A Comparative Exploration of Ifa Ontology

I salute Wole Soyinka, reading whose Myth, Literature and the African World initiated me into Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology and inspired my moving from practicing Western Hermetic magic in its conjunction of ancient Egyptian, Jewish, Christian and other sources to focusing on adapting the Hermetic magical techniques in practicing Orisa spirituality, thereby enabling an individualistic, mentally centred adaptation of the community run and concrete rituals of traditional Orisa religion. This progression has been enhanced by my later appreciation of the practical value of text centred rituals and contemplative techniques dramatized in Soyinka's works, as in Death and the King's Horseman, A Shuttle in the Crypt, 'A Credo of Being and Nothingness' and The Man Died.

Bros IBK,

thanks for inspiring this further effort to think things through on this subject and to project possible future initiatives along similar lines.

The discourse has gone far beyond non-critical assertions of 'you cannot'.

the qs is-why do you hold the views you do?

what experiential or theoretical ground are they based upon?

this subject may be addressed in both what may be described as a transcendentalist and a constructivist understanding of spirituality, both of them overlapping.

the transcendentalist

adapting a line of enquiry of which moshe halbertal makes superb use in concealment and revelation : esotericism in jewish thought and its philosophical implications, an approach also adopted by Deepak Sarma's Epistemologies and the Limitations of Philosophical Inquiry: Doctrine in Mādhva Vedānta in terms of the distinction between insider and outsider epistemologies, one may see the esoteric, to which ifa belongs, as one expression of the human tendency to create or recognize spaces of exclusion and inclusion, of insiders and outsiders, both social and epistemic, as i would put it.

if ifa practitioners insist that there is no initiation into their community except through the methods they lay out, of course, within the parameters of ifa as a social system, one cannot go behind that to become a member of the community as a group of people working together in terms of their mutual commitment to particular beliefs and practices.

Along similar lines, Sarma's Epistemologies "explores the degree to which outsiders can understand and interpret the doctrine of the [ Hindu] Màdhva school of Vedànta [ which] is based on insider epistemology .... so restrictive that few can learn its intricate doctrines".

This qs is compounded in this instance bcs the issue is centred on study AND practice of Ifa, not only on study.

Christopher Bartley's review of Sarma's book further contextualises the question-

" If one is not a member of a private club, one probably doesn't care about what goes on within its walls. If a tradition is closed to nonmembers, successfully concealing its beliefs and practices (in the manner of some versions of Freemasonry), that's the end of the matter. If texts are really not accessible, the activities that the philosopher can pursue are not just "severely restricted"! If what a tradition involves is public (even allowing for esoteric elements revealed only to initiates and for rituals of restricted participation), there are still "outsiders," but they are not debarred from appreciation, discussion, and critical philosophical analysis of its truth claims" .

These points are amplified by the fact that the issue in question here is about both study and practice of Ifa, a form of practice that involves procedures that are often learnt through being guided by an expert, such as ritual techniques, interpretations of divination symbols during divination sessions, chanting of divination texts and herbal preparations and applications.

Bartley continues:

" 'What is meant by 'insider epistemology?' Sarma says:

[T]here are two kinds of communities that uphold insider epistemologies. One is centred around experiential data and claims that outsiders can neither know nor understand what it is like to be an insider. The other simply does not permit outsiders to access root texts. Though actual communities are likely to lie somewhere between these two, or combine elements from each, this bivalent taxonomy is useful as a heuristic device [sic]. (p. 9)"

in a related context, within relatively publicly accessible secular education,one may aspire to attend harvard or any other great university, but without taking part in the activities unique to a harvard student, can one be a student of harvard? without being granted the right to take part in such activities, can one participate in them?

Sarma expands on and clarifies these questions in the context of Madhva Vedanta:

"is it possible to know, to understand completely, or to study a community without joining it? Does being an insider give access to data and/or experiences that are not available to outsiders? Do insiders have a higher degree of understanding of that data or experience than outsiders? Such a privileging may limit the degree to which an outsider can understand a doctrine or set of practices. Are their difficulties in deciding who is an insider and who is not? Does the voice of the insider have more epistemic authority than an outsider's voice, or vice versa? Lastly, are there epistemologies that restrict or limit the kinds of inquiries that social scientists can make?"

Francis Clooney's foreword to Sarma's book presents a related modification of traditional pedagogical exclusiveness in Madhva Vendanta, describing Sarma as discussing the "implications of Mådhva publishing – the primary texts, translations, for scholarly initiates, for wider audiences, and finally on the Web – and how this practice of publication is, to a degree, transforming the community's understanding of and relationship to various kinds of outsiders".

along similar lines, in recent times, one can, to a degree, be a student of a university without the official induction into the system represented by matriculation and without participating in its traditional lecture system, by taking advantage of free online lectures provided by some universities, with access to the free public lectures provided by some universities expanding such possibilities of participating in the university's learning culture.

Along similar lines, the Western esoteric school AMORC, Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross, perhaps the world's best known Rosicrucian organisation, keeps the details of its learning system private to members while engaging in vigorous public presentation of its more general ideas.

is a spiritual system like ifa identical to such examples of secular institutions particularly since ifa, like all social systems, operates in terms of related protocols of entry and participation?

to what degree is the ifa example commensurate with that of other spiritual systems such as Madhva Vendanta and AMORC?

in relation to the example of secular learning institutions, may ifa be encapsulated in terms of such comparative characterizations? may the very essence of ifa not consist in its integrating as well as transcending such categorizations?

wande abimbola perhaps in ifa divination poetry or an exposition of ifa literary corpus, or both, makes statements of strategic significance for the ontological and epistemic essence of ifa that help in addressing these questions.

he states that the central goal of the process of ifa divination, the process of enquiry by which the system is best known, is to find out the will of ori, the aspect of the self that predates terrestrial birth, will outlive physical birth and embodies the ultimate potential of the self, a potential that consists of possibilities brought from orun, the zone of ultimate origins, and the negotiation of the intersection of that potential with the circumstances of material existence, a negotiation carried out with the aid of ifa divination, according to an interpretation of one perspective evident in adegboyega orangun's presentation, in destiny: the unmanifested being, of contrastive views among various babalawo-adepts in the esoteric knowledge of ifa.

following abimbola, the principal method of making this enquiry is through the symbolism of odu ifa, themselves described as spirits, spirits who descended to earth from orun, the zone of ultimate origins, spirits with their own ori, their own inward identities and sense of ultimate direction and potential, as different from their outward, visible expressions, those externalities being what abimbola names 'oju odu ifa', 'the face of odu ifa', the concept of 'oju' being central in yoruba philosophy as an opening into inward values that the external form transmits, as in the saying , 'oju l'oro wa', 'discourse is in the face', as Pius Adesanmi translates the expression in his essay 'Oju l'oro Wa', an opening into inwardness as represented by the continuum from 'oju lasan' or immediate , corporeal vision or perception to grasp of the penetralia, the character of phenomena that might not be evident on its surface, a deeper awareness representing 'oju inu' inward vision or perception'.

the system therefore, is centred on relationship betweens human beings and abstractions, these abstractions being ori and odu ifa. sentient abstractions, but abstractions nevertheless. these abstractions are understood to predate and to be independent of human culture though ifa represents a cultural form created to relate with these pre-terrestrial entities.

the symbolism representing odu ifa is spatial, graphic and numerical. they can thus be compared with the Pythagorean/platonic, hindu yantra/Jewish and hermetic kabbalistic sephirothjc understanding of the cosmos as shaped by archetypal mathematical forms.

in terms of correlations between odu ifa and other ideas of potencies underlying the cosmos, at times described in mathematical terms, hindu yantra theory shares with odu ifa a conception of multi-ontologicality, in which yantras are understood as the geometric character of divine identities, the abstract embodiment of deities, mantra, sacred sound, their sonic identity, being another abstract form and the anthropomorphic, the concrete form.

odu ifa are demonstrated in terms of spatial patterns assumed by the ifa divination instruments when cast in divination, spatial patterns dramatizing the conjunction of a metaphysical ground and the spatio-temporal immediacies of human experience, patterns further expressible in graphic form, in terms of paired vertical lines indicating the fundamental binary structure of ifa as also demonstrated in the relationship between its masculine pole, orunmila and its feminine pole, odu, projecting a genealogical model in terms of which the total 256 odu ifa are developed as derivations from a fundamental 16, which themselves are derived from a primary 2, itself derived from a primary 1, a genealogical model also dramatised in the kabbalistic sephiroth, as evident in daniel matt's video introduction to the central kabbalistic text, the zohar, a video outlining the creative strategies through which jewish esotericism emerged and developed, an understanding that would be benefical to ifa students in contrast to the tendency to see ifa as closed, as unchanging divine revelation, like the christian bible, rather than open and transformative, as ese ifa, ifa literature, demonstrates in the scope of historical reference it embodies crossing vast periods of time, indicating growing composition across time, a strategy closer to the continous emergence of hindu sacred texts, even though ultimately based on such temporally, ideationally and mythically prior texts as the rig-veda, the mahabharata, the ramayana and the upanishads, foundational, however, to even such much later sacred texts as the siva sutras of vasugupta, the vijnana bhairava tantra, the yoni tantra among many others in an unfolding landscape of sacred texts unfurling across time and space.

the Pythagoreans i understand , were very secretive. plato, for his part, outlines an involved system of training in the republic for those who would encounter these underlying forms of existence as he understood them.

believers in the independent existence of mathematical forms as phenomena discovered by rather than created by the human mind, among modern mathematicians, are represented by such very highly developed mathematicians as kurt godel.

must one undergo formal academic training, and if so, to what level, in order to engage with this understanding of mathematics? what about people like ramanujan, the largely self taught mathematical genius who described his family goddess as a central inspiration for his discoveries?

the ori concept is a variant of the igbo chi, the benin ehi, the akan sumsum, among others in african thought, and further afield, other cognate ideas in Hinduism and Christianity, among other systems.

given the universality of these ideas, what is unique about ifa's treatment of them? given their abstract nature, are they not independent of the specificities of ifa, ifa being one but not the only style of conceptualizing and addressing them?

if these identities actually exist, would they not be independent of even though though related to any human efforts to frame them in terms of particular methods of understanding and interaction?

benin babalawo joseph ohomina states in a conversation that the yoruba were the first to decode the language of odu, spirits whose nature is little understood by humanity but who underlie the work of the babalawo, but that the language of the odu is not a human language, a summation fully consonant with abimbola's description of odu ifa as spirits from orun, thereby predating human culture though understanding of them is expressed by humans in terms of human cultural forms.

given this line of thought, may it not be argued that the originality of ifa and the unique significance of its system consists in its own distinctive slant on and elaboration of these ideas as well its practical ways of engaging with them and the entities they refer to, rather than in terms of exclusive access through traditional ifa methods?

if one chooses to identify oneself with these ideas as they are framed in ifa and to some degree develop one's own approach to engaging with the ideas, may one not be said to be practicing a form of ifa? not the traditional form but a form of ifa, nevertheless, which explores the ori concept through the lens of the implications of the various ese ifa, ifa literary forms through which the idea is developed and through trying to understand and relate with odu ifa using the spatial, visual and verbal symbols of these information matrices and active agents?

i would see that as ifa.

i would also see as an ifa initiation ritual any ritual of commitment to such an endeavor, a ritual that strives to call upon or draw the guiding attention of ori and odu, in the same way that tibetan buddhism and zen buddhism are very different from each other and from what the buddha is known to have taught in india but are inspired by that teaching to such a level they are known as forms of buddhism.

spirit in general and particular spirits, are not constricted by limitations created by human beings, thus making the esoteric core of ifa adaptable to various cultural contexts. all aspects of the system, in my own vew, are also adaptable and profitably modifiable.

the argentinian writer jorge luis borges tells a story in 'the theologians' in which two rival theologians at last reach the presence of God, after one was burnt alive for heresy based on accusations by the other while the accuser eventually died in an accidental fire years later. God was not able to tell the difference between both men. the distinctions in human eyes between heretic and true believer had no value for God.

i have practiced various African, Western and Asian spiritualities, often as a solitary worker, without a direct connection with any person directing me and in each case I have experienced unforgettable encounters.

the constructivist

exposure to what i describe as the technologising orientation of western magic, critical strands of asian spiritualities and the scholarly study of spirituality is helpful in exploring the questions being addressed in this essay. this orientation involves asking and trying to answer the qs- what is going on within a particular belief system? what is the role of the various factors involved? what factors lead to the holding of these beliefs and what are the consequences of holding them? what motivates the activities related to these beliefs and what outcomes emerge from these activities?

influenced by such critically engaging and adventurous orientations, the western magical and asian spiritual systems have moved beyond 'we do it this way bcs this is how it has always been done'.

they are able to lay out the logic, the rationale, the epistemic and metaphysical justifications of the modalities through which their systems are created and sustained.

such critical orientations are also demonstrated by classical african spiritual systems, but i suspect they are de-emphasized in the literature about them.

it is represented, for example, by Adeleke Adeeko's invocation of a Yoruba expression in the thread of his Facebook post of 30th October 2017 "láìsí ènìyàn, imalẹ̀ kò sí (without humanity, divinity is not)", an expression adapted by Soyinka in 'A Credo of Being and Nothingness' as 'without the knowing of divinty by man, can deity survive?', orientations reinforced by karin barber's 'how man makes god in west africa : yoruba attitudes towards the orisa' as well as by ulli beier's the return of the gods:the sacred art of Susanne wenger and by wenger herself in a life with the gods in their yoruba homeland along with nimi wariboko on kalabari religion in terms of the injunction to a deity to avoid becoming too troublesome or it would be shown the wood it was carved from, , approaches dramatised by the account in achebe's arrow of god of how a particular deity or deity representation [?] was created and the novel's exploration of the dynamics between deity as independent of humanity and deity/ideas of deity as a part of the field of relations shaped and navigated by humanity, one way of interpreting that novel.

ese ifa, zen Buddhist stories and hindu myth suggest a self conscious play with ideas of deity, with a particular ese ifa in abosede emmanuel's odun ifa : ifa festival urging the deity to be satisfied with the small shrine being constructed for him or go into the forest himself to cut bamboo and thatch to construct the shrine himself.

correlating transcendentalist and constructivist approaches

how could one correlate the transcendentalist understanding, represented, for me, by Rudolph otto's the idea of the holy, which understands religion as centred in an encounter with the numinous, something compelling and distancing in its awesome otherness, and the constructivist, emblematised for me by karen Armstrong's a history of God, which focuses on the imagination as a primary means of navigating the inaccessibility to linear logic of much spirituality as well as of tacking questions the human being cannot answer?

the world demonstrates qualities and specific contexts, in nature and even human creativity, which compels people to understand them as sacred. in such contexts, the sacred imposes itself on human understanding or stimulates that understanding along particular lines.

people are also motivated, through elements observed in the world outside themselves, through their own reflections, to visualize, conceptualize and otherwise engage with the sacred.

how do these categories relate to the question of whether or not one can initiate oneself into ifa?

i hold that the phenomena that underlie ifa's understanding of its own epistemic authority, ori and odu, are not products of human creativity and so can be accessed using methods different from the full participation in the social construction represented by an ifa community.

the community has made available to the public a significant degree of its own methods for gaining access to those entities, information robust enough to be successfully adapted by a solitary explorer outside the traditional context.

developing an independent ogboni spirituality

along with self initiation into ifa, i am also considering developing a similar system for self initiation into the aspirations represented by the ogboni esoteric order, perhaps the most historically powerful group in yoruba esotericism yet significantly shrouded in secrecy, with academic publications the only significant sources i know for information about it accessible to non-initiates.

a comprehensive appreciation of ifa is facilitated by understanding its intersections with the earth centred spirituality of ogboni, while ogboni is better appreciated in relation to conjunctions between the Ogboni centring on Ille, Earth as the great mother, and female figures engaged with by Ifa in relation to the constellation of deities that constitute orisa cosmology, as in the correlation between Iya Agba, the venerable, aged mother of the orisa in her withdrawal into the earth sorrounded by four calabashes indicating primordial aspects of human existence, a story whose magnificent potential as suggested to me by judith gleason's a recitation of ifa inspires a no of my engagements with it, and dennis williams account in icon and image of the sacred forms buried in the iledi, the sacred ogboni meeting house, ideas similar to those of wenger's on the nature of the iledi in the sacred groves of osogbo, ideas of identification with chtonic forces which babatunde lawal in the gelede spectacle develops in terms of a conjunction between ille and the feminine principle in orisa cosmology generally .

is it possible to develop a spiritual system, both theoretically robust and spiritually functional, inspiring the mind as well as enabling contact with forms of power and sentience outside the scope of materially centred science, that being one way of describing spirituality, out of such basic but fundamental material on ogboni as i have described above?

can one construct an iledi using such basic conceptions, trying to emulate an ancient, highly secretive spiritual tradition purely from those textual reports with their limitations of informational scope and distance from the felt immediacy of what is a group activity solidified by its ancient lineage?

can such an independent, do-it-yourself system approach anything near the combination of magnificent art and spiritual aspiration represented by the central ogboni symbol, the edan ogboni, described, perhaps by an academic article the details of which i dont recall right now, of being consecrated through a nine day ritual at the end of which the edan is infused with a spirit which moves to and from the ritual instrument to serve the interests of the initiate to whom it is consecrated?

yes.

all one needs are the relevant ideas, the relevant instruments and the relevant techniques in developing this variant of earth centred spiritualities, of which Western Paganism is the best known recent development.

the materials are nature and any material object one chooses to use a a conductor of spirit, in relation to the particular spirit one wants to relate with or the form of spirit one wants to construct.

developing an independent iyami aje spirituality

it would also be wonderful to develop an initiation and system of training not only for ifa and ogboni but also for iyami aje, perhaps the most mysterious of yoruba esoteric conceptions although gathering serious momentum in the diaspora as a definitive spirituality practiced by identifiable people rather than what might be seen as a potent body of beliefs based on ideas about a group of largely unidentified human beings, one african version of the paradoxical characterization of the female centred magical spirituality named in English as witchcraft in its female centred version.

the ifa/ogboni/iyami aje nexus is deeply mutually enriching, as diaspora olorisa are demonstrating. this intersection enables an engagement with the comprehensiveness of yoruba esotericism in its material and abstract forms, in its earth grounded and more imaginative and intellectual character.

my exposure to these systems is both theoretical and practical, having experienced encounters with unconventional forms of sentience and with unconventional possibilities of human capacity and perception associated with these systems, from extra sensory perception to the movement between physical and non-physical dimensions enabled by energy centres in nature and thereby engaging with another person in the same environment, interaction in a non-dimensional space facilitated by a centre of energy in the forest, encounters in which one interacts with others also present, one's physical body is in one location while one's mind manifests through another form of one's body focused in the interdimensional matrix constituted by the forest centre, one way of describing the idea from southern nigeria of witches conducting meeting in trees and using forests as their base of operations, such as take off and landing strips for their astral aircraft, as someone in benin described the idea to me.

ifa/ogboni/iyami aje represent rich constellations of ideas and possibilities of engagement with the mysterious beauty and power of existence as developed in yoruba esotericism, awo, which both those systems and humanity would benefit from making them more transparent and accessible within an understanding of the greatest mysteries as existing in plain sight yet beyond full cognising-the fact of existence itself and the nature and possibilities of life and sentience.

these systems would be even further enriched and their illumination of human potential expanded, through the demonstration of the convergences between ogboni, for example, and nigerian cross river ekpe, in the transposition to human social life of spiritual powers encountered in the forest, analogous to ogboni's focus on the powers of earth, and such conjunctions expanded to include non-african systems, such as the magnificent achievements of western paganism and witchcraft, which share with ogboni the veneration of nature and of the earth as mother along with sharing with iyami aje a centering on the arcane feminine, while taking forward the valorisation of the feminine evident in iyami aje while addressing the misogynistic attitudes that characterized traditional western witchcraft conceptions, similar ideas being present in the Yoruba iyami aje conceptions, in the midst of a profound engagement with the numinous as represented by the arcane feminine, a combination of valorisation and wariness particularly powerfully evoked by the cycle of Hindu female deities known as the ten mahavidyas, emblemataised by the convergence of Kali who wears a garland of skulls, whose darkness of skin is the zone to which the cosmos disappears at the conclusion of a cosmic cycle to reemerge at the commencement of another cosmic cycle to tripurasundasri, the beauty of the three cities of being and becoming, a glance from whom can radically empower the most decrepit old man, unskilled in the arts of love, making him so charged with erotic force that women race after him, their clothes bursting off their bodies in their desperate haste, as described by the Soundaryalahari, the Billowing Waves of the Ocean of Beauty, and is yet the 'Absolute Conscious Reality, beyond notions of being and non-being'

On 23 May 2018 at 18:40, Ibukunolu A Babajide <ibk2005@gmail.com> wrote:

Vincent OLUWATOYIN Adepoju,

The conflicted Edo man with Yoruba names.

You love self-masturbating using your armpits intellectually. You cannot re-work Ifa. That is a dream that can never come true. You can NEVER Self-Initiate that is another fallacy ab Initio. Those who practice Ifa initiate you into it. When they are satisfied that you have acquired the spiritual and corporal knowledge. You will enter Igbo Ifa to be initiated. There is nothing like self initiation.

If you think by deploying high fallutin and bombastic ill put together English bombastic words, you can will irrationality and absurdity into the opposite you are wasting your time.

You fool some, but you will never fool me.

Cheers.

IBK

_________________________

Ibukunolu Alao Babajide (IBK)
(+2348061276622)
ibk2005@gmail.com

On 22 May 2018 at 19:40, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:





Reworking Ifa

Self Initiation and Self Development in an Ancient African Tradition

Democratizing the Practice of African Esoteric Systems



Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju



Compcros


Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
                                "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

Tree trunk and roots photo by myself representing the Tree of Odu from Wande Abimbola's An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus. The tree is so named by me because it prefigures, in structure and cosmological associations, the 16 Odu Ifa, the primary information network and active agents of Ifa. The disciples of the deity of wisdom Orunmila, the masculine pole of the masculine/feminine dialectic underlying Ifa, the feminine being his wife Odu, after Orunmila's unanticipated departure from the earth, sought and found him in orun, the zone of ultimate origins, where they encountered him seated under a tree of sixteen branches, as big as houses, branching dynamically in various directions, at which meeting he passed on to them the Ifa system, organised in terms of the 16 Odu Ifa.

The tree's form, along with Orunmila's presence under it, like the Norse god Odin, who, in order to gain wisdom, hangs on Yggdrasil, each of whose branches constitutes one of the worlds that collectively compose the cosmos, evoke such images of the structure and dynamism of the cosmos as the Jewish Kabbalistic Tree of Life with its roots in the unknowable source of existence and its branches the network of all that is, as well as the cosmic tree in the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, which contains in its seed the cosmos that the entire tree will become. Photograph taken in the Jhalobia Recreation Park and Gardens Lagos.



  Abstract

An argument for developing systems of self-initiation and self-development in the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge, spiritual development and divination in order to make Ifa more accessible to enthusiasts beyond the current limitations, controversial practices and abuses emerging within the growing globalization of the traditional model of Ifa initiation and learning. The main text is complemented by pictures and accompanying text projecting Ifa as a spirituality centred in the intersection between the transcendent and the terrestrial, dramatized by the power of the beauty and mystery of nature.

The Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge, spiritual development and divination is one of the world's great powerhouses of knowledge, integrating mathematics, literature, the visual and verbal arts, spirituality and philosophy in a matrix of primary disciplines, with ancillary disciplines including an extensive and complex herbal corpus. This cognitive scope is both highlighted and expanded in a growing range of scholarly and more general writings on Ifa, in the context of a growing globalization of the Orisa cosmological and spiritual tradition to which Ifa belongs.

Ifa is also a bastion in the little studied field of African esotericism. Esotericism may be understood as the exploration of the structures of meaning and the direction of existence through the use of techniques either concealed from the public or inaccessible to the public on account of most people not having cultivated the perceptual faculties vital to accessing such knowledge. This description of what I describe as social and epistemic esotericism represents my own understanding within the controversial characterizations of esotericism as this has emerged in the academic study of Western and Jewish esotericism, perhaps the most developed areas in the scholarly study of this field of knowledge.

The expansion of the geographical and social reach of Ifa beyond Nigeria has inspired a reconfiguration of the system in terms of its monetary value, with a particularly blatant case being an online provider offering to train clients to become qualified babalawo, adepts in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa, in 78 hours, a level of development, which, if I can recall correctly, my Ifa teacher Joseph Ohomina described as taking 16 years to reach in the traditional system. Even if the traditional requirement of memorizing large parts of the Ifa literary corpus, the central information storehouse of the system, were modified on account of the modern focus on high levels of written literacy , is it realistic to expect adepthood in any spiritual system within a short time frame?

Furthermore, the increasing complaints from people in the Americas about the high cost of initiation into Ifa necessitates inquiry as to whether or not one can initiate oneself into the tradition.

Purists insist it is not possible for a number of reasons. Centrists state its possible in rare cases. I insist it is possible for anyone who so chooses.

My theoretical and practical experience of various spiritual and other cognitive cultures from Africa, the West and Asia convinces me of the supreme truth of the assertion by Jesus Christ, the founder of Christianity, that "The Spirit bloweth where it listeth and none knows whence it cometh

and whither it goeth", a summation fully in consonance with the Yoruba concept of ase, which I understand as a cosmic force that enables being and becoming, existence and change, a description in line with John Mbiti's presentation in African Religions and Philosophy of a similar idea as unifying classical African thought, a concept actually globally widespread, as I demonstrate in my essay "A Salute to the Elephant : Abiola Irele at the Intersection of Disciplines", an essay that subsumes Irele's work in terms of his oscillation between individual studies of imaginative works and the exploration of imagination in general, particularly the African imagination, as a cognitive style in the arts and in the correlation of the arts and the sciences, advancing his projection of the possibility of conjuncting Orisa cosmology and modern scientific cosmology in a synthesis contributing significantly to restructuring dominant conceptions of the cosmos.





Photographic self-portrait in the grounds of the university guest house, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. The network of tree branches above a face in reflection within contemplative semi-darkness softly illuminated by overhanging spaces of light, evokes the cognitive framework enabling intersections of mind and cosmos.

"The spiritual world of the Yoruba is a powerful, metaphysical forest-wilderness, vegetatively ferocious and of a scarcely conceivable vitality. A turbulent order prevails, in which all life is closely intertwined with itself, maintains itself mutually, while with great intensity each part holds its ground. If this jungle-arcarnum is metaphorically compared to a mighty, mansion like giant tree, with all its innumerable forms of animal and plant tenantry, Ifa would be neither root, trunk, branch, twig, leaf, flower nor fruit of this tree, but the unimaginably complex network of veins and channels that permeates it throughout." Susanne Wenger in A Life with the Gods in their Yoruba Homeland, with Gert Chesi. Wörgl, Austria : Perlinger, 1983.74.

"Ifá is about the power of wisdom to approach the mysterious and, through this, to offer an understanding of the visible and invisible worlds [ that constitute the forested mystery of existence] through which our lives, collective and unique, are made accessible- Nicholaj De Mattos Frisvold, Ifá: a Forest of Mystery. Scarlet Imprint / Bibliothèque Rouge, 2016. 7.

"The most obvious characteristics of [the Yoruba novelist D.O Fagunwa's ] world is its fusion into a comprehensive theatre of human drama...the natural and supernatural realms.His characters exist and move within an imaginative framework...created ...directly out of the African, and specifically Yoruba, conception which sees the supernatural not merely as a prolongation of the natural world, but as co-existing actively with it...transposing the real world in his work in such a way as to reveal its essential connection with the unseen...giving to the everyday and the finite the quality of the numinous and the infinite. ...in the symbolic framework and connotations of his novels...his forest stands for the universe,inhabited by obscure forces to which man stands in a dynamic moral and spiritual relationship and with which his destiny is involved.

...The tremendous adventure of existence in which man is engaged is dramatised by the adventures of Fagunwa's hunters who go through trials and dangers in which they must justify and affirm their human essence....the unique combination of physical and spiritual energy that is the the privilege of man in the universal order, and which the traditional image of the hunter represents in the highest degree [ in]the dynamic correlation of individual responsibility and the pressure of external events and forces [ reflecting] the understanding that human life is as much a matter of chance as of conscious moral choice [the oral literature, as in the deployment of literature as a vehicle of philosophical and philosophical insight in Ifa, dramatises] the moral and spiritual attributes needed by the individual to wrest a human meaning out of his life".

From Abiola Irele,"Tradition and the Yoruba Writer:D.O.Fagunwa,Amos Totuola and Wole Soyinka".The African Experience in Literature and Ideology.London: Heinemann,1981. 174-196.179-181. Discussed by me in "Forest as Cosmos: Abiola Irele on Classical Yoruba Philosophy of Nature".

I am particularly challenged by the contrast between the paucity of information on Ifa initiation and the descriptions of its cost and the absolute ease with which one can undergo one of the most powerful Christian initiation rituals available, the Pentecostal ritual of being Born Again. This observation is reinforced by ready access to two of the greatest of human creations, the Hindu Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram ritual and the rituals of the Western esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, particularly the edition of the Golden dawn ritual text by Israel Regardie.

The Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram, of which the Shakti Saddhana version is the richest English translation I know, is an imaginative navigation of the cosmos mobilizing all the senses as portals to ultimate reality. The Golden Dawn rituals are a majestic synthesis of ideas from various cultures directed at shaping the mind within a cosmic matrix through meditations and rituals of superb architectonic splendour and sublime poetry. This system rivals the world's greatest scriptures and yet surpasses them in providing practical techniques for achieving the goal of aligning consciousness with a metaphysically primal zone that is the goal of all religion, but which a good number of religions do not describe how to achieve in their most influential scriptures, Hinduism being, to some degree, an exception with such works as the Sri Devi Khadgamala and other Tantric texts, such as the Vijnana Bhairava tantra, another magnificent example of the combination of inspirational philosophy and praxis, my
favorite being the translation in Paul Rep's Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, the Christian, Khadgamala and Golden Dawn being systems I have practiced to varying degrees.

Other readily available fantastic ritual compendia include Evans Wentz' edited Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines : Seven Books of Wisdom of the Great Path, According to the Late Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup's English Rendering and the Western esotericist Aleister Crowley's Magick, Liber ABA, Book 4. Another is The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage , beautifully described by Aaron Leitch at that link.

The Abramelin ritual shares with Ifa a focus on a spiritual identity understood as intimate to the self, known as ori in Ifa and the Holy Guardian Angel in the Abramelin operation, ideas that demonstrate significant similarity. The Abramelin system also shares with Ifa an unconventional relationship with forces often seen as dangerous, such as the Abramelin operation being concluded by invoking what the ritual texts describe as evil spirits in order to serve the interests of the magician while ese ifa, Ifa literature, often present Orunmila, the mythic founder of Ifa negotiating with the ajogun, the forces of destruction, as I describe in "Orunmila and the Sixteen Evils: Yoruba Divination Poetry in Comparative Context by Aníbal Mejía. Commentary by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju."

In a world in which various ideologies are in competition, a competition made more acute by the consistent challenge, directly and indirectly, to Africans to demonstrate their contribution to the global cultural patrimony, particularly as these contributions come from their ancestral cultures, in a world where a good number of other spiritualities command significant space in the global imagination, demonstrating qualities and motifs even non-adherents of these religions recognize and in a significant number of cases, identify with, within the increasing globalization of classical African spiritualities in which the Yoruba Orisa tradition and Ifa are at the forefront, it becomes imperative to make these African spiritualities fully accessible to all, and ideally, the steps of progression in the systems they demonstrate clarified and the modes of development represented by those systems made readily accessible.

I am not formally initiated into Ifa nor have I been trained as an Ifa practitioner beyond my own efforts but I believe I have sufficient theoretical knowledge of the system and have reached a depth of exposure to its practical possibilities, an exposure which, though still embryonic, empowers me to justify the logic of a self administered Ifa initiation, to develop such an initiatory system, as well as, to some degree, map stages of growth, various possibilities of development in theoretical and practical study, one may aspire to in Ifa and guide people in climbing these rungs of the ladder or suggest how these steps may be attained.



"I am here in the trees, in the river, in my creative phase not only when I am here physically, but forever, even when I happen to be travelling-hidden beyond time and suffering, in the Spiritual Entities which, beceause they are Real in many ways, present ever new features. I feel sheltered with them -in them- beceause I am so very fond of trees and running water - and all the gods of the world are trees and animals long, long before they entrust their sancrosanct magnificence to a human figure".

Susanne Wenger from Adunni: A Portrait of Susanne Wenger by Rolf Brockmann and Gerd Hotter. Machart:Hamburg, 1994. Back cover. Photograph taken by me in the Jhalobia Recreation Park and Gardens Lagos.

Wenger's work is central in the exploration of the naturistic matrix of Orisa cosmology, as described in various works by her and others, including my explicit working out of the relationship she developed between landscape and cosmology in "Cosmogeographic Explorations : Metaphysical Mapping of Landscape at the Oshun Forest and Glastonbury".

Even though I am still trying to work out how to penetrate the more esoteric aspects of Ifa, I can at least share the actions I am taking in pursuing this goal and the outcomes of those actions in what is best understood as a shared journey rather than in terms of the picture of a fully informed person educating others from a commanding height. In the face of the exploration of the mysteries of the ultimate meaning and direction of existence in their intersection with the daily cycle of human life, which I understand as the mission of Ifa, everyone is an explorer, no one is or can be fully informed.

The complete picture I am developing is not identical with traditional Ifa though based on the older formation. I am inspired in this initiative by the proliferation of forms of Buddhism between the traditional Theravada and the developments away from the traditional forms but inspired by them known as Mahayana, by the large range of methods and philosophies in Hinduism as well as by the variety of Rosicrucian esoteric systems of which the Golden Dawn and AMORC, the Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross, are perhaps the most prominent.

We live in a world flooded by readily accessible and relatively free information. Only those ideological systems that can position themselves adequately within this information flow will retain significance or grow in relevance as time passes.

I shall follow this statement of purpose with an Ifa self initiation ritual I have composed, clarifying the sources of the ideas used in the ritual and the logic of their use. This is a ritual the core of which I developed when I committed myself definitively to studying Ifa and which I have performed a number of times and refined from time to time over the years.

After that I shall provide suggestions of inspirational Ifa texts and of the Orisa cosmology to which Ifa belongs, works that give information as well as project an imaginative dynamism capable of uplifting the mind, inspiring a sense of mental expansion, facilitating the centring of consciousness in an exalted ideational matrix unifying terrestrial existence and its metaphysical coordinates, conducing to moving from idea to experience, from thought to encounter.



"The unique function of Obatala within the realm of Orisha Awo (Mysteries of Nature) is to provide the spark of light that animates consciousness. To call an Orisha the Chief of the White Cloth is to make a symbolic reference to that substance which makes consciousness possible. The reference to White Cloth is not a reference to the material used to make the cloth, it is a reference to the fabric which binds the universe together. The threads of this fabric are the multi-leveled layers of consciousness which Ifa teaches exist in all things on all levels of being. Ifa teaches that it is the ability of forces of nature to communicate with each other, and the ability of humans to communicate with forces in nature that gives the world a sense of spiritual unity"- from Obatala: Ifa and the Chief of the Spirit of the White Cloth by Awo Fa'lokun Fatunmbi .

"Nature is a temple in which living pillars murmur in a soft language, half strange, half understood; man wanders there as through a cabalistic wood, forest-groves of symbols, strange and solemn, aware of eyes that watch him in the leaves above. Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance, echoes long that from afar rebound, merged till one deep low shadowy note is born, in a deep and tenebrous unity, vast as the dark of night and as the light of day, vast as the turning planet clothed in darkness and light, vast as the night or as the fires of morn, sound calls to fragrance, colour calls to sound, perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond, expanding as infinity expands, possessing the diffusion of infinite things"-from Charles Baudelaire's "Correspondences", a collage of different translations from the poem's page at fleursdumal.org.

Photograph taken by me in the Jhalobia Recreation Park and Gardens Lagos.

After publishing online my introduction to inspirational Ifa and Orisa texts, I am likely to continue by presenting a do-it-yourself course of study in Ifa, drawing on my various writings on Ifa, most of them freely accessible online through the "Cognitive Platforms" section of my central website, expanding this foundation through engagement with the explosion in Ifa and Orisa writings online and offline, conjunctions amplified through dialogue with other bodies of knowledge, a program representing my own contributions to the growing body of Ifa study programs referenced online

Along with the traditional training methods, it is helpful to have the option of self training, for people, who, like myself, either prefer to work alone or who want to alternate solitary work with working with others, such as a teacher. I gained a lot from my Ifa teacher Joseph Ohomina, in terms of the inspiration of his quality of character and ideas about Ifa that are central to my aspirations and work in Ifa, ideas the core of which I discuss in "Cosmological Permutations : Joseph Ohomina's Ifa Philosophy and the Quest for the Unity of Being". My experience with Ohomina represented having access to the option of formal training with a babalawo and even the offer of initiation, even without cost being an issue, his teaching being magnanimously free and movement to and from our places of learning being entirely at his own expense, options for formal training and initiation I chose not to take, preferring informal and general discussions with him.

I invite you to follow a debate on self-initiation in Ifa at this link initiated by a question I asked on the subject in the Facebook platform the Ifa Studies Group.

Also published on

Facebook

academia.edu ( PDF)

Scribd ( PDF)

Ifa Student and Teacher blog

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Friday, May 25, 2018

Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Reworking Ifa: Self Initiation and Self Development in an Ancient African Tradition: Democratizing the Practice of African Esoteric Systems [ with PDF]

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