Dialogues: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Reworking Ifa: Self InitiationandSelf Development in an Ancient African Tradition: Democratizing thePracticeof African Esoteric Systems [ with PDF]

thanks, Olayinka.

I'm keen on knowing why you think my goals are laudable. That would help me in assessing what I am doing.

From Quack to Establishment Figure

pirituality, however,

as is evident from history,

does not operate the way you describe.

ou are fix

on a central control model represented by your observation that

online academic courses... have to be designed again by discipline course designers and standardized so that they have acceptable comparative measurable value... otherwise they would provide quacks the like of which is all over the place in Pentecostalism as satirized in Soyinkas Jero Plays and Requiem for A Futurologist

It is in such quackery that a Pentecostal priest can set up a church in his living room and name himself a BISHOP with no qualms about the validity of the gradation since there is no standardization of the process of priestly progression and ranking as obtained in the Catholic communion or Anglican communion or current I

a priesthood as constituted in the Apena and Plus I rankings among others which are collectively rather than individually determined

You forget that the people whose examples have ultimately led to the Catholic and Protestant communions were understood as iconoclastic quacks by the religious authorities they opposed in the process building their own revisions of established systems.

Consolidational Innovation : Innovating Within the Central Control Model of Social Organisation

Educational Systems

The central control model you have described is one in which a centralised understanding of ideology, method and evaluation opens itself to modification while maintaining central control, as in innovations in delivery and scope of access represented by such innovations within the Western academy as free online course, public sharing of research outcomes, long distance, online PhDs and PhDs by publication, and has been very successful in education, specifically the official, dominant Western model.

In educational history, one may observe the distinction between the central control model and an independent model in terms of what is described as the triumphant progression of Abraham Flexner from the radical revision represented by his experimental school to his founding of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

Flexner's school " did not give out traditional grades, used no standard curriculum, refused to impose examinations on students, and kept no academic record of students[ instead promoting ] small learning groups, individual development, and a more hands-on approach to education [ yet] Graduates of his school were soon accepted at leading colleges, and his teaching style began to attract considerable attention", suggesting he was innovating on and yet working within the traditional system.

Nevertheless this independent model may be seen as eventually subsumed into the central control model represented by the Institute for Advanced Study, in which the privilege of unregulated learning is restricted to outstanding researchers within the traditional educational system, thereby successfully, in my view, subverting Flexner's original vision of how best the human being may learn even from its earlier learning stages, making the system a reward for people distinguishing themselves through the traditional system that Flexner's approach was a contradiction of, his approach of open ended learning from basic levels thus translated into the freedom of the researcher who has gained the qualifications of the traditional system to pursue research that does not necessarily have a practical value, the "usefulness of useless knowledge", as Flexner provocatively put it, an adaptive subversion even more an ironic given that the Institute for Advanced Studies was Flexner's idea and he was its first director.

The central control model is so successful beceause of the control of social systems by rewards and exclusions tied to these educational strategies. In spite of very influential and recurrent exemptions to the rule, most striking in recent history being the 20th -21st history of US entrepreneurship, this correlation of educational standardization associated with reward remains the dominant relationship between this dominant educational system and society.

Religion

A related model is dramatized in religious history by figures and movements that develop new approaches within the framework accepted by the religious establishments within which they operate. Various Catholic saints after the Reformation, such as St.Teresa of Avila in her monastic reforms and her mystical writings, and St.Ignatius of Loyola in his founding of the Jesuits and development of the Spiritual Exercises, may be seen along those lines, including prior figures such as St. Anthony of Egypt whose innovations in the hermit lifestyle inspired what later became the emergence of monasticism as part of Christian orthodoxy.

Disruptive Innovation: Innovation Creating New Organisational Models

There also exists another equally influential model of social organisation, involving innovations that do not gain acceptance by the social establishment to which they are related but are influential anyway, leading to schism with the mother ideology. These include figures who insist they are only distilling the essence of the mother faith, like Jesus Christ, but whose innovations are seen by the orthodox as too radical and confrontational to be integrated into the mother faith, hence their work leads to a variant of the originating faith, as Christianity is founded on Judaism.

From Jesus and Martin Luther to Buddha and Al-Hallaj

Martin Luther understood himself as returning to the essence of Christianity as represented by the primacy of faith over ecclesiastical structures, but the mother church did not accept his perspectives, hence his protest became a split from the source, Protestantism.

I doubt if its possible to adequately understand the Buddha's innovations without comparing them with the Hindu culture he both drew from and reacted against in terms of conceptions of the self and the methods required to explore the relationship between the human being and the source of existence.

Al-Hallaj, insisted, even as he was being executed for heresy, that he was only articulating a fundamental possibility of Islam, the possibility of radical intimacy between the human being and Allah, described by the scriptures as closer to the human being than his jugular vein. He has become a icon of Islamic mysticism but I wonder if his approach has been able to gain widespread open emulation given what I understand as the strict policing of Islamic orthodoxy.

Jesus: The Paradigmatic Triumph of the Rebel

Jesus, the Galilean carpenter's son, had no priestly pedigree or known training, yet his humble birth has become iconic of the emergence of the divine in the most unlikely circumstances. His disciples may be described as being among the lowest members of the working class, fishermen like Peter, prostitutes such as Mary Magdalene, people rejected by Jewish society in his time such as the tax collector working for the Roman colonizers, yet the victory of his vision has been astonishingly total, going from strength to strength across the world over the centuries.

The religious authorities of his time who saw him as an upstart have had their names become synonymous, in many minds, with the picture he painted of them, their names becoming bywords for self righteous dishonesty and hypocrisy, as in the negative interpretation of the term "phariseeism", the stories and names by which he characterized his opponents have become frames of the imagination and philosophy of entire civilizations, evident in daily speech and art- the spontaneous humanity of the Samaritan as opposed to what Jesus described as the self centred piety and inhuman rules of the Pharisees and Sadducees, the chasing of the money changers from the temple, among other iconic motifs of Christian art, a comprehensive victory that would have seemed most unlikely in his time on account of the power differential between himself and those religious authorities, capped by his execution at the hands of the Roman colonizers, a death that seemed to have sealed the fate of his aspirations, the faith he inspired, amazingly becoming the Roman state religion long after his death, thus transforming the fate of the heretofore persecuted Christians of Rome, that faith ironically remaining, in the form of the Vatican, as the core of what survives of the institutional and geo-political systems most closely aligned to the very Roman civilization that ruled his country in his time as a little outpost of a vast empire.

The Paradoxical Tension Between Creative Dynamism and Social Organisation as a Central Principle of Human Existence

As Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor' in The Brothers Karamazov beautifully depicts the logic of, a good number of Jesus' disciples across the centuries have become what he is described as depicting the Pharisees as, the tension between legality and uncircumscribed humanity, between self aggrandizement and self transcendence, framed by the ironic convergence between the condemnations of the Jewish authorities by Jesus and the later behavior of those acting in his name, demonstrating that this tension is central to religious life.

Later devotees of Jesus like St. Francis of Assisi have tried to emulate his extreme self dispossession but those inspired by such examples as those of Francis have found themselves compelled to organise themselves into social systems, the various bodies of the Order of St. Francis, leading to facing the perennial challenge of the tension between the dynamism of spiritual inspitration and the structures in terms of which social relations are guided.

The culture of reworking existing social systems, at times through radical approaches, is a central means through which religions have developed over the centuries. Jesus was a rebel reviled by the Jewish authorities, Luther was a rebel reviled by the church, but such rebels are often projecting a need within the body politic which has not been articulated before them or not with the total identification with which the reformers identify with their mission, the vision of Jesus in relation to Judaism and that of Luther in relation to what has become known as Catholicism being correlative as efforts to discover or return to what they understood as the creative dynamism and human intimacy of spirit as opposed to the structurations created by the older religious systems in which the reformers reached maturity.

Nimi Wariboko, in The Pentecostal Principle, builds on Protestant theologian Paul Tillich's recognition of this paradoxical dynamism in religious life, in which Tillich describes the creative drive of spirit as the Protestant Principle and the organisation of the fruits of this drive into social systems as the Catholic Substance, if I recall the specifics correctly, taking those ideas beyond fixation on any religious denomination, Catholic or Protestant, but simply recognizing the fact that all these groups demonstrate these principles at different points in their history.

Wariboko builds upon these ideas in developing the idea of the "Pentecostal Principle" which may be seen as a principle of transformation expressed by but not fully actualized by Pentecostals, and perhaps not even unique to Pentecostals, an idea that seems pervasive across his exploration of different subjects, from theology to economics to urban planning, illustrated at various points by drawing upon his native classical Kalabari philosophy in dialogue with a spectrum of Christian and secular thinkers, an idea that bears striking relationships to John Mbiti's description of African thought in African Religions and Philosophy as unified by a conception of cosmic dynamism enabling being and becoming, an idea Wariboko perhaps engages in relation to Kalabari thought in his works focusing on that cosmology.

From those devotees who do not describe themselves as opposing the traditional system but simply as doing their own thing, but the radical implications of which are evident, from Jesus to St. Francis of Assisi, to St. Teresa of Avila and her companion St. John of the Cross, to theologians like Karl Rahner and his idea of anonymous Christianity, to explicit reformers like Luther and the Pentecostals, to radical mystics like Al-Hallaj, the infinite possibilities of an initial spiritual inspiration emerge in various forms, their possibilities unanticipated.

long those lines,

take with critical respect what the

igerian

entecostals are doing.

he examples represented by

your description of

the

Pentecostal priest [ who] can set up a church in his living room and name himself a BISHOP with no qualms about the validity of the gradation since there is no standardization of the process of priestly progression and ranking as obtained in the Catholic communion or Anglican communion

have become the most powerful social and economic force in Nigeria after politics.

lukoya of

MFM, the Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries,

for example,

is described as beginning

his ministry

with 25 members

meeting

in his living room but now runs a massive empire, including pre-tertiary schools and a university, an organisation which is yet still smaller than that of some other

similar systems

. Chris

yakhilome of Christ

mbassy began as a student in university but his operations have since become corporately sophisticated on an international scale.

aving established themselves, these figures now set up their own

standardization of the process of priestly progression and ranking as obtained in the Catholic communion or Anglican communion

The creations of the persistent and successful rebel, outsider or lone aspirant

eventually becomes another variant of the necessary social structuration represented by the establishment.

On 26 May 2018 at 06:55, Windows Live 2018 <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:

In interesting! I agree that your goals are laudable. We shall have to see if they are practical. Your model of individual vs communal engagement in the western academy has already been facilitated by online academic courses. They have to be designed again by discipline course designers and standardized so that they have acceptable comparative measurable value otherwise they would provide quacks the like of which is all over the place in oentecostalusm as satirized in Soyinkas Jero Plays and Requiem for A Futuriligist.

It is in such quackery that a Pentecostal priest can set up a church in his living room and name himself a BISHOP with no qualms about the validity of the gradation since there is no standardization of the process of priestly progression and ranking as obtained in the Catholic communion or Anglican communion or current Ida priesthood as constituted in the Apena and Plus I rankings among others which are cikkectuvely rather than individually determined .

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>

Date: 26/05/2018 00:11 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Reworking Ifa: Self InitiationandSelf Development in an Ancient African Tradition: Democratizing thePracticeof African Esoteric Systems [ with PDF]

thanks olayinka

what i stated was

self initiation into ifa

not

self graduation from ifa studies

to get a grounding on traditional initiation into ifa, a useful guide is the suggest the discussion on the facebook group i linked in my essay. most of those commenting are clearly serious ifa practitioners who, disagreeing with my views, support their own views by outlining various aspects of initiation into ifa.

i also suggest the work of babalawo kolawole ositola in his 'on ritual performance : a practitioners view' as well as margaret thompson drewal's work with him represented, among others by "Embodied Practice/Embodied History: Mastery of Metaphor in the Performances of Diviner Kolawole Ositola' in the yoruba artist ed by abiodun et al and in yoruba ritual : performers, play agency to gain an idea of a form of traditional initiation into ifa as well as of life guidance with the aid of ifa.

anyway, i am also arguing that not only can one only initiate oneself into ifa but one can also mark one's progression in ifa along various axis of achievement.

in terms of access to specialized ifa information, one of the most specialized is ifa herbalogy, which is magnificently represented by pierre verger's ewe: the uses of plants in yoruba society. i believe one can start from that in self education and move cautiously but creatively forward from there.

the PhD metaphor is apt but is only one side of the story. the PhD is a representation of scholarship as a communal endeavor, operating within protocols defined and administered by a group.

communal scholarship, however, is one kind of scholarship, though the most prominent. there also exists the model of individual or independent rather than communal scholarship. prominent independent scholars have demonstrated varying degrees of relationship with the traditional western dominated educational system from which the phd model is drawn, while others have operated in other learning contexts outside that model.

asian and western spiritual systems, which inspire me, also demonstrate recognition of individualistic and independent spiritual development.

examples of this are represented by the solitary life of the hermit as different from the communal life of the monk. st. anthony of egypt, the hermit who pioneered christian withdrawal from social life into contemplative seclusion in contrast to st. benedict of nursia whose rule for monastic life has been central to western christendom are representative of these contrastive but correlative forms of religious life. a prominent figure whose life and writings combine both is the 20th century us monk thomas merton.

a famous 20th century hindu hermit was ramana maharshi, beautifully described in paul brunton's a search in secret india. one of the world's best known hermits is the tibetan Buddhist poet jetsun milarepa. yet all these figures, christian, hindu and buddhist belonged to established communal traditions from which they chose to withdraw to practice a more individualistic style of spirituality.

even the Buddha's long withdrawal into seclusion, from which emerged the insights that became buddhism, was conducted agst the backdrop of established traditions of hinduism which he found unfulfilling, leading him to seek seclusion in order to find the answers he sought.

maharshi beginning his career as a hermit, rather than passing through the communal tradition as milarepa , the buddha and merton did.

ifa is significantly expressed through technical procedures. is there enough available info on these procedures for them to be studied and perhaps mastered by oneself? i think so.

some people have found themselves compelled into such seclusion by circumstance. st. john of the cross was imprisoned by fellow members of the carmelite order in the course of the efforts by st. teresa of avila and himself to set up a more rigorous monastic lifestyle. out of that imprisonment and possibly turture, came some of his greatest poetry, some of the greatest in history, and thus in the field of mystical literature to which it belongs, among the glories in the carmelite crown.

out of wole soyinka's two years or a little less nigerian civil war imprisonment, came the awesome the man died and the poetry collection a shuttle in the crypt, his greatest poetry known to me across the idanre collection and ogun abibiman, with the equally impressive poetry of credo of being and nothingness being one poem compared to the no in shuttle.

shuttle in the crypt and the man died are rich in contemplative strategies representing what soyinka named in shuttle as 'a map of the course trodden by the mind', constituting, with the man died, an evocation of the 'struggle agst a vegetable existence', a magnificent mental universe drawing from various cognitive systems, myriad religious traditions, to create its own testimony to the mountain where all paths converge, to adapt the image of the rosicrucian mystic raymond bernard in messages from the celestial sanctum.

the issues central to ifa initiation, whether initiation into ifa or initiation indicating mastery in ifa, may be seen as epistemic, metaphysical and procedural, all three aspects being both relatively distinctive and yet correlative.

i have dramatised my understanding of these issues in terms of self initiation into ifa in the self initiation ritual i have presented here and on other platforms. this understanding is evident in the ritual itself and in the notes indicating the logic of the sources chosen and the combinatorial logic employed in correlating these sources.

i am composing an essay that explores these issues further in the context of initiation into ifa.

i shall be examining these issues in terms of progression in ifa as i develop a course of study and practise along such lines.

the focus shall be on an understanding of ifa as a way of life, an understanding of Ifa compellingly described by Awo Falokun Fatunmbi, David Wilson in 'Obatala: Ifa and the Chief Spirit of the White Cloth', a discipline in which the divinatory system in terms of which ifa is best known is developed as a means of exploring the conjunction of the pre-temporal wisdom represented by Orunmila, described as having been consulted by Olodumare the creator at the time of creation, with the temporal contexts of human existence as these emerge from the 'odu' in 'Olodumare' the 'receptacle from which each moment is born', as described by Orisa cosmology theologian Shloma Rosenberg in 'Olodumare', expressed as the generative matrix known as odu ifa, the essential idetities of all possiblities of existence, as described by babalawo joseph ohomina.

anyway, having written that, i realise thats one way of approaching it but am i likely to approach it that way?

i doubt it.

i am interested in moving from such lofty and abstract theology to something similar to what pentecostal theologian and philosopher nimi wariboko describes as 'micro-theology', the theology of practical experience, iinterpreting wariboko by adapting a definition from karl rahner's 'theology of everyday things', theology as lived in terms of the details of daily life as these may reflect or dramatize cosmological conceptions or enable them or simply advance engagement with the intersection of utimate questions and human concrete living.

i am interested in the practical experience of living ifa. how can it help me navigate the details and larger course of my life? how can it assist me develop a sense of meaning that pervades my life in the face of the uncertainties that define human existence? how can it assist me in drawing upon my deepest potential? how can it facilitate the most successful negotiation between unchangeable circumstance and aspiration in relation to and beyond those circumstances, enabling me fly above circumstance into futuristic possibility? how may the distinctive ideas, motifs and methods of the matrix constituted by ifa's mathematical and literary constitution, projecting a spiritual and philosophical orientation in consonance with a powerful visual artistic tradition, assist in pursuing these goals?

can ifa be conducive to the quest to engage intimately with the source of existence, perhaps enabling a cognitive synthesis representing the approximation in human understanding of the totality of possibility represented by odu ifa, the ifa information system?

on the scope of my engagement with ifa, one may google 'adepoju ifa' or 'oluwatoyin vincent adepoju ifa'. even then, the available evidence does not reach back to an earlier stage of engagement before ready access to the internet in nigeria.

On 25 May 2018 at 12:14, Windows Live 2018 <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:

I concur that there can be no such thing as self initiation into Ifa

Its like a person awarding himself a Ph d in the western academy. Only the 'gate-keepers of each discipline can do this after adjudged requisite scholarship. Ifa scholarship mastery is more complex and lengthier spanning between 10 to 15 years which is why the omo awo initiate starts early enough in his youth to be able to be shown the different departments by his mentor and directed to where to source the medicinal herbs used in preparations. Toyins engagement with If Ifa to my knowledge is only in the past few years.

I think Toyin is mainly concerned with the philosophical exposition and inadvertently chose the wrong word to describe his engagement. Anyone can attempt expositions citing relevant sources providing the exponents agree with him.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Ibukunolu A Babajide <ibk2005@gmail.com>

Date: 23/05/2018 19:10 (GMT+00:00)

To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>

Cc: Yoruba Affairs <yorubaaffairs@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Reworking Ifa: Self Initiation andSelf Development in an Ancient African Tradition: Democratizing the Practiceof African Esoteric Systems [ with PDF]

Vincent OLUWATOYIN Adepoju,

The conflicted Edo man with Yoruba names.

You love self-masturbating using your armpits intellectually. You cannot re-work Ifa. That is a dream that can never come true. You can NEVER Self-Initiate that is another fallacy ab Initio. Those who practice Ifa initiate you into it. When they are satisfied that you have acquired the spiritual and corporal knowledge. You will enter Igbo Ifa to be initiated. There is nothing like self initiation.

If you think by deploying high fallutin and bombastic ill put together English bombastic words, you can will irrationality and absurdity into the opposite you are wasting your time.

You fool some, but you will never fool me.

Cheers.

IBK

_________________________

Ibukunolu Alao Babajide (IBK)

(+2348061276622)
ibk2005@gmail.com

On 22 May 2018 at 19:40, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:





Reworking Ifa

Self Initiation and Self Development in an Ancient African Tradition

Democratizing the Practice of African Esoteric Systems



Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju



Compcros



Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

                                "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

Tree trunk and roots photo by myself representing the Tree of Odu from Wande Abimbola's An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus. The tree is so named by me because it prefigures, in structure and cosmological associations, the 16 Odu Ifa, the primary information network and active agents of Ifa. The disciples of the deity of wisdom Orunmila, the masculine pole of the masculine/feminine dialectic underlying Ifa, the feminine being his wife Odu, after Orunmila's unanticipated departure from the earth, sought and found him in orun, the zone of ultimate origins, where they encountered him seated under a tree of sixteen branches, as big as houses, branching dynamically in various directions, at which meeting he passed on to them the Ifa system, organised in terms of the 16 Odu Ifa.

The tree's form, along with Orunmila's presence under it, like the Norse god Odin, who, in order to gain wisdom, hangs on Yggdrasil, each of whose branches constitutes one of the worlds that collectively compose the cosmos, evoke such images of the structure and dynamism of the cosmos as the Jewish Kabbalistic Tree of Life with its roots in the unknowable source of existence and its branches the network of all that is, as well as the cosmic tree in the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, which contains in its seed the cosmos that the entire tree will become. Photograph taken in the Jhalobia Recreation Park and Gardens Lagos.



  Abstract

An argument for developing systems of self-initiation and self-development in the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge, spiritual development and divination in order to make Ifa more accessible to enthusiasts beyond the current limitations, controversial practices and abuses emerging within the growing globalization of the traditional model of Ifa initiation and learning. The main text is complemented by pictures and accompanying text projecting Ifa as a spirituality centred in the intersection between the transcendent and the terrestrial, dramatized by the power of the beauty and mystery of nature.

The Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge, spiritual development and divination is one of the world's great powerhouses of knowledge, integrating mathematics, literature, the visual and verbal arts, spirituality and philosophy in a matrix of primary disciplines, with ancillary disciplines including an extensive and complex herbal corpus. This cognitive scope is both highlighted and expanded in a growing range of scholarly and more general writings on Ifa, in the context of a growing globalization of the Orisa cosmological and spiritual tradition to which Ifa belongs.

Ifa is also a bastion in the little studied field of African esotericism. Esotericism may be understood as the exploration of the structures of meaning and the direction of existence through the use of techniques either concealed from the public or inaccessible to the public on account of most people not having cultivated the perceptual faculties vital to accessing such knowledge. This description of what I describe as social and epistemic esotericism represents my own understanding within the controversial characterizations of esotericism as this has emerged in the academic study of Western and Jewish esotericism, perhaps the most developed areas in the scholarly study of this field of knowledge.

The expansion of the geographical and social reach of Ifa beyond Nigeria has inspired a reconfiguration of the system in terms of its monetary value, with a particularly blatant case being an online provider offering to train clients to become qualified babalawo, adepts in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa, in 78 hours, a level of development, which, if I can recall correctly, my Ifa teacher Joseph Ohomina described as taking 16 years to reach in the traditional system. Even if the traditional requirement of memorizing large parts of the Ifa literary corpus, the central information storehouse of the system, were modified on account of the modern focus on high levels of written literacy , is it realistic to expect adepthood in any spiritual system within a short time frame?

Furthermore, the increasing complaints from people in the Americas about the high cost of initiation into Ifa necessitates inquiry as to whether or not one can initiate oneself into the tradition.

Purists insist it is not possible for a number of reasons. Centrists state its possible in rare cases. I insist it is possible for anyone who so chooses.

My theoretical and practical experience of various spiritual and other cognitive cultures from Africa, the West and Asia convinces me of the supreme truth of the assertion by Jesus Christ, the founder of Christianity, that "The Spirit bloweth where it listeth and none knows whence it cometh

and whither it goeth", a summation fully in consonance with the Yoruba concept of ase, which I understand as a cosmic force that enables being and becoming, existence and change, a description in line with John Mbiti's presentation in African Religions and Philosophy of a similar idea as unifying classical African thought, a concept actually globally widespread, as I demonstrate in my essay "A Salute to the Elephant : Abiola Irele at the Intersection of Disciplines", an essay that subsumes Irele's work in terms of his oscillation between individual studies of imaginative works and the exploration of imagination in general, particularly the African imagination, as a cognitive style in the arts and in the correlation of the arts and the sciences, advancing his projection of the possibility of conjuncting Orisa cosmology and modern scientific cosmology in a synthesis contributing significantly to restructuring dominant conceptions of the cosmos.






Photographic self-portrait in the grounds of the university guest house, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. The network of tree branches above a face in reflection within contemplative semi-darkness softly illuminated by overhanging spaces of light, evokes the cognitive framework enabling intersections of mind and cosmos.

"The spiritual world of the Yoruba is a powerful, metaphysical forest-wilderness, vegetatively ferocious and of a scarcely conceivable vitality. 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-arcarnum is metaphorically compared to a mighty, mansion like giant tree, with all its innumerable forms of animal and plant tenantry, Ifa 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." Susanne Wenger in A Life with the Gods in their Yoruba Homeland, with Gert Chesi. Wörgl, Austria : Perlinger, 1983.74.

"Ifá is about the power of wisdom to approach the mysterious and, through this, to offer an understanding of the visible and invisible worlds [ that constitute the forested mystery of existence] through which our lives, collective and unique, are made accessible- Nicholaj De Mattos Frisvold, Ifá: a Forest of Mystery. Scarlet Imprint / Bibliothèque Rouge, 2016. 7.

"The most obvious characteristics of [the Yoruba novelist D.O Fagunwa's ] world is its fusion into a comprehensive theatre of human drama...the natural and supernatural realms.His characters exist and move within an imaginative framework...created ...directly out of the African, and specifically Yoruba, conception which sees the supernatural not merely as a prolongation of the natural world, but as co-existing actively with it...transposing the real world in his work in such a way as to reveal its essential connection with the unseen...giving to the everyday and the finite the quality of the numinous and the infinite. ...in the symbolic framework and connotations of his novels...his forest stands for the universe,inhabited by obscure forces to which man stands in a dynamic moral and spiritual relationship and with which his destiny is involved.

...The tremendous adventure of existence in which man is engaged is dramatised by the adventures of Fagunwa's hunters who go through trials and dangers in which they must justify and affirm their human essence....the unique combination of physical and spiritual energy that is the the privilege of man in the universal order, and which the traditional image of the hunter represents in the highest degree [ in]the dynamic correlation of individual responsibility and the pressure of external events and forces [ reflecting] the understanding that human life is as much a matter of chance as of conscious moral choice [the oral literature, as in the deployment of literature as a vehicle of philosophical and philosophical insight in Ifa, dramatises] the moral and spiritual attributes needed by the individual to wrest a human meaning out of his life".

From Abiola Irele,"Tradition and the Yoruba Writer:D.O.Fagunwa,Amos Totuola and Wole Soyinka".The African Experience in Literature and Ideology.London: Heinemann,1981. 174-196.179-181. Discussed by me in "Forest as Cosmos: Abiola Irele on Classical Yoruba Philosophy of Nature".

I am particularly challenged by the contrast between the paucity of information on Ifa initiation and the descriptions of its cost and the absolute ease with which one can undergo one of the most powerful Christian initiation rituals available, the Pentecostal ritual of being Born Again. This observation is reinforced by ready access to two of the greatest of human creations, the Hindu Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram ritual and the rituals of the Western esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, particularly the edition of the Golden dawn ritual text by Israel Regardie.

The Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram, of which the Shakti Saddhana version is the richest English translation I know, is an imaginative navigation of the cosmos mobilizing all the senses as portals to ultimate reality. The Golden Dawn rituals are a majestic synthesis of ideas from various cultures directed at shaping the mind within a cosmic matrix through meditations and rituals of superb architectonic splendour and sublime poetry. This system rivals the world's greatest scriptures and yet surpasses them in providing practical techniques for achieving the goal of aligning consciousness with a metaphysically primal zone that is the goal of all religion, but which a good number of religions do not describe how to achieve in their most influential scriptures, Hinduism being, to some degree, an exception with such works as the Sri Devi Khadgamala and other Tantric texts, such as the Vijnana Bhairava tantra, another magnificent example of the combination of inspirational philosophy and praxis, my

favorite being the translation in Paul Rep's Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, the Christian, Khadgamala and Golden Dawn being systems I have practiced to varying degrees.

Other readily available fantastic ritual compendia include Evans Wentz' edited Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines : Seven Books of Wisdom of the Great Path, According to the Late Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup's English Rendering and the Western esotericist Aleister Crowley's Magick, Liber ABA, Book 4. Another is The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage , beautifully described by Aaron Leitch at that link.

The Abramelin ritual shares with Ifa a focus on a spiritual identity understood as intimate to the self, known as ori in Ifa and the Holy Guardian Angel in the Abramelin operation, ideas that demonstrate significant similarity. The Abramelin system also shares with Ifa an unconventional relationship with forces often seen as dangerous, such as the Abramelin operation being concluded by invoking what the ritual texts describe as evil spirits in order to serve the interests of the magician while ese ifa, Ifa literature, often present Orunmila, the mythic founder of Ifa negotiating with the ajogun, the forces of destruction, as I describe in "Orunmila and the Sixteen Evils: Yoruba Divination Poetry in Comparative Context by Aníbal Mejía. Commentary by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju."

In a world in which various ideologies are in competition, a competition made more acute by the consistent challenge, directly and indirectly, to Africans to demonstrate their contribution to the global cultural patrimony, particularly as these contributions come from their ancestral cultures, in a world where a good number of other spiritualities command significant space in the global imagination, demonstrating qualities and motifs even non-adherents of these religions recognize and in a significant number of cases, identify with, within the increasing globalization of classical African spiritualities in which the Yoruba Orisa tradition and Ifa are at the forefront, it becomes imperative to make these African spiritualities fully accessible to all, and ideally, the steps of progression in the systems they demonstrate clarified and the modes of development represented by those systems made readily accessible.

I am not formally initiated into Ifa nor have I been trained as an Ifa practitioner beyond my own efforts but I believe I have sufficient theoretical knowledge of the system and have reached a depth of exposure to its practical possibilities, an exposure which, though still embryonic, empowers me to justify the logic of a self administered Ifa initiation, to develop such an initiatory system, as well as, to some degree, map stages of growth, various possibilities of development in theoretical and practical study, one may aspire to in Ifa and guide people in climbing these rungs of the ladder or suggest how these steps may be attained.



"I am here in the trees, in the river, in my creative phase not only when I am here physically, but forever, even when I happen to be travelling-hidden beyond time and suffering, in the Spiritual Entities which, beceause they are Real in many ways, present ever new features. I feel sheltered with them -in them- beceause I am so very fond of trees and running water - and all the gods of the world are trees and animals long, long before they entrust their sancrosanct magnificence to a human figure".

Susanne Wenger from Adunni: A Portrait of Susanne Wenger by Rolf Brockmann and Gerd Hotter. Machart:Hamburg, 1994. Back cover. Photograph taken by me in the Jhalobia Recreation Park and Gardens Lagos.

Wenger's work is central in the exploration of the naturistic matrix of Orisa cosmology, as described in various works by her and others, including my explicit working out of the relationship she developed between landscape and cosmology in "Cosmogeographic Explorations : Metaphysical Mapping of Landscape at the Oshun Forest and Glastonbury".

Even though I am still trying to work out how to penetrate the more esoteric aspects of Ifa, I can at least share the actions I am taking in pursuing this goal and the outcomes of those actions in what is best understood as a shared journey rather than in terms of the picture of a fully informed person educating others from a commanding height. In the face of the exploration of the mysteries of the ultimate meaning and direction of existence in their intersection with the daily cycle of human life, which I understand as the mission of Ifa, everyone is an explorer, no one is or can be fully informed.

The complete picture I am developing is not identical with traditional Ifa though based on the older formation. I am inspired in this initiative by the proliferation of forms of Buddhism between the traditional Theravada and the developments away from the traditional forms but inspired by them known as Mahayana, by the large range of methods and philosophies in Hinduism as well as by the variety of Rosicrucian esoteric systems of which the Golden Dawn and AMORC, the Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross, are perhaps the most prominent.

We live in a world flooded by readily accessible and relatively free information. Only those ideological systems that can position themselves adequately within this information flow will retain significance or grow in relevance as time passes.

I shall follow this statement of purpose with an Ifa self initiation ritual I have composed, clarifying the sources of the ideas used in the ritual and the logic of their use. This is a ritual the core of which I developed when I committed myself definitively to studying Ifa and which I have performed a number of times and refined from time to time over the years.

After that I shall provide suggestions of inspirational Ifa texts and of the Orisa cosmology to which Ifa belongs, works that give information as well as project an imaginative dynamism capable of uplifting the mind, inspiring a sense of mental expansion, facilitating the centring of consciousness in an exalted ideational matrix unifying terrestrial existence and its metaphysical coordinates, conducing to moving from idea to experience, from thought to encounter.



"The unique function of Obatala within the realm of Orisha Awo (Mysteries of Nature) is to provide the spark of light that animates consciousness. To call an Orisha the Chief of the White Cloth is to make a symbolic reference to that substance which makes consciousness possible. The reference to White Cloth is not a reference to the material used to make the cloth, it is a reference to the fabric which binds the universe together. The threads of this fabric are the multi-leveled layers of consciousness which Ifa teaches exist in all things on all levels of being. Ifa teaches that it is the ability of forces of nature to communicate with each other, and the ability of humans to communicate with forces in nature that gives the world a sense of spiritual unity"- from Obatala: Ifa and the Chief of the Spirit of the White Cloth by Awo Fa'lokun Fatunmbi .

"Nature is a temple in which living pillars murmur in a soft language, half strange, half understood; man wanders there as through a cabalistic wood, forest-groves of symbols, strange and solemn, aware of eyes that watch him in the leaves above. Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance, echoes long that from afar rebound, merged till one deep low shadowy note is born, in a deep and tenebrous unity, vast as the dark of night and as the light of day, vast as the turning planet clothed in darkness and light, vast as the night or as the fires of morn, sound calls to fragrance, colour calls to sound, perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond, expanding as infinity expands, possessing the diffusion of infinite things"-from Charles Baudelaire's "Correspondences", a collage of different translations from the poem's page at fleursdumal.org.

Photograph taken by me in the Jhalobia Recreation Park and Gardens Lagos.

After publishing online my introduction to inspirational Ifa and Orisa texts, I am likely to continue by presenting a do-it-yourself course of study in Ifa, drawing on my various writings on Ifa, most of them freely accessible online through the "Cognitive Platforms" section of my central website, expanding this foundation through engagement with the explosion in Ifa and Orisa writings online and offline, conjunctions amplified through dialogue with other bodies of knowledge, a program representing my own contributions to the growing body of Ifa study programs referenced online

Along with the traditional training methods, it is helpful to have the option of self training, for people, who, like myself, either prefer to work alone or who want to alternate solitary work with working with others, such as a teacher. I gained a lot from my Ifa teacher Joseph Ohomina, in terms of the inspiration of his quality of character and ideas about Ifa that are central to my aspirations and work in Ifa, ideas the core of which I discuss in "Cosmological Permutations : Joseph Ohomina's Ifa Philosophy and the Quest for the Unity of Being". My experience with Ohomina represented having access to the option of formal training with a babalawo and even the offer of initiation, even without cost being an issue, his teaching being magnanimously free and movement to and from our places of learning being entirely at his own expense, options for formal training and initiation I chose not to take, preferring informal and general discussions with him.

I invite you to follow a debate on self-initiation in Ifa at this link initiated by a question I asked on the subject in the Facebook platform the Ifa Studies Group.

Also published on

Facebook

academia.edu ( PDF)

Scribd ( PDF)

Ifa Student and Teacher blog

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Saturday, May 26, 2018

Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Reworking Ifa: Self InitiationandSelf Development in an Ancient African Tradition: Democratizing thePracticeof African Esoteric Systems [ with PDF]

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