USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Mystical Journeys in Lagos: Ogboni Mysticism in Urban Space : A Philosophy of Peregrination: Photo Essay

Oluwtoyin Vincent Adepoju

You have to be very careful, especially because you happen to be sitting there, either in the darkness or in the morning light, writing this:

"The smooth surface of her legs is like the Tora in brightness, and I follow it and tread in its footsteps as though I were Moses"

I strongly advice you to please not get carried with any excess zeal, just because you delight in that kind of metaphor. You should know better than me at least, that in your flight of fancy you cannot re-wire your head to re-word your enthusiasm and achieve an official death sentence thereby via an Islamic fatwa or a warrant for your arrest . I suppose that your best friends ( Northern Hegemony / Innocent Fulani Herdsmen/Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association could also put a contract out on your head for writing ( in the name of comparative whatever) that

"The smooth surface of her legs is like the Quran in brightness, and I follow it and tread in its footsteps as though I were Muhammad"

I give this good advice bearing in mind a very fundamental reaction experienced in Nigeria and known as The Miss World riots 2002

On Friday, 16 November 2018 09:37:18 UTC+1, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju wrote:

                                                                             Mystical Journeys in Lagos

                                                                         Ogboni Mysticism in Urban Space

                                                                           A Philosophy of Peregrination

                                                                            

                                                                                         Photo Essay

                                                                                Text and Pictures by 

                                                                           Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                                             Compcros

                                                                             Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

                                                            "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

                                                                                                                 and                                                                                                                  

                                                                             

                                                                       

                                                                                           The Greater Ogboni Fraternity

                                                                                                 Earth, Humanity, Cosmos

                                                                                                  Abstract

An exploration of defining ideas of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order in terms of sights of Nigeria's commercial and cultural capital, Lagos.

                                                                                      

Ogboni mysticism  consists in adapting the Earth and humanity centred thought of  Ogboni in pursuit of  union with ultimate reality. Ogboni mysticism in urban space is the correlation of Ogboni thought with the human and physical nexus of urban existence, seeking ultimate meaning, aspiring to  ultimate cognitive integration,  the unity of understanding fusing all coordinates of knowledge, what is known and the one who knows, through the most seemingly mundane experiences of urban life.

Taking pleasure in walking as recreation, I observe the sphericality of the pellucid blue of the sky as it arcs to form the horizon, seeming to touch the Earth, taking my mind to Babatunde Lawal's image from Yoruba cosmology of sky and Earth as two halves of Igba Iwa, the Calabash of Existence, symbolizing the totality of being in its interpenetration of diverse dimensions,  the interior of this calabash, integrating ideas from Ogboni thought and from Ifa, another Yoruba   knowledge system, consisting of  intersecting lines forming a quadrant, the four sections of which contain mud, chalk, charcoal and dust, natural substances evoking central aspects of human life, each associated with a divine identity over which supervenes the matrix from which these personalities emerge, Iya Agba, the venerable aged woman.

For me, each moment is a revelation of unique beauty at the intersection of consciousness and the world, each sight, each encounter, an embryo of possibility through which the landscape of experience could be suddenly illuminated by a flash of lightning in the sky of consciousness, hence I treasure each moment, each exposure to the unevenness of  the Lagos  economy represented by a partially broken wall beside which runs water from what might be a burst pipe, the earthen ground beside the wall strewn with rubbish, but the view into the myriad motions of my fellow humans, in vehicles and on foot, afforded by the gap in the wall, becoming for me like the sight suddenly glimpsed of the ocean beyond as one bends to wash one's hands at a bowl of water before entering the tea room in a Japanese garden, thus reminding the viewer of the relationship between the water in the bowl and the ocean beyond and thus of the connection between oneself and the universe, an image I  celebrate through a line  which quotes one of my favorite writers in Yoruba thought, from Awo Falokun Fatunmbi's translation of "Oríkì Òrúnmìlà : Praising the Spirit of Destiny" [ or The Spirit of Understanding of the Matrix of Possibilities Within a Cosmic Nexus], and in the next line, modeled after the Fatunmbi  translation , an aspiration to the opening of the mind to creatively unconventional vistas.

The second image reflects, in terms of her elegance as evoking an exquisite bird in flight,  on the picture of a woman met by chance on the Opebi, Ikeja, Lagos street where I took the first two pictures on a Sunday morning walk, the avian image complemented by quotes in  the next two lines from the Tarjuman Al-Ashwaq, the Interpreter of Desires,  by the Islamic mystic and thinker Ibn Arabi, as translated by Reynold Nicholson. The beauty and power of Arabi's lines consists in the cognitive shock it delivers through its combination of evocative scope with allusive and structural concentration, qualities amplified through the visual  anchor created by the picture in its concretisation of the poetic lines about a woman walking. 

                                                                                                                                            

                                               

                                                                                                            

                                             

                    

           

                                                     Ayan ile ni awo egbe ile, ekolo rogodo ni awo ominile

                            Near the crack in the wall where the elders meet, Peace ascended to Heaven and did not return                                                 At the crack in the wall where the elders converge, illumination descended upon me and did not depart

                                

                                                                  

                                                                                                                

                                                             

                                                                                                          

                                                             

                                                                                          Egret in Flight

                        When she walks on the glass pavement thou seest a sun on a celestial sphere in the bosom of Idris

   The smooth surface of her legs is like the Tora in brightness, and I follow it and tread in its footsteps as though I were Moses

The sphere of superlative beauty is used by Arabi  in another of his works  in evoking the unity of existence. The convergence of images of glass, the sun and the celestial, in relation to the sphere, intensify its transcendent beauty, further reinforced by the sphere being found in the bosom of the exalted human  identity existing within a divine realm that is the ancient philosopher and prophet  Idris, this combination suggesting an apprehension of an ultimate unifying principle represented by the sphere.

The texture of the skin of the legs of the woman referred to in the poetic lines  is likened to the illumination emanating from a primal manifestation of God in the Abrahamic religious tradition, the Tora, better known as "Torah", a text central for Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Light, in terms of the colour luminosities of human skin, is conjoined with the spiritual and cognitive illumination emerging from that textual embodiment of divine wisdom.

A material, though non-concrete reality, light and its relationship with colour in the context of the human body, is thus fused with the abstraction represented by the  knowledge and inspiration coming from a holy text. The writer proceeds to amplify this startling conjunction of contraries through presenting himself as walking in the woman's  footsteps, a walk, that, since it is a demonstration of sensitivity to the divine illumination, is akin to the discipleship with the divine demonstrated by one of the central founders of the Abrahamic lineage, Moses, understood as the divinely inspired  writer of the Torah. 

 

                                                                                                      

                                                                  

A snake of traffic, a curvaceous woman buying yams from a wheelbarrow carting seller on the road as a yellow "keke napep" taxi passes, cars climbing from under the Opebi/Oregun link bridge in Lagos. An ordinary day but a day, a moment, in which everything is special, as one's sensitivity to the beauty and miracle of existence expands, one's keenness sharpened to the long evolutionary train that has led us here, awareness inflamed to the complex of cosmological features that makes possible homo sapiens and our existence on Earth, possibilities encapsulated in this moment, a fortunate convergence of actualised potential in the absence of which there would be nothing-non-existence, instead of something-the cosmos, where we live, "ile iwa", the house of being.

                 

                                                                                                                                                 

                         

All possibilities of existence, in as much as they are engaged through human consciousness in its enablement by Earth,

are subsumed by Ogboni

                                        

                           

At the intersection of being and becoming, the voices of the night spoke to me.The movement of the clouds and the expanse of the sky are the depths of my mind. At the intersection of what is, what was and what may be, there I stand. The sky : the template of possibilities. The movement of the clouds : the patterns  exploring those possibilities. Look into these  forms and ask your questions, the answers  emerging in whispers  of the mind. 

                                                                                                                                                                                         

                                   

                         

 Wedding of  Nollywood, Nigerian Film Industry,  Stars Linda Ejiofor and Ibrahim Suleiman on 11th Nov. 2018  at   Jhalobia        Recreation Park and Gardens, 67 Murtala Muhammed  International Airport Road Lagos 

                                                                                                                         

                                                                                                  

Various schools of thought  use  a particular vantage point as a pivot in developing an understanding of the unity of being. This could be an idea, a structure of ideas, an image or even a sound, as in the OM of Hinduism. 

An image that serves such a purpose in Ogboni thought is that of the male and female couple, represented in terms of a sculptural pair known as edan ogboni, both understood as "iya", mother, the primal progenitor that is Earth, the enabler and framework of  human existence as it can be universally attested to.

The atmospheric envelope represented by the sky and  central to protecting life on Earth, constitutes, along with the terrestrial form of the Earth,  a unified system understood in classical Yoruba thought as imaging the unity of contraries that constitutes the totality of being.

This terrestrial/ celestial balance is itself made possible by a confluence of cosmological factors, from the nurturing power of the sun to the influence of the moon, along with the laws of space, time and energy that enables the entire configuration within which this cosmological complex exists.

These complementary oppositions are subsumed in terms of  the male and female couple represented by edan ogboni, as these ideas may be developed from Babatunde Lawal's  outline of Ogboni symbolism of the couple in  "

À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó

: New Perspectives on Edan Ogboni" and of the significance of binary unity in terms of earth/sky conjunction in relation to ultimate being in Yoruba thought in his " Èjìwàpò: The Dialectics of Twoness in Yoruba Culture".

                                                                                               

                             

Both men and women, taken individually, have also been interpreted as pivots of the unity of existence. I don't recall taking this picture at the Ejiofor and Suleiman wedding, the memory most likely encased in other actions of mine I recall more clearly. The spontaneous pose, foregrounding  the carefully groomed hair and face, her  hands meeting in a composed steeple  as she leans on the table with a look both alluring and contemplative, and which, most likely drew my attention, recalls for me various interpretations of feminine presence in terms of what Abhinavagupta describes in his Tantraloka as a flash of lightning from the dancing body of Bhairava, his words evoking the suddenness in which something visually striking may emerge through human action, all dynamism, in his school of thought within Hinduism, being an expression of the creative activity of the feminine dynamic within the masculine foundation known as Bhairava.

Self-possession,  expressed in outward poise, external stillness dramatizing the vibrance of the mind, consciousness centred in  recognition of itself, of one's identity as an individual existent, in relation to the world outside oneself, these are the qualities expressed for me by the careful composure of the woman centred in this picture, values enhanced by her exquisite grooming and classical features.

The memory of the Hindu correlation of its central version of the masculine and feminine couple as the pivot of existence, the deities, Siva and Sakti,  with psychological qualities, consciousness and the self recognition of consciousness, helps me appreciate the psychological values of  this image from the wedding.

Ogboni iconography also blends the masculine and feminine in terms of the feminine, thereby subsuming, to a degree, both polarities within one polarity, in terms of fully bearded women holding ripe breasts or suckling infants.

Beautiful as the lady in the picture is, who can say what the range of her personality is? Along with the sensual feminine grace she so carefully cultivates and projects, what other kinds of power could she also demonstrate?

Returning home after my peregrinations within Lagos, I withdrew into my study and composed myself to explore the meaning of my experience, explorations  from which this essay has emerged. 

Beyond these concrete images, I reflected, is it possible to concisely encapsulate these insights of the conjunction between Ogboni or Ogboni related thought and encounters within the streets and venues of Lagos? What image, for example, could subsume my experience, feeding on the sensory data taking shape before my eyes but also processing it in terms of abstract knowledge, facts experienced and lived through, but also transmuted though the fire of mind in search of the unity of all coordinates in terms of the calabash of totality where the poles are united with the equator, all axes conjoined, knowledge travelling between human and spatial dynamisms and my physical and cognitive mobilities, integrating the expressions quoted here from German Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project as presented at a depiction of a concept made famous by the French writer Charles Baudelaire,  "Flâneur-A Person Who Walks the City in Order to Experience It" in correlation with Mazisisi Kunene's summation of classical Zulu philosophy in his Anthem of the Decades,  something I can meditate on in my aspirations to seek a platform from which to unify my own quest for the unity of existence, something possibly more basic, requiring less effort to recall and visualize than the rich modelling of edan ogboni?

Also published on Facebook

--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.