Initiation into Edan Ogboni
Foundational
Aesthetic and Cognitive Mysticism
2
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
and
The Greater Ogboni Fraternity
"Earth, Humanity, Cosmos"
Abstract
An effort at developing a version of the crafting, ensouling and dedication to an initiate, of an edan ogboni, a central symbolic form and spiritual vessel of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order.
Dedicated to the indomitable scholars of Ogboni, and particularly to
Babatunde Lawal
whose scholarship is particularly strategic for an understanding of the Earth grounded, embodied and yet transformative character of classical Yoruba thought, at the intersection of aesthetics, epistemology and metaphysics to which Ogboni is distinctively central.
Contents
Picture of Master of Equanimity and Seeker of Balance Edan Ogboni
Abstract
Dedication
Invocation through Aesthetic Contemplation
Ontological Questions in Ogboni Mysticism and Magic
Invocation through Aesthetic Contemplation
Inspired by my relationship with the image of the Adhi Buddha Vajra Dara, an overarching deity guide of Milarepa's Kargyutpa school of Tibetan Buddhism, as depicted in the Evans Wentz' text, of similar visual presence and of related symbolic value to me as the edan ogboni discussed here, and on account of the traditional ritual techniques for relating with edan being unavailable in the texts I have read, I approach this image, my favorite edan ogboni picture, as a contemplative form, adapting the traditional idea of the edan as the subject of invocations of a spirit meant to inhabit the sculpture and work with the initiate to which it is consecrated as a companion till the departure of that initiate from the world, as described by L. E. Roache in "Psychophysical Attributes of the Ogboni Edan", African Arts, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1971, 48-53+80, by Denis Williams in "The Iconology of the Yoruba 'Edan Ogboni' ", Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 34, No. 2, 1964, 139-166 and in the particularly impressive account of Evelyn Roache Selke in From the Womb of Earth: An Appreciation of Yoruba Bronze Art.
I imagine the possibility of a similar ensoulment of form enabled by contemplation of the representation of the edan ogboni, at the intersection of mind and image, the "cave of the mind", the cave metaphor evoking correlations between the primordial spirituality represented by Ogboni veneration of Earth and the caves where some of the earliest human art is to be found, caves being perceivable as the vagina of Earth as primal mother, as suggested by Max Oelschlaeger in The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology, caves where early humans imaged their visual explorations of the universe in art, conjuncting physical reality and the world of the mind represented by imagination, thereby giving birth to the human ability to transcend the material immediacies of their existence, visualizing possibilities transformative of those material conditions, as J. Ki Zerbo argues for art as the defining quality of emergent humanity in "African Prehistoric Art" from UNESCO General History of Africa, Vo.1 : Methodology and Prehistory.
Ontological Questions in Ogboni Mysticism and Magic
I thus suggest how one may develop a mental relationship with the edan through contemplation of an image of the sculpture or through a visual focus on the sculpture itself, thereby indicating a version of the classical approach of invoking a spirit into the physical structure of the edan.
If spirit is understood as mobile and amenable to human shaping, as is suggested by the Yoruba concept of ase, as described by the representative accounts in Henry Drewal at al's Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, Rowland Abiodun's "Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics: The Concept of Ase", "Ase: Verbalizing and Visualizing Creative Power through Art" and Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, and the Igbo idea of ike, as depicted by Chinua Achebe in "The Igbo World and its Art", may such an animating presence not be shaped by the power of thought and emotion, vehicles of depth of aspiration, within the context of a physical edan or a mentally visualized one or one encountered purely in terms of a picture on the screen of an electronic device, as in digital versions of this essay?
Can an intimacy of relationship not be thus developed with the edan, inviting the transformation of the perceived and the imagined through the energizing power of the conjunction between the idea of cosmic force as unifying classical African thought as recounted by John Mbiti in African Religions and Philosophy and other conceptions of such a force, here evoked in terms of an adaptation of Jesus' words along similar lines, about the mobility of spirit, in his reworking of Jewish spirituality in the Biblical Book of John?
May an edan ogboni thus energised through the power of thought and emotion be able to demonstrate the qualities attributed to edan in the classical context? The ability of the edan to effect healing of illness, the power of the spirit invoked into the edan sculpture to leave the confines of its physical form and move invisibly across space, passing through walls, alert to otherwise concealed activity, even sensing danger to the initiate and investigating this danger and reporting back to him through dreams or engaging with non-human spirits in the interests of the initiate to whom it is dedicated, as memorably summed up by Roache, "when ill fortune is attributed to the anger of gods/spirits… the Edan leaves its 'body' and communes spirit to spirit with the supermortals, attempting to placate and discover what appeasing measures would be required".
In other words, can a relationship with edan of the kind I develop in this essay enable the empowerment of the role traditionally attributed to ori in Yoruba thought, the immortal, spiritual centre of self through whom all influence from various deities is filtered, the centre of a person's ultimate potential, the only one who can follow his devotee on distant journey without turning back, even the most distant, the journey of death, as this identity is depicted in Yoruba cosmology and particularly in the ese ifa, literature of the Ifa system of knowledge, "The Importance of Ori", from Landeg White and Jack Mapanje's edited Oral Poetry from Africa, from where the journey image in the poem comes from, and adapting a Rosicrucian Order AMORC First Temple Degree initiation manual formulation of a similar conception, of a personage intrinsic to the self but transcending its temporal character, one which, no matter how far one travels within the journey of life and its vicissitudes, one would not find a friend more devoted to serving one?
This aspiration could be pursued by making the edan one is cultivating a relationship with a representative of one's ori, one's highest potential, an identity grounded in the source of existence. Hence the need to choose to build a relationship with an Ogboni sculpture expressing such a personalization of ultimate values as one understands these values and how best one wants to see these values expressed in oneself. Hence I have chosen the edan ogboni that inspires this essay, interpreting it in terms of the ideas expressed in the poem that opens the essay.
Israel Regardie makes a compelling presentation of a similar idea in The Tree of Life : A Study in Magic, in which the Holy Guardian Angel in the Western esoteric tradition represents an identity similar to that of the ori in Orisa cosmology:
...when one inflames oneself in prayer towards the Holy Guardian Angel, as the secret aspiration of the soul will have been, upon that will the Angel seize, in the ecstasy of bliss which ravishes the soul away, to convey hismanifestation to the world.
Along related lines Hindu, Christian and Buddhist thought identify the essence of the self, or with Buddhism, the self's ultimate possibility, with the source of existence. These spiritualities go further to identify ultimate reality with a personality that is both anthropomorphic and transcendent of the anthropomorphic, thereby facilitating the identification of the human with the ultimate. Srividya reinforces this orientation by providing a unifying logic to this spectrum of the embodied and the transcendent in depicting deity in terms of the anthropomorphic, the geometric and the sonic in an ascending order of abstraction understood as defining the underlying structure of being.
Along such lines, one may contemplate the edan ogboni in terms of its identification with the human form, its suggesting particular values through its modeling of the human body. One could proceed from that contemplation of its visual character to transcend the image and enter into the silence of the mind fed by the elevating character of that imagistic contemplation.
The visual evocation of elevated values feeds the soil of the contemplating mind as it moves beyond the particularities represented by the visual image to immersion in the oceanic silence of consciousness, possibly enabling entry into the silence at the source of being, breaking the silence of an ancient pond, a frog jumps into water, a deep resonance, to adapt a translation of Japanese poet Matsuo Basho's frog haiku, an extremely compressed poetic form of vast evocative force.
Thus, contemplating the edan ogboni, proceeding though the path represented by the beads of transformation: black : hidden mystery; red : fire of transformation emerging from the unknown; white : light of illumination, consciousness in its primal form.
Through these emerge concentric circles of làí-làí, eternity, a vision of the content of the original agreement between Orí and Olórun, the compact between the self and the ground of being, a poetic summation of aspiration distilled from Awo Falokun Fatunmbi's "Initiation into the Mysteries of Nature" and "Ifa and Embracing Good Fortune".
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