the overarching plenitude of Osanodoze, are the sometimes puzzling realities dramatized by suffering, striving, the gap between aspiration and fulfillment, those issues beyond human control or human predictive capacity, yearnings and perplexities in relation to which the human being has called upon a vast network of unseen powers across time and space to help close the gap between desire and fulfillment, expectation and reality, provide succor in pain, guidance in uncertainty, an orientation pictured by the matrix of spiritual powers dramatized by Ebengho’s shrine, from non-human deities to the continuum between the non-human and the human, the human embodiment of spiritual power characterized as the Powers of the Night, the latter being figures possibly identical with the Benin notion of ''azen,'' translated into English as ''witches'', enigmatic forces inspiring wariness and hope, correlative with both creation and destruction.
The raw realities of existence, the tension between pain and fulfillment, the cry of the slaughtered animal and the smile of the human being whose fortunes the sacrifice of the animal is meant to enable, a paradoxical convergence coming together in the enigmatic potencies represented by the Powers of the Night the iroko tree and its animal sacrifices are meant to call upon and satisfy, dramatize symmetries of discordance, evoking the agonizing tensions of existence, in which life and death, in their various forms, exist in a symbiotic unity.
These are possibilities which may be seen as suggested by the visual potency of this tree, hidden from public view at the back of the shrine as befits an agent of converse with powers perceived as existing in the shadows of reality, powers, which, for most, are more speculative than encountered, more rumored than confirmed, inspiring circumspection rather than the bold embrace enjoyed by belief in the creator of the universe evoked by the uncomplicated emblems of fulfillment represented by the sweet drinks of the iroko at the front of the shrine, dramatizing the wellspring of existence to which many aspire as the summation of life's possibilities.
Ebengho's shrine, therefore, is fronted by a projection of ultimate possibility, an iroko tree dedicated to the creator and sustainer of the cosmos, a tree complemented by the one at the back, expressing the dynamism of the Powers of the Night, occult potencies vital for the raveling and unravelling of the details of life's challenges and opportunities.
Arcane Tree and Arcane Feminine
as
Visualized by Nigerian-US artist Victor Ekpuk
Feminine, avian, arboreal, magical.
Women, birds, trees, magic.
An arcane complex, an unusual woman within an arcane tree,
A perspective on what might be the Powers of the Night as understood by Ebengho:
"Azen
are the Benin equivalent of Yoruba Iyami, what Europeans came and told
us are witches. These are women (with some men) who have awakened their astral
energy and know how to use it.
In Benin culture its usually matrilineal, though some covens allow men who are born of members to join, and some allow men married to members to join. Most Benin covens are within families and passed from generation to generation, with the matriarch of the family serving as head. There are other types of covens too, rogue ones, as well as those predominantly male, like Oso Epitan.
I know all this because my ex, who introduced me to this world, felt she could open up, what with my being a spiritual student. Her mom of blessed memory headed her own coven, now it’s her aunt. As the next eldest female, she is set to take over one day. They meet non- physically at physical places, usually a tree in their leader's compound or some other private facility. You could pass by the tree and not notice anything, unless your sixth sense is active.
They assume whatever shape they desire in those meetings. Not only witches but any advanced astral traveller can change the shape and form of their astral body to any person, object or animal they desire, and manifest as such physically. There's a science to it. Even advanced Rosicrucians can do it, talk less of witches. It's not the physical body they are changing, but their astral one when outside the physical body.
From what I saw, they have energy fields in those trees, where they store and draw their combined astral energies. The head of the coven is in charge of this egregore. An egregore is the consciousness or spirit force of a group. A group of people who meet regularly or work together for a purpose automatically create one in time. A coven functions like a spiritual cooperative group, instead of money, the resource they share is energy. I saw a couple of members request for energy to do certain things, which were deliberated on and approved. At this point my ex closed my vision, an opening that had enabled me see the azen in conclave in the first place.
At the time we dated I was a student of Eckankar. I was learning lucid dreaming through their techniques. She and I used to discuss spiritual things, as a matter of fact we still do. At some point we practiced meeting astrally. Even now I still see her in dreams. Along the way she shared some information about herself and her family, because she knew I could be trusted. I was naturally curious to know more. So she arranged to take me along for a meeting one night and have me watch from a distance. That's how I had the experience. When she felt I had seen enough, she blocked my sight. Spirits can do that to each other, as I came to learn later. That allows for privacy in their world. If not, any spirit could spy on the activities of other spirits.
A lot of female practitioners at Olokun, Emotan, Aiyelala shrines and Ogboni in Benin are in one coven or the other. And they will share with you if you are a fellow spiritual practitioner and they like you. Benin is a very spiritual place. Their spirituality is not as popular as Yoruba spirituality, though they are similar due to their shared history. The Ifa system of knowledge is Iha in Benin, Orunmila, the founder, is Oronmila, Aje is Azen, and so on.
Benin people are not ashamed of their spirituality and do not conceal it. Even in Yorubaland, because of the actions and activities of the political, religious and traditional leadership, Isese, Yoruba traditional religion, is not as prominent as may be thought. But the full involvement and endorsement of Benin spirituality by the Oba of Benin and his chiefs means there is no stigma attached to being a Benin traditional worshipper, enhancing the prominence of the spirituality is prominent in Benin.
The concept of Aje or Azen is not unique to either Benin or Yoruba culture. I have recently come to understand that my people Ndi Igbo have women's societies, Umuada nwulu onwu, Igba Odu and Iyambo ( the female Ekpe adopted from the Efik). I am sure other tribes in Nigeria and Africa have similar groups.
One reason why Iyami is a popular topic is because of the globalization of Yoruba spirituality. Other native spiritualities with similar structures are still mostly restricted to the practice of indigenes, who are not interested in promoting their practice.
Witches can cause harm but they can also do lot of good. In fact they are not fully harnessing their knowledge base for community development. Like most African resources, their knowledge and abilities are geared towards their own progress and that of their families. That's what differentiate Africans from Westerners. The Westerners will use what they have for all, Blacks will use what they have for themselves and their people only."
By Chidi, a member of the Universal Ogboni Whatsapp group
Between the Macrocosm and the Microcosm
Both trees in Ebengho's shrine, in the symbolism of their locations, in relation to the different but complementary uses to which they are put, may therefore suggest the shrine as a microcosm of cosmic, terrestrial and human possibilities.
The iroko in front, in its dedication to supplication of the creator of the universe, may symbolize the generation of the multitudinous possibilities constituting the cosmos, possibilities dramatized by the individualities and synergistic unity represented by the various deities served by the meticulously constructed shrines constituting Ebengho's multi-roomed shrine complex, a wonderful assemblage most powerful in its visual force and aesthetic power, its union of selectivity of materials and arcane presence, an artistic installation of global quality, on a nondescript location in Benin-City, Second Cemetery Road, off Ehaekpen Street.
The dramatic force of the image of the Iroko of the Night, at the back of the shrine, is generated by its stark primary colours at the intersection of colour symbolism and the resonance of blood, in relation to the organic image of the tree in its far reaching associations as uniquely emblematizing vegetative nature.
This tree integrates some of the most powerful motifs known to humanity in terms of colours, nature and the life force of animals represented by blood, in constructing an aesthetic resonance, a marshalling of visual force in relation to natural form, evoking far reaching echoes in ancient symbolisms, in which varied luminosities project diverse associative possibilities operating at a level below ratiocination, below intellectual caging, but even more potent for being more subconscious than conscious.
Journeying Across Being and Becoming
The relationship between both trees, the Iroko of Osanodoze, in front of the shrine, and the Iroko of the Night, at the back, may be subsumed in terms of a journey from ultimacy to manifestation, from the quiet presence of the Iroko of Osanodoze to the multi-coloured and even disturbingly stark presence of the Iroko of the Night, as it may be called, a progression between the One and the Other in which the shrine constructs within the shrine complex the trees lead into and consummate become the Many, the multifarious possibilities of existence represented by the deities the shrines evoke, deities relating to the various aspects of human life that homo sapiens seeks understanding about and relationship with, reaching for help and guidance through identities only partly understood by their devotees.
Cosmological Vision between Ifa Hermeneutics and Shrine Construction
The aspiration to cosmological vision in its relationship to the specificities of existence, an orientation represented by the Ifa system of knowledge and divination embodied by Ebengho's calling as a babalawo, an adept in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa, may be seen as resonant in Ebengho's shrine complex, constituted by shrines to various deities and to the creator of the universe.
This cosmologizing and particularizing orientation is demonstrated by the shrine's explicit invocation of the presence of Osanodoze, the creator of the universe, in terms of an iroko tree in front of the shrine where supplication to the creator takes place.
It is also suggested by the scope of the diversity of deity shrines that come after the iroko in the shrine complex, like explosions from a primal matrix, as the deities are depicted as erupting from a primordial centre in Yoruba cosmology, an ''intense vibration'', ''resting in the sky like a swarm of bees'', yet a source of the creative cataclysm in which the One becomes the Many, multiple dynamisms radiating from a primal core, the human being henceforth taking forward the creative process initiated at cosmogenesis through, adapting Karen Barber, ''how man makes God in Orisa tradition'', this interpretive sequence drawing from ''Invocation of the Creator'' in Ulli Beier's edited African Poetry, 1966, Beier's interpretation of those poetic lines in The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger and Barber's ''How Man Makes God in West Africa: Yoruba Attitudes Towards the Orisa''.
This movement towards the complementation of comprehensiveness and particularity is also evoked by the presence, at the back of the shrine, of the iroko for calling upon the Powers of the Night, human figures at the intersection of the human and the divine, a subsummation of the arcane universe the shrine reflects, mysterious figures deeply implicated in the creative and destructive possibilities of human life.
Both trees may be imaginatively conjoined in evoking ideas of origination, manifestation and multiplicity, of diversity and consummation, suggesting a journey from the cosmic origins evoked by the tree associated with Osanodoze, in front of the shrine, through the variousness and ultimate unity of the ideas and different deities evoked by the shrine complex, to the convergence of human capability and spiritual power dramatized by the conception of the Powers of the Night embodied by the tree at the back of the shrine, further possibilities ultimately subsumed in Osanodoze as the ultimate source of origination and unity of diversity within cosmic wholeness.
Ebengho's Shrine as a Matrix of Pilgrimage
Such a progression suggests the potential of the shrine as a pilgrimage site, a place one may traverse physically or imaginatively. Each location in the complex, from the tree at the front of the shrine, to the empty performance and ritual space leading to the shrines in the shrine house, to the shrines themselves and to the tree at the back of the shrine house and the creative cacophony of shrine construction materials and shrine/s at that back, may thus be seen as an opportunity for reflection on the significance of that spot, evoking a journey of being and becoming at macrocosmic and microcosmic levels, in terms of cosmic emergence and progression and human and personal birth and development within this larger matrix.
Such a pilgrimage may be conducted physically or virtually. It can be done through a physical visit to the shrine. It may be carried out in viewing pictorial or film images of the shrine. It could be developed in terms of an imaginative visit to the shrine by visualizing it or through contemplating an abstraction of the shrine, an abstraction distilling values associated with various aspects of the shrine, as well as with the shrine complex as a whole.
Abstraction of Ebengho's Shrine Complex
The white circle of the Iroko of Osanodoze, outside the main circle, at the top, stands for the integration of all colours
in white light, a constellation visible when the light is passed through a
prism, an image suggesting cosmic totality in this context.
The constituents of this totality are symbolized by the deity shrines making up the shrine
complex, here represented by circles of different colours inside the main circle.
The black circle of the Iroko of the Night, outside the main circle, at the bottom, represents the absorption of
heat by a black surface, suggesting here the subsummation of the dynamism of cosmic
potential,
represented by the deities whose shrines make up the larger body of the shrine complex, after its emergence from the plenitude of
Osanodoze, a subsummation within a synthesis demonstrating by the convergence of humanity, spirit and deity dramatizing the tensions and progressions of existence.
Image design and construction by myself.
Universal Resonance of Tree Symbolism
The opening and consummating forms of the shrine, the complementary polarities represented by the iroko at the front and the one at the back, in their respective associations with Osanodoze, the creator of the universe and with the Powers of the Night, are correlative with a global spectrum of tree symbolism as evoking cosmic structure and dynamism and humanity's place within this continuum.
Eloquently Beautiful Mystery of Trees
as Depicted by
Nigerian Artist Ato Arinze
From the Norse Yggdrasil to the Judaic Origin and Western Esoteric Kabbalistic Tree of Life,
the Biblical Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Hindu Gita Tree
of Life
These conjunctive forms of tree symbolism range from the imagistic concreteness of the Norse Yggdrasil to the far reaching combination of abstraction and imagery of the Judaic origin and Western esoteric Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the Biblical Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Hindu Gita Tree of Life, all of which may be conjoined in what I describe as the Ifa Tree of Knowledge and Existence.
Yggdrasil
The roots of Yggdrasil, its trunk and branches, reach into or constitute various worlds. At one of its roots is the Well of Mimer, zone of unfathomable wisdom. At those roots are also the three Norns, female figures spinning threads constituting the web of human lives. Underlying the character of the tree as a zone of understanding of the nexus of realities, the god Odin sacrificed an eye which he dropped into Mimer and hung for days on the tree, both actions taken in quest of supernal insight and wisdom, manifest particularly in his discovery of the oracular symbolism of runes, as Daniel McCoy compellingly describes in ''Odin's Discovery of the Runes '' and Ralph Blum does The Book of Runes (1993, 31).
The Kabbalistic Tree of Life
The Kabbalistic Tree of Life is vivid in its union of abstract ideas and concrete imagery, represented in terms of the fusion of the organic image of a tree with the abstractions of number symbolism, in which the metaphoric roots of the universe are symbolised by the number 0 and its consummation in the material cosmos by 10.
The numbers between 0 and 10 constitute the movement of cosmic emergence from ultimate origination in an unknowable plenitude to the concentration of cosmic possibility in the material cosmos within which the human being seeks understanding of this totality from within his embodied existence.
The various branches of the tree, with its roots and apex, are represented by the sequence of numbers from 0 to 10. Each number in this sequence symbolizes a central quality of the creator of the universe. That quality is itself understood as the foundation of an aspect of the cosmos. The cosmos is thus seen as an expression of its creator, who, nevertheless, transcends that creation, as suggested by the evocative qualities of the number 0, standing for this creator.
The progression of numbers from 0 to 10 are linked to each other in a manner suggesting correlations between aspects of the universe as expressions of the nature of its creator. Each of these links is also represented by a number. This network maps the structure and dynamism of the cosmos, a totality also actualised in the human being as a microcosm of this ultimate system.
Expressive Range between Judaic and Western Esoteric Kabbalah
Abstraction in relation to visual images may be seen as characterizing the Western esoteric adaptations of Kabbalah. The Judaic sources of the tradition, however, may be understood as more varied in their expressive forms, those abstractions and imagistic dynamisms growing out of or in relation to powerful mythic narratives and a river of stories, both imagined and historical.
This is demonstrated, for example, by the paradigmatic Kabbalistic text the Zohar, stories and ideas shaped around the far reaching discussions of a group of wanderers, as evidenced in English by the twelve volume complete translation by Daniel Channan Matt and other scholars, elucidating Moses de Leon's authorial genius, argued by foundational Kabbala scholar Gershom Scholem as a more credible authorial reference than the almost mythic attribution of the text to Simeon Ben Yohai (1995, 156-204) ; the reworking of the primal Kabbalistic cosmology by Isaac Luria in terms of ideas of rupture in divine creativity; the adaptation of Lurianic Kabbalah by the narrative spirituality of Nahman of Bratslav, using stories as means of dramatising and relating with spiritual realities, as demonstrated, among the wealth of Bratslav scholarship, by Arnold Band's edited Nahman of Bratslav: The Tales, with Joseph Dan's preface exploring the relationship between mythic construction and personal history giving birth to Nahman's achievement, and the embodiment of the values of this tradition as a means of survival in the horrors of the Holocaust, as demonstrated in Yaffa Eliach's Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, narratively vivid and rich in editorial contextualisation of the religious springs and mythic frames of these first hand accounts of faith and survival.
Some Strategic Texts in Kabbalah
A classic reference for understanding the complex history of Kabbalah is Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, although Scholem's book predates Eliach's collection of Hasidic stories, the latter vital for demonstrating the ongoing adaptations of Kabbalah, highlighted by its relevance to issues of survival in such an extreme situation as the Holocaust, a context resonant with questions of ultimate as opposed to immediate values, divine justice and human suffering, correlations between good and evil, their universal and relative possibilities.
Scholem is also not adequate for understanding the developments of this tradition by Western esotericism. Israel Regardie's The Tree of Life: A Study in Magic is superb for its clarity and scope as an example of this adaptation. I am not informed on studies of the history of Kabbalah in Western esotericism although Robin Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft discusses this as an aspect of its subject.
A supreme text of Western esoteric Kabbalistic Tree of Life symbolism and its adaptation to ritual and contemplation, dramazing its integration of Hermetic, ancient Egyptian, alchemical, Rosicrucian and other cultural forms subsumed or constructed by Western esotericism, is Israel Regardie's edition of the controversially authored The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, published by Llewellyn in various editions, the 1989 6th edition being particularly rich in contextualising introductory text while the 2015 7th edition aims to make the the text more modern and acessible.
An excellent, succinctly powerful, poetic demonstration of Kabbalistic symbolism in the Western esoteric context is William Gray's The Office of the Holy Tree of Life. The varied possibilities of the Internet, though, remain primary for introductory guidance on such rich and complex subjects, online possibilities also useful for exploring contemporary developments of these traditions.
The Biblical Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil
These two climaxes of global tree of life symbolism, from the concrete to the abstract, are themselves correlative with the Biblical Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, evoking two major parameters of existence, life and its enablement of knowledge, knowledge of good and evil, complementary binaries vital for understanding existence. These imagistic summations of relationship between life and its expression in knowledge, represented by the Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, resonate with the cognitive thrust of the enablement of Odin's wisdom by Yggdrasil and the Well of Mimer at its roots, wisdom represented by the textual instruments, the oracular runes discovered in the well.
This relationship between life and knowledge is also demonstrated by the understanding, in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, of intelligence and wisdom as primary forms of expression of the source of existence. This focus on life in relation to cognitive capacity and understanding, suggests, perhaps, relationships between life and the sentience enabled by life, the ability to gain knowledge made possible by consciousness and the movement of knowledge beyond the particulars of existence in penetration to a unifying core represented by wisdom.
The Hindu Gita Tree of Life
This sequence of possibilities also resonates with the Tree of Life of the Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita, the Song of Splendour. Krishna, the creator and sustainer of the universe, as understood in this text, describes this tree as embodying himself as the union of spirit and matter:
In the vastness of my Nature I place the seed of all things to come; and from this union comes the birth of all things.
The tree everlasting, its roots above in the Highest, its branches below, enveloping the struggling souls, eternal fragments of the Supreme.
Its leaves, the sacred hymns, the Vedas, studying which the seeker is inspired to declare '' I go for refuge to that Eternal Spirit from whom the stream of creation came at the beginning.''
The tree in the material world, cut it down, so you may see the roots of the tree in the world of spirit.
That quote is a collage of lines from Juan Mascaro's translation (Penguin, 2003, 66, 70) and Ranchor Prime's (Barron's, 2003, 111), along with a last line by myself, distilling a subtle point in the translations for greater clarity, a collage of lines chosen to suggest the visual force and ideational reach of this image, at the cost of simplifying its complexity, which incidentally integrates elements evident in the Norse, Kabbalistic and Biblical tree images, using them in a manner representing the tree as suggesting the spiritual and material universes and the means of understanding their differences and correlations.
The Ifa Tree of Existence and Knowledge
This conjunctive network across Norse, Judaic, Western esoteric, Biblical and Hindu tree cosmologies further develops the associations of the twin iroko trees defining the spatial and associative coordinates of Ebengho's shine.
The conjunctions between existence and awareness suggested by these tree images may be subsumed within the more immediate associations of Ebengho's shrine represented by what may be named the Ifa Tree of Existence and Knowledge.
Between Cosmology and Epistemology, Between Structure and Knowledge
The Ifa Tree of Existence and Knowledge, in the associative value of its constitution by roots, trunk, branches and leaves, may suggest the organizational structure of Ifa, the cosmological associations of this structure and the hermeneutic implications of this complex as a means of exploring intersections between the cosmos and the human being represented by the challenges of living addressed in Ifa divination.
This tree may thus evoke ultimate reality and its manifestations, as well as the processes through which this cosmological structure and dynamism is apprehended by the human mind.This understanding may be seen as emerging in dialogue with the odu ifa, the organizing structures and active agents of Ifa, represented by the branches of the tree. The understanding thereby developed may be understood as represented by the leaves of the tree, the ese ifa, the literary forms in terms of which Ifa's knowledge is expressed, verbal expressions grouped in terms of particular odu ifa.
The Ifa Tree of Existence and Knowledge is my name for the palm tree of sixteen branches, massive as houses, spreading in many directions, under which the disciples of the deity Orunmila found him when they went seeking him in orun, the land of ultimate origins, after he had left the Earth, appealing to him to return.
Instead of returning to Earth, Orunmila, witness to creation, insightful on all possibilities of existence as the unfolding of those possibilities enfolded at the emergence of the cosmos, perceptive of the flow of the river of being and of how this river may be directed in particular circumstances, gave his disciples the nuts of the palm tree as replacement for his presence.
The symbolic configurations of the palm nuts when cast in the consecrated context of Ifa divination thereby became guides to Orunmila's wisdom and power as witness to creation, bridging dimensions between being and becoming, existence and change, actuality and potential, as this story may be retold from its rendition in Wande Abimbola's An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus.
The sixteen massive branches of the palm tree, projecting in various directions, may evoke the sixteen major odu ifa, the organizational categories of knowledge in Ifa, constituting a huge library of verbal art of unknown scope, known as ese ifa, composed over perhaps centuries, integrating perspectives on aspects of the cosmos and its totality in relation to human life and used as means of interpreting the voice of the oracle in Ifa divination.
From Organic to Animistic Life
The odu ifa are also known, in one view, as not only organizational forms, chapters of a vast literary archive, as Abimbola describes them in An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus, but also as living beings, a fragment of whose inconceivable scope is known to humanity, interpretive matrices enabling human knowledge even as these matrices themselves constitute sentient agents.
Abimbola describes them in Exposition as spirits who descended from the ultimacy that is orun, while Benin babalawo Joseph Ohomina depicts them as spirits whose origin we do not know, understanding only a small aspect of their significance, but who embody the names, the identities, of all possibilities of existence, from material forms to emotions, from the stars to human celebrations and conflicts, in a personal communication I present and discuss in ''Cosmological Permutations : Joseph Ohomina’s Ifa Philosophy and the Quest for the Unity of Being'', quoting him:
The Odu are the names of spirits whose origin we do not know. We understand only a small fraction of their significance.They are the power behind the efficacy of whatever we prepare. They are the names of all possibilities of existence. Abstract and concrete, actual and potential. Concrete forms such as rain, water, land, air and the stars, abstractions such as love and hate, situations such as celebrations and conflicts, all have their spiritual names in the various Odu.
Smith Olumide Akinwande Olanrewaju Akinsanmi presents a similar perspective most poignantly:
....how I wish I know
Ifa. How I wish to tell you that those dots, those numbers that you see in Odu
Ifa are not man made tools, they are seeds, they're souls like us, elder brothers
of Earth Man are they. They are remnants of our universe's ever beating
heart.
( A response on the thread of Olobe Yoyon's Facebook post ''On Mágùn...'' of Februrary 17, 2023)
The branches of the Ifa Tree of Knowledge and Existence may thus be seen as the odu ifa, the organizational categories of Ifa, themselves organized in terms of mathematical order, developed through relationships between binaries constituting a foundational sixteen odu, ultimately elaborated into a total of two hundred and fifty-six. The leaves of the Ifa Tree of Knowledge and Existence may be understood as the ese ifa, the stories and poetry in terms of which Ifa's knowledge is organised in literary form.
Susanne Wenger presents a related perspective:
The spiritual world of the Yoruba is a powerful, metaphysical-forest wilderness, vegetatively ferocious and of a scarcely conceivable variety. A turbulent order prevails, in which all life is closely intertwined with itself, maintains itself mutually, while with great intensity each part holds its ground.
If this jungle arcanum is metaphorically compared to a mighty, mansion like giant tree, with all its innumerable forms of animal and plant tenantry, Ifá would be neither root, trunk, branch, twig, leaf, flower nor fruit of this tree, but the unimaginably complex network of veins and channels that permeates it throughout...a meta-algebraic universe of equations that manifests itself in the poetic Ifá corpus of 4096 symbol-laden poems.. a translation of ...metaphysically rhythmic cadences into their physical dimension, a magnificent architecture of word-symbolisms, the word-cathedrals of Odù, Odù, the main structure of meaning of Ifa and of life, called Odù, after the goddess Odù'' ( Susanne Wenger and Gert Chesi, A Life with the Gods in their Yoruba Homeland, 1983, 74 and 76; I have slightly edited the sentence sequences for continuity).
Intercultural Subsummations
Ifa's literary range and numerical compressions and expansions may thus be understood in terms of what I have named the Ifa Tree of Existence and Knowledge. The Ifa Tree of Existence and Knowledge is interpretable as conjuncting values demonstrated by cosmic tree images across space and time. These include imagistic vividness of the kind demonstrated by the Norse Yggdrasil. It includes abstractions and visual imagery resonant with those demonstrated by the Hindu Gita Tree of Life and the Judaic and Western esoteric Kabbalistic Tree of Life. It also includes the confluence of these qualities with the narrative range represented by the Judaic Kabbalistic Tree of Life, even though Ifa's literary scope is of an unknown vastness.
The Kabbalistic form, however, benefits from centuries of reflection on its symbolic possibilities and value for religious practice, insights readily accessible through texts in various Jewish and Western languages, given the ethnic origins and geographical spread and consequent cultural diffusiveness of Kabbalah, while the Ifa equivalent of such an interpretive and practical scope, across West Africa and the African Diaspora, is only recently becoming evident in various print and digital texts, social media such as Facebook being a primary site for explorations of Ifa's possibilities.
The Need for Comprehensive Synthesis in Ifa
The range of interpretive possibilities developed in Ifa may be described as awaiting a comprehensive synthesis, although it seems a greater ideational synthesis may already have been achieved in other variants of the system to which Ifa belongs, such as the Dahomean Fa, as suggested by Paul Mercier's ''The Fon of Dahomey,'' in Daryll Forde's edited African Worlds (1970) and Nyornuwofia Agorsor's account of a similar system in Ghana, which I reference in "Performative, Visual and Lyric Spirituality: Space, Image, Interpretation: Nyornuwofia Agorsor, Efa Initiate, Speaks to Lekan Babalola's Ifa/Efa Shrine/Priest Image".
A holistic grasp of the achievements represented by various Ifa variants, similar in structure, from the Igbo Afa to the Benin Oguega to the Dahomean Fa, correlating them with other systems outside this complex with which they share similarities, such as the Chinese I Ching, taking account of various studies in the arts, philosophies and spiritualities of these systems, and the sciences, in relation to them, is priceless for an adequate actualization of the interpretive potential of Ifa, a great system from which glimmers of further possibilities emanate.
Complementary Binaries of Odu Ifa and the Tree Coordinates of Ebengho's Shrine
In contributing to developing such a comprehensive synthesis of Ifa's wide ranging achievements in its varied expressive forms, the binary structure of odu ifa may be correlated with the complementary trees fronting and concluding Ebengho's shrine. The tree in front could suggest cosmic unity, cosmos as unity of diverse potential, while that at the back could stand for the diversity of cosmos. This diversity could evoke the struggle to create cosmos out of chaos, or to find cosmos in chaos, seeing beyond the moral fragmentation, existential unpredictability, the coexistence of natural beneficence and natural disaster, human and spiritual good and evil, that characterises life in the world, suggesting the contradictions of existence represented by life and death dramatised by that tree as a site of animal sacrifice in the name of human empowerment.
Emergence from the Matrixial Centre
Between Self and Cosmos in Eji Ogbe
The roots of the self are the same as the roots of cosmos, ''the one and only Origun in orun from which each earthly ori branches'' as stated in the ese ifa, ''Ayajo Asuwada'', ori being the immortal essence of the self and Origun, a name for the ultimate creator in Yoruba thought, as originator of ori, as referenced in Akinsola Akiwowo's ''Towards a Sociology of Knowledge from an African Oral Poetry''.
Eji Ogbe as Cosmological Foundationality
This image of roots and essence, of relationships between primordial, originating identity and contingent identity, may be correlated with other ese ifa dramatizing cosmogonic dynamics. This conjunction may be further identified with the paradigmatic odu ifa, Ogbe, primary emblem of the binary structure of odu ifa, its vertically arranged units of four lines prefiguring its own multiplication into eight units of one line each, arranged in a vertical sequence of one line beside its counterpart, giving the odu Eji Ogbe, from which combination of eight vertical lines the remaining 255 odu ifa are developed in terms of variations of four columns of two or one vertical line facing each other.
Eji Ogbe Inscribed on an Opon Ifa, an Ifa Cosmological Symbol and Divination Tray
May such a structural progression not be interpreted in terms of the generation of multiplicity from basic components in all aspects of existence, as understood in various cultural forms, from scientific and mythic cosmologies to human biology, an interpretive possibility further reinforced by the associations of the binary structure of odu ifa, its possible correlations with such binaries as male and female, positive and negative, good and evil, nature and culture, among others?
The Emergence of Totality
Eji Ogbe
The paradigmatic authority of Eji Ogbe is evoked in the following powerfully suggestive lines, dramatizing various universes of reference, from nature and its indwelling spirits to the creator and sustainer of the universe:
The might of all rivers in the world is not to be compared with that of the sea;
the dignity of rivers which rise on a hill is not as that of the lagoon.
There is no Ifa that can be compared with Eji-ogbe;
To command is the privilege of a commander;
Eji-ogbe, you are the king of them all.
I asked for honours from the Lagoon, for he is greater than the River.
I received them, but I was not satisfied. I asked them at the hands of
Olokun Jeniade, the God of the sea and father of all rivers, but still I was not satisfied.
Who does not know that only the gifts of Olorun, the God of Heaven, are sufficient till the day of one’s death?
( From J. D. Clarke, ‘Ifa Divination’, JRAI 69, 1939: 248, quoted in Oral Literature in Africa, Ruth Finnegan, Open Book Publishers, 2012, 196)
Correlating Eji Ogbe with Cosmogonic Ese Ifa
Such a robustly evocative characterization of Eji Ogbe reinforces correlations of this primary odu ifa with other dramatizations of ultimate reality, of cosmogonic emergence and cosmic development, in ese ifa. These possibilities are conducive to reflection on the dramatization of ideas through mythic imagery, characterization and narrative, exploring the imaginative creativity of the ese ifa artists in terms of perspectives on the human condition and on existence in general, as dramatized through the literary forms they deploy.
The Mirror of Primal Possibility
Particularly powerful demonstrations of cosmogonic ese ifa are the selections organized and discussed in the first chapter of Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art and in ''Ayajo Asuwada'', translated and analyzed by Akinsola Akiwowo in ''Towards a Sociology of Knowledge from an African Oral Poetry'', both of which I compare in ''Manifestations at Cosmogenesis : The Three Awo Before Time, the Descent of Ọrọ and Asuwa and the Splitting of Oyigiyigi: Universal Implications of Three Yoruba Cosmogonic Narratives''; various renditions and analyses of the emergence of the various orisa or deities through the splitting of Orisanla, the primal orisa, as particularly memorably narrated and analyzed in Ulli Beier's The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger, as poetically explored by Wole Soyinka in his poem ''Idanre'', section VI and as examined by Niyi Osundare in ''Wole Soyinka and the Atunda Ideal: A Reading of Soyinka's Poetry'' ( Perspectives on Wole Soyinka, ed. Biodun Jeyifo, 2006) , as has also been done by other scholars; my two part study, expansion and discussion of the ese ifa I title ''Igbadu: Odu, the Venerable Old Woman Becomes a Calabash'', Part 1 ( forthcoming) and Part 2.
Visualizing the wellspring of possibility represented by Eji Ogbe, one may reflect on relationships between sentience, awareness, human expressive capacity and cosmic order, as well as ideas about divine power enabling and underlying the cosmos, as dramatized by the cosmogonic thrust of Abiodun's text; a person could engage conceptions of order as shaping nature and human society expressed in ''Ayajo Asuwada'' as addressed by Akiwowo; a reader could muse on mythic speculations about the emergence of cosmic plurality, in relation to ideas about relationships between deity concepts and human creativity, as suggested by the Orisanla mythos; the navigator through the intersection of myth and ideas could range over the constellation of cosmic and human possibility projected through the image of the central calabash surrounded by four calabashes, forms indicating space as container and enabler of possibilities, dramatized in ''Igbadu: Odu, the Venerable Old Woman Becomes a Calabash'', as presented, retold and analyzed by myself.
As the Divine Council was praying for the restoration of harmony in Orun, the World of Origins, Olodumare, the creator of the universe, neither male nor female, both male and female and yet more than both, stretched out their right hand and caught the open air. The divine one also stretched out their left hand and again caught the open air. The far seeing personage again stretched out their right hand and caught the prayers for harmony. Thereafter, the sublime one went outside with their clenched fists and planted the contents of both hands in the ground.
The next day, a plant grew on the spot where the one who spans reality planted the prayers caught in the air. It soon blossomed into a full blown plant which began to flower and to bear fruit. When the fruits were ripe for harvesting, they began to drop to the ground.
These fruits were kolanuts, used in African societies for purposes of hospitality and prayer.
(Slightly adapted by myself from “The Creation of the Kolanut” in Ifism.Vol.4.The Complete Works of Orunmila:The Odus of Iwori by Cromwell Osamaro Ibie,1993,1-6.)
Interpreting the symbolism of the kolanut in the cognate Igbo culture,Ogbonna Agu states:
…creation [ has to do with the ] dawn…the rising of the light of the sun from the darkness of night to reveal the majesty of created things: the rivers, the mountains, trees, forests, birds and other creatures of the land and sea.
... morning yet on creation day...
....[ represented by] the early morning kolanut invocation which the [Igbo] household elder uses to usher in the light of the new day.
…the Igbo would say that uwa welu awa-meaning that the world appeared suddenly [ an ambiguous statement] for it could also mean that the world is broken into pieces. But something has to be, before it can be broken.
In the early morning ritual, the kolanut is used to symbolise this concept of creation, for it has lobes which are broken. Thus, the operative word again is iwa- to break, from which one has uwa, the created world. By the day breaking, we mean that the light broke out of darkness.
This is poetically expressed in symbolic terms by the use of the kolanut. The kolanut has a natural division along which the lobes are held together. These divisions join in the centre to form an x-shaped mid-point which cracks open with the effect of the sun acting upon it. That is an indication of the way the light of day breaks off the pod of darkness of night for dawn to appear.
... before Chukwu rose in the sky, there was darkness which afterwards ushered in daylight. The correlative to this is the ritual act of kolanut breaking performed every morning as the sun begins to rise. After the invocation and religious speeches, the kolanut is ritually broken and offered to all assembled. Each takes his share, just as each individual gets his share of Chi or fortune, from the universal largess ( from the sun above)...
During this invocation, the sun, the light of day on creation day, when all created things were revealed before the eyes of men as the light of Chukwu illuminated them [ is called upon]. And the kolanut invocation is like a roll-call of all the various entities that make up the natural pantheon of Igbo cosmology [ dealing] mainly with the world of nature...testifying to the antiquity of the tradition.
...each new day comes as a gift from Chukwu...hence the kolanut entity Chukwu, is first invoked...Next come the various entities representing the various days of the Igbo week...in that order down to the earth goddess Ala, the goddesses of the seas and the rivers, the hills and mountains and so on, till the ancestors are finally called upon.
( From Ogbonna Agu's The Book of Dawn and Invocations: The Search for Philosophic Truth by an African Initiate, 1997, 11-13)
Pol Ndu's visualization of a quest for knowledge through an Igbo Afa divinatory ritual dramatizes the beauty of similar imagistic formations:
Here again, Igwekala
I bend low and whisper:
...
tell me, my true-god,
what holds back your hand?
...
Four rays meet:
in a circle;
and the circle, a spark
that breaks,
fluid-crawling furrows of the four lines,
into extra ripples
and extra cycles
Your silence speaks infinite light,
fathomless love and flowing pity,
invincible quantum of unhatched glory
...
the stainless brand
hall-marking eternity,
here.
( From "Afa ( Before Chukwu at Dusk)" in Isidore Okpewho's The Heritage of African Poetry, 1985, 73)
Kolanut Symbolism in Relation to Toyin Falola's Theory of Shrines
Toyin Falola sums up the implications of such an associative range in relation to the kolanut in terms of what may be named theory of shrines, incidentally clarifying the interpretive orientations vital to unravelling the evocative potential of such a sacred assemblage as Ebengho's shrine complex:
Objects speak and communicate without words.
Objects encode the characters of the being they represent…
The location of an archive may be characterized as an archive itself: the grove of a ritual tree is such a place, where the tree and its location constitute a library.
Above all, objects open a wide door to a large body of mythologies, stories, legends, and many sayings, short and long.
Ritual objects supply texts on the environment and open us to multiple worlds of charms, magic, and medicine.
Plants are part of our knowledge system. Such plants as [ the Yoruba] ewúro entangle our world with those of non-humans. In this entanglement facts and fiction become merged into both complex and simple ideas. Ayé (the world) and Ọ̀run (invisible world) [ in Yoruba cosmology] are united by these objects, in various ways. Kolanuts [ an African social and ritual food] may invoke the power of ancestors to bless the living, but it has always been a major trade item for centuries that united long distance traders, facilitating the creation of trading colonies as well as the spread of languages.
Ritual objects supply ideas on prayers and philosophy. Kolanut, for instance, has tremendous symbolic power, associated with peace, conflict mediation, and life sustenance. Kolanut generates a limitless number of prayers around rites of passage, politics, and social order. In non-secular spaces, kolanut generates a tremendous amount of data on perceptions of self and of the other; and it can be used to affirm convictions and affections.
(From "Ritual Archives'', The Toyin Falola Reader, 2018, 913-937. Apologies to the writer for quoting the sections from the essay in an order different from his).
Cosmologies of Life Force and Cosmologies of Text
The Biblical Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil may be seen as subsuming the Norse, Kabbalistic and Hindu Gita trees of life by conjoining the ideas of life and the capacity for knowledge enabled by life, values integrating the varied symbolism of those trees from diverse cultures. This correlation between life and knowledge may be further appreciated in terms of what may be described as cosmologies of life force and cosmologies of text.
Cosmologies of Life Force
Cosmologies of life force depict the cosmos as pervaded by life, a force emanating from the creator of the universe. John Mbiti describes classical African cosmologies, for example, as characterized by ''a force, power or energy permeating the whole universe. God is the Source and ultimate controller of this force ( African Religions and Philosophy, 1976, 16), an understanding of classical African cosmologies first foregrounded by Placide Tempels in Bantu Religion and later developed in relation to Yoruba thought by the pioneering work of Rowland Abiodun, later collected in his Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art.
A related idea is developed by French philosoper HAENRI bERGSON IN THE CONCEPT OF ELANIE VITALE
An earlier essay of mine ''Similarities between Conceptions of Cosmic Force in African and Chinese Philosophies and the Fiction of Philip Pullman and K.J.Parker'' sums up the multi-cultural range of these perspectives:
At the interface of metaphysics and epistemology, in which metaphysics is understood as the study of the characteristics that define being in and of itself and of the distinctive identities of forms of being, and epistemology is described as the exploration of the characteristics of and relationships between ways of arriving at knowledge, is an idea that unifies conceptions developed within African and Chinese thought, known as chi or qi in the latter, and the magical fantasy of English writer Philip Pullman, in the motif of Dust in his novelistic trilogy His Dark Materials and summed up in the Wikipedia article on Dust, and US author K.J.Parker’s novelistic The Fencer Trilogy. This conception can be described as that of a cosmic force correlating energy, matter and consciousness.
These conceptions, from different civilizations, originating in different periods of time, and expressed in terms of disciplines with different ontological presuppositions, such as the relationships between truth and fiction,between animate and inanimate forms of being, could be understood as a continuum along an incline formed by a related core of ideas.
Taken collectively, these various conceptions include the notion of a force that pervades the cosmos and is describable as imbuing various forms of matter, human, plant, animal, geological and aquatic, among others, with consciousness. It is used as a summative description of human possibility, in terms of the ability to create change as demonstrated in human cognitive capacity and action, from intellectual mentation to imagination and psychic perception. All these characteristics do not emerge in all the examples I have given. The notion of a cosmic force, however, unifies all of them.
Cosmologies of Text
Religious and Philosophical Perspectives
Cosmologies of text understand the cosmos as grounded in texts, ranging from single words, as in the Hindu OM, to entire alphabets, as with the Kabbalistic understanding of the Hebrew language ( Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism ) and Hindu Tantric interpretations of Sanskrit ( Andre Padoux, Vac: The Concept of the Word in Selected Hindu Tantras, 1990; Natalia Isaveya, From Early Vedanta to Kashmir Shaivism, 1995, secondary texts discussing such primary texts as Abhinavagupta's Parātrīśikā-Vivaraṇa: The Secret of Tantric Mysticism, trans. Jaideva Singh, 2011).
Also representative of cosmologies of text are Japanese Buddhist philosopher Kukai's conception of cosmos as sacred text ( Ryuchi Abe, The Weaving of Mantra: Kukai and the Construction of Esoteric Buddhist Discourse, 1999; detailed summary in ''Kūkai'', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2022), the Buddist ''The Whole Universe in a Sutra'' ( trans. by Luis Gomez in Religions of Asia in in Practice. ed. Donald Lopez, 2002), to sentient entities as names identifying all possibilities of existence, expressed in stories, as in Ohomina's understanding of the odu ifa.
From the Scientific to the Philosophical and Religious
Cosmologies of text are correlative with perspectives in contemporary philosophical and religious thought that see value in the idea of information as the foundation of reality, an orientation inspired by the stratetegic role of information in nature and human creativity. This is represented, for example, by the critical role of information carrying systems in biology, demonstrated particularly by DNA, through which biological information is transmitted across members of a species, shaping the distinctive character of that species, as well as individually marked expressions of that distinctive character. The fundamentality of information is also demonstrated in the transformations of individual human and social possibility enabled by the explosion of access to information created by technology, particularly Information Technology currently reaching its apex in human history so far in the Internet.
''[Information in science] connotes a cosmic principle of organization and order'', James Gleick, in The Information ( 2011, 9) thereby quotes Werner Lowenstein's The Touchstone of Life : Molecular Information, Cell Communication, and the Foundations of Life (1999, xvi). The biological foundations of Lowenstein's conclusions resonate with Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregerson's edited Information and the Nature of Reality ( 2014), which explores scientific and humanities perspectives, from biology, physics, information theory, philosophy and theology, on the question of what comprises the foundations of reality and its ultimate organizing principle, and the possibility of information as consituting these foundations and supreme syntheses.
Integration of Cosmologies of Life Force and Cosmologies of Text in Ebengho's Shrine Complex
in Relation to the Ifa Tree of Existence and Knowledge
Kabbalistic cosmology integrates both cosmologies of life force and cosmologies of texts. Cosmologies of life force and cosmologies of texts may also be represented by the iroko trees of Ebengho's shrine as these may be correlated with the Ifa Tree of Existence and Knowledge.
In being organic forms, those iroko trees are readily evocative of life and cosmologies defined in terms of life force. The life that animates the trees is an expression of the life force, àṣẹ, that animates the cosmos, in Yoruba cosmology, permeating all forms of being, enabling sentience and agency in even inanimate forms and in non-physical forms, such as the odu ifa, as may be deduced from Henry John Drewal, John Pemberton and Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, .
Life force enables consciousness, which in turn empowers awareness of self and environment, leading to the need for self expression, beginning with speech. As unified sequences of meaning, speech acts are forms of text, a character even more evident when they are organized into such elaborate sequences as in ese ifa, the literary expressions of odu ifa.
The odu ifa are described by Abimbola as non-physical sentient agents, spirits, and, by Ohomina, as spirits who are textual forms, names, identifying all possibilities of existence, a textual conception suggesting those cosmologies that understand texts as underlying or constituting the cosmos.
Ebengho's shrine complex, therefore, may be visualised as dramatising the cosmos as permeated by a web of life force emanating from the creator of the universe evoked by the iroko in front of the shrine, power energising the identities demonstrated by the deities the shrines symbolise and subsumed by the iroko at the back of the shrine representing the animation of spiritual power in the human being.
The entire continuum dramatises structures of knowledge, possibilities of understanding demonstrated by Ebengho's work as shrine artist and the evocative possibilities of this work, possibilities representing texts such as this one, inspired by the shrine complex.
The shrine complex and its inspirational potential embody Ebengho's unique creativity, its capacity to inspire creativity in others and the varied creativities thus unleashed. ''Power flows in many channels,'' Chinua Achebe sums up ike, the Igbo version of àṣẹ, a balance of universality and individuality summed up in the expression ''everyone and his own'' ( " The Igbo World and its Art").
These creativities, that of the shrine creator and of others who engage with the shrine, may be represented by texts, the quintessential human expressive form as thinker and expresser of thought, texts perceivable as the leaves growing on a tree of knowledge, a tree itself a compound of life and the capacity for knowledge it enables, the Ifa Tree of Existence and Knowledge.
Integration of Self and Shrine
''What matters most for the babalawo'', states babalawo Bamigbaye Sunday Onifade, whom I encountered in Lagos, ''is not the shrines of the babalawo, but what is in the adept themselves'', their integration of the spiritual currents of their calling, their sensitivity to the conjunctions of dimensions these shrines are meant to actualize, one might add.
Along similar lines, along with exploring Ebengho's shrine physically, imaginatively, or both, the enthusiast may imaginatively subsume within themselves the images through which the shrine complex may be distilled, such as the geometric contruct earlier presented and the Ifa Tree of Existence and Knowledge.
Withdrawn into oneself in contemplation, the roots of the tree may be seen as located in one's heart, imaginatively understood as the point of integration of emotion and intellect, the wellsprings of the self, the point at which the self touches its deepest possibilities, those possibilities understood in some spiritualities and philosophies as beyond mortality, beyond the limitations of space and time, the point where the individual ori touches the ''Origun in orun, from which each earthly ori branches'' adopting the language of ''Ayajo Asuwada'', ''a destination which is not restricted to the conditions and limits of this life but reaches into the infinite'', employing German philosopher Immanuel Kant's summation on the ultimate posibilities of the self in his Critique of Practical Reason.
The trunk of the tree becomes one's own trunk, the point of integration of upper and lower body, the branches one's arms, the leaves, one's thoughts. One becomes both the tree and the embodiment of wisom seated at its roots, the image of perfection a goal to which one aspires.
At the centre of the universe is a tree and at its foot a little old man. The tree is his mind, the branches his thoughts, their leaves his words.
How may one map the branches of this tree, large as houses, spreading in various directions, their leaves innumerable?
An image of the human being as thinker and expresser of thought, his consciousness the standpoint from which he perceives the cosmos, therefore in a sense, the centre of the cosmos, since cosmic vastness and its individualities only exists for him to the degree that he perceives it.
An image adapted from Wande Abimbola’s An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus and first presented in my ''Charting the Footsteps of a Navigator and
Creator of Thought: Mapping the Omnivorous Writings of Toyin Falola through Genre and Style".
Philosophical Questions and Mystical Consummations
Whatever might be the character of the universe is accessible to the human being only in terms of the scope of a person's access to information about the universe in its specifities and unifications, as well as the person's ability to interpret and correlate this information.
To what degree can such information be gained and to what degree may it be correlated? What could be the outcome of such a comprehensive synthesis?
Those are perspectives and questions resonating across philosophy and spirituality, from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant ( Critique of Pure Reason) to the English magician and mystic Aleister Crowley ( Magick: Book 4 andThe Autohagiography of Aleister Crowley), to the users of imaginative forms meant to simulate cosmic unity and complexity, in Kabbalah, in Hindu and Buddhist yantra and mandala theory and practice, the latter as demonstrated by Yantra: The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity, the European memory artists of Mary Carruthers' The Book of Memory ( 1990) and The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (2000) creatives powerfully fictionalized in Natasha Mostert's Season of the Witch (2007), richly describing the mystical vision of this technique (385-401).
This is a vision of a kind magnificently rendered in the summative section of Italian poet Dante Aligheri's Divine Comedy in terms that resonate with the vegetative and texual imagery of tree of life and cosmos as text cosmologies, ''The leaves scattered throughout the universe as pages of a great book making up the cosmos, things in themselves, their individual qualities and their interrelations, an unfolding of a totality enfolded in love, all these I beheld as one simple flame'' a reworking of European medieval philosophy yet resonating with Mazisi Kunene's account of a similar aspiration in Zulu thought, developing associative values of plant symbolism in relation to the organization of knowledge:
After creation, man was endowed with two minds: the precision mind and the cosmic mind. While the precision mind analyses and reorganises the details of the material environment, the cosmic mind synthesises fragments of information to create a universally significant body of knowledge.
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At the highest point of reasoning, significant units of information merge with universal concepts pulled together by a unique form of intellectual power.
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When the cosmic mind grinds its elements of experience into a totality of knowledge, it acquires a discipline which by its ‘horrific’ power erases the boundaries between the past and the present, the living and the dead, the physical and the non-physical. The individual initiate acquires, like a chameleon’s all-round vision, the power to conceptualise the totality of life at once. Such wisdom is enshrined in the rounded calabash of symbolic cosmic power.
( Anthem of the Decades, 1981, xxii-xxiii)
Images emerging from various cultures as uniquely recreated by Dante and Kunene, yet resonating with the arboreal evocativeness, the tree coordinates within cosmological associations, of various tree symbolisms across time and space, that may be conjoined within Ebengho's shrine.
Donation Suggestion
You are hereby invited to donate to Compcros, the mutidisciplinary initiative dedicated to the development and free sharing of knowledge, from which this project comes. Donations are used in paying for research and publication resources, including time. Donations to this project will go primaily to further visits to Benin to learn about their work from David Ebengho and his associates.