--The Master of Equanimity and Seeker of BalanceInitiation into Edan Ogboni
Foundational
Aesthetic and Cognitive Mysticism
3
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
Logic of Contemplative Method
Sequence and Sources of Contemplative Progression
Logic of Contemplative Method
The contemplative technique employed here, different from but also adaptable to a relationship with the physical handling of the edan in the classical context, is influenced by my practice of visualization in Western magic, Buddhism and Hinduism, systems which, along with cultivating a strong culture of contemplation and visualization, incidentally resonating in this reworking of Ogboni ritual`, also demonstrate a reliance on physical ritual forms as Ogboni traditionally does with edan.
The focus of this adaptation of the traditional invocatory method, however, is on psychological interiority, mental mobility and ideational flexibility, values also emerging in the classical Ogboni symbiosis of sculpture, ensouling spirit and initiate, but actualized here in experimental terms different from the social and ritual contexts of traditional practice, from edan commissioning to its delicate construction and elaborate consecration, the novel method evident here demonstrating a suggestion of what may be done, in different ways, with the inspiration provided by Ogboni thought and spiritual activity.
The foundation of my aesthetically centred approach to relating in meditation with the edan ogboni is to admire and contemplate it, letting it work on my mind, with what I know about the edan kept in suspension, allowing the visual immediacy of the work exert itself on me, thus fertilizing what I know without being limited by my existing knowledge.
The power of art consists primarily in its ability to touch depths of the self that may be reached through but are not confined to structuring by concepts, a force at times bypassing ideas and plumbing beyond the filters of the intellect, even as it may energize such conceptual dynamisms.
This is best achieved by contemplating art, opening the mind to its force through admiration of its distinctive beauty, letting mind and work, abstraction and concreteness, the invisible dynamism of consciousness and the shaping by mind and hand that is art, meet at the point that is composed by these forms of being, enabling the birth of a summative oneness from the convergence of two, in the spirit of the Ogboni symbolism of the emergence of three from two and the sublime deployment of a similar idea by Hindu Trika Shaivism, particularly as it is actualized by Abhinavagupta in terms of the union of his father and mother emblematizing the coming together of the God Shiva and the Goddess Shakti in generating the cosmos, to which his heart beats in rhythm to its pulsating core, as he describes this in the opening stanzas of such works as the Tantraloka, the Tantrasara and the Paratrisika Vivarana.
In this context, interpretations of art may be seen as an invitation to glory in the creation of the artist and the creative capacity of the interpreter, a guide in constructing one's own individualized relationship with the work of art. Striking interpretations could prove indelible in one's mind, creating the foundations of one's own interpretations and continually inspiring rich reflection.
In this sense, adapting a Christian writer's formulation, readings of art are like guides to cultivating one's own approach to prayer by using the prayers of others in developing the depths of the self calling out to the depths of the cosmos that is prayer, the scaffolding that aids the construction of the building is not discarded but integrated into the structure of the architectural form, and, employing a Zen Buddhist image, the bridge through which the shore is reached is not transcended but becomes part of the significance of the destination arrived at with its aid, in the spirit of the Western esoteric Hermetic maxim that "The way is the goal and the goal is the way".
Dorothy Sayers declares in her introduction to the first volume, Inferno, of her translation of Dante Alighieri's cosmological epic The Divine Comedy, that "a great poetic image is more than the sum of its parts", constituting a potency that cannot be summed up by any level of analysis or interpretation, a fact that is also true of powerful and particularly, of great art, such as the edan ogboni that motivates this work.
Salutations to the now anonymous master who created it.
Sequence and Sources of Contemplative Progression
The structural and numerical centrality of the crescent and the circle in the image, in relation to Babatunde Lawal's description in "À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó", of the crescent, spiral and concentric circle in Ogboni iconography as evoking recreative capacity, lead to my adapting the exhortation to the initiate in the seminal Western esotericism text, The Teachings, Rites and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, edited by Israel Regardie, to "Situate yourself at the centre of the cross of the elements, from whence issued the creative word at the birth of the dawning universe", the rhythmic beauty of that expression supremely rich in associations running from the Christian symbolism of the cross to the account of creation through the Word in the Biblical Book of John to the Hermetic conception of the elements as the foundations of spiritual growth.
Interpreting the crescents of the edan as suggesting temporality associated with the phase of the moon in which it assumes a crescent shape, as Lawal states, and the concentric circles on which the circles terminate as evoking the integration of all possibility around a centre, a universal and ideationally compelling manner of viewing a concentric circle, I arrive at "Situate yourself at the intersection of the crescent and the circle/between change and stability/between transformation and totality".
This understanding of the mystical potential of Ogboni thought is thus depicted in terms of sensitivity to the tension between temporality and change and the human aspiration to transcend these dynamisms, between the ultimacy that is Olodumare, "axiom paradoxon,…beginning and consequence", as summed up by Susanne Wenger on Olodumare, a central Yoruba conception of ultimate reality, in her review of Harold Courlander's Tales of Yoruba Gods and Heroes, and the opposites Olodumare integrates and transcends, as superbly described by Ulli Beier in The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger.
In this context, Olodumare subsumes the various perspectives from which the cosmos may be perceived as represented by the orisa, deities in Yoruba cosmology. This cosmology may also be understood in relation to the quest for a point of synthesis in the emphasis on process as a central rhythm of being, process in terms of recurrent transitions between emergence from and return to orun, the zone of primal origins where Olodumare is centred, a process known to most humans as birth and death but in Yoruba and other cosmologies which share similar perspectives as a cycle of birth, death and rebirth.
The configuration of three concentric circles forming an elegant amplification of the visual power of the centripetal force of the circles, their location on the figure's chest suggesting the figure as embodying the qualities they symbolize, leads to my evocation of this structure in images inspired by Dante Alighieri's great visual picture in the Divine Comedy, of the Christian conception of God as Three Persons in One, depicted by Dante in terms of three circles occupying the same space, each breathed out of the other as flame emanating from flame.
I adapt, in referencing a sequence of activity, from knowledge to action to study and renunciation. lines from the Hindu Katha Upanishad of the methods through which the self may be transmuted from its focus on temporality to a cognitive grounding in eternity.
I conjoin with those lines a slightly adapted sequence from Mazisi Kunene's exposition of classical Zulu epistemology in Anthem of the Decades, a distinctively articulated conception of cognitive mysticism though resonant with correlative ideas beyond its originating cultural context.
The Kunene lines are given striking visual particularity through the images of the chameleon and the calabash, indicating the methods through which human perception may be transmuted from its accustomed focus on linear temporality and mono-dimensionality to a cognitive grounding in temporal unification and an immediate perception of the multi-dimensional unity of being.
I conclude part 1 by adapting T.S. Eliot's lines from his poetic cycle Four Quartets, of the consummation of spiritual development in terms of the image of the fire of transformation and the rose of consummating beauty.
The descriptions of brass in terms of luster and permanence, health, wealth, beauty, and fertility, comes from Lawal's "À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó, where he relates those virtues to Osun, the river goddess, whose personality is further alluded to here in terms of the harmony of images of silken essence and magical aged power drawn from Beier's The Return of the Gods. The associations of iron as valor, creative energy, industry, hunting, and warfare, strength for hammering, cutting, securing, bracing, vigor, and "cutting edge" vital for success and longevity also come from Lawal, who correlates them with Ogun, the god who clears the way, the characterization of the deity as pathfinder evoked in the poem adapted from the delineation of Soyinka's picture of Ogun in Cultures of Creativity: The Centennial Exhibition of the Nobel Prize, 2001, edited by Ulf Larsson and translated by Daniel Olson.
The concept of "Nothing" in the first line of the poem is inspired by the conjunction between the idea of "Nothing" in scientific cosmology, described by Tian Yu Cao in "Ontology and Scientific Explanation" as the "Quantum Nothing", the unknown possibility representing the zone before the emergence of the cosmos, and similar ideas in various religious cosmologies, such as the Great Unmanifest of Kabala, the ultimate fecundity at the source of existence but which exists as a potential rather than an actualization and so is beyond even the most exalted encounter by any entity, as understood in Dion Fortune's The Mystical Qabala, the Void of Buddhism, beyond being and non-being,so described because it transcends all categories through which the mind apprehends phenomena, and the Tao of Taoism, that which has no name yet is the mother of the myriad things, as depicted in Lao Tzu's Tao te Ching.
These ideas from scientific and religious cosmology are reinforced by "the Living Darkness" of the penultimate passage, evocative of the biological darkness of the womb, fundamental to the conception and gestation of human life, the darkness of night and the darkness experienced on closing one's eyes, both crucial for human regeneration in sleep and for recreative thought in contemplation, imagination and introspection, gestative possibilities at the human and terrestrial scales resonating with the cosmic frames represented by the cosmological "Nothing", the equivalent of darkness in biological and atmospheric terms, values constellating in relation to ideas of absence of light enabling gestative capacity, subsumed for me by the symbolism of black in Akan Kente cloth.
The "Shadow", complementing the concept of "Nothing", comes from Ayi Kwei Armah's adaptation of Akan thought, as he describes it in a personal communication, in the chapter "The Inspirers" from his novel The Healers:
Those who learn to read the signs around them and to hear the language of the universe reach a kind of knowledge healers call the shadow. The shadow, because that kind of knowledge follows you everywhere. When you find it, it is not difficult at all. It says there are two forces, unity and division. The first creates, the second destroys.
The meditator on the edan is finally depicted as encountering, in the numinous space enabled by the arcane presence of the edan, brethren in relation to whom he was entrusted with the task of projecting a broader understanding of Ogboni, assuring them, in the language of Buddhist evocation of reaching a zone of ultimate achievement, that the shore of his accomplishment of this task is opening to increasing fulfillment.
The edan ogboni is thus interpreted in terms of visual correlations between its form and some of the most vividly realized and sublime ideational constructions from various ideological contexts around the world.
This interpretive exercise may thus be understood as actualizing, through verbal interpretation of the motifs that define this example of edan art, Lawal's luminous summation, in "À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó", of the intersection of creativity and tradition in the art of edan ogboni:
Edan [unlike descriptive orientations in traditional Yoruba sculpture ] is concerned with the essence and timelessness of being, and therefore is metaphorical in its imagery; its form, though inspired by the human figure, has a meta-empirical reference.
Yet the emphasis on the esoteric provides the brass-smith…with a unique opportunity to exercise his creativity and experiment with the human figure while still complying with… prescribed characteristics handed down over generations. A close examination of the edan corpus reveals variations on common themes and a great diversity in artistic skills, inventiveness, and temperaments.
The handling of headgear and coiffures, facial expressions, and body decorations is individualized, and form ranges from the two-dimensional to the volumetric and architectonic.
The society's concern with archetypes in its rituals and corporate emblems would seem to impose severe restrictions on the artist. Yet, it is the same concern that gives the artist the inspiration to operate at a higher level of creative consciousness, enabling him to dissociate the human figure further and further from the mundane. The result is a corpus of startling and highly original forms.
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Professor and Chair
Department of Sociology & Anthropology
Senior Fulbright Scholar
Lincoln University
Pennsylvania, USA
(484) 365-7545
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
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