Poetically Powerful Summation of Yoruba Origin Orisa Cosmology
Integrating the Work of Akinwumi Ogundiran and Wole Soyinka
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
This is the most powerful short summation of Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology known to me, integrating the writing of archaeologist and historian Akinwumi Ogundiran and writer and philosopher Wole Soyinka.
I have taken the liberty of conjoining both texts in order to demonstrate their mutually enhancing power. In doing this, I have edited Ogundiran's lines so as to highlight their poetic force and added the stanza on the deity Eshu to Soyinka's poem to create a more complete depiction of Orisa cosmology than he had composed.
Apologies, gentlemen, for these transgressions.
Of what value could the ideas depicted by this summation have to people uninterested in Orisa cosmology?
The ideas are very beautiful. They are a quintessence of some of the best conceptions ever developed by humanity, expressed in poetry harmonious with some of the richest expressions of lofty ideas in world literature, sacred and secular.
For those already interested in Orisa spirituality, this summation will deepen their appreciation of its imaginative and ideational power.
The Ogundiran text is adapted from his The Yoruba: A New History, 2020, 128-9, while Soyinka's poem comes at the conclusion of his essay The Credo of Being and Nothingness, 1991.
The adaptation from Ogundiran opens the summation. Soyinka's lines begin from ''Obatala fulfills.''
Deities: parallel mirrors for viewing and reflecting on everyday social lives.
Light bouncing from these everyday lives: creating infinity effect: the òrìsà pantheon.
The òrìsà : multiple angles for viewing everyday lives in a series of reflections receding into an infinite distance.
Deep learning, knowledge, and expertise required to observe, read, and interpret these reflections.
Everyday life is not static, the pantheon cannot be static.
New deities (new parallel mirrors) were therefore created from time to time to capture and account for these new everyday experiences .
Obatala fulfills. Purity, love, transparency of heart. Stoical strength. Luminous truth. Man is imperfect; man strives towards perfection. Yet even the imperfect may find interior harmony with Nature. Spirit overcomes blemish – be it of mind or body. Oh, peace that giveth understanding, possess our human heart.
Seek understanding of the signposts of existence. Is knowledge not within and around us? If the Supreme Fount of Thought sought counsel of Orunmila in the hour of crisis, why will you by-pass the seer of signposts, O seeker of knowledge? Wisdom may slumber on the gums of infants; lucky that man who patiently awaits the loosening of infant tongues. Ifa maps the course through shrouded horizons.
Ogun sets the example : Virtue wears the strangest garb – comradeship in strife, meditation in solitude, the hardy route of self sacrifice…Life is multiple and strange. The death of fear liberates the Will that sets forth where no mind ever trod. Ogun liberates : rise beyond his shadow.
Justice is the mortar that kneads the dwelling-place of man. Can mere brick on brick withstand the bloodied cries of wrong from the aggrieved? No more than dark withstands the flare of lightning, roofs of straw the path of thunderbolts. Sango restores.
Without change, can we grow? The day of birth points to the moment of death. Without pain, what is the value of pleasure? What is life without death to give it urgency? Position yourself with Eshu at the intersections of change. Eshu – the flash that unites the cosmos, the gleam that illuminates being to being, the potential for transformation.
Honour to the Ancestors. If blood flows in you, tears run, bile courses, if the soft planet of brain pulses with thought and sensing, and earth consumes you in the end, then you, with your ancestors, are one with the fluid elements. If the beast knows what herbs of the forest are his friends, what plea shall man make that boasts superior knowledge, yet knows no empathy with moisture of the air he breathes, the juice of leaves, the sap in his roots to earth, or the waters that nourish his being? Man may speak Oya, Osun, Orisa-Oko…yet mind and spirit encompass more than a mere litany of names. Knowledge is Orisa.
Orisa preaches Community : found it! This, no honest men will deny : man has failed the world or the world has failed mankind. Then question further : what faiths and realms of values have controlled our earth till now? And next : since their gods have failed, may ours not yield forgotten ways that remedy?
The Will of man is placed beyond surrender. Without the knowing of Divinity by man, can Deity survive? O hesitant one, Man's conceiving is fathomless : his community will rise beyond the present reaches of the mind. Orisa reveals Destiny as – Self-destination.
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