From Blood to Knowledge
The Rebirth of Odu and the Creation of Opon Ifa
Tales from Ifa Tuntun
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
''Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
Abstract
A story of a woman's discovery of powers facilitated by her own biological changes and her efforts to represent and share the knowledge and skills she gains thereby.
Ever since the monthly flow of blood from her body had ceased, she had experienced a concentration of the power.
What was once exacting was now easy, what she once sought for now came to her.
Yet, her power to birth was multiplied in a plane beyond the world of flesh and blood, of bone and muscle, the capacity to bring the squealing ones into the world of seeking within the unknown illuminated by the sun had been concentrated into the ability to guide the passage between what is not and what is in a way different from but no less miraculous than the act of enabling the emergence of that spark at the centre of something that moves and thinks, blood flowing and muscles growing, as it climbs the first steps on the ladder of time.
Deftly, carefully, she carved the space through which she would symbolize the transition she had experienced, the possibilities she now embodied.
An empty centre took shape under her hands, circular, suggesting infinity, square, evoking the directions of space, whichever choice she made, the symbols blended.
On that empty centre would fall the patterns suggesting the relationship between what exists and what can be, explaining why what is, is the way it is, and how to make it what one wants it to be.
Around the centre she carved images indicating the dynamism of the passage between being and becoming, time and infinity, the snake with its tail in its mouth, the twisting strands that never end, images of people doing all kinds of things, because she was creating an instrument through which people could make sense of the various possibilities of their lives.
"Kpelebe, kpelebe" she sang to herself as she worked.
"The anthill sought guidance for the ant who was mesmerized by the size of the mountain", the words flowed, forming themselves in terms of new patterns of thought, creating themselves as her brain unfolded the implications of what she was doing, a hidden intelligence birthing constellations of understanding.
"Was the mountain about to fall on him and his family?" the ant wanted to know.
"Something shaped through vast spans of time is challenging to understand by something that lives within the time between the opening and closing of blinking eyes" was the response.
"Do not fear. The mountain is minding its own business that has little to do with you" the ant was assured.
The efforts of that fateful day, when a visionary woman tried to interpret her insights in terms of carving and song have come down across history as a vast network of poetry and stories related to the portable instrument with a square or circular empty centre, the opon ifa, an instrument complementing the effort to discover relationships between being and becoming, existence and change, now known as Ifa.
The memory of the woman was absorbed into the system while the men who later became its custodians recognized her in a few stories in which she disappears from view while a male character became prominent.
Her patient presence bore fruit, however, as centuries passed and people wondered "who is this Odu who is never encountered unless in concealment but who gives her name to the patterns of meaning through which the oracle answers questions?"
The ant gradually understands the mountain, the realities of a story greater than itself but within which it finds itself, ancestral histories contributing to the larger history of the world, the world itself enfolded in the mystery that is the universe.
What is Going on Here?
In the Ifa system of knowledge and divination, one of the world's greatest collections of literary texts, organized round a spiritual and philosophical core, a powerful voice is recognized but muted, the feminine principle represented by Odu, who appears sporadically in Ifa literature, and whose presence is often associated with going into concealment, while her male counterpart, her husband Orunmila, strides through the Ifa corpus in adventures of various kinds, a muting of a feminine voice all the more striking in the explicit recognition of her centrality to the system even as the literature brackets her presence.
I have made it my task to contribute to the literary centralization of this feminine voice through adapting existing ese ifa, Ifa literature, through commentary on this literature and through creation of new literary texts pursuing this goal, such as the one above.
My vision is for Odu to achieve full actualization, a totalistic imaginative embodiment akin to the complex roundedness of such Hindu female divine characterizations as Kali and Tripurasundari, expressions of Shakti, the feminine principle enabling manifestation in Hinduism, each of whom is the centre of entire systems of knowledge and spiritual practice in which they are dominant and the masculine principle is either integrated into or exists as a complementary partner.
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