I have pointed out on this forum how Soyinka summarised this in his poem 'Seed' from Idanre: with the paradox ' rust is ripeness'
It means death and life are complementary values of continuity and regeneration
' Aiku pari Iwa therefore means being and non being are complementary and that is how Yorùbá concept of reincarnation and Àbíkú( which Soyinka again wrote a poem on) are to be understood.
People are reborn to carry out specific tasks which only the Òrìşa know, and which only the Ifá priests ( whom Toyin Adepoju is not among having no formal training) can interpret.
OAA
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Date: 29/11/2020 13:00 (GMT+00:00)
To: WoleSoyinkaSociety <WoleSoyinkaSociety@yahoogroups.com>
Cc: usaafricadialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>, Yoruba Affairs <yorubaaffairs@googlegroups.com>, Bring Your Baseball Bat <naijaobserver@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: [WoleSoyinkaSociety] ''Aiku PariIwa'' : Deathlessness Consummates Existence : The Broken Calabash and the IfePhilosopher's Paradoxical Quest for Immortality
Great thanks, Tunde.
The personalistic aspect of the text is a work of fiction created to project an idea.
The Ife philosopher is a fictional figure I created in relation to the equally fictional archaeological excavation that unearthed his existence and deciphered his ideas.
The Ife philosopher is a fictional figure I created in relation to the equally fictional archaeological excavation that unearthed his existence and deciphered his ideas.
Those ideas themselves are a distillation from various sources, African and Asian, resonating with Western thought.
These reworkings are based on the Yoruba expression ''aiku pari iwa'' from Rowland Abiodun's ''The Future of African Art Studies: An African Perspective,'' ''iwa'', ''being'' or ''character'' or both, being a subject he further examines in Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art.
I present varied interpretive possibilities of that expression in ''Aiku Pari Iwa : Consummation of Being in Classical Yoruba Philosophy''
I present varied interpretive possibilities of that expression in ''Aiku Pari Iwa : Consummation of Being in Classical Yoruba Philosophy''
This blend of fact and fiction is a response to the question,''What is the logic of Yoruba and classical African ideas of reincarnation, particularly in contrast to Hindu, Buddhist and Western esoteric theories of reincarnation?''
Hindu, Buddhist and Western esoteric conceptions of reincarnation understand the cycle of birth, death and rebirth as driven by human ignorance of the meaning of existence, on account of which people have to reincarnate, gaining increasing understanding until reincarnation becomes unnecessary.
In these contexts, the Earth is a school and life on Earth the process of passing through that school.
In my exposure to the Yoruba understanding of reincarnation, however, I am yet to read of any explicit effort to justify the process, to explain its logic within the context of a cosmos operating in terms of inbuilt values, rather than something whose direction is unknown.
In my exposure to the Yoruba understanding of reincarnation, however, I am yet to read of any explicit effort to justify the process, to explain its logic within the context of a cosmos operating in terms of inbuilt values, rather than something whose direction is unknown.
The closest I have come to this in my reading is in the ideas of Wole Soyinka and Kolawole Ositola.
Soyinka references the process of birth, death and rebirth as one of passage through the intersection between terrestrial and cosmic being, an ''Abyss of Transition,'' as described in Myth, Literature and the African World, the introduction to Death and the King's Horseman, dramatised in the chant of Olohun-Iyo in that play and perhaps depicted and discussed in other works such as The Road.
Kolawole Ositola discusses the transmission of sacred mission across generations, mediated by the ethos of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order, as quoted by Margaret Thompson Drewal in Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency, 1992,32-8 in the chapter titled ''The Ontological Journey.''
Drewal visualizes this continuity through reincarnation in depicting this process in terms of a spiral (46-7).
I examine correlations between Soyinka's thought along these lines and Ogboni thought as reflected upon by Ositola and resonating with Babatunde Lawal in ''À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New Perspectives on Edan Ogboni," on ideas of regeneration in Ogboni in relation to the image of the spiral and the circle in my essay in progress, "Classics in Ogboni Studies : Wole Soyinka: Philosopher of Ogboni" and my forthcoming essay "Tales of Mystery and Power: Ogboni Aesthetics in a Multicultural Context''.
The associative values of the spiral image are powerfully developed in the culturally cognitive Nsibidi symbol system as cultivated by the Cross River Ekpe esoteric order, in terms of a structure of ideas including the sun, journey and eternity.
These ideas suggest an interpretation of the cycle of human life, perhaps in relation to reincarnation, in terms of progression, ''journey'', within spaces of physical illumination, represented by the role of the sun in life on Earth and cognitive illumination, in the metaphoric understanding of the light of the sun, developments within and beyond terrestrial space eventuating in a movement into eternity, as the interpretation of the symbol at the Smithsonian description of Victor Ekpuk's Good Morning Sunrise, may be developed.
Ekpe esotericism is so closely guarded, however, I am not aware of any publicly available interpretation in depth of their symbols, although Ekpe chief Effiong Edem Etim's forthcoming "Nsibidi as an Ancient Way of Communication in Africa before Colonisation : Prospects and Challenges" in the Erudite Journal of the Federal College of Education, Uyo, suggests movement forward in this direction.
The spiral motif, as demonstrated by such works as Jill Purce's The Mystic Spiral, by the short, memorable film of its adaptation in an ongoing New York skyscraper construction, and the idea of progression into eternity, are recurrent in various thought systems.
Ekpe esotericism is so closely guarded, however, I am not aware of any publicly available interpretation in depth of their symbols, although Ekpe chief Effiong Edem Etim's forthcoming "Nsibidi as an Ancient Way of Communication in Africa before Colonisation : Prospects and Challenges" in the Erudite Journal of the Federal College of Education, Uyo, suggests movement forward in this direction.
The spiral motif, as demonstrated by such works as Jill Purce's The Mystic Spiral, by the short, memorable film of its adaptation in an ongoing New York skyscraper construction, and the idea of progression into eternity, are recurrent in various thought systems.
The most powerful depiction known to me of human life as progression into eternity is German philosopher Immanuel Kant's meditation on temporality and infinity in relation to terrestrial and cosmic space and time in the first paragraph of the conclusion of his A Critique of Practical Reason, a meditation beginning ''Two things fill the mind with ever new and ever renewed admiration and awe, the more often and the more steadily they are reflected upon, the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.''
He concludes on how, through the operations of his personal moral orientations, he is able to escape from the destination accorded to his body by the law of consignment to Earth at the conclusion of his lifetime, and enter into the infinite, having worked out his life within the short span allowed it within the minisculity of the Earth, itself existing within the immensity of the celestial bodies located within the void of cosmic space.
Those being among Kant's best known lines, various translations of them as well as scholarly and more general discussions of them are constantly being developed , such as Patrick Frierson's ''Kant and the End of Wonder, '' Paul Guyer's ''The Starry Heavens and the Moral Law'' and Howard Caygill's ''Soul and Cosmos in Kant: A Commentary on 'Two Things Fill the Mind...' ''
A powerful visual evocation of a related idea is the circle and a central motif in evoking the circle in classical African thought is the calabash, as described by Daybo in ''The Calabash, a Cultural and Cosmological Constant,'' recurring in evocations of the womb, as Emma Christian Rice examines in ''Rethinking the Calabash: Yoruba Women as Containers,'' of cosmic wholeness, as in the Yoruba Igba Iwa, the Calabash of Existence, superbly described by Babatunde Lawal in ''Èjìwàpò: The Dialectics of Twoness in Yoruba Art and Culture,'' and most powerfully for me, in terms of knowledge of cosmic unity in Zulu thought as depicted by Mazisi Kunene in his introduction to Anthem of the Decades.
Calabash symbolism, however, is complexified from its conventional associations with wholeness, with unity of being, by ideas of the value of fragmentation in relation to the calabash or the pot, such as Daniel Odier's account of his Tantric teacher Lolita Devi's thought in Tantric Quest, in which this unity needs to be broken to enable new forms of understanding, a perspective incidentally relatable with Olu Oguibe's superb interpretation of El Anatsui's broken pot sculpture series in relation to African symbolism in ''El Anatsui: Beyond Death and Nothingness.''
These perspectives are subsumed in the expressions attributed to the Ife philosopher, ''The calabash undergoes shattering to be made whole,'' '' the broken sphere prefigures the complete circle.''
The speculations drawn from these lines-
''What could these mean?
These perspectives are subsumed in the expressions attributed to the Ife philosopher, ''The calabash undergoes shattering to be made whole,'' '' the broken sphere prefigures the complete circle.''
The speculations drawn from these lines-
''What could these mean?
It is speculated that he believed death and rebirth represent opportunities for increasing growth of understanding, until the mind of the individual passes without interruption between these states, ultimately deciding where and how the transitions take place''
are demonstrations of the ideational implications of the imagistic forms represented by the proverbs, if they could be so named.
This style of writing uses a fictional scholarly context, employing conventions of scholarship, in framing or generating a story, thereby creating an imaginative universe in which the reader is invited to engage with a play with ideas in the tension between the seriousness associated with scholarship and the playfulness of functional creativity.
I am inspired in this by the Argentinian writer of philosophical fictions, Jorge Louis Borges, by the US master of mystical horror H.P. Lovecraft and the English magical fantasist J.R.R. Tolkien, who created an entire scholarly culture in relation to his Lord of the Rings novelistic series.
I am inspired in this by the Argentinian writer of philosophical fictions, Jorge Louis Borges, by the US master of mystical horror H.P. Lovecraft and the English magical fantasist J.R.R. Tolkien, who created an entire scholarly culture in relation to his Lord of the Rings novelistic series.
On Sun, 29 Nov 2020 at 06:29, Tunde Awosanmi atundah@gmail.com [WoleSoyinkaSociety] <WoleSoyinkaSociety@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
Dear Toyin,Please share as usual whenever you come across the source of the information. It is worth digging into.I experimented with this thought in a stage performance a few years back. It'll be great to return to it and further the thought.Thanks.'Tunde Awosanmi.
On Sat, Nov 28, 2020 at 6:41 PM Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju toyin.adepoju@gmail.com [WoleSoyinkaSociety] <WoleSoyinkaSociety@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
''Aiku Pari Iwa'' : Deathlessness Consummates Existence
The Broken Calabash and the Ife Philosopher's Paradoxical Quest for Immortality
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
The Yoruba expression
''Aiku pari iwa''
May be translated as
''Deathlessness consummates existence''
''Immortality completes existence''
''Immortality consummates essence''
''Immortality completes being''
It is attributed to Osuntokun, a philosopher who lived in the city of Ife in what would now be known as 300 BC.
Records of this figure were deciphered from correlative interpretations of Ese Ifa and Nsibidi texts excavated by the Ogunlayan team at the Opa Oranyan site at Ife in 2015 and recently translated by a combined team of experts in these expressive forms.
Piecing together fragments of evidence in years of painstaking work, the archaeologists concluded that this thinker held death was the door into deathlessness.
''The calabash undergoes shattering to be made whole,'' '' the broken sphere prefigures the complete circle,'' are expressions described by the researchers to be representative of his thought.
What could these mean?
It is speculated that he believed death and rebirth represent opportunities for increasing growth of understanding, until the mind of the individual passes without interruption between these states, ultimately deciding where and how the transitions take place.
A friend tried to find the original archaeological report from the Journal of the African Archaeological Institute where I learnt the information came from but could not find it.
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