USA Africa Dialogue Series - Reworking the Yoruba Origin Ogboni Esoteric Order: From the Two to the Three, from Temporality to Eternity : Philosophical Reflections and Spiritual Invocation in an Earth Centred Spirituality and Philosophy

                                                                                             

                                                                                 

                                                        Reworking the Yoruba Origin Ogboni Esoteric Order

                                                                         From the Two to the Three

                                                                       From Temporality  to Eternity

                             Philosophical Reflections and Spiritual Invocation  in an Earth Centred Spirituality and Philosophy

                                                                                       Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                                        Compcros

                                                                             Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

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

  

                                                                                      Abstract

A journey into the philosophical core of the Yoruba Ogboni esoteric order, as mediated by the conjunction between its visual art and a central aphorism of the school, as these expressive forms are interpreted by scholars of Ogboni. The essay concludes with an invocation crafted by adapting the literature on the subject and related ideas, thus developing both a scholarly exploration and a spiritual application of the study of a philosophy and spirituality whose rich ritual culture  is largely concealed from the public.The essay takes forward the vision of contributing to the adapting classical African hermeneutic forms, in general,  and  esoteric systems, in particular,  to individualistic use, as described in the preceding  essay "Reworking the Yoruba Origin Ogboni Esoteric Order : From the Two to the Three : Multiplicity and Unity in an Earth Centred Spirituality and Philosophy".                                                 

                                                                                            

                                                                     

                                 

                                                                                     

The sublime concentration and quiet intensity of the fully bodied figures in the image above, their stylisation of the human form generating a sense of the regal and the intimate, of the human as a combination of the familiar and the strangely beautiful, perceived in relation to their role in the symbolism of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order,  evoke for me our first parents in humanity's emergence on  earth, having evolved from creatures who crawled out of primeval seas,  subsequently building communities that are the forerunners of the vast demographic and infrastructural networks known as cities.

 The Ogboni figures are depicted in the solemn focus of people presiding over a sacred rite, as befitting those who initiated the effort to make meaning of the terrestrial journey between the two great unknowns that is our existence in the brief flight of the bird  into and out of the room that is earth, adapting the Venerable Bede's image in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, an  image so powerful it needs to be quoted verbatim from the  Wikiquote     source where it is readily reached, it being difficult to find a richer  summation of the human condition, penetrating to the  core of philosophical and religious  value, subsuming and transcending the Christian context in which is presented: 

"The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine [ Christianity, most likely]  contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed." 

 

Stephan Korner, writing in Kant on the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, describes this sensitivity to the puzzlement of human existence as the "metaphysical moment".  Ogboni sculpture testifies to this imperative, and akin to Bede's focus on undeniable human realities, does this by focusing on the human person, and through the presence generated by its sculptural art, suggests the sense of engagement with metaphysical sensitivities through the eloquence of visual form.

The image above is a collage, by myself, of pictures from various online sources, showing edan ogboni, Ogboni visualization of onile, "owners of the house", the founders of particular Ogboni iledi, Ogboni sacred meeting houses, representing onile, "owners of the earth",   founding ancestors of the community and of humanity,  both forms of symbolization subsumed in their characterization  as "Ile" Earth, the primal masculine/feminine generatrix  that enables terrestrial existence, the creative identity that is the centre of Ogboni devotion, an interpretation conjoining  the insights of Henry Drewal's "The Meaning of Osugbo Art: A Reappraisal"  and Babatunde Lawal's "À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New Perspectives on Edan Ògbóni".

The austere elongation of the midsections of the full figured edan, culminating in  richly noble faces, is a visual strategy similar to that deployed by the 16th-17th century  Greco-Spanish artist El Greco, in combination with the twisting of his elongated forms, in generating a sense of dynamic beauty and spiritual force, as  evident in the rich Wikipedia essay on his work.  The elongated forms of  the edan ogboni  create an impression  that is both ascetic and richly, though quietly expressive, faces projecting a near  uncanny beauty, an idealisation of the human suggesting its kinship with  elevated possibilities beyond the conventional understanding of the  human,  idealisations conjoined with the playful creativity of elegantly foreshortened legs.

Anthropomorphism is at times conjoined with abstraction in edan ogboni  symbolism, as demonstrated by the  edan at top right, where human heads sit atop spiral inscriptions, representations of recreative motion linking diverse entities  and different states of being, a capacity emblematised by the orisa or deity Esu,  as described by Lawal in  "À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó" . Esu is  "a constant traveller" , "with the enormous capacity to know the truth and reveal it", "ubiquitous and invisible, so much so that his 'temple' can also be within the individual self", as described by Toyin Falola, in  Esu : Yoruba God of Power and the Imaginative Frontiers. Esu is understood as  a fundamental principle of self awareness.   "If someone did not have his Esu in his body, he could not exist, he would not know that he is alive; therefore everybody must have his individual Esu", as depicted by Juan Elbein and Deoscoredes Dos Santos in "Esu Bara : Principle of Individual Life in the Nago System". 

The edan inscribed with spirals conjoin the human head with an abstract form.  The human head is known in Yoruba philosophy as the centre of biological organisation and psychological existence as well as the analogue of the concentration of the ultimate potential of the self, the immortal identity known in Yoruba thought as "ori inu", the inward head. The edan place the physical and spiritual  significator represented by the head atop a shaft inscribed with a spiral and constituting the "body" attached to the head. In conjoining the anthropomorphic symbolism  of the head with the abstract symbolism  of the spiral these edan  may be seen  as projecting  a description of the character of reality and as emblematising the need to engage with reality in the light of the dynamism represented by  the transformative and conjunctive potential evoked by the spiral, leading to the self, creatively positioned within the flux of experience,  becoming an embodiment of this realization.

       

The eloquently modeled genitalia of both fully realised human forms in the other edan pair  suggests procreative capacity,  one aspect of the conjunctive  and transformative potential signified by the spiral,  the human equivalent of the generative power of Ile, Earth, demonstrated in the ability to birth  a third expression  from the union of the gendered pair evoked by the edan, a creative possibility  which may be correlated with the enigmatic Ogboni expression "Ogboni meji l o mo idi eta", "Two Ogboni know the meaning and matter of the three", as rendered and interpreted  by Henry John Drewal in "The Meaning of Osugbo Art", an expression which may also be translated as  "Two Ogboni grasp the foundational significance of the three or of the triune principle", "idi" in "idi eta" signifying  the bottom in a physical sense, transposed, metaphorically, in this expression,  to refer to a foundation on which a phenomenon rests as its pivot. 

"Two Ogboni, it becomes three", as rendered and interpreted by Morton-Williams  in "the Yoruba Ogboni Cult in Oyo",  suggests "a sign of incompleteness [ in terms of continuity of development ]  and therefore a concern with process and time",  suggesting   the emergence of a third principle, in both a biological and epistemic sense, from the binary. The epistemic possibilities of this idea  are demonstrated, par excellence, in Yoruba thought by the structure of the odu organisational system of Ifa,  a central Yoruba knowledge system, a structure which may be seen as emerging from the conjunction of Odu, the feminine matrix embodying the essential identities of phenomena and Orunmila, the foundational intelligence underlying cosmic creativity, as this husband and wife pair may be described, generating the multiples of two, four, eight  and sixteen, culminating in the 256 odu permutations mapping all possibilities of existence in Ifa metaphysics.

Lawal expounds further on the meaning of the emblematic Ogboni expression, which he renders,   "Agbagba meji lo mo idi eta", "Only two elders know the secret of the number three",    in these lines from    "À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó",  slightly modified by me by removing intervening sentences so as to distill the core of the section:

 "the number two (eeji) suggests harmony or equilibrium; hence ejire (an epithet for twins) means 'the friendly and compatible two.' The number three (eeta), on the other hand, signifies dynamic power (agbara), both physical and metaphysical, a compelling force [associated] with ase, the 'power to make things happen', empowered at creation by Olodumare to link cause with effect, the physical with the metaphysical, the visible with the invisible, and the human with the superhuman. Thus the mystical union implicit in threeness transcends the intimacy and equilibrium commonly associated with twoness. 

Threeness in Ogboni symbolism alludes to a dynamic force uniting two elements toward a common purpose. In addition to its association with dynamism, occultism, secrecy, and spiritual bonding, the number three connotes completeness with regard to the span of life: childhood (morning), the prime of life (afternoon), and old age (evening) ".

That "evening" enables entry into-post terrestrial existence, an Abyss of Transition as described by Wole Soyinka in Myth, Literature and the African World and Death and the King's Horseman, defined by motion between terrestrial and post-terrestrial life, along with influence exerted on those on earth by those beyond and on those  beyond by those on earth. [Thus,  edan ogboni], as summed up by William Fagg and John Pemberton in Yoruba Sculpture of West Africa and quoted by Rowland Abiodun in Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art,  represents "a vision of life in terms of its completeness and transcendence of time", projecting entry into an infinity both still and dynamic, contemplative and active, participating in the cycle of transition between the terrestrial and the post-terrestrial, yet a source of  those "voices often heard", those touches often felt, those "wisdoms which come suddenly to the mind when the wisest have shaken their heads and murmured; it cannot be done", an evocation of inspiring ancestral presences slightly adapted from Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, bygone voyagers awaiting the seeker in  pools of contemplative silence,  Soyinka's transposition of the same motif  from the localisation represented by the Yoruba source of Horseman to a universalistic reference in   A Shuttle in the Crypt. Adapting perspectives from Rowland Abiodun's  "The Future of African Art Studies: An African Perspective" and Yoruba Art and Language, these significations may be seen as  exemplars of "aiku pari iwa", the deathlessness that consummates existence.

 

An ultimate evocation, incidentally confluent with the  Ogboni vision,  of the binary matrix generating a third, complementary expression, the  man/woman/father/mother harmony enabling animate existence on earth, a demonstration  of the dynamism of the cosmos, a central vision of the Hindu and Buddhist strand known as Tantra, as represented by such works as the Saundaryalahari, the Billowing Waves of the Ocean of Beauty, the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra and a centuries persistent tradition of  visual art complementing the verbal expression, in such texts, of dialogical relationship between the God Shiva, a masculine principle representing all men  and the Goddess Shakti, a feminine dynamic embodied by all women, is dramatised by 10th century Hindu thinker Abhinavagupta, who opens a number of his books, such as the Tantraloka, Light on the Tantras and the Paratrisika Vivarana, The Secret of Tantric Mysticism,  with this sublime concretisation of the ultimate significance of the sexual union of a loving couple  coming together to conceive a child: 

"May my heart, the core of my being which is the core of all beings, the innermost awareness that animates all manifestation, shine forth, the product of the exuberance of emotion due to the mating of my father and mother, embodying the bliss of the ultimate,  one with the state of absolute potential made manifest in the fusion of these two, my father as Shiva, the foundation of being complete in himself, whose zest in creativity is manifest in her, my mother, as Shakti, the universal Divine Energy which expresses its stamina in ever fresh creativity, radiant in ever new genesis,  my mother Vimala, whose greatest joy was in my birth and my father Simhagupta, when both were all embracing in their union. May my heart, which is the emission of vibrance from the couple and therefore  full of the supreme nectar, shine, expand as the totality of the bliss of the Absolute".

My rendering of those lines amalgamates various translations and interpretations of the passage, guided by  Bettina Baumer's Abhinavagupta's Hermeneutics of the Absolute: Annuttaraprakriya: An Interpretation of his Paratrisika Vivarana, which integrates, among others,   Jaideva Singh's translation of and commentary on the Paratrisika, which I have also used,  and  Alexis Sanderson's translation and extensive commentary on a version of the lines in question in "A Commentary on the Opening Verses of Tantrasara of Abhinavagupta".

Invocation

 I call upon

 the harmony of two 

the dynamism of three 

 the physical and metaphysical force  to make things happen

 empowered at creation by Olodumare to link cause with effect

 the physical with the metaphysical

 the visible with the invisible

 the human with the superhuman. 

I call upon  the intimacy and equilibrium of two and the mystical union of three.

I call  upon   the  dynamic force uniting two elements toward a common purpose

I call upon that which powers   the span of life, ultimately enabling entry into the post-terrestrial

I call upon that which enables the completeness and transcendence of time

I call upon that which leads into the infinity still and dynamic, contemplative and active

I call upon that which enables the cycle of transition between the Earth and the beyond.

I call upon those whose voices are often heard

whose touches are often felt

whose wisdoms come suddenly to the mind when the wisest have shaken their heads and murmured; it cannot be done

 I call upon  bygone voyagers awaiting the seeker in  pools of silence.

 I enter into aiku pari iwa, the deathlessness that consummates existence.

 

May my heart, the core of my being which is the core of all beings

the innermost awareness that animates all manifestation

shine forth

the product of the exuberance of emotion

due to the mating of my father and mother

embodying the bliss of the ultimate

one with the state of absolute potential made manifest in the fusion of these two

my father as Orunmila

the foundation of being complete in himself

the foundational intelligence underlying cosmic creativity

whose zest in creativity is manifest in her, my mother, as Odu

the universal Divine Energy which expresses its stamina in ever fresh creativity, radiant in ever new genesis

the feminine matrix embodying the essential identities of phenomena 

my mother [ insert your mother's name] , whose greatest joy was in my birth

and my father  [ insert your father's name], when both were all embracing in their union.

 May my heart, which is the emission of vibrance from the couple

 and therefore  full of the supreme nectar, shine, 

expand as the totality of the bliss of the Absolute. 

Invocation adapted from

Babatunde Lawal,  "À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New Perspectives on Edan Ògbóni".

Wole Soyinka, Death and the King's Horseman and  A Shuttle in the Crypt.

Rowland Abiodun,"The Future of African Art Studies: An African Perspective" and Yoruba Art and Language : Seeking the African in African Art.

Abhinavgupta, Tantraloka, Light on the Tantras,  Paratrisika Vivarana, The Secret of Tantric Mysticism, translated by Jaideva Singh and Tantrasara.

Bettina Baumer, Abhinavagupta's Hermeneutics of the Absolute: Annuttaraprakriya: An Interpretation of his Paratrisika Vivarana.

Alexis Sanderson, "A Commentary on the Opening Verses of Tantrasara of Abhinavagupta".

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