--Are African cultures against the public display of the erotic?
Dear Toyin:
Couched in this framework, topic of eroticism is more ENGAGING, interesting and useful!
________________________
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Sent: Thursday, September 6, 2018 4:49 PM
To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Convergences of the Erotic, the Philosophical and the Spiritual in Yoruba and Hindu Thought
Convergences of the Erotic, the Philosophical and the Spiritual in Yoruba and Hindu Thought
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corer of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Responding to Olayinka Agbetuyi's comments on my essay on masculinity in the context of male eroticism.
Great thanks, Oga Agbetuyi for your response
to my post.
Great thanks to the moderators for allowing my post in.
I particularly enjoyed this from Agbetuyi, partly bcs I had anticipated such a response wondering if I had been paid, and in kind, for the essay:
'Have you been paid for this abuse of sensibilities of respectable scholars and did that payment include payment in kind rather than in cash?'
On pornography, where does it begin or end? Is any erotic display necessarily pornographic? Is pornography necessarily something that should not be discussed in a scholarly forum, and if so, without recourse to examples of the subject matter in question?
I posted the essay here bcs it an engagement in the philosophy of human embodiment, exploring the scope of male physicality from the sartorial to the erotic, traversing various conceptual zones and diverse cultural complexes, evoking humanity's fascination with the material contouring that enables our terrestrial existence.
Are African cultures against the public display of the erotic?
In recognition of the preeminence of human physicality and its erotic character in terrestrial existence, Hindu Tantra and classical Yoruba thought, for example, address male and female genitalia as expressions of divine creativity and occult power.
Related
symbolic values
on the significance of
female
and male sexuality
as
cultivated
in classical Yoruba cosmology are developed and abstracted in Hindu Tantra
. In the Hindu Kamakala Yantra,
a yantra being a Hindu geometric cosmogram,
above, from David Gordon White's edited Tantra in Practice, the structure embodies the convergence of masculine and feminine principles in generating and sustaining the cosmos.
The lingam, the phallus understood as an embodiment of cosmic creativity, of the God Shiva, rises from the base of the yantra to intersect at its centre with the meeting point of converging triangles. Triangles are used in Tantra to symbolise the yoni, female genitalia perceived as a manifestation of cosmic creativity on the terrestrial plane and as an analogue of the zone of cosmic emergence
from its ultimate source. Contemplating this yantra is capable of stimulating the experience of mental orgasm, akin to the orgasmic force through which the cosmos is generated and sustained by the erotic activity of Shiva and Shakti, a mental orgasm experienced as an intensely blissful convergence of cognitive possibilities in terms of a cosmological vision.
Taiwo Makinde, in "Motherhood as a Source of Empowerment of Women in Yoruba Culture", describes the goddess Iyamapo as associated with the "water from the vagina, a part of which is considered as the place harboring the secret of a woman's power".
A Shivalingam, a c
lassic Hindu evocation of the lingam of Shiva, the phallus understood as a comic force, in the yoni, female genitalia perceived as an expression of cosmic creativity, of Shakti. Indian thought is adept at the correlation of the concrete and the abstract. Its dramatization of cosmological possibility in terms of the concrete experience of male/female conjunction is actualized at various levels of concreteness and abstraction, a spectrum subsuming the scope of human cognitive possibility.
Oludare Olajubu, in "References to Sex in Yoruba Oral Literature", depicts Iyamapo as saluted in the name of the vagina, at the beginning of an artistic display, in a solemn religious rite aimed at propitiating "the mysterious and potent powers of the Yoruba world", "that rule the circumstances of …performance":
… I salute the vagina that stands
inverted without bleeding
[" the vagina that contains the blood that comes with the female menstrual period, but that flows only on special days, the flow being regulated by a great power"-Olajubu]
Iyamapo, please, I beseech you
I do not intend to slight you
you with bearded mouth".
The yantras, geometric embodiments, of the ten Mahavidyas, Hindu Goddesses described as embodying all possibilities of existence, from the terrestrial to the cosmic, from the erotic to the transcendental, from life to death and rebirth. They are depicted in the Yoni Tantra, a classic of female centred veneration, as positioned at various points of the yoni, on account of which the devotee is enjoined to contemplate both the yonis of suitable women and the abstract evocations of the yoni represented by symbolic triangles, yantras, embodying particular female divinities.
Afrikka
"When she, the ultimate Shakti [ the feminine principle that enables existence and transformation], of her own will assumed the form of the universe, then the creation of the [ yantra, the geometric embodiment of deity and cosmic process and structure] revealed itself as a pulsating essence. From the void [ of the] visarga [ identified with the yoni, female genitalia as cosmic form] emerged the bindu [ point of cosmic emergence] , quivering and fully conscious. From this pulsating stream of supreme light emanated the ocean of the cosmos...." From the Yoginihridaya, Heart of the Yogini. Lines translated by Mike Magee.
Adeyinka Bello's comment on a previous social media post by myself on the aesthetics and philosophy of the masculine in relation to the erotic model Juan Philips, the same essay that inspires this exchange, superbly complements the preceding invocation:
"Iba oko t'o d'ori kodo ti o ro!Iba obo t'o dori kodo ti o s'eje!
I pay homage to the penis that is hung without bringing sperm; I pay homage to the vagina that has stopped menstruating. Paying homage to our elders who have used these organs to bring life and are now old or gone. But whose contributions can never be forgotten".
Bello's invocation resonates with perhaps the most powerful expression of the relationship between human erotic and procreative forms and conceptions of occult, mysterious power evoked by those human characteristics, edan ogboni, a central symbolic and magical instrument of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order, often constructed as two paired male and female figurines, often naked, as is perhaps befitting as children of Ille, Earth, the great mother to which Ogboni is dedicated.
Spirals of transformation and infinity, at the circumference of an opon ifa, a central cosmological symbol and divination platform of the Yoruba origin system of knowledge, in tandem with the face of Esu, embodiment of the cosmos as constituted by paradox through which the intersections between possibilities are cognised, looks on from the top of the tray as the empty centre lies open, awaiting the casting of the divination instruments which will assume patterns understood as the emergence of insight through the conjunction of the self in its deepest aspect, ori inu, the 'inward head', and the possibilities of existence represented by the patterns assumed by the divination instruments. The ensemble is ringed by the circle of eternity.
Babatunde Lawal, in 'New Perspectives in Edan Ogboni' describes the presence of bearded women in edan ogboni sculpture as indicating both the wisdom ideally associated with age and the evocation of occult power assumed by a woman, suggested by the assimilation or cultivation of a force anchored in human biology but transgressive of biological limitations, a transformative capacity understood in classical Yoruba thought as particularly embodied by women on account of their privileged procreative capacities, the potency of this procreative force concentrated even in post-menopausal women through the concentration of blood that no more escapes with the monthly cycle.
Iroke ifa, phallic structured tapper used to tap the opon in order to activate an Ifa divination session. The conjunction of the phallic iroke, its procreative evocations reinforced by the figure of a kneeling woman present in a good number of examples of iroke ifa, an image demonstrating votive and child birthing significance in classical Yoruba culture, and the empty centred opon, its empty centre being the zone where cognitive possibilities emerge through the symbolic patterns assumed by the divinatory instruments when cast on its surface, may suggest the intersection of phallus and vaginal and womb space, a convergence of Orunmila, the male principle, and Odu, the female principle, of Ifa, enabling the emergence of the 267 odu ifa, a symbolic binary permutation system evocative of a kinship tree and understood as representing all possibilities of existence, acting as Ifa's means of providing insight into the queries brought to it as an oracle.
The 'bearded mouth' of Iyamapo, correlative with the bearded women of edan ogboni, is also conjunctive with the beard of the Iyan Nla mask, the Great Mother mask, of Efe Gelede performance, perhaps the most significant classical Yoruba celebration of the feminine, the feminine in its character as embodiment of creative and destructive potencies represented by the archetypal personalities Iya Wa Osoronga, which may be translated, following Pierre Verger, as Our Mothers Sorcerous.
The beard of Iyan Nla, as Henry Drewal explains in "Art and the Perception of Women in Yoruba Culture", evokes both age and preternatural power suggested by the conjunction of the masculine and the feminine in a concentration of transgressive possibility suggesting the transgression of biology that her powers enable, that beard itself evocative, in my view, of the 'bearded mouth' of Iyamapo, the 'beard' that demonstrates the character of the erotic and procreative space it covers as "a dark, small orifice… concealed in pubic hair", as Drewal puts it, a concealment that suggests women's unique capacities for secrecy, and, therefore, for the incubation and effective utilization of the most profound spiritual powers, activities for which secrecy is essential, a feminine quality also resonating with the deep secrecy in which the mask representing Iyan Nla, the Great Mother of All, from terrestrial existents to deities, is preserved, venerated and used in Gelede performance, qualities of Gelede in its conjunction with conceptions of the feminine emphasized by Drewal.
Collage of majestic opon ifa and a veve, a symbol attributed to the African diaspora religion Voodoo, evoking the foundations of odu ifa symbolism in binary principles.
This imagery of concealment derived from female erotic space is further developed in classical Yoruba conceptions of the "clitoris [ as] believed to possess some kind of 'power', similar to the power possessed by the Eegun [an artistic tradition understood as projecting the invisible but potent force of the ancestors][ bcs ]both are concealed, unseen, and use the power of 'our mothers' " ( Iya wa osoronga), a term used synonymously with 'witches'(aje)", as described by Rowland Abiodun in "Woman in Yoruba Religious Images".
Quietly majestic beauty of an example of edan ogboni , a central symbol and spiritual instrument of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order, from Babatunde Lawal's "New Perspectives in Edan Ogboni". The work shows male and female united as children of Ille, Earth, and naked, perhaps in recognition of the primordiality of their existence under that primal maternality, a power whose force is suggested by the transgressive potencies emblematised by the bearded woman.
Images conjoining fascination and taboo, concealment and hazardous revelation, suggesting the numinous in its combination of otherworldly distancing and fascination, as evoked, in this context, by female genitalia, shape characterizations of Iyan Nla in her various manifestations:
Mother whose vagina causes fear to all
Mother whose pubic hair bundles up in knots
Mother who set a trap, set a trap.
From Henry Drewal, "Art and the Perception of Women in Yorùbá Culture"
The pot breasted mother
With much hair on her private parts;
The owner of a vagina that suffocates like dry yam in the throat.
From Babatunde Lawal, The Gelede Spectacle: Art, Gender, and Social Harmony in an African Culture, translating from Pierre Verger, Notes Sur le Culte des Orisa et Vodun.
Homage, my mother, the Osoronga
Mother with the beautiful eyes,
Who has a bunch of hair in her private part
…………………………………………………………………
The famous bird of the night who flies gracefully.
By Sule Akinbami in Lawal, Gelede.
The emergence of the primary sixteen odu ifa which are eventually developed into the complete sequence of 256, suggested by this collage of a Voodoo symbol and a quietly beautiful but visually dynamic opon ifa.
Interpreting the following poem
The inexhaustible sea, immense water,
Roaring eddy of seashells,
Querulous, though she has no rival
Vibrations from the deep.
From Lawal, Gelede.
Lawal states, "the mystery associated with female genitalia echoes in 'vibrations from the deep'". Building on Lawal's previously expressed understanding of "inexhaustible sea", in its similarity to the flow of milk from the mother's breasts that nourishes the infant, as evoking the nurturing qualities of the feminine, one may correlate the unrivalled inexhaustibility, immensity and roaring force of the sea, its deep vibrations, with the depths of vaginal and womb space and the mysterious creativity of life, the most potent known to humanity, which they enable.
My favourite bearded woman edan ogboni, from Lawal, "New Perspectives on Edan Ogboni". Formidable in her prominent beard, she yet holds aloft her breasts, symbolising her maternality as a representative of Ille, Earth, mother of all, a primordial motherhood at the centre of Ogboni, the Yoruba origin esoteric order to which this image is belongs. She is surrounded by spiral disks, suggesting transformative powers central to nature which she evokes.
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