Olokun Invocation Using Christopher Okigbo's Labyrinths
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
The image of water is a recurrent feature in efforts to represent the idea of a power that permeates the cosmos.
In various cultures, from Africa to Asia and the West, the nourishing ubiquity of water leads to its recognition as a central form of cosmic power.
Christopher Okigbo's great poetic cycle Labyrinths develops this motif with unique conceptual boldness and magnificent verbal force in visualizing Idoto, the spirit of his village stream in Ojoto, Nigeria, as "the water spirit that nurtures all creation".
This video, Olokun Invocation Using Christopher Okigbo's Labyrinths portrays an adaptation of Okigbo's poetry, a body of work that I do not know to be used in a sacred sense at present, in an actual invocation of the aquatic essence that constitutes much of the earth and the human being, and is described by scientists as the terrestrial form from which animate beings emerged.
The invocation is conducted in the Compcros : Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems Public Library, Research and Retreat Centre, in the Vision Park, Histon/Cambridge, office complex, hence the background sounds of motion in other offices outside where the ritual is conducted and the bleep of a mobile phone text at the climax of the ritual.
The video is being posted even with these background sounds. This is done in order to demonstrate the spontaneous character of the video, thereby dramatizing the internalisation of the ritual form and content within the devotee, enabling him to conduct the ritual anywhere, at anytime he chooses.
This spontaneity also realizes the integration of ritual activity in general within secular space, and the novel transposition of this great poem into a practical ritual context that can be carried out in any location.
The ritual can also be conducted in total silence, with the entire verbalisation sounded internally.
This is the second video where I demonstrate the potential of Okigbo's poetry beyond the academic context which seems to be its major means of exposure.
The first video, Meditationson Okigbo's Labyrinths, integrated the poem with Christian Gregorian chant and Sanskrit chanting of the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, underwater photography by David Doubilet, the visionary paintings of Nicholas Roerich, along with other images, and lines from Okigbo, Doubilet, the Christian mystic Saint John of the Cross, the Hindu Upanishads and other texts.
Another video version of Okigbo's poem is "Idoto Poem by Christopher Okigbo" by a poster who signs themself as AutumnV25.
The present video quotes largely accurately from memory most of the beginning and the conclusion of the invocation and journey to the Goddess in Okigbo's Labyrinths.
I added a few lines of my own to make the sequence clearer to listeners unfamiliar with the poem.
The "Olokun" in the title of the video is the name in classical Yoruba and Benin religion for the aquatic principle understood as a divine entity.
I am using the Olokun name because I am not yet aware of any personification of the aquatic principle as a whole, as different from specific water deities, in his Igbo culture on which Okigbo bases his poem, even though Ala, who embodies the Earth in Igbo cosmology might play that role, and because I find Benin and Yoruba/Orisa tradition characterizations of the aquatic force as a universal form particularly compelling.
Okigbo's effort is the only one known to my very limited exposure to Igbo religion to develop a universalistic conception of the aquatic principle.
The black and white works of art behind the devotee are Norma Rosen's sublime renditions of Benin Olokun graphic art while the one in colour is a yantra, a geometric form believed to embody a deity, of the Hindu God Ganesh.
For a superb description of another water spirit, and female, too, like Okigbo's Idoto, from Igbo culture, one could see the Amazon product description and review\s of The Water Goddess in Igbo Cosmology, Ogbuide of Oguta Lake by Sabine Jell-Bahlsen and the African Studies Review review of the book by Christey Carwile. ( All links accessed 22/11/2012).
Begun and completed 22 November 2012
Also posted at
Olokun (blogger)
Scribd (PDF)
Compcros
Compcros
Compcros
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