The Scholar at the Threshold of Mystery: Gratitude, Scholarship, and the African Quest for the Ultimate: Transforming Gratitude into Prayer from Toyin Falola's Acknowledgements in Ifa Priestcraft: Ifayemi Elebuibon and Yoruba Ancestral Knowledge Systems- Expanded and Illustrated
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
The inspirational core of this piece is the transformation of Toyin Falola’s acknowledgements in Ifa Priestcraft: Ifayemi Elebuibon and Yoruba Ancestral Knowledge Systems ( 2026) into a prayer inspired by the spiritual sensitivity and aspirational force of that section of the scholarly book.
This recreation of Falola’s text is framed by an introduction explaining the logic of this effort and relating it to Falola’s larger body of work. Selections of art and commentary on that art amplifies the evocative force of the broader verbal text. To see the player without the images, go to "I Call Upon them Active in the Secret Places of Power and Grace: A Prayer on African Primordial and Recreative Wisdom by Toyin Falola. Adapted by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju".
Contents
Abstract
From Acknowledgements to Prayer
Between Spiritual Practice and Non-Spiritual Scholarship
The Underlying Quest for Ultimate Meaning through a Community of Thought and Practice
Acknowledgements Pages as Art and Philosophy
Introducing a Mystical Vision into Falola’s Inspirational Template
The Multi-Religious Genius of Falola Metaphysics and Yoruba Metaphysics
A Universe of Synergistic Spirituality
''I Call Upon them Active in the Secret Places of Power and Grace''
Image and Text: The Little Man with a Head Full of Wisdom
Image and Text: Deity, Ancestral Figures and the Youth
Image and Text: The Child Between Worlds
Image and Text: The Music of Symbols
Image and Text: Children of the Full Moon
Image and Text: Shrine Set, detail
Image and Text: Totem of Unconscious 6 (Eulogy of the Night Bird)
From Acknowledgements to Prayer
This is an adaptation into a prayer of the acknowledgements pages of Toyin Falola's Ifa Priestcraft: Ifayemi Elebuibon and Yoruba Ancestral Knowledge Systems (2026).
The goal of this adaptation is to project the passion and aspirational force of those pages.
The text would thereby be better appreciated as a contribution to the practice of classical African spiritualities by a person immersed in that culture.
The writer's testimony, restructured in the manner I have done here, can function as an inspirational network of ideas. This ideational structure could operate as an instrument for the practice of indigenous African spiritualities or simply facilitate the appreciation of their inspirational power.
Between Spiritual Practice and Non-Spiritual Scholarship
This prayer joins the growing body of texts by practitioners of classical
African spiritualities. It amplifies the yet embryonic collection of such verbalizations
testifying to the inner life of these devotees, their subjective experiences as
they make meaning of their lives. This meaning making process operates within
belief systems through the ideational constructs and practices defining those
aspirational communities.
Ifa Priestcraft, however, is fundamentally a scholarly rather than a spiritual text. It is a work analyzing its subject to better understand it, rather than one inviting readers into the emotional and ideational coordinates of a belief community in belonging to that community.
The book is directed at critical study, not at promoting allegiance to a faith network. The reader does not need to identify with or even agree with the ideas presented in the book for that reader to gain from the work.
The Underlying Quest for Ultimate Meaning through a Community of Thought and
Practice
Underlying this fundamental intellectual drive, however, is a larger cognitive
thrust, one integrating the author's sense of ultimate meaning as a socially
embodied creature, as an African and a scholar, a thinker seeking to understand
his place in the universe at the intersection of various cosmological
orientations, that of his native Yoruba being one, and the subject of Ifa
Priestcraft.
This urgency palpitates as a dynamic undercurrent in the book. It flowers
into prominence in the acknowledgements where the act of giving thanks to those
who have contributed to the author's journey in composing the volume becomes a
reflection on that journey as engaging his deepest sensitivities and
orientations.
Acknowledgements Pages as Art and Philosophy
As has been consistently demonstrated by another scholar in
spirituality and philosophy, Nimi Wariboko, Falola dramatizes the
possibilities of a book's acknowledgements as a work of art and of
profound thought in itself, demonstrating the expression of ''thank
you'' in terms of reflection on the foundations and possibilities of human
existence ( Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,
ed., ).
Falola's acknowledgements can be approached in this light: not simply as
supplementary matter surrounding the principal argument of a book, but as a
space in which the scholar's intellectual project becomes connected with the
conditions of his being. The acknowledgements thus becomes a
miniature philosophy of relational existence.
It tells us that knowledge is produced through relationships; that intellectual accomplishment is indebted to innumerable forms of support; that individual achievement is embedded within collective histories; and that the life of thought is inseparable from the life of the person who thinks.
This adaptation of Falola's acknowledgements into a prayer foregrounds that subjectivity where scholarship and and the scholar’s deepest being intersect. It illuminates the zone created by the convergence of scholarship, thought, gratitude, aspiration, and spiritual imagination. The adaptation reworks an author's process of giving thanks into a means of focusing aspiration through prayer. The prayer can be appreciated, however, without identifying with its ideas.
Prayer, in this re-presentation, is therefore not simply petition. It gathers scattered experiences into a meaningful constellation. It transforms memory into gratitude, gratitude into aspiration, and aspiration into an orientation towards the future. It gives language to the desire that one's intellectual, social, ancestral, and spiritual inheritances might become meaningful within a larger and even ultimate order of existence.
The resulting text may consequently be appreciated even by readers who do not identify with its religious or metaphysical ideas. Its significance can be approached phenomenologically: as an attempt to represent what it feels like for a human being to locate intellectual work within a larger and even supreme horizon of meaning.
I have not been able to get permission to share, as open access, the acknowledgements in its original form, given the recency of the publication, but the author has permitted this reworking of the piece in terms of a prayer.
That permission makes possible a distinctive experiment in literary and intellectual transformation: the movement from acknowledgement to prayer, from documentation to aspiration, from scholarly gratitude to devotional articulation.
The prayer should therefore be read on its own terms.
It is an interpretive and creative response to the intellectual and spiritual energies perceived within the acknowledgements. It does not ask the reader to accept the beliefs expressed within it. Rather, it invites the reader to contemplate the possibility that scholarly testimony can contain latent forms of spiritual expression, and that the language of gratitude can be transformed into a language of aspiration.
The deeper question consequently integrates what the scholar has written and whom he has thanked into a larger enquiry.
What kind of human being emerges through the act of giving thanks?
And beyond that:
What happens when gratitude becomes prayer?
What happens when scholarship becomes a path through which the human person seeks orientation within the universe?
It is in that threshold—between knowledge and aspiration, scholarship and spirituality, intellectual history and inward experience—that this adaptation locates its purpose.
Introducing a Mystical Vision into
Falola’s Inspirational Template
The lines beginning ‘’Forerunners in our journeys to the Ultimate’’
and ending ‘’to that which enables all’’ is the one stanza composed purely of
my own words. I have added it to provide a mystical direction to the prayer, an aspiration to union between the essence of
the self and the source of existence.
This takes the prayer beyond creative relationships with spiritual agents and the development of positive character qualities to integrating those orientations within what I understand as the ultimate of human aspirations, the desire to share consciously in the being of that which underlies existence.
I understand mysticism in its precise sense as the aspiration to perception of, or union, with the ultimate source of existence. Ideational foundations for such a goal are evident in various schools of classical African thought. This is evident in the belief that the essence of the human self, the fundamental, immortal identity of the human being, ori, in Yoruba, chi in Igbo, ehi in Edo, kra in Akan, is a spark from the ultimate source of existence, the One and Only Origun in Orun, from Whom Every Ori Branches, as it is stated in the Yoruba Ifa poem “Ayajo Asuwada” ( Akinsola Akiwowo, “Towards a Sociology of Knowledge from an African Oral Poetry”).
I read this image of branching as an invitation to contemplate the relationship between the multiplicity of individual beings and the unity of their source. Although these concepts from various classical African schools of thought are not interchangeable, they provide resources for exploring the relationship between the human self and its metaphysical ground.
Resonant, though distinct, ideas appear in other religious traditions. he biblical description of the human being as made in the image of God suggests a fundamental relationship between humanity and the divine. The Qur’anic declaration that God is nearer to the human being than the jugular vein evokes divine intimacy.
In the Upanishads, particularly as interpreted in Advaita Vedanta, the relationship between the deepest self and ultimate reality is understood in terms of their essential identity.
Buddhist traditions offer a different orientation: without generally positing a creator or an eternal self, they develop disciplines through which human beings may awaken to awareness of the meaning and dynamism of existence.
These perspectives differ substantially, yet each offers resources for considering how ordinary awareness might be transformed through an encounter with what is most fundamental.
Unlike such systems as Buddhism and Hinduism as well as Christian and Islamic mysticism, however, the possibilities of such ideas for inspiring the desire to encounter or experience this ultimate source directly, thereby moving from belief to knowledge and embodied experience, is rarely developed, if at all in what I have read so far of classical African thought and its later developments. I am interested particularly in the movement from inherited belief and conceptual understanding towards lived realization: the effort to experience inwardly what a tradition affirms about existence.
That aspiration towards perception of or unity with the essence of being, however, has given birth to a good degree of the most lofty examples of human thought and creativity in various fields. It is also intimately related to efforts to grasp the unity of existence, as this aspiration emerges in various disciplines, from the humanities to the sciences. Mysticism per se may not always be evident in those fields, but thinkers within them may share in the conviction that human understanding can reach beyond isolated phenomena towards a more comprehensive apprehension of existence, travelling a significant distance in understanding the essence, structure and dynamism of existence as a whole, the structures, relationships, and processes through which existence unfolds.
Such aspirations from Western and Asian spiritualities are at the core of my own spiritual and general cognitive life and I wish to contribute to enflaming further related orientations in African thought, drawing on its distinctive resources while bringing them into conversation with other traditions.
Classical African thought and the creative works it has inspired have developed or suggested various forms of mysticism, though. The few examples of such I know include Mazisi Kunene’s account of Zulu epistemology in his introduction to Anthem of the Decades. He describes grasping the unity of being through the union of ideas of the particular and the universal.
Another is Christopher Okigbo’s suggestion of animistic mysticism, union with the source of existence through identification with the indwelling intelligence of a natural form, in this case Idoto, the spirit of a river, in the introduction and body of his poetic cycle Labyrinths. Understood in this way, the river becomes a possible threshold through which the self approaches a more encompassing reality, “the water spirit that nurtures all creation’’, as Okigbo puts it. This is an interpretive possibility I draw from the poetry, rather than a systematic doctrine explicitly formulated by Okigbo. These two, however, are not well known, to the best of my knowledge.
Ahmadou Hamapate Ba’s Kaidara: A Fulani Cosmological Epic from Mali and Germaine Dieterlen’s “Initiation Among the Peul Pastoral Funai” also demonstrate mystical overtones, offering suggestive accounts of initiation, symbolic knowledge, and the transformation of understanding. Their mystical possibilities invite further exploration, as is done for Ba’s work by Monica Brodnicka ( Such as “The World as Manifestation of Spirit: Mysticism and Metaphysics in West African Religions” (Journal of Religion in Africa, 31 May 2017).
My present familiarity with these works and their reception, however, does not permit me to determine how extensively those possibilities have been developed within the traditions they present or by subsequent interpreters.
I have restricted myself to a less than dramatic statement of mystical vision in the lines in the poem below where I introduce them, rather than use the more dramatic developments of mystical ideas in the classical African sources or those related to them known to me. I have done this so as to blend into the more quietly powerful tone of Falola’s formulations as evident in the rest of the poetic prayer.
In the stanza I have contributed to the prayer, I have chosen a restrained expression of mystical aspiration. I have not drawn extensively on the more dramatic images and formulations available in the African sources known to me. I have done this so as to blend into the more quietly powerful tone of Falola’s formulations, carrying the prayer towards an encounter with the source of existence while preserving the gently contemplative character of the whole.
The Multi-Religious Genius of Falola Metaphysics and Yoruba Metaphysics
The acknowledgements the prayer adapts is all the more remarkable in representing one-traditional African and particularly Yoruba cosmology and its associated practices-within Falola's depth of relationship with various belief systems, Islam and Christianity being the other two most prominent in his life, a tripartite convergence he describes while centralising his Islamic identity, in Malaika and the Seven Heavens: A Memoir of my Encounters with Islam.
Falola therefore represents the multi-religious genius that is Yoruba metaphysics at its most inclusive, the folding of various spiritual paths into one way of life without dissipating their uniqueness. He thereby belongs with the traditional Yoruba esoteric order Ogboni elders in Oshogbo who are also Muslims, the keepers of the shrines of indigenous Yoruba spiritual figures Egungun, Eshu and Aje at Lagos' Ikopodo neighbourhood who are Muslims and with the writer of a yet unsurpassed work in the mythic understanding of classical Yoruba cosmology, Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief, Bolaji Idowu, a Methodist minister.
A Universe of Synergistic Spirituality
Along similar lines, Falola's exploration of spirituality in
Africa constitutes a universe of its own. This is a world of knowledge
integrating traditional African, Islamic, Christian and other bodies of
faith and thought into a synergistic unity in which each orientation is
distinct yet correlated as unique but conjunctive windows into the
human striving for the Ultimate as this is demonstrated in Africa.
The pluralistic Yoruba orientation, evident in degrees in various parts of
Yorubaland, dramatized through Falola’s scholarship and memoirs, may be better
appreciated in terms of correlative examples of other African creatives.
The Malian scholar Ahmadou Hampate Ba, for example, is a foremost scholar on the spiritualities and philosophies of a cluster of African peoples ranging from the Fulani to the Bambara, as demonstrated by his essay “ The Living Tradition’’ ( UNESCO General History of Africa Vol.1. ed. J. Ki-Zerbo) and Kaidara: A Fulani Cosmological Epic from Mali ( two English trans., one by Daniel Whitman and the other by Priye Amadi) among other essays and books. Yet, he is also the writer of Tierno Borkar: The Sage of Bandiagara, a work on a remarkable Muslim leader.
Maïmouna Guerresi’s artistic work is inspired by Sufism, Islamic mysticism, in Senegal, yet her creativity is also attuned to older, nature centred spiritualities in that region and other parts of the world.
These convergences may suggest a sensitivity, perhaps in the larger religious cosmos, of the applicability of the idea Ulli Beier describes of Susanne Wenger in The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger, of the relationship between the various orisa or deities in relation to Olodumare, the source of the universe in indigenous Yoruba cosmology.
This application is represented by seeing various faiths as distinctive but
ultimately correlative windows into the universe, aspects of that Totality
beyond human apprehension, but which draws humanity to itself, as the human
person responds by transforming social realities into windows of infinity, as
Akinwumi Ogundiran describes the shaping process of the indigenous Yoruba
cosmos in The Yoruba: A New History.
Such a perspective allows the various faiths to remain distinct while also being understood as potentially correlative modes of approaching existence.
Each may constitute a window rather than the entire landscape. The window gives access to something beyond itself, while remaining shaped by its own history, language, symbols, practices, institutions, and experiences of revelation.
The Ultimate, from this perspective, exceeds the capacity of any one human formulation to contain it completely. Yet this very excess may be what draws human beings toward continual seeking.
The human response is not merely intellectual. Human beings transform their social worlds into symbolic environments through which they pursue meanings larger than themselves. They make cities, shrines, artworks, rituals, myths, philosophies, books, institutions, and communities into vessels for meanings that reach beyond immediate material existence.
In this sense, the religious imagination is also a creative transformation of reality. The shrine, the city, the ritual object, the work of art, the book, and even acknowledgement pages can therefore become sites where finite human experience opens toward larger horizons of meaning.
The images interspersed across the prayer are therefore chosen by me to complement and amplifying the vision of the verbal text. They are works of art inspired by classical African spiritualities and philosophies, and, except one, are by African artists whose work is focused on that inspirational zone. One, however, is by a non-human creator, ChatGPT, responding to an aspect of Falola’s work with a sensitivity and evocative force that moved me to include it among the works by human creators.
Directly and indirectly, these artistic works employ material form to evoke what cannot be limited to the purely physical world. They suggest something approached from various angles in the history of thought, where African and non-African perceptions intersect.
These include the Yoruba àṣẹ, intangible, pervasive yet uniquely expressed in each existent as its distinctive identity projected through its own creative force or capacity to affect others. In art, it may be described as manifesting the incandescent force of ọ̀rò, the intersection of human and divine expressive power, its potency accessible only through imaginative creativity, its nakedness too potent for direct gaze (Yoruba Art and Language), an idea that may be extended in exploring the potency of art and expressive forms in general across cultures.
Also resonant here is the Sublime as described by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in Critique of Judgement, compelling yet transcendent of human understanding, not necessarily generating a sense of smallness before grandeur, as described by Kant, but the sense of being confronted by something opening out beyond the confines of daily human existence as one knows it.
It is within this possibility of scholarship and expressions of gratitude opening into the deepest fundamentals and ultimate amplitude of existence that the present adaptation locates its significance. Falola's acknowledgements record thankfulness arising from a scholarly journey. This adaptation takes that appreciation and asks what happens when its underlying aspirations are given the form of prayer.
The result is neither a replacement for Ifa Priestcraft nor a claim that the original acknowledgements constitute devotional literature. It is a creative re-presentation: an attempt to make audible, through another literary form, the spiritual and existential resonance that can accompany intellectual work.
''I Call Upon them Active in the Secret Places of Power and Grace''
I call upon them active in the secret places of power and grace
the unseen hands and voices:
the ancestors who whisper in the ears of seekers
the spirits of knowledge who open roads when people close doors
and the cosmic forces of creation
that insist
without cease
that who we are
can never be ended
and that what we know can never be forgotten.
What can I realize without your blessing?
Brethren who believe in the divine intelligence of our heritage.
Image and Text: The Little Man with a Head Full of Wisdom
"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’’-Chinese proverb.
"The small man with a head full of wisdom,
from whom even the Supreme Fount of Thought
sought counsel at the time of creation.
Òbíríkítí, the infinite circle
who alone is capable of reversing and nullifying
the date of a person’s death
My lord, unfathomable knowledge
not knowing you in full, we can accomplish nothing.
The being whose presence is awesome in the dark,
Your wealth intimidates like the looks of a male dog
You are the full moon that outshines all other celestial bodies
My lord, Who is sufficient in support of life
the Spirit who wrestles with Death and prevails.
My lord, first to be incantation at waking
Primeval order
Exactitude that regulates existence with rectitude
offspring of snake which blends into the foliage
as it slithers through the forest.’’- Yoruba Orunmila
(Wole Soyinka, The Seven Signposts; Rowland Abiodun, Yoruba Art and Language)
“Kaidara, the wandering, decrepit old man who is yet a beam of light from the
hearth of Gueno, the ultimate creator’’-Fulani (Ahmadou Hampate Ba, Kaidara:
A Fulani Cosmological Epic from Mali)
The ideas above are evoked by my picture on the preceding page of the greatest artist of African spiritualities known to me, Bruce Onobrakpeya, in his home/studio, in Mushin, Lagos.
I am thankful
to the ancestors
to the guilds of
shamans
diviners
herbalists
griots
wisdom elders
and quiet spiritual workers
whose biographies form the scaffolding
of this continent's metaphysical infrastructure
whose service to this earth has been woefully underappreciated
at times even the target of scorn.
History will absolve them.
Custodians of memory
architects of Africa's epistemic resilience
behemoths of knowledge on whose shoulders we stand.
Image and Text: Deity, Ancestral Figures and the Youth
Ancestral figures, in alliance with a divine personage,
possibly the deity Amadioha from Igbo spirituality, constellate round the young
aspirant in Chiagoziem Orji’s Amadiọha.
“ the coming together of different forces to
achieve something great ‘igwe bu ike’, [ is] represented by the tiny lines
swimming on the figures.
The lines spreading or shooting out into the background represent roots and lightning. This is a representation of spiritual protection, energy, power. These are the guidelines passed down to us by ndị ichie, roots that must be watered and a light to show generations to come.
The faded figures represent “Chi na Mmụọ so Mmadụ”, ”ancestors” ”protection”, ”guidelines”, “Odinaala”[ classical Igbo spiritual and philosophical culture], ”traditions” , ”our strong root”, ”spiritual forces and energies”, “Ezumezu Umụ dị, ọkpara”, ”Agwụ”[ the Igbo deity of creativity and spiritual guidance] , ”Amamihe”, ”foresight”, “information”.
The lines spreading inside the boy representrepresents “strong will of the youth”, ”ambitions”, “goals” “energy” “knowledge that was passed down to us”, “foresight” “ihe / light” “healthy roots”. “greatness”.
The markings around the nipples represent ‘’Anyanwụ’’ [the Igbo deity who embodies the physical and spiritual values of nurturing and
illumination represented by the sun], “good health”, ”long life”, “a path filled with light and protection from darkness” ( Chiagoziem Orji, X, Amadiọha, June 7, 2024.
Forerunners in our journeys to the Ultimate
tracing the light within to the light beyond
the nourishing darkness within
to the mystery at the source of existence
the rich interior silence
to that which enables all.
We never travel alone in our knowledge.
What we become reflects a gathering of extraordinary people
who
in the fullness of their presence
love
encourage
support
challenge
inspire
question
correct
and
mentor us: seen and unseen, living and dead, and the unborn.
Our friends and fellow thinkers
our believers
those who share our visions
of a free and self-determined African future:
thank you, every one of you
for confirming our determination
not just to let our cultures survive but to help them thrive.
Not just something bestowed upon us
but something that we must be prepared to fight for
fathom, and fashion with dignity through participatory practice.
I appreciate your friendship and support in both the quiet times and the times of turmoil.
Image and Text: The Child Between Worlds
Various worlds converge in the child at the centre of this image. She embodies the fresh potential of the human being, a promise echoed by the green shoot rising from the earth behind her. Girl and plant mirror one another as forms of emerging life, their possibilities still unfolding.
She is positioned between two intersecting worlds. The world of ancestors and primordial spiritual creativity and the everyday world of humans living on Earth amidst material nature. Both worlds demonstrate related configurations but are clearly different, suggesting a kinship that embraces their differences.
The spiritual world, behind her, is evoked by the translucent blue of the space and of the human figures within it. Golden luminosity irradiates other forms within the zone, suggesting their character as inspirational centres- sun, stars and moon, celestial configurations suggesting the cosmic scope of existence; an elegant bird-suggesting spirit flight, prophecy and wisdom?
Ghanaian Adinkra symbols, knowledge distilled into visual form, evoking inspired understanding? An elegantly large tree, like the majestic baobab, evoking cosmographic plenitude through the creatures living and perching on it? Its rootedness in earth and its reaching towards the sky referencing a cosmological nexus, a world tree, where all forms of being converge? Perhaps the spiritual identity or counterpart of the other tree to the right, illuminated by the light of the sun in the world of time and space?
Three huts are visible in the background, looking, amidst the surreal landscape, like dwellings of hermits, withdrawn from humanity to seek realities beyond the material. The huts perhaps operating in the world defined by the zone they are in as points of concentration of spiritual intelligences, giving focus to the powers diffused throughout the surrounding space.
Mountain ranges soar in the background. Images of glorious possibilities within a space resembling the world of time and space but very different from it, perhaps the template on which the spatio-temporal universe is patterned, certainly resonating with it as two contrastive but complementary polarities composing the same universe.
Bridging the ancestral universe, the world of orun, as known in Yoruba, the zone of primal origins, and the everyday world of time, space and sunlight, is a lyrical bridge, arching like a rising and falling musical sequence, within which are visible an image of life, represented by vegetative fecundity, symbolized by the image of a leafy plant, an image of love, represented by the symbol for a heart, an evocation of justice, represented by scales. Their placement suggests that communication between worlds involves both spiritual awareness and ethical cultivation: the nurturing of life, the deepening of compassion, and the pursuit of just relationships.
Directly underneath this lyrical evocation of a bridge between worlds is the child. The centrality of her figure in this location between the ancestral and the everyday worlds is reinforced by the two white concentric circles in the centre of which she sits, as older people face her, contemplating and discussing the promise she represents. The convergence of worlds thus becomes a convergence of generations: inherited wisdom surrounds emerging possibility, and the child becomes the living centre through which the past may nourish a future still taking form.
The left foreground develops this vision through a compact constellation of rocks, luminous in brown, within which can be seen Akan and Gyaman Adinkra symbols, a pot and a green plant, the whole suggesting vitality, cognitive sensitivity and creative complexity, as if alive with intention, its material stillness animated by the meanings it gathers.
Inscribed on the rocks is the Adinkra symbol Adinkrahene, its concentric circles evoking the expansive force of authority, of charismatic impact, of kingly elevation, the directing agency of leadership, a constellation of qualities defining greatness, the outward expansion of the circles suggesting the widening influence of a compelling presence: the capacity of an individual or an idea to organize relationships and inspire others.
Also visible on the rocks in a spiral, suggesting the spiral of the Nigerian Cross River Nsibidi, evoking the sun, journey and eternity
( Inscribing Meaning Exhibition, Smithsonian).
This conjunction of movement, radiance, and enduring existence enriches the spiral’s possibilities within the present image., leading into the Igbo Uli, spiral suggesting the coiled motion of reptiles, their sinuous, coiling and uncoiling movements representing the Earth goddess Ala, suggesting the unity of all forms in existence ( Robin Sanders, The Legendary Uli Women of Nigeria).
The spiral, in its Nsibidi and Uli expressions may therefore be understood in this context in terms of relationships between motion and repose, time and eternity, the discrete and the whole, the unfolding of multiplicity and the still centre around which it turns.
These spiral forms indirectly evoke the balance of motion and poise, the dynamism of spirals and the still centre unifying them within the projection of the union of strength and humility by the Adinkra symbol Dwennimmen. This symbol indicates power may therefore be understood as a capacity tempered by restraint, an ability to act that remains receptive to what exceeds the self.
The pot introduces a complementary image of containment and generation. Read through Yoruba and Igbo associations of vessels with fertility and the maternal body, it suggests a fecundity at once human and cosmic: a space in which life is held, nourished, and brought into form. Beside it, the green plant gives visible expression to growth, translating generative possibility into the immediacy of living matter.
A constellation of possibilities is thus constructed in this small but symbolically rich foreground space, bringing together natural forms-plant and rocks and humanly created structures-pot and abstract symbols. The rocks evoke the earth as the material ground of life.
Together these forms evoke a creative space where a palpitating life, represented by the plant, is in action, anchored in the material enablement represented by the rocks as evoking earth, and demonstrating the intelligence of human creativity, suggested by the pot, itself dramatising the transformation of matter through practical imagination, while the graphic symbols suggest the capacity to condense experience into abstract thought.
This complex therefore suggests the human being, the only creature known to combine those possibilities.
A symbolic portrait of the human being is developed: embodied in matter, sustained by biological processes, and capable of reshaping the world through making and meaning.
Their convergence echoes the child at the centre of the image. What appears in the foreground as an assemblage of distinct forms is gathered in her as a living potential for growth, understanding, and creation.
From within this constellation of evocations, a path proceeds in a lyrical sequence, an elegantly sinuous road to the world of orun, the zone of primordial origins as known in Yoruba, where ultimate possibilities are embodied by the tree, the sun and stars and where the ancestors are poised, watchful over humanity.
The path leading to this zone assumes the translucent blue of the space it leads into, suggesting its character as belonging to the world beyond the material coordinates of the zone it emanates from, a point of origin configured by the brown rocky constellation, where converge biological life, represented by the plant, and human intelligence and creativity, evoked by the pot and abstract symbols.
Beginning among those emblems of material existence, biological life, and human creativity, the elegant road suggests a passage through which these familiar dimensions of being may open towards their spiritual ground.
The path and bridge together give visible form to the possibility of communication between worlds. Beneath the bridge, encircled by the attention of her elders, the child embodies that possibility as a future still unfolding: rooted in earth, nourished by ancestral presence, and open to the wider cosmos.
In this journey, there are long days of questioning
wondering
searching for that noetic understanding
of the rationale and design that shape and inform the order of the world.
I am grateful to those iconic embodiments of indigenous knowledge
colossi of heritage
whose openness in engaging the doors of sacred knowledge
with us
in a patient, vivid, and generous manner
form the soul of our understanding.
Priests
scholars of civilization
world ambassadors of African metaphysics
living testaments to African knowledge systems
in their
mathematical
ethical
scientific
philosophical
historical
poetic
and spiritual force.
Their lives a living witness
to Africa’s profound and indispensable contributions to the human story.
Image and Text: The Music of Symbols
The music of symbols, the ability of the human being to develop the particular into the universal, to depict the universal in terms of the particular, expressed through Ghanaian artist Owusu-Ankomah’s synergy between Ghanaian Adinkra symbols and his own symbolic abstractions.
Within a space suffused largely by Adinkra geometrizations and other abstract structures, projecting power in solemn black, highlighting their diverse symmetries as these lyrical convergences are further amplified by the sea of deep blue from which they seem to rise, a man’s form is outlined as he raises his hands in what looks like exaltation or prayer.
To his left and right,
beneath his feet, and above his head, sequences of circles in various
colours constellate, dancing, equilibrated, verticalized, standing out, in their diversity of colour,
from the blue and black spaces against which they dance.
From out of the spectrum of human mentation represented by the background of
abstract symbols, the circle constellations rise, evoking the individual human
mind, represented by the artist,
creating its own quests for cognitive penetration and harmony
represented by symbols, the circles
being Owusu-Ankomah’s symbol for the totality of possibilities, which he
names the Microcron.
I thank they whose brilliance is embedded in the primordial African cosmological consciousness
giving voice to unnamed yet deeply felt enigmas within us
providing spiritual navigation for specific questions we dare to ask more daringly
alerting the world to how Africans have
indeed
been contemplatives of the universe
not its silent co-spectators.
Investigators of ancient knowledges
refining our wonder
inspiring our thoughts and research
affirming our deepest beliefs
that the world's indigenous epistemologies
most especially
that of Africa
are indeed
sophisticated
dignified
and cosmic.
I am immeasurably grateful.
May they continue to be rewarded by the ancestors with the radiance of ancestral grace.
Image and Text: Children of the Full Moon
(Acrylic and pastel on pigment. 43 in. × 50 in.)
‘’The soft planet of brain, pulsing with thought and sensing’’, Wole Soyinka ( The Seven Stanzas; The Credo of Being and Nothingness).
The universe, in terms of the tension between its mystery, represented by the enigmatic inscriptions within the inner circle, and the human quest to understand the cosmos, evoked by the outer, blue circle enclosing the inner circle.
Interpretive possibilities suggested by Victor Ekpuk’s Children of the Full Moon 2, on the preceding page.
The tension between the immediacy of perception and the limitations of understanding what one perceives, is at the heart of Ekpuk’s aesthetic.
This dynamism is developed as he journeys from the inspiration of the balance between esoteric and exoteric knowledge in the Nsibidi communication system of his native Cross River region in Nigeria to the creation of his own visual language, where Nsibidi symbols and his own self self created visualities cohere, as in Children.
The same Nsibidi symbol may have various meanings, some known to the general public, and others accessible only as one gains more expansive understanding of Nsibidi in climbing the initiatory degrees of the Cross River Ekpe esoteric order, for whom Ekpe is a primary language.
Nsibidi is thereby both open and concealed, exoteric and esoteric, an orientation resonating in Ekpuk’s inspiration by Nsibidi, defined by his scriptic language, visually compelling but never fully resolvable into definitive meaning, forever tantalizing the viewer with the sense of familiar forms but puzzling the mind with the overall enigma of the visual constellation.
This reading of Ekpuk’s work lends itself to an adaptation of what Catholic theologian Karl Rahner describes as the universe as grounded in mystery, not ‘’the unfortunate remainder of what is not yet known’’, but the idea that existence, in its essence, and totality, eludes definitive human grasp because it is beyond the categories in terms of which the human mind is able to gain understanding “ Living into Mystery: Karl Rahner’s Reflections on his 75th Birthday’’ by Leo Donovan, America).
Concluding decades of enquiry, the scientist Isaac Newton asserts, in spite of his spectacular success in describing the laws unifying the celestial bodies, among other great achievements in understanding the physical structure and dynamism of the universe, that the essence of things is unknowable to the human mind, as the essential being of God, as different from his attributes expressed in the character of the universe, is also unknowable:
……what the real substance of anything is we know not. In bodies, we see only their figures and colours, we hear only the sounds, we touch only their outward surfaces, we smell only the smells, and taste the savours; but their inward substances are not to be known, either by our senses, or by any reflex act of our minds; much less then have we any idea of the substance of God. our minds; much less then have we any idea of the substance of God. (“General Scholium’’, in Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. Andrew Motte).
I am deeply indebted
to the creators of the flame of Pan-Africanist faith
that has long sustained me
to the ancestors who theorized the existence of Black pride
those who have struggled and continue to struggle against colonial annihilation
those who continue to remind us that Africans-though not Africans alone- must speak for Africa.
I am of that tradition.
I am dedicated to ensuring that African thought
is no longer a subaltern presence
but a form of global thought at the center of civilization.
Image and Text: Shrine Set, detail
Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Shrine Set, a section of which is shown above, is a most ingenious reworking of forms from classical African shrine structures.
At the centre of this section of the work is a screen from which a variety of forms, humanoid and non-humanoid, a mysterious assemblage, are hanged at the top, and dangle at the bottom,.
The entire construct is composed to suggest the numinous, the awesomely uncanny, far removed from conventional human contexts but fascinating in its mystery, a mystery foregrounded by the script emblazoned on the screen’s surface, Onobrakpeya’s self created Ibiebe script, inspired by Urhobo language writing but developing its own visual identities and their relationship with particular meanings, a script most people would not be able to decipher beceause of its origins in the creativity of an individual, a creativity that has not permeated any culture in order to take it into widespread use, hence projecting a sense of the arcane, the enigmatic, compelling in its visual force and intriguing in its esoteric character.
The sense of the mysterious is amplified by the structures dangling from the screen, humanoid, geometric and less definable shapes the significance of which is not evident from the obvious configurations of the visual structure but which have to be inferred by the viewer, who may see them as composed to generate a general impression of strangeness, an esoterically understood sequence, rather than a specific body of ideas.
Taken together, the screen, the shapes attached to it and the script on it, represent Onobrakpeya’s transportation of the sense of the arcane evoked by some shrines of classical African spiritualities, in which screens, simpler kinds after which the complex one in this image is patterned, are used in demarcating the sacred space of the shrine from the profane space next to it.
I call on the children of wisdom and noble heritage
you whose mind wakes even as the sun sets
your words rumble like thunder—divine creation indeed.
May we be children of joy
whose path shines both on earth and in heaven
knowing history
seeing the way.
When troubles come
may we respond with love
when questions arise
may we answer with wisdom.
May we become
courageous ones
bearers of knowledge and humility
crowned with glory
flying like the indigo bird
teachers
thinkers
rooted in African heritage.
May we speak it with pride
honoring the great lineage and teaching others the same
great before humans and humble before God
souls whose light shines beyond generations.
May we be children whom God loves and who bless the world
children whose name is a prayer
moving through the world clothed with grace and peace
bearers of names of inspiration
who know that good character and faith are true honor
who praise God in all seasons
knowing that good character is greater than wealth
children of divine mercy.
May blessings and compassion follow us on life's journey
our hopes never fading
our destinies stories of greatness.
Steadfast children
who walk in love and contentment
whom God created in goodness
whose destiny smiles with joy.
Praise that cannot be written on water
engraved upon the mountain of wonder
so that the whole world may know truth.
May we be knowledge seekers
couriers of messages between investigators
dedicated to truth
rescuing from excess of errors
bridges between worlds
the sacred and the academic
the spoken and the written
the divine and the human
gifted translators and interpreters of African knowledges
following in the footsteps of the seers and scribes who have come before us
divining the utterances of the gods with a sensitivity and precision
that is rare in this day and age
our work infused with ìmo àti òye
twin virtues of knowledge and deep understanding
that enable us bring out
the symbolic
poetic
and spiritual dimensions of African thought
in fresh and accessible ways.
Meticulously compiling sacred texts, myths, and rituals
preserving the integrity and power of òfin àsẹ
the divine order of utterance
creating new opportunities
for the transmission and reception of
African wisdom and worldviews
among global audiences.
Listening with ears
but also with spirit
so that the voices of Orúnmìlà, Nyame and Kaidara
divine guides from the Yoruba, the Akan and the Fulani
and others luminous throughout Africa
may speak through our words and ideas
translators ,
cultural custodians
spiritual interlocutors
modern-day akowé òrìsà— scribes of the divine.
Image and Text: Totem of Unconscious 6 (Eulogy of the Night Bird)
Victor Ekpuk, Totem of Unconscious 6 (Eulogy of the Night Bird), 2011
Mixed media collage-ink, and gold leaf on paper
“I flew so high, so high, I seized my quarry in the end’’ goes a line from the Christian mystic St. John of the Cross’s poem “On Falconry’’ in which the soul’s quest for God is depicted in terms of a falcon seeking its prey through flying higher than ever into the sky.
A person who has ever entered into an elevated mental state would identify with Victor Ekpuk’s Totem of Unconscious 6 (Eulogy of the Night Bird),one of the richest yet subtly powerful depictions of such an experience.
A bird, vivid and dynamic in minimalist white and red, rises on a slender line of white from a multi-coloured complex of myriad abstract forms surrounded by a vivid green evoking nature, into a compact “cloud” of multiple visual abstractions, the bright colours of the bird starkly outlined against the uniform black and faint white of the scriptic density of this cloud.
The soul entering into ‘’the cloud of unknowing’’, the coruscation granting entry into the being of God which yet is beyond the understanding of the entity thus granted access, hence the cloud that envelops the bird in the Ekpuk piece is defined by deep black, the foundation of its faint white inscriptions?
understanding of the entity thus granted access, hence the cloud that envelops the bird in the Ekpuk piece is defined by deep black, the foundation of its faint white inscriptions?
‘’And the higher he rises
the less he knows:
That is the dark cloud
that illumines the night.
The one who knows this
always remains unknowing,
all science transcending’’
John of the Cross continues, in ‘’I Entered into Unknowing’’ the same theme, as in his ‘’On Falconry”, of cognitive ascent, of flight in quest of experience of something encountered in paradox, encountered as “a dark cloud’’ that is yet radiant, illumining the night in which it shines.
These are images of distance from conventional experience as the mystic penetrates into the presence of God, transcending all that the human being had previously understood as knowledge, ‘’all science transcending’’.
This rhythm of images and colours incidentally resonates richly with Ekpuk’s Totem of Unconscious 6 (Eulogy of the Night Bird), perhaps because they both share a similar inspiration in the idea of a person entering into unusual realms of being and awareness, perhaps an aspiration from the ascending levels of cognitive exposure enabled by the progressive unfolding of knowledge in Ekpe esotericism?
Central to the beauty and power of Ekpuk’s work is that it lends itself to whatever interpretive compass the viewer brings to it, unrestricted as this work is by any particular frame of thought, its essence being to open mental doors through its enigmatic beauty.
This piece of Ekpuk’s may be further appreciated:
‘’Combining collage, ink, and gold leaf on paper [ Totem of Unconscious 6 (Eulogy of the Night Bird)] explores the boundaries between text and image. The intricate mark-making creates a layered, rhythmic texture that looks like a lost manuscript or an unreadable, ancient text” [ Google AI]
“The
‘Unconscious’ Metaphor: As noted by prominent art
historian Dr. Chika Okeke-Agulu…Ekpuk's works act as a "personal search
for codes with which to articulate, indeed decode the multiplex manifestations
of contemporary phenomenon." The reference to the "Night Bird"
and "Unconscious" points to the spiritual, unseen archives of memory
that African diaspora communities carry across generations.” [ Google
AI]
I have spoken.
A testament to the power of language as a vessel of presence and power
seeking to understand African divinity
to touch the mystery of being itself.
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