Ògbóni
From Myth to Physics
Yorùbá Esotericism at the Matrix of Disciplines
A Response to Olayinka Agbetuyi
2
Part 10
Collage by myself evoking matter and energy transformations in the earth, in nature in general, in the human being and in machines, mediated through images of CERN ( the European Organization for Particle and Nuclear Research) research and Ògbóni, Yoruba esoteric order, iledi,Ògbóni sacred space ritual structure, all centered in the figure of Onile, Owner of earth and of Human habitation on earth, centre of Ògbóni veneration.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
This essay is a development of the philosophical and mystical potential of the Yorùbá origin Ògbóni esoteric order. This effort is carried out by demonstrating intersections between Ògbóni cosmology, in its ritual activity, and scientific cosmology within the framework of its technological expression, particularly in particle physics, the study of the smallest constituents of matter.
These conjunctions are demonstrated in the context of relationships between an account of the ritual construction of the Ògbóni iledi, the order's sacred meeting house, and the activity of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Particle and Nuclear Research, both creativities described as contrastive ways of engaging with varied conceptions of energy.
This essay is a response to queries raised by Olayinka Agbetuyi, in the USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google group, as a rejoinder to my article, "Ògbóni: From Myth to Physics : Yorùbá Esotericism at the Matrix of Disciplines: A Response to Olayinka Agbetuyi", which reacted to his engagement with my earlier essay published in the same group, "From a Horned, Naked Woman to Cosmological Physics and Explorations of Consciousness: Developing the Wisdom of the Yorùbá Origin Ògbóni Esoteric Order through its Multi-Cultural and Trans-Disciplinary Associations : A Voice from the Universal Ògbóni Fraternity".
Contents
Abstract
Visually Conjuncting Ògbóni Symbolism and CERN Research
Correlative Visualizations of Human Relationships with Diverse Conceptions of Energy
The Associative Power of the Ògbóni Iledi Ritual Complex
The Spectrum of Ogboni Visualizations of Ile, Earth, as Onile, Owner of Earth and of Human Habitation on Earth
Visually Conjuncting Ògbóni Symbolism and CERN Research
In the light of convergences between CERN and Ògbóni, one could imagine being erected one day on the grounds of CERN a representation of the Ògbóni iledi configuration as a means of contemplating the timelessness of humanity's engagement with energy within the context of what Wole Soyinka describes in Myth, Literature and the African World as the mysterious immensity that surrounds us, the immensity implicit in all enquiry, brooding behind pictures of cosmic origin in science and myth.
Related conceptions are evoked by the scientific idea of the Quantum Nothing, the unknown state of being before the explosion understood to have brought the universe into existence, magnificently analyzed in Tian Yu Cao's "Ontology and Scientific Explanation" in John Cornwell's edited Explanations: Styles of Explanation in Science, in terms that incidentally suggest its parallels with the Jewish Kabbalist conception of Ain Soph, the Unmanifest, and the Buddhist Void.
The scientific idea of the Quantum Nothing and religious ideas of the Unmanifest and the Void signify a point beyond which the human mind cannot go yet which projects the question of the generative antecedents to the cosmos as we know it.
Correlative Visualizations of Human Relationship with Diverse Conceptions of Energy
Thus, one may be led by such a representation of the Ògbóni ritual configuration to appreciate the distance of humanity's journey from the discovery of the capacity of wood to release energy when burned, resulting in charcoal, to the giant CERN colliders under the earth releasing massive amounts of energy as they smash particles together.
One may also reflect on the relationships between efforts to discover the constituents of matter through CERN's initiatives and efforts by such figures as the Ògbóni ritual specialists to distill and concentrate àse, a creative energy believed in Yorùbá cosmology to inhere in all forms of being, pursuing this activity through interaction between symbolic natural substances, ritual speech and gesture as means of activating and directing this force, as Rowland Abiodun elaborates of Yorùbá ritual practice generally in "Àse : Visualizing and Verbalizing Creative Power through Art", "Àse : Understanding Yorùbá Art and Aesthetics" and Yorùbá Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, employing these strategies within the context of burying the ritual substances in earth, understood as concentrating this force.
Ideas of cosmic force, and specifically, of fields of energy, are perennial in human thought, from religious to scientific cosmologies.
The Higgs field, central to CERN's work, is described in scientific cosmology as a field, a space permeated by a force, which particles pass through, and thereby gain mass, enabling the material structure of the cosmos.
Gravity, magnetism, electricity-these examples of invisible but potent fields in science are the current forms of the older scientific belief in the ether, which has fallen into dis-acclaim.
Thus, one may appreciate the continuity within difference between the Yorùbá conception of àse and the scientific conception of fields of force.
A scientist may take a break from working with the underground machines at CERN and go above ground to relax in the company of the hypothetical Ògbóni monument, inspiring reflection on past, present and future, the unknown and the unknowable, on our ancestral past evoked by organic sources of energy represented by charcoal, as these reflect the sophisticated machines of the present and the unimaginably transformed instruments of the future, activities shaped by our enmeshing in the material universe constituted by matter, energy, space and time, ideas of material cosmos evoked by the symbol of mud, standing for earth in the Ògbóni monument, materiality within which takes place activities powered by homo sapiens, the warm blooded creature evoked by red dust ground from the bark of the camwood tree, as visualized in the Ògbóni imagination.
Within this sphere of action across space and time, is there an ultimate foundation, an ultimate nexus of possibility within which all being converges, a question seeming to recede infinitely the farther the human being grows, flakes of white falling to earth evoking both mystery and beauty, completing the Ògbóni configuration in terms of the whiteness of chalk standing for what Ògbóni initiate Susanne Wenger describes as Axiom Paradoxon, Beginning and Consequence, the ultimacy, one may observe, which is yet embodied by Earth, Iya Agba, the venerable aged woman surrounded by her four calabashes of chalk, camwood, charcoal and mud in her home under the earth, an image from an ese Ifá, a story from the Yorùbá origin Ifá system of knowledge that correlates the two Yorùbá institutions of Ògbóni and Ifá.
The Associative Power of the Ògbóni Iledi Ritual Complex
My correlation of CERN science and Yorùbá cosmology and ritual is inspired by the Ògbóni iledi configuration on account of the paradoxical associative range of the Ògbóni ritual system, encapsulating a cosmos of possibilities with the conciseness of a few, everyday natural substances in relation to the ubiquity and seeming ordinariness of earth.
It is not as dramatic, for example, as Soyinka's magnificent depiction of the Yorùbá deity Ògún's shaping of diverse forces to carve a path for his fellow deities from orun, the world of ultimate origins, to earth, in Myth, Literature and the African World or the further development of that story in his poem "Idanre" and its evocation in his Ògún Abibiman.
The Ògbóni motifs demonstrate instead the sublimity of the seemingly mundane, the cosmicisation of the everyday, emblematizing the creative powers of the feminine, concealed in human womb or womb of earth, yet enabling, sustaining and regenerating all.
Earth, however, is also a terrible power that both sustains and destroys, hence her parallels stretch to Kali, the Hindu creator/destroyer/recreator Goddess, to Shiva, who dances the cosmos into being, becoming, ending and rebirth, reverberations of the continuity of existence through the Hindu Shakti, the motive force that enables existence and transformation, kin of the Yorùbá àse.
The Spectrum of Ògbóni Visualizations of Ile, Earth, as Onile, Owner of Earth and of Human Habitation on Earth
Some Ògbóni depictions of Onile, Earth, as embodiment of Earth and of human congregation, evoke the quietly voluptuous, akin to the more explicit voluptuousness of the Hindu Shakti, all the better to evoke the dynamic plenitude of existence which these figures represent.
The Ògbóni depictions run the gamut from the buxom female to the elderly female, evoking dramatizations of the feminine life cycle in its embodiment of procreative capacity, erotic effervescence, and post-menopausal existence, as evocative of the human life cycle.
It is thus akin to the more explicit evocation of these biological continuities in such cosmologies as that of modern Western Paganism and particularly modern Western witchcraft, in the image of the maiden, mother and crone, recognizing the inherent creativity of every stage of feminine and of human life.
These images from Western spiritualities transform the old European stigmatization of young and old women as evil witches into valoristic images of the maturation of power.
The seeds of such a transformation also exist in classical Yorùbá conceptions of the feminine, since ideas of such maturation of àse, life force, in the woman through the development of the life cycle are central to classical Yorùbá conceptions of the feminine.
They need, however, to be better developed and projected to contribute to taking Africans away from the demonization of women as witches, a goal achieved in the West in terms of forms of female empowering spiritualities.
Such negative mentalities, however, are still represented in such African examples as the confusion of the valorisation and demonization of women in classical Yorùbá thought.
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