Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Stately Presences by Brethren of Earth Across Time and Space
British Artist Henry Moore's King and Queen on Site at Glenkiln and an Edan Ogboni Couple by an Unknown Artist in Yorubaland
Abstract
A development of mystical theory and practice from scholarly literature on the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order, in its confluence with other schools of thought and with my personal philosophical and spiritual explorations.
The essay is inspired by a response of humanities scholar Kenneth Harrow to my picture essay, "Mystical Journeys in Lagos: Ogboni Mysticism in Urban Space : A Philosophy of Peregrination", that essay and this one being part of my efforts in developing an interpretation of Ogboni philosophy and practice that may be adapted even without access to the conventional learning systems of Ogboni, for those inspired by such conceptions but not motivated by the idea of membership of Ogboni in the traditional sense.
Earlier vision on images in this essay: The essay is organized in terms of a central expository text, complemented, in two places, by images of a particular edan ogboni, a central Ogboni symbolic and spirit vessel, accompanied by text that builds on these pictures as suggesting strategic values of the interpretation of Ogboni thought and practice which I am developing.
Change of plan: Since the edan ogboni expositions earlier planned have already been presented on this group as "Initiation into Edan Ogboni : Preliminary" 1 and 2, and will be expanded in "Initiation into Edan Ogboni: Foundational", I have decided to use the present essay sequence in further exploring issues inspired by other images in advancing the goal of this essay in constructing a continental-African, and a transcontinental-beyond Africa, body of thought and other expression in relation to Ogboni philosophy and spirituality.
I initiate this through comparisons between Ogboni aesthetics, its conception of art and the place of this ontology within a broader metaphysics of the nature of existents and how they are interrelated. These ideas are demonstrated or suggested by Ogboni sculpture, comparing these conceptions and their imagistic expressions with similar aesthetic values from beyond Yoruba and African culture. Such a trans-Yoruba exploration contributes to building a robust picture of convergences in styles of thinking, facilitating the integration of Ogboni thought into the global stream, and enriching that stream through dialogue with Ogboni.
I begin the exploration of this possibility by juxtaposing and comparing a sculpture by British artist Henry Moore and an edan ogboni by an anonymous Ogboni sculptor.
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Abstract
Ogboni Thought as Earth Centred Philosophy
Between Intersubjectivity and Mutual Objectivity in Knowledge
Cover Image and Explanatory Text : Stately Presences by Brethren of Earth Across Space and Time
Forms of Mysticism Between the Terrestrial and the Transcendental
Unitive and Perceptual Mysticism
Mystical Discipline in an Attitude to the Everyday
Image and Explanatory Text: Ogboni Aesthetics at Intercontinental Intersections
Dear Kenneth,
Ogboni Thought as Earth Centred Philosophy
As an Earth and humanity centred philosophy, Ogboni is a school of thought, focused in the exploration of the "physical processes that account for our being here and the world being here", as you put it so well in your response to my essay, along with our individual and social existence. Ile, the Yoruba term for Earth, being the primary template of human existence, represents the proximate human encounter with the forces that shape the cosmos, generating matter, energy and consciousness, enabling "the question of why we can observe and make sense of the universe", as we try to understand the evolutionary dynamism that "accounts for ourselves along with the universe we inhabit", adapting your words.
Classical Ogboni philosophy approaches Earth as a sentient entity. In developing a post-classical Ogboni philosophy, I hold that one may choose to identify with that idea or not. One may derive inspiration from the idea without subscribing to it, while one could also explore its possibilities regardless of the character of one's personal relationship with the idea.
Between Intersubjectivity and Mutual Objectivity in Knowledge
I, for my part, am an animist, not only by belief but by personal experience and knowledge. I encourage others to use either the same methods as I have or other approaches, or both, in exploring the factuality of animism for themselves.
This kind of knowledge is best understood as a form of intersubjectivity, not an objective form of understanding. It involves the cultivation of perceptual capacities innate to people but underdeveloped in most. My central explanatory framework for this epistemology is the understanding of perception as capable of ranging from the immediacies of corporeal vision to ratiocinative thinking and to more abstract and still conventional forms of awareness such as imagination and intuition to unconventional forms of knowing, such as extra-sensory perception to projections of consciousness beyond the physical body to mystical insight, experiential knowledge of the unity of being, a continuum of possibilities which I have worked out from Babatunde Lawal's account of classical Yoruba epistemology in "Àwòrán: Representing the Self and Its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art", complemented by John Umeh's description of the Igbo Afa knowledge system theory of perception in his After God is Dibia: Igbo Divination, Cosmology and Sacred Science in Nigeria in relation to my personal experience.
Priceless as the mutual verificatory model of experimental knowledge you describe is, it can account for only a part of the spectrum of reality. A strictly ratiocinative view holds that reliable understanding of the world begins and ends in ratiocinative thought, and particularly in access to knowledge through mutually verifiable experiments.
As a humanities scholar, you know that is not true, that imaginative, affective, sensory and intuitive knowledge are also valid and that they are not always mutually verifiable through experiments.
How may one take advantage of the critical strength of ratiocinative thought while also empowered by access to the various ways of knowing available to the human being, is a central epistemological question in the quest for human wholeness.
Stately Presences by Brethren of Earth Across Time and Space
British Artist Henry Moore's King and Queen on Site at Glenkiln and an Edan Ogboni Couple by an Unknown Artist in Yorubaland
King and Queen cc-by-sa/2.0 - © Dutyhog - geograph.org.uk/p/1848392 . Edan ogboni from University of Iowa Museum of Art, pictured in Babatunde Lawal's "À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New Perspectives on Edan Ògbóni." African Arts, Vol. 28, No. 1,1995, 36-49+98-100. 38. Both images edited by me from colour to black and white.
Structural essentiality facilitating monumentality of presence. The physical unbarring of self before the finality represented by Earth in edan ogboni. The elemental paring of form in Moore's King and Queen, correlative with the naked presence of rocks even as the vitality the inanimate geological forms may encapsulate in their structure and potential is released by the dynamism of the restlessly probing curiosity demonstrated by the union of human hand and mind, here suggested by the combination of sinuosity and solidity in the curves of the elegant figures.
The one time location of these figures on an elevated point in the open air sculpture museum of Glenkiln in Scotland, as described by, among other sources, Glenkiln by John McEwen and John Haddington, dramatizes with moving force, Moore's lifelong relationship in his art between the human form and landscape, constructing his sculptures in terms of design values derived from natural rhythms, welding this with sensitivities inspired by non-Western and non-Asian art, exemplified particularly by the pervasive influence of pre-Columbian, Mesoamerican sacred art, represented by a reclining sculptural motif named Chacmool, an adaptation of the name given it by Augustus Le Plongeon, the archaeologist who introduced it to the world.
The Chacmool 's projection of "stillness and alertness, a sense of readiness-and the whole presence of it, and the legs coming down like columns", are qualities Moore describes as inspiring his work, as quoted at the Wikipedia page of the sculpture from Brown Hornton Stone's contribution on this motif in Moore's work in "Important Art by Henry Moore", qualities resonant in the meaning of the name given the figure, translated from Maya by Le Plongeon, as "paw swift like thunder", as stated by Lawrence Desmond in "Chacmool".
That reclining pose frequently recurs in Moore's work at various stages of the figural and the abstract, suggesting both latencies of power in the human form, particularly the fecundative and erotic potential of women, and its association with forces beyond the human, as suggested by the evocations between his sculptures and designs generated by landscape.
Moore's King and Queen, its Glenkiln location accentuating its embodiment of the artist's blend of a naturalistic and a humanistic aesthetic, conjoining nature and the human being, and the edan ogboni I juxtapose it with, reinforce each other in terms of their development of the iconic image of the male and female couple, through the evocation of majesty through simplicity of form and dignity of pose, amplified by subdued colours, both reaching beyond the empirical to evoke the symbolic through a balance between the figural and the abstract, and resonating in the ideational context in which both works were created, the devotion to the potencies of Earth as primary inspiration, in terms of design values in Moore's art and as universal mother in edan ogboni.
Unifying the terrestrial alignments evoked by these works is the splendour of the sky in the picture of King and Queen, the sky a space of possibility suggesting the recreative expanse opened up by Earth and its atmospheric envelope, facilitating becoming like the Tibetan Buddhist dakini, a "traveler in space", like Ogboni characterizations of the feminine, projecting feminine erotic and inspirational power in terms of space opened up by the numinosities of Earth and its enveloping spaces, resonating in metaphysical spaces beyond Earth and the material cosmos, as superbly depicted, among other sources on the intersection of the feminine and the spiritual in the figure of the dakini, in June Campbell's Traveller in Space : Gender, Identity and Tibetan Buddhism, the latest edition of her more evocatively titled Traveller in Space: In Search of Female Identity in Tibetan Buddhism, on the contradictions demonstrated by what she describes as the complementarity of elevation and denigration of the feminine in that religion, Judith Simmer Brown's Dakini's Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism, magnificent on the convergence of naturalistic imagery and metaphysical elevation within the image of the feminine in the figure of the dakini, and Miranda Shaw's Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism, on women's contributions to Tibetan Buddhism, texts that could inspire the exploration,within the complexities of classical Yoruba conceptions of the feminine, of the intersections of the feminine and the spiritual in Ogboni art, thought and practice.
Forms of Mysticism Between the Terrestrial and the Transcendental
Unitive and Perceptual Mysticism
On mysticism, there are mysticisms and there are mysticisms.
The essence of mysticism, as I understand it, is the notion that the human mind is capable of experiencing the essence of reality rather than simply having intellectual knowledge about it. Classic metaphors in developing this idea are sexual union, as articulated particularly famously by the Christian mystic St. John of the Cross in his "Living Flame of Love" and "Dark Night of the Soul", the Buddhist image of the dew drop slipping into the sea, and that of the moth consumed by the candle flame that fascinates it, as depicted by the Islamic mystic Farid ud Din Attar in his Parable of the Birds.
Other conceptions different from such unitive approaches may refer to a participatory form of knowing, as depicted by Mazisi Kunene's account in Anthem of the Decades, of the climatic process in Zulu epistemology being the grinding of the elements of experience through a cognitive process similar to the transformation of raw materials by fire in cooking. This recreative dynamism creates a grasp of the relationships between the details of phenomena and their cosmological values [erasing ] "the boundaries between the past and the present, the living and the dead, the physical and the non-physical [enabling the initiate acquire] like a chameleon's all-round vision, the power to conceptualize the totality of life at once", a summative experience visualized in terms of the spatial unification of a calabash.
The Kunene explanation may be related to the description of a mystical experience by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri in his Divine Comedy, in which, climaxing a quest integrating European classical and medieval cultures, he sees "all the leaves strewn throughout the universe, things, their qualities and their interrelations, perceived as one simple light".
Such an aspiration involves going beyond what an Aristotle scholar describes as the Greek philosopher's conclusion, in spite of his encyclopedic efforts, of "the ultimate impossibility of conceptually unifying all of being", the cognitive mystic aspiring to achieve, not just a conceptual synthesis, a cohesive even if a heuristic and provisional understanding of the universe, but also reaching a perceptual unification.
Mystical Discipline in an Attitude to the Everyday
The mystic, like myself, may be inspired by such a vision without having experienced it at all or experienced it in its full blown form. They may gain inspiration from the notion that human experience demonstrates an intersection of all possibilities the human being can conceive, from the divine, as abstract conception, lived experience or explanatory paradigm, or all these at once, to cosmological processes as observed phenomena or abstract synthesis, a cosmos of possibilities converging in every moment, such as in the various everyday activities glimpsed around the Lagos Oregun/Opebi link bridge represented by the picture and accompanying text in my essay "Mystical Journeys in Lagos".
Such a sensitivity is itself a mystical concept, similar to the contemplative strategies developed in the Hindu classic the Vjnana Bhairava Tantra, centred in cultivating keenness to the metaphysical implications of every moment, of all activity, in a spirit summed up, in another context, by the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner in Belief Today, of puddles of water as mirroring the vast vault of heaven, of the act of seating as evoking the aspiration to anchor oneself in the equilibrium of stability and dynamism of God who "is ever active and ever at rest", as another writer puts it, a "theology of everyday things" as Rahner describes this style of thought, akin to the Protestant theologian Nimi Wariboko's account, in The Split God, of "micro-theology", "theology from below", in relation to "macro-theology", a convergence of the immediacies of human existence with cosmological frames of interpretation.
In interpreting everyday scenes in that manner, I derive inspiration from various philosophies and mystical accounts of cosmological unity. These range from descriptions of the unity of the material world in relation to human consciousness represented by correlating scientific cosmology, philosophy and psychology to religious cosmologies such as the observation from the Jewish origin Kabala that "Malkuth [ the material universe] is in Kether [ the most abstract expression of deity] and Kether is in Malkuth" and the Buddhist idea that "Nirvana [ the grasp of ultimacy, beyond being and non-being, yet is the source of being] is in samsara", [the spatial and temporally shaped character of material existence].
Such conceptions motivate experiencing the world, not simply in terms of its immediacy but in terms of seeing each context as a centre of ultimate possibility, a perceptual choice one may make, even without experiencing the transformative mental states which mystics describe as leading them to see the universe in that way. Adapting Yoruba Orisa cosmology, one may relate to each context, each instant, as the "odu" in "Olodumare", the calabash of being, "the repository of possibility and circumstance from which each moment is born…the constellations of possibilities that contain all events past, present and future" adapting Shloma Rosenberg at his site Mystic Curio on the semantics of "Olodumare", a central Yoruba conception of ultimate reality.
"The world is changing", they said as they sat looking into the future. "The river and hills we have long gazed on in fulfillment at their splendour will henceforth be known as rivers and hills and no more, beautiful waters and glorious earth, but no more than that. The fire running through all these will be unknown to most, the knowledge lost, the power of seeing into the life of things forgotten".
British artist Henry Moore's King and Queen, majestically sited in the glorious landscape of Glenkiln, could be imagined as so stating, gazing into the seemingly infinite distance, visualizable as the unfolding of time into a far future perceivable from their vantage point at the advent of the global dominance of European modernity and its limitation of nature to inanimate matter.
The ancient knowledge would never be wholly lost. Resonating with modern Western Paganism in its veneration of Earth, are such schools of thought as the centuries old Yoruba origin Ogboni, for whom the Earth is alive and whose art is believed by its devotees to incarnate sentient but otherwise invisible entities that project the presence of Earth as "iya", venerable mother.
What power, in the Ogboni system, is believed to unify Earth and the art embodying her, an idea incidentally resonating with a strand of thought in Western Paganism? Ase, a force that enables consciousness in all forms of being and stimulates the heightening of consciousness in humans, an interpretation deriving from my own exploration of nature under the inspiration of the nature and animistic mysticism of Western esoteric thinker Dion Fortune, an experience which Yoruba philosophy is helping me better understand.
Ogboni metal sculpture actualizes an unusual beauty in terms of evocative force which may be interpreted as projecting a sense of powers numinous in their origins beyond the human sphere but humanized through their integration into human existence. Such a summation may be made through correlating the suggestive values of Ogboni sculpture with the interpretation of the relationship between form and meaning in Ogboni art represented by Dennis Williams' "Iconology of the Yoruba Edan Ogboni" and Babatunde Lawal's " "À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó".
"Sculpture should always have some obscurities and further meanings. People should want to go on looking and thinking: it should never tell about itself immediately", Moore is quoted as stating by McEewen in Glenkiln (11). May this perspective resonate with the understanding that Ogboni art embodies rather than symbolizes spiritual entities, facilitating communication between sentient, non-human essence and human consciousness, as Dennis Williams' states in "Iconology"? This conjunction between ideas of diverse forms of consciousness lends itself to interpretation in terms of the contemplative, questing gaze Moore describes as critical for the unfolding of sculpture to the viewer on account of the inexplicit depths he describes as ideal for this art.
Could these ideas be relevant for art, in general, and for other forms of being, in the understanding, from Yoruba and Igbo thought, that each existent demonstrates a form of sentience deriving from the ultimate reality and cosmic originator known, among other names, as Chukwu in Igbo and Olodumare in Yoruba?
Umeh describes this concept as chi in Igbo. Olabiyi Babalola Yai sublimely sums up the correlative Yoruba concept of ori as "essence, attribute, and quintessence...the uniqueness of persons, animals, and things, their inner eye and ear, their sharpest point and most alert guide as they navigate through this wold and the one beyond" in his review of John Pemberton et al's Yoruba Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought in African Arts, Vol.25, No.1, 1992, 20+ 22 +24 +29, 22.
"The Igbo world is an arena for the interplay of forces. It is a dynamic world of movement and of flux. Igbo art, reflecting this world view, is never tranquil but mobile and active, even aggressive. Ike, energy, is the essence of all things human, spiritual, animate and inanimate. Everything has its own unique energy which must be acknowledged and given its due. 'Ike di na awaja na awaja' is a common formulation of this idea: 'Power run in many channels'. [ The complement of that saying] 'Onye na nkie, onye na nkie'-literally, 'Everyone and his own"- is a social expression of the same notion often employed as a convenient formula for saluting en masse an assembly too large for individual greetings".
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