Toyin
Thanks for this long winded piece which conflates so many issues. If I may start from the end what is univeral Ogboni and on whose behalf was it established since there is a specific organisation within Yoruba land with that mame who have sole authority to use that name?
Have you applied to the Ogboni as constituted in Yoruba land in western Nigeria and have they invested you with the authority to establish a universal Ogboni on their behalf?
If not your activity is clearly fraudulent!
You also stated that you have created your own ese Ifa. if you know the origins of the traditional ese Ifa you will realise that name dropping Wande Abimbola will not enable you to be a bonafide person capable of creating even a single line of ese Ifa. I am afraid this is another 419 on your part. Only bonafide Ifa priests who have gone through the proper novitiate and gone through the proper rankings create genuine ese Ifa. So whatever you created is fake and must be treated as such. No wonder your prolegomenary gambit of self initiation priest hood. ( no such thing exists except perhaps in the charlatanry of the border lines of pentecostalism -which is why they are rife with scandals including sex for grades.) Proper religions have good organisational structures with strictures on how progress and not your abracadabra method.
You cite Orisa culture in diaspora. This is another 419 gimmick. Those who started Orisa culture in the diaspora took it from Yoruba land in the Middle passage and adapted it to their new locales ( same with the West African coast line.) But here is Toyin Adepoju seated in the original home land of Ifa and Ogboni culture in Yoruba land where he should defer to the authorities for these organisations faking residency abroad after ejection from the United Kingdom, the locus of his original plans. Are you adapting Ifa and Ogboni to their home lands in Lagos or Benin? To delude the world along these lines of self delusion you state:
Yoruba origin spirituality, (sic) Orisa spirituality
is better understood as a world spirituality,
not an ethnic spirituality, on account of its
intercontinental and intercultural breath...
Yes, it is but it has an extant ethnic cote and those who live within that ethnic core practice the ethnic variant. An American can not stay in the UK since child hood ( I actually had such students in the UK) till adulthood and start broadcasting abroad American iEnglish as international English!
Let me ask you a wuestion: Why have you not chosen to adapt Islam and lets see if a fatwa will not be pronounced ? You said:
What religious and other organisations do is
create systems of access to such
possibilities. These systems are often the
innovation of a person or a group eventually
adopted by others.
You stated that you were not trying to describe African aesthetics but depicting your own aesthetics, Is your name Immanuel Kant? Everyone on this listserv knows you by the name Vincent Oluwatoyin Acepoju.
Your translation of " Oju loro wa" as well as Adesanmi's misses the point of what the Yoruba mean by its usage. What is more, the image of the woman you posted showed no face but the hips: what is the correlation?
You have been missing the point in much of your studies because you refuse to seek the guidance of experts. Do not pass on the ignorance!
OAA
Sent from Samsung tablet.
-------- Original message --------
From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Date: 04/11/2019 16:59 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Beauties of Lagos: Meeting Kantinthe Metropolis
This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (toyin.adepoju@gmail.com) Add cleanup rule | More info Thanks OAA.
Great thanks for your response linking various aspects of Yoruba esotericism and philosophy in relation to aesthetics.
Dialogue Between Exoteric Surfaces and Esoteric Depths
You state:
"Let me start with your oxymoron' open study of the sacred.' Your statement has inadvertently summed up the cogency of my position!
If it is sacred why indulge in its OPEN study?"
But, the open disclosure and study of the sacred is the foundation of most of what we know of religion.
Religions thrive significantly through scriptures, largely verbal, but also visual and gestural, symbols encoding the inspirational core of those spiritualities.
Most scriptures are publicly accessible, while the esoteric dimension of the religions in question represent ways of interpreting and applying those scriptures.
The Zohar, central to Jewish esotericism, is an imaginative interpretation of Jewish scripture as publicly understood.
Regardless of whatever esoteric depths the babalawo may enter into, ese ifa, Ifa literature, accessible even to non-initiates before the advent of widespread writing and now widely accessible globally through a constant stream of written texts, is the primary cognitive system of Ifa.
Christian Apophatic Theology and Public Christian Discourses
Various Christian mystics reference the divine transcendence of all cognitive categories, apophatic theology, with the image of the cloud of simultaneous obscuration and enlightenment dramatizing this perspective, an image possibly derived from Moses' encounter with God in the cloud within which he received the ten commandments, a picture interpreted in cognitive terms in such images as St.John of the Cross' "the dark cloud that illumines the night".
The primary inspirational point for these journeys to and from the readily accessible, however, is the exoteric core of Christian spirituality, the Bible, made available to all through great sacrifice, even of life, as with William Tyndale who was executed for translating the Bible into English, a risk taken by Tyndale, in the understanding adapted from St. Jerome, that ignorance of the Bible is ignorance of Christ, as the Encyclopedia Britannica 1971 sums up Tyndale's vision, a vision eventually proving critical for the Protestant Reformation, a further democratization of Christianity marked by translating the Bible into indigenous European languages, as with Martin Luther's seminal translation into German.
The Face as External Expression of Inward Being in Yoruba Thought as
Demonstrated in Odu Ifa
This understanding of scripture as both the face, the outward expression and the concentration of an infinite essence that may be deduced through continuous study of that outward expression is suggested by Wande Abimbola's characterization in either Ifa Divination Poetry or An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus, of the visual expression of odu ifa, the primary organisational forms of Ifa.
Abimbola describes these visual mathematical permutations as "oju odu ifa", "the face/s of odu ifa", a description in keeping with the understanding of the significance of the human face in classical Yoruba thought.
These conceptions of the face are summed up in the expression "oju loro wa", translated by Pius Adesanmi as "the face is the abode of discourse".
They are also subsumed in the expression "oju inu", "inward vision/ eye or inward, penetrative perception". Oju" in Yoruba may represent either the face or the eyes embedded in the face.
"Oju inu" signifies a progression into the ontological depths of phenomena. This cognitive movement begins from "oju lasan", basic perception, or the outward eye which perceives only the externals of phenomena.
I discuss this ideational continuum in "Oju L'Oro Wa : From Physical Vision to Witchcraft and Mystical Insight: An Intercultural Exploration of the Face as Epistemological and Metaphysical Matrix in Yoruba Thought" (USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google Group) and "Adapting Yorùbá Epistemology in Educational Theory and Practice in Nigeria" ( Yorùbá Studies Review).
That characterization from Abimbola suggests the odu ifa are best understood in terms of a progressive apprehension of their symbolic and existential depths, from an exoteric surface to esoteric foundations, from their mathematical visual structures to the literary expressions those visual forms symbolise, ese ifa, the scriptures of Ifa, perhaps the best known of what may be described as scriptures of the Orisa tradition to which Ifa belongs.
The study of these "faces " of odu ifa would further proceed from the identity of these symbolic matrices as human cultural constructs represented by mathematical visual forms and literary structures to their understanding as expressions of entities whose essential identity is beyond the scope of human culture even while it embraces that scope.
At this foundational level, the odu ifa are understood as spirits, sentient agents described as emerging from orun, the world of ultimate origins, into Earth, as depicted by Abimbola, akin to Nyornuwofia Agorsor's reverential address to these forms, as I compile this in "Performative, Visual and Lyric Spirituality: Nyornuwofia Agorsor" and reinforced by Benin babalawo Joseh Ohomina, who, in a personal communication, describes the odu ifa as pre-human entities, embodiments of all possibilities of existence, a small fraction of whose significance as accessible to humanity is encoded in Ifa and whose non-human language the Yoruba pioneered the translation of into a human language, Yoruba, as I describe this perspective in "Cosmological Permutations : Joseph Ohomina's Ifa Philosophy and the Quest for the Unity of Being".
Transforming Theology into Scripture
Beyond scripture's role in terms of a dialogue between exoteric surface and esoteric depths, beyond what may be understood as that first order discourse in spirituality, "faith seeking understanding" is one definition of theology, an often public wrestling with the meaning of faith, with theological texts at times proving so seminal they become part of scripture.
Examples of this are the Biblical Letters of Paul, the first systematic effort to reflect on and express in expository terms the meaning of the Christian message, or such literary forms as the Jewish tales of Nahman of Bratslav, the Islamic literature of Jalal ud din Rumi, these becoming forms of scripture for devotees of schools within larger religions, even though these texts are understood as ultimately pivoting around the primary Jewish Scriptures with Nahman's works or the Koran, as with Rumi.
The proliferation of Hindu sacred texts may also be related to the movement from reflection on scripture to the creation of new scriptures, exemplified by such Sakta-female centred spirituality-texts as the Soundaryalahari to Shaivite-a central male deity- texts as the Shiva Sutras, but all ultimately constellating, in terms of their primary metaphysical and epistemic premises, around the earliest and most influential, the Mahabharata,the Ramayana and the Upanishads, this summation however, useful as a starting point of inquiry, being perhaps a crude summation of the development of Hindu literature.
Illuminating Religion through Critical Scholarship
Beyond the work of believers in constructing scripture or theology, is the indispensability of scholarship not necessarily emerging from believer's perspectives. The philosophy of religion, along with other disciplines as they relate to religion, from neuroscience to sociology to history, are indispensable in the understanding of religion,even for a good number believers, helping them situate their faith within a critical depth and cultural breadth.
So, I am having difficulty grasping why you, a self professed scholar, and one essentially trained in the Western tradition-bcs in spite of your disavowal of what you describe as Western perspectives , I doubt if you have received education in any other context at the same level as you have been trained in Western thought constituted by both disciplinary contents and investigative procedures-is able to declare that understanding the nature of the sacred is not assisted by its open study.
Ifa Training Between Openness and Secrecy
On occlusion of information in Ifa, keeping its sacred practices deeply shielded from the outside world, are you not referencing Ifa of decades ago? Is what you are describing not Ifa of the days of limited literacy in pre-technological Yorubaland?
Things have changed. Current Ifa study is heavily savvy in the use of a broad range of media, from print to digital, from electronic opon ifa which can be programmed to 'da fa', perform Ifa divination, to the ever growing ocean of books and articles on Ifa, including Dutch diviner Jaap Verdjuin's book teaching how to do Ifa divination without being initiated into Ifa or learning it in the traditional sense, to my own efforts in creating new ese ifa, some of my efforts in various branches of Ifa even being poached by people presenting themselves online as babalawo, to correlations between Ifa and various branches of knowledge, such as Olu Longe's landmark inaugural Ifa Divination and Computer Science, developments, which, from the slowly growing picture evident in various developments online, are being taken on board in the evolution of Ifa training.
Truly up to date Ifa training needs to be both sensitive to its traditional roots and its contemporary developments across disciplines, as well as looking towards the future as a partner in shaping the human agenda.
A survey of approaches to Ifa from Nigerians of various races in Nigeria and Ifa devotees across the world, as evident in various social media platforms, websites and books, makes it clear that Ifa is steadily emerging into the full flowering of a modern movement, rooted in tradition but reflexive in relation to tradition, adapting to various social and technological contexts, intimately sacred yet facing the world.
Some Representatives of Contemporary Ifa and Orisa Spirituality
Solagbade Popoola and Yemi Elebuibon are two Yoruba babalawo who have been able to make themselves relevant in Nigeria and the West through making their insights accessible through a modern idiom.
Among diaspora babalawo, African-American Obafemi Origunwa is prominent in developing a brand of Ifa directed at the business of daily living, insights fed by his Ifa training as well as his academic training in the social sciences.
Caucasian babalawo Awo Falokun is remarkable in the sensitivity and scope of his Ifa philosophy, reflexive and multi-disciplinary, his latest initiative being his unfolding of his ides using his Facebook wall.
African-American olorisha and Ifa devotees Melba Farrell and Iyalemole Ngozi-Fabuluje , in their various Facebook Ifa, Orisa and African spirituality groups are mounting a sustained critique of patriarchy and misogyny in Ifa, as they work at developing what they name American Ifa, striving to excavate what they understand as pristine value from patriarchal encrustations in Ifa thought and practice in building a from of Ifa adapted to the distinctive circumstances of the American Orisa community.
Their work is complemented by that of Ifa and African spirituality adept Ayele Kumari, who not only reinterprets traditional Ifa hermeneutics in ways privileging the female presence in Ifa, has developed a female centred Africana and world spirituality communicated through the digital platforms of her school.
Even before these current developments, photographic evidence exists, though limited, of Ifa initiation and Ifa shrines in the work of such researchers as Margaret Thompson Drewal in such works of hers as "An Ifa Diviner's Shrine in Ijebuland" and Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency.
A Yoruba babalawo she worked with, Kolawole Ositola, published an article in a Western academic journal, reflecting on his practice as an Ifa priest, "On Ritual Performance: A Practitioner's View",(TDR (1988-), Vol. 32, No. 2 (Summer, 1988), pp. 31-41, The MIT Press
URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1145850).
A Yoruba babalawo she worked with, Kolawole Ositola, published an article in a Western academic journal, reflecting on his practice as an Ifa priest, "On Ritual Performance: A Practitioner's View",(TDR (1988-), Vol. 32, No. 2 (Summer, 1988), pp. 31-41, The MIT Press
URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1145850).
Diverse Forms of Science and Philosophy?
What is Yoruba science? Science in the Western context has undergone significant change in its epistemologies from the Greeks to what may be seen as its eventual consolidation in the 17th century Scientific Revolution, leading to the nature of science as a method of enquiry and of ideas developed form such enquiry as generally understood today.
On what grounds, using what criteria, are particular elements of Yoruba culture, particularly its cosmology, beyond obvious technological forms such as metal smelting and scientific forms such as mathematical structures, to be understood as science, ?
Conceptions of a multiverse are ubiquitous, being central to societies operating within systems prior to the development of Western science and technology up till the 20th century, but are those conceptions identical with the scientific approaches to similar ideas?
The same goes for the Hindu and Ghanaian Ewe idea, the latter as described by Ghanaian visual and musical artist and thinker Nyornuwofia Agorsor, in her interpretation of her Cosmos Series of paintings of a cyclical universe, recurrently destroyed and regenerated, to which scientific cosmologist Roger Penrose's relatively recent cosmological model in Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe, is similar, but does that make the Hindu and the Ewe ideas examples of science bcs a scientist in the modern Western understanding of the term has developed a similar idea?
The same goes for ideas of the universality of consciousness, a central idea of animism and similar to panpsychism, a recent development in Western philosophy, a similarity I discuss in "Between Classical African and Contemporary Western Philosophies of Nature and of Consciousness : A Study in Comparative Ecological Metaphysics".
What are the implications, however, of the different epistemic contexts in terms of which both sets of conceptions are developed and assessed?
Establishing the possibility, and even more so, the existence, of a form of science different from that fed by various civilizations across time but reaching its climax in the modern West needs to proceed through a rigorous process that is not intellectually inferior to the rigour of contemporary scientific practice and philosophy of science.
Aside from that, religion and science can be correlative, can even inspire each other, but they are not identical even when they demonstrate similar ideas.
African, Western or Individualistic Aesthetics?
What are African as different from Western aesthetics and is anyone bound to identify with an understanding of such aesthetic practices?
I am not trying to describe African aesthetics in this context.
I am depicting my own aesthetics, drawing parallels with African, Asian and Western expressions that have fed my own aesthetic formation as an African with an international cultural background operating in an international space.
In doing this, I point out the complexity of aesthetic perspectives evident in African history, counteracting monolithic and uncritical descriptions of this rich landscape.
On Forms of Inspiration and Authority in Spirituality
On your views on my usurping the rights of traditional bearers of Yoruba esoteric knowledge, you state-
"We can only debate general views on such institutions. We cannot usurp their Yoruba Constitutional rights to be source of arcane and restricted epistemology to guarantee Yoruba collective psychic equilibrium. To be empowered to do so you do need to FORMALLY join them beginning your period of novitiate.
What the Yoruba authors you cited stated on the Ogboni and Ifa is what the extant authorities have authorised them to state. Who authorised your pronouncements? Those authors might as well come here to openly debate what is conveniently concealed under the cover of books but they defer to the inappropriate nature if the exercise. They are mature enough to realise what kind of reception will be waiting for them; which is precisely what you got."
The reality is that once a person or a community develops and makes known a body of knowledge, it is no longer their sole property.
Thus, Wole Soyinka is not known as an Ogun priest or priest of any Yoruba spirituality in the traditional sense, but the study of Yoruba spirituality is incomplete without his work on Ogun and Yoruba cosmology.
Same goes for the magnificent work of various writers on various spiritualities, such as the Methodist priest Bolaji Idowu whose Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief remains the best book length overview of Yoruba cosmology known to me and perhaps the best in existence.
Another is Ulli Beier whose The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger is a classic on the intersection of art and spirituality.
With Idowu's book, Beier's book and Soyinka's Signposts of Existence, anybody has got what I understand as the best or among the best summations of Orisa cosmology, without acquaintance with which any comprehensive study of the field, particularly in English, the major language of the spirituality, is lacking strategic exposure, in my view.
A good no of luminaries in various spiritualities were not priests or did not begin as priests. The iconic St. Francis of Assisi was a layman, same with Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, who composed his seminal Spiritual Exercises, the initiatory text for Jesuit novices and central to Catholic spirituality, well before he became a priest. The greatest work of Christian literature outside the Bible is possibly Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy written by a man of letters and politician, not a priest.
"The spirit bloweth where it listeth and none knows whence it cometh or whither it goeth" declared another layman with no priestly training whose revolutionary interpretation of Judaism is the nucleus of one of the world's most influential religions, the religion of Francis and Ignatius.
The Yoruba concept ase, the Igbo ike and related ideas in other African spiritualities, ideas described by John Mbiti in African Religions and Philosophies as unifying African religions, are fully consonant with the view of the Judaic reformer, ideas emphasizing universal enablement which may be cultivated in distinctive ways by anyone.
What religious and other spiritual organisations do is create systems of access to such possibilities. These systems are often the innovation of a person or a group eventually adopted by others. Adaptations from the originating branch occur as with the development of Neo-Platonism from Platonic thought, and of various forms of Buddhism from the insights of the Buddha, new initiatives at times emerging outside traditional priestly contexts.
What various lay innovators have done in Christianity and Buddhism are what I am doing in various spiritualities. All I need are the relevant ideas, interpreting them as an inspirational core, the group's codification of its self understanding. The creative possibility of a human being to interpret and adapt knowledge is the root of my self generated authority.
The Dynamic Globalization of Orisa Spirituality
Yoruba origin spirituality, Orisa spirituality, is better understood as a world spirituality, not an ethnic spirituality, on account of its intercontinental and intercultural breadth, from Nigeria to South and North America and Europe and its similarities to other African and non-African spiritualities, from the consonances between Ifa and the Igbo Afa, the Benin Oguega and the Dahomean Fa and the Chinese I Ching, along with the broader input of Orisa tradition in American and Haitian Voodoo and more, across various ethnic formations globally, a scope reflected by such books as Osun Across the Waters: A Yoruba Goddess in Africa and the Americas and Ifa Divination, Knowledge, Power and Performance, described as exploring Ifa throughout the Afro-Atlantic.
So, what is at stake in these permutations is not 'Yoruba psychic equilibrium' sustained by a traditional band of custodians as an unchanging configuration across time but the dynamism of the spirituality originating from Yorubaland, undergoing change across space and time, while its originating core remains a point of reference subject to constant reinterpretation.
Between Originality and Negative Appropriation in My Work on Ogboni
You state-
And for the avoidance of doubt let me assume the book for which you are collecting donations from France, the US and the UK is not a compendium of Internet lifting from the said authors which you said are readily available on the Internet.
If it is not good luck; if it is on the other hand you draw attention of Internet Police to yourself as Internet scammer (419) profiting from the sweat of others.
As a self described Scholar of the Marketplace, in the Socratic spirit of developing knowledge within the context of public activity, social media being my primary publishing platform, almost all my work on Ogboni is published on social media, as summed up in the following compilation, with links to the relevant writings, of my full length essays on the subject, published here, on Facebook and on the open access document archive academia. edu, "My Journey in Developing Universal Ogboni Philosophy and Spirituality, a New School of the Ogboni Esoteric Order".
My book of invocations and prayers in the Universal Ogboni Fraternity, the school of Ogboni I am developing, is a compilation of texts first published on this group, , while I have composed and posted another body of texts on Facebook, accessible through the Facebook group I founded, The Universal Ogboni Fraternity.
The public visibility of my work means that anyone can assess it for its originality, the level of creativity in its use of sources,the scope of credit given to my sources and its total cognitive honesty.
Tools of Spiritual and Philosophical Quest
A person can, at a point in a long journey, do things that others do not understand how what the person is doing is possible.
If one invests, one reaps.
Spiritual systems are ideally built on deep investments, time spent in searching for the hidden, making the arcane second nature.
My major tools are listening ( to oneself and the outside world) looking ( within and outside oneself) , reading, thinking, writing.
The possibilities of these tools are infinite.
Thanks
Toyin
On Sat, 2 Nov 2019 at 16:07, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
--Let me start with your oxymoron' open study of the sacred.' Your statement has inadvertently summed up the cogency of my position!
If it is sacred why indulge in its OPEN study?
The Ifa institution involves its acolytes in up to 15 years period of novitiate yet they will not invite cameras to record any aspect.
They KNOW that they know what they are doing and anyone who does not believe they know what they are doing can go jump in a lake for all they care! They know such disposition is all the patent they have got against exploitation and abuse of their calling and that was the implication of your earlier suggestion of self initiation into Ifa priesthoid
Yoruba science does not have to be an exact replica of western science to be valid. This is why the world is now coming to terms with the existence of a multiverse rather than a universe (universe at whose behest? Westernization?
Your discourse assumes a universal ( western) ethos on beauty and that was the primaries where you foundered as Alagba Kadiri cogently pointed out to you. Even Shakespeare stated that beauty is in the eye of the beholder meaning what is accepted as beauty is culturally determined indicating a multiverse of beauty. The outrage attendant on your post confirms that.
I am a Kant scholar and I know that under the Kantian Categories we are informed that the meaning imposed on the objects we perceive is mediated by the ( cultural) 'spectacles' through which we apprehend them. You have decided to don western spectacles to interpret subjects constituted with African spectacles so you see mirage.
The Chinese have inexorably stuck to this position on multiverse.. The West has reluctantly accepted this verity which has opened a parallel path of Chinese medicine (acupuncture, etc , ) globally.
What the Yoruba authors you cited stated on the Ogboni and Ifa is what the extant authorities have authorised them to state. Who authorised your pronouncements? Those authors might as well come here to openly debate what is conveniently concealed under the cover of books but they defer to the inappropriate nature if the exercise. They are mature enough to realise what kind of reception will be waiting for them; which is precisely what you got.
If you seek an enlightened discourse on your discreet topics contact an Oshugbo bearer of Ogboni or a membership of Ifa priesthood and stop usurping their roles and robbing them of their livelihood.
Direct other interested parties to them so they can perform their roles in situ. Trust me, if their professional ethics allows them, the moderator would have brought them on the llistserv (he is well grounded enough in Yoruba society) and they would not need your surrogacy.
This is without prejudice to your rights to publish in any regular publication of your choice.
We can only debate general views on such institutions. We cannot usurp their Yoruba Constitutional rights to be source of arcane and restricted epistemology to guarantee Yoruba collective psychic equilibrium. To be empowered to do si you do need to FORMALLY join them beginning your period of novitiate.
In sum you do not contrive universal ethos in beauty where there is a multiverse and surreptitiously impose a western universe of that notion on Yoruba and other diverse global epistemologies.
OAA.
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>Date: 02/11/2019 08:51 (GMT+00:00)To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Beauties of Lagos: Meeting Kantinthe Metropolis
OAA,
As I have asked you before, are you aware this is a moderated group?
I wonder if you appreciate the implications of my qs.
The Erotic and the Esoteric in Yoruba Discourse
As for your perspectives on Yoruba secrecy in relation to the erotic, I wonder how accurate your views are.
You state:
"It not for nothing that the Yoruba named the female genitalia 'obo' ( that which must be apprehended in secrecy and concealment instead of coming to discuss the function of a woman's clitoris on a public listserv scholarly or no scholarly) It is not a subject that is meant for public scholarly discussion."
Yet Rowland Abiodun in "Woman in Yoruba Religious Images", Loland Matory in Sex and the Empire that is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion , Henry John Drewal in "Art and the Perception of Women in Yoruba Culture" and Babatunde Lawal in Gelede are doing exactly that, explaining the spiritual and philosophical implications of the secrecy and concealment you reference rather than refraining from such public discourse in the mistaken belief that physical apprehension is equivalent to the abstraction of discourse.
Ogboni sculpture reinforces such orientations through its highlighting of the same subject in images of Onile, referencing the human being through created forms in which that which is concealed in the human being may be safely apprehended beyond the concealment necessitated by the human form, even if that apprehension is reached in carefully controlled ritual contexts.
A conception of the epistemics of concealment and revelation in Yoruba esotericism may thus be developed on the basis of this imagery, dramatized through the privileged relationship between particular Yoruba religious institutions and specific feminine spiritual figures, Ogboni in relation to Onile, Ifa in relation to Odu, Gelede in relation to Iyanla, perhaps in a manner related to British ritual artist Carolyn Hillyer's Oracle of Nights in which the space in question becomes a cave of exploration of and recreation of self.
Yoruba Esotericism in Relation to Scholarship
On your views on Yoruba secrecy in relation to the esoteric in Ogboni and Ifa, are you not substituting your views for facts?
You state:
"The Yoruba do not believe everything should be and is dissectible in the manner of western empiricism the way you have carried on for a long time on all subjects in this forum thereby making the sacred profane, divesting them of their veneration and mystique just to satisfy western audiences. The Yoruba do not believe their existence is simply to satisfy western curiosity.
...Yes,Ifa agency exists for the same purpose: to examine with the appropriate tact and reverence issues considered delicate or sensitive for general public discussions. That is the true meaning of 'awo' as you rightly guessed. Are you giving Yoruba discreet discourses the reverence they deserve for the sake of societal sanity. etiquette and reverence by letting everything "hang out' in your decided over analysing?"
Do your sweeping assertions not require a careful justification which you are not providing?
What is the kind of discourse that represents dissection divesting phenomena of their veneration and mystique?
You are making statements contrasting scholarly analysis of the sacred with the integrity of the sacred but you dont demonstrate how the work of Adepoju violates that integrity.
If you cant critically examine that qs then are you not guilty of a kind of superstition in which any open study of the sacred is equal to desecration?
Do Africans generally have no interest in depth of scholarly and open understanding of the sacred and the esoteric? Are Western audiences insensitive to "the veneration and mystique" of the sacred and the esoteric within the centuries of study of these subjects in all kinds of discourses in those cultures?
You do not attempt to contextualize your views through even a brief mapping of comparative approaches to relationships between scholarship on the sacred and the enhancing or devaluing of religion, particularly since scholarship has been a central tool of both approaches.
You make sweeping statements about attitudes to the conjoining of discretion/secrecy and the sacred in Yorubaland, a sensitivity you describe Adepoju as contravening but dont address the fact that what he writes on Ogboni, one of the most secretive of Yoruba religious/esoteric groups, is got from scholarly literature, available through JSTOR and from books in the open market, some of which one can read online, texts he references in his writings, the rest of his work on Ogboni being extrapolation from those sources at times in relation to his own personal spiritual and philosophical journey.
Between Social and Epistemic Esotericism in Yoruba Thought
Even then, is it not pertinent to examine the character and significance of secrecy in Yoruba spirituality rather than assume a stance that can be seen as fetishistic of secrecy rather than a critical engagement?
The Yoruba term awo, perhaps the closest to the English esoteric, is used to refer to groups of people joined in the pursuit of sacred mysteries and power. It may also be used to refer to a kind of mastery, a form of adepthood, an immersion and a skill in managing such arcane realms, as in the term 'babalawo', which may be seen as questionably translated as 'father of secrets' bcs the term 'baba' in that term may be better understood, not as referring to fatherhood in a procreative, even if abstract sense, but in terms of adepthood, mastery, in relation to awo.
To what degree is this awo which may be seen as at the core of the various meanings of the term a human creation, cultivated and sustained through the secrecy through which it is related with?
To what degree is it a character of the universe with which the human being relates, a quality to some degree significantly, if not wholly, independent of the human being?
To what degree is it a character of the universe capable of human cultivation as in the Yoruba concept ase understood to empower all forms of existence, enabling creativity and change, adapted individualistically in all contexts but universal to existence ?
In sum, to what degree does the concept of awo reference a humanly constructed secrecy, what I describe as social esotericism or the secrecy of nature itself, those dimensions of existence that are beyond full encapsulation by the human mind even as they demonstrate unmistakable potency, which I describe as epistemic esotericism?
Along such lines, is the German philosopher Immanuel Kant not a powerful dramatization of similar ideas as he reflects on the glory of the power of human understanding even within the limitations of the human being in such texts as his account of the Sublime in A Critique of Judgement and on temporarility and eternity in A Critique of Practical Reason?
" The higher I ascended, the less I understood, transcending knowledge with my thought" declares the Spanish Christian mystic St. John of the Cross. " My words in describing my vision of the ultimate are no better than that of the child crying 'mama,papa'," states Italian writer Dante Aligheri at the conclusion of his cosmic journey in the Divine Comedy,yet those lines he describes as feeble are some of the world's greatest poetry.
Write and dissect ad infinitum, mystics declare as they write voluminously, what is being rendered escapes capture. It does not need to be hidden because it cannot be fully depicted on account of its own nature and of human limitations.
In the light of such insights, confirmed by my experience with various spiritualities, including practice of Yoruba Orisa and Benin nature spirituality, I wonder about the elevation of secrecy that is at times branded as a badge of authenticity in African spiritualities.
Exploring the Dynamic Potential of Yoruba, Particularly Ogboni Esotericism
Thus, may relationship with such phenomena not be susceptible to flexibility, to recreactive rethinking and adaption with time and changing contexts?
Is secrecy best treated as a fetish, its own justification or as a means to an end, a means adjusted in relation to time and changing exigencies?
If Ogboni were to reveal all their rituals to the world, for example, would that make the rituals less efficacious?
To what degree is Ogboni esotericism a means of creating a bond among members rather than an intrinsic requirement of its ritual culture?
One of the greatest spiritual texts ever created is the Golden Dawn, the core of modern Western esotericism. Yet the book is available for free online, the notion of the esoteric in Western thought going beyond secrecy.
Does its ready availability dilute the effectiveness of the spiritual culture and rituals of the book?
It was the release of those texts from secrecy that led to their pervasive effect on Western esotericism.
One of the most controversial magical texts in Western esotericism is the Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin, which describes a rich six month ritual for entering into a relationship with one's personal spirit, capped by an invocation of a hierarchy of demons for the empowerment of the magician, a cosmography experimented with in other circumstances by various magicians with challenging results, yet I bought my copy of that book in an open air book stall at Oba market in Benin-City.
Yet, people continue to report success with the ritual and with those demons as encountered in other contexts, sharing their methods and experiences publicly.
Ogboni Esotericism and the Expansion and Contraction of Knowledge in Public Space
Is this greater democratization of knowledge not central to Western development of widespread writing while Africa did not reach that level?
Is it not related to why scripts like the Nigerian Cross River Nsibidi of Ekpe esotericism did not mature into more flexible and widespread writing systems?
If Ogboni were to do a critical review of their fund of knowledge, deciding what to share with the world and what to keep confidential, possibly sharing perspectives on their philosophy and some of their rituals, even as their members share some of their journey on the Ogboni path, would that weaken Ogboni, unless the ignorance of the public is used as a tool of power?
Ogboni has become a byword for infamy in Nigeria, associated in the public mind with human sacrifice and desperate, inhuman quests for wealth and power, as Ogboni members continue to maintain their almost total secrecy.
Through my work on social media people are rethinking Ogboni. Even though I make it clear I have never been one nor do I intend to join Ogboni, preferring to work on my own, people approach me for guidance on life issues on account of my declaration of knowledge about Ogboni and as developing a new school of Ogboni.
People in France, the UK, US and Nigeria have acquired my book on this new school of Ogboni by making a donation of any amount of their choice.
Others have approached me on how to join what I am calling traditional Ogboni, describing themselves as being being burnt by scammers or by Ogboni members described as less than straightforward, and I am able to introduce them to my trusted contacts in the community of traditional Ogboni , even as I increasingly advise these aspirants to proceed cautiously, making sure as much as possible that the requirements at every stage of their progression are agreeable with them.
I am doing what nobody perhaps has ever done. Entering into sustained public discussion of the wealth of Ogboni philosophy, art and practices, a strategic foundation in classical Yoruba spirituality without which other Yoruba spiritual institutions closest in underlying philosophy to Ogboni, Ifa and Gelede, remain fragmented.
Between Demonisation and Valorisation of African, Particularly Ogboni Esotericism
Is this claim by you not a contradiction-
'It is because the West wanted to know every thing about any thing about every one for the purposes of control that the colonial masters through the agency of the Christian missionaries labelled such groups and such approaches, agencies of darkness and evil.
Are we still under colonialism? Are you a colonial agent?'
Do you gain knowledge of something by demonizing it? Does such demonizing not prevent knowledge of what is demonized by discouraging people from exploring it? Is it not such labeling that made African esotericisms a no go area for many Africans, so that their own heritage is lost to them?
Classical African spiritual and particularly esoteric systems are demonized, so much so that the majestic beauty of Ogboni philosophy and art is unknown to most in Nigeria, so much so that Christian songs like "Jesus power, superpower, Ogboni power, powerless power" are a staple, in a country where in its commercial capital Lagos, I am yet to see any locally made art of God as a Black person in spite of the dominance of Christianity in the region, yet these kinds of comments are your response?
What is the paradigm of scholarship within which you approach these subjects? What is the source of that paradigm? How critical is your understanding of the possibilities and responsibilities of scholarship in this context?
--On Fri, 1 Nov 2019 at 12:13, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
--Toyin:
What I have stated is common knowledge among the Yoruba.
The Yoruba do not believe everything should be and is dissectible in the manner of western empiricism the way you have carried on for a long time on all subjects in this forum thereby making the sacred profane, divesting them of their veneration and mystique just to satisfy western audiences. The Yoruba do not believe their existence is simply to satisfy western curiosity.
It not for nothing that the Yoruba named the female genitalia 'obo' ( that which must be apprehended in secrecy and concealment instead of coming to discuss the function of a woman's clitoris on a public listserv scholarly or no scholarly) It is not a subject that is meant for public scholarly discussion. That is why the agencies of Ogboni and Ifa priests exist to examine such issues with the required out of the public required decency, tact and sacredness.
Yes,Ifa agency exists for the same purpose: to examine with the appropriate tact and reverence issues considered delicate or sensitive for general public discussions. That is the true meaning of 'awo' as you rightly guessed. Are you giving Yoruba discreet discourses the reverence they deserve for the sake of societal sanity. etiquette and reverence by letting everything "hang out' in your decided over analysing?
It is because the West wanted to know every thing about any thing about every one for the purposes of control that the colonial masters through the agency of the Christian missionaries labelled such groups and such approaches, agencies of darkness and evil.
Are we still under colonialism? Are you a colonial agent?
OAA
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>Date: 01/11/2019 07:03 (GMT+00:00)To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Beauties of Lagos: Meeting Kantinthe Metropolis
OA,
Thanks.
So you are making pronouncements then that are not open to discussion?
You are not generating invitations to examine open ended issues?
Yet you are conflating your views on the propriety of presenting supposedly erotic material in a group like this one with views on esotericism and privacy of Ifa divination consultations. relating these to ideas about the Yoruba deity Eshu ?
You introduce to this subject such recondite issues as Ogboni esotericism, arcane knowledge, ideas about privacy as opposed to public revelation in Ifa consultation, conceptions of Eshu which you say I cited in another sequence of posts, conflating all these with ideas about spaces of discourse of the erotic.
Since you conflate those complex but tantalizing issues the way you are doing without an effort to clarify your views on them, what am I to do but simply wonder how critically you are approaching your cunjuncting of those ideas.
You are making a statement on the validity of particular spaces of discourses in relation to diverse but possibly correlative subjects, with a focus on conceptions of secrecy and the arcane in relation to public discussion, with particular reference to Ogboni, relating this to individuality and privacy of Ifa consultations, in terms of the similarities and differences between these two fields of enquiry, examining how they resonate with the Eshu reference you allude to, but you present your convergence of these complexities in terms of a bare conflation without justification for mixing these varied discourses, particularly in relation to questioning the propriety of erotic presentations in scholarly spaces such as this one.
I have an idea of the direction in which you are going, but how realistic is it for me to respond adequately since you have not explained your understanding of these cultural forms and your rationale for correlating them as you are doing?
It would be so helpful if you took the trouble to do so.
The strategy you are adopting is correlative with that of Moshe Halbertal in Concealment and Revelation: Jewish Esotericism and its Philosophical Implications, in which he locates the specialized character of spiritual esotericism within ideas of concealment of knowledge in exoteric discourses, such as conceptions of the subconscious mind in psychoanalysis.
Your effort at transposing a discussion about eroticism vis a vis a scholarly listserve in terms of the range of cognitive forms from Yoruba culture you reference could be very useful in the task of building foundations for the study of Yoruba esotericism, and its contribution to other African and non-African esotericisms, relating to such Yoruba concepts as awo ( spiritual mystery and power ) and eewo ( taboo) , in relation to broader bodies of knowledge, of which ideas of concealment and unveiling in relation to the erotic are pertinent, with Yoruba ideas on the erotic in general and female eroticism in particular being valuable vantage points for such an examination.
Thanks
toyin
It is part of what justifies Ogboni as a 'secret' society dealing with ARCANE knowledge and not general public discourses. The same goes for the Eshu excerpt you cited. Ifa priest consultations are not generally conducted in the open square but in privacy.
--On Fri, 1 Nov 2019 at 02:24, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
--I am not generating a discussion on it. Im saying your response had not taken care of why we should not be generating extensive discussions as you did in respectable circles. In fact your response has amplified my position that such discourses do not form part of the staple of the general public discourses:
It is part of what justifies Ogboni as a 'secret' society dealing with ARCANE knowledge and not general public discourses. The same goes for the Eshu excerpt you cited. Ifa priest consultations are not generally conducted in the open square but in privacy.
OAA
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>Date: 31/10/2019 22:58 (GMT+00:00)To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Beauties of Lagos: Meeting Kantinthe Metropolis
Im puzzled Olayinka.
You first dismissed the subject as something that should not be broached on this forum at all now you are trying to generate a discussion about it, such discussions being what I find particularly inspiring about responses to such posts.
So, what do you want- dismissal or discussion?
toyin
--On Thu, 31 Oct 2019 at 21:02, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
--Toyin:
Much of what you said here skirts around the use of the picture the way you used it but did not deal with the core of the objections.
Philosophysing about beauty in general and in abstract about gods and genitalia is different from a particular human form which is being violated.
Your holistic theory of human beauty is not depicted but the derriere so Salimonu's ',point is cogent.
Publications of erotica discourse within the cover of books is not the same as live public digitized discussion.
And again what has Kant got to do with it?
OAA.
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>Date: 31/10/2019 13:21 (GMT+00:00)To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Beauties of Lagos: Meeting Kant inthe Metropolis
Thanks, Salimonu.
I would be pleased if you were to post a link to that debate on Nigerian universities so one can read exactly what I wrote, and in what context, since it was some years ago.
These lines of yours beautifully adapt a social philosophy, although you are insensitive to the beauty of the woman in the picture you describe:
Depicting Social Philosophy through an Image
"What constituted beauties of Lagos for you is [ a] photograph [ of a woman] stocked into trousers like a sack of cocoa beans and standing in front [ of ] a hawker's shed. Behind her was a metre wide gutter with stagnant rain and household waste water. The gutter that probably end [ s] up at another residential building was constructed by civil engineers who obtained their degrees in town planning by paying money and sexual briberies to their professors and lecturers.
The stagnant water in the gutter looks like mosquitoes' parliament where bills of malaria are passed to the inhabitants in the area. The sweater girl with stored buttocks in trousers stood alone in front of plastic [ w] rapped bakeries with no attendant in sight. The hawker, probably, ran away on seeing the camera man mistaking him for [ a ] bribe-taking Nigerian official."
Perceptions of the Female Bottom
This is entertaining-
The sweater wearing (girl) woman stocked into trousers showing outwardly protruded buttocks was labelled in your 'Beauties of Lagos' as *A Shock of Discovery.*
Traditionally, judging beauty of humans in Nigeria always start from the facial outlook, but your photographed beauty in Lagos was faceless. Your notion of beauty of a (girl) woman is limited to the size of her buttocks. As a result of what seems to be your obsession to huge lady's buttocks you posted a second picture of the faceless lady with the huge buttocks crossing over a gutter and you remarked, *Carrying the treasure across the road.* To you, the treasure was the girl's huge buttocks stocked in European trousers and on top wearing a sweater in a 32 Celsius degree warm temperature.
...At no time in the history of Nigeria did our mothers wear clothes with the intention to attract men for sexual intercourse. Our mothers in those days never wore clothes to exhibit their buttocks to men with explicit sexual invitation to men that, if you like my buttocks come and mount on me. Men and women looked forward to marriage where sexual intercourse was instituted for the purpose of purpose of regenerating.
...African men of yesteryears exercised self-discipline and control in matters of sex. They never regarded sex as leisure hour recreation. I don't know what you gain by staring at a woman's large and stored buttocks inside a trousers.
However, I am puzzled that you regard her buttock as a shocking discovery and a treasure in disregard of the environment in which the two of you found yourself.
If animals are put in the same environment in Europe or America the perpetrated would be jailed for cruelty to animals. In a world where every Nigerian man is presumed to be a pimp and every Nigerian woman is a prostitute, I think we should be mindful of what we write and publish. They call us thieves and we dance in the market square carrying [ a] goat."
The Human Bottom as a Physiological and Symbolic Nexus
The human bottom, most exquisitely actualized in the female bottom, as celebrated in that picture of mine you are discussing, is a physiological and symbolic nexus, a point of balance between and unification of the upper and lower body.
It is also the zone enabling the body to rest as it seats on that bottom in the human person's various peregrinations between birth and transition.
The bottom is both a means of rest and the zone rested upon, thus evocative of a range of physical and abstract values relating to foundationality, the pivot or essence of phenomena, the zone on which a subject or phenomenon rests. This double value is demonstrated in the range of meanings of the word for bottom, "utuhu" in Okpameri, my native language, and possibly of "idi" in Yoruba.
These terms indicate the idea of "bottom" which may be physical or abstract, the human bottom or that of an object or the foundation or core of a subject or a phenomenon.
Seating on one's bottom may thus evoke the need for rest in both a physical and a non-physical sense, in a material and a psychological or spiritual sense.
It may suggest the aspiration to ultimate rest, resting on the foundation providing the rationale and consummation of that ceaseless motion that defines humanity, resting in the balance of motion and stillness known as eternity, as the symbolism of sitting is described by Catholic theologian Karl Rahner in Belief Today.
The bottom is also an aesthetic and erotic nexus, its spherical unities suggesting the linking of beauty and desire, rising into peaks of possibility suggesting the declaration "Buttocks as hillocks", of the Hindu Goddess Tripurasundari in the "Tripurasundari Ashtakam", the personage a side glance from whom empowers with an irresistible erotic force, the most decrepit man, unskilled in the arts of love, so that women run after him in desperate longing, their clothes slipping from their bodes, as declares the Soundaryalahari, The Billowing Waves of the Ocean of Beauty, yet she is the same entity from a thread of whose garment the cosmos is created, images evoking the spectrum of value of the relationships between the aesthetic and the erotic.
The Foundationality of the Erotic
The erotic is fundamental to existence and its capacity to animate the most pleasurable responses negates your views about sexuality as related purely to procreation.
Central to civilization is the channeling of the erotic, while its suppression is psychologically and socially dangerous.
Beauty and eroticism, aesthetics and sexuality, belong together in a continuum, and civilization consists partly in being able to separate aspects of this continuum as appropriate for demonstration in particular contexts. Ignoring or suppressing altogether any aspect of this continuity leads to psychological and social deformations.
The Scope of Human Centred Aesthetics in Various Cultures
Hence, in spite of the central significance of fertility in classical African civilizations, environments that required high fertility rates for various reasons not always pertinent today, if at all, the physicality, the embodiment of women and men, were not seen simply in terms of procreative instrumentality, objects for bringing new life into the world, but in terms of a richly embodied aesthetics, ranging from the physical to the abstract, from the senses to moral values, from physicality to the divine, within a continuum in which the erotic was a driving force.
Thus, Romanus Egudu's translations in Igbo Oral Poetry contain a celebration of the form of a particular woman as akin to "a straight line drawn by God", her beauty like a lamp with which wayfarers find their way, if I recall that last image correctly, evoking moral values resonant with the Yoruba expression "iwa le wa", "inward being is beauty", indicating, in my view, not only a focus on the aesthetics of personality but the correlative puzzle of the fact that visible beauty, the most immediately evident, does not have a necessary relationship with inward beauty, which is often not obvious, this being my own response to an idea which Rowland Abiodun explores at length in Yoruba Art and Language, an example of relationships between physical and other forms of beauty relentlessly explored in aspects of the aesthetics of perhaps all continents, as in Islamic, Western and Jewish aesthetics, where physical beauty becomes an entry into moral and divine beauty.
Beauty is one of the attributes or "faces" of God as it shapes the cosmos as seen in Jewish Kabalistic cosmography. Platonic inspired aesthetics seeks to find or reflect ultimate beauty in natural beauty.
The Aesthetic-Erotic Continuum
Where the aesthetics of the human form are encountered, the erotic is not far behind. A Yoruba expression declares that since the hairy place of pleasure between a woman's legs, that place in which the deity Eshu has secreted himself within a concentration of honey as depicted in a particular Ifa poem, is not easy to perceive, we seek after the delights of the face instead.
Another Yoruba expression builds upon this perspective in declaring, "Oju lan do", "it is the face we have sex with", evoking the central attraction of the human face in the aesthetic-erotica continuum, the face being perhaps the most potent physical demonstration of human being.
Evoking this continuum is Ogboni art, which depicts Onile, the female centre of veneration in the Yoruba origin esoteric order, as naked, as her clitoris is prominently but elegantly displayed.
The clitoris has no procreative function, its only role being the enhancing of sexual pleasure, as I point out in my essay on this art posted on this group, referencing current medical literature on the subject-" Female Erotic Intelligence and Arcane Power in the Art of the Yoruba Origin Ogboni Esoteric Order : An Intercultural Dialogue : Part 1 " part of my essay series "My Journey in Developing the Universal Ogboni Fraternity : a New School of the Yoruba Origin Ogboni Esoteric Order".
Why should the art of such a venerable group as Ogboni, particularly as it existed in its older pre-colonial formations, thus celebrate female eroticism, and outside the procreative capacity of that eroticism?
What could we learn about that foregrounding in relation to Loland Matory's account, in Sex and the Empire that is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion , of the clitoris being referenced in Yorubaland as "the king in the world"?
How do these ideas relate to the interpretation of female genitalia in classical Yoruba thought as described by Rowland Abiodun in "Woman in Yoruba Religious Images" and by Henry Drewal in "Art and the Perception of Women in Yoruba Culture" , as an abode of mysterious occult power?
What relationships may be drawn between these ideas and those of the African female esoteric group, the Mevoungou of Cameroon, which I referenced in " Female Erotic Intelligence and Arcane Power in the Art of the Yoruba Origin Ogboni Esoteric Order 1" , for whom the clitoris is a centre of spiritual power?
As we proceed on this train of thought, puzzling over the possibly correlative significance of an aspect of female biology within diverse African cultures, are we far from the Hindu Yoni Tantra, in which female genitalia is a centre of worship, a matrix of cosmic and terrestrial creativity in which cosmic life emerges into human embodiment, through which the transformation of the senses through pleasure points to points of entry into the ultimate ground from which the senses are derived as a primary form of apprehending existence, a biological zone visualized as a cosmos of being and becoming, a matrix of creativity where cosmos conjoins with earth, its physical geography co-terminus with a cosmography realized by the ten Mahavidyas, female embodiments of wisdom manifest in the permutations of existence, terrestrial and cosmic?
Gaze in veneration at that sacred space, declares the Yoni Tantra, consummating that adoration by penetration, and thus, as Abhinavagupta would describe in the Tantraloka, the clitoris and the linga, the phallus as a symbol of cosmic creativity, become the instruments lighting a flame, a flame consuming the senses, at the height of which erotic intensity, awareness peaked at a climax of bliss, the entwined two become Shiva, the power enabling being and becoming, dramatizing the vibrations of union between the God Shiva and the Goddess Shakti from which the cosmos continually emerges.
Eroticism in Classical African Literature
Were classical Africans truly insensitive to the erotic, relating to sexuality only in terms of procreation?
Along with the example of Ogboni art, one may also consider such expressions as an exquisite oral poem from the Bagirmi in Ulli Beier's compilation African Poetry: An Anthology of Traditional African Poems, in which the poet armours herself, painting her eyes with black antimony, girding herself with amulets, as her chant continuously invokes the person she hopes to allure with these enchantments, with whom she aspires to "satisfy my desire", "you my slender boy", hoping to realize an aspiration similar to that of another lover in an Egyptian poem in the same collection, "This is my desire : / with you to release it, / to be alone with you/ when it sounds the call of freedom, /my bird, scented with myrrh".
Clearly, this is a world far from the pure focus of sexuality on procreation which you ascribe to classical African cultures.
Exploring the Scope of Human Centred Aesthetics
" On a dark and secret night/starving for love and deep in flame/I left my house guided by nothing but the fire, the fire inside", states the Spanish poet San Juan de La Yepes , " I went in search of my lover in the night that joined the lover to the beloved/ wounding my neck with his caresses/suspending all my senses", continues the celibate monk who subsequently describes himself as depicting his relationship with God in his "Dark Night of the Soul", thus demonstrating the significance of the erotic as a primary guiding point for humanity, even in humanity's relationships with God, the ultimate point of reference in existence.On my writing about women, I am a writer on the aesthetics of the human being, particularly the female person, from the erotic to the arcane and spiritual.
The human person and all aspects of the human form inspire endless response across time and space, as demonstrated by the range of references in my essay on the beard of the artist and scholar Dele Jegede and on the face of the thinker Iro Eweka.
On the erotic, I don't identify with the idea that celebrating, even publicly, the harmony of the beautiful and the erotic is necessarily something negative.
On celebrating the beauty of female anatomy, does that necessarily indicate a sexual orientation?
Eroticism, sexuality, aesthetics, are continually at play in people's encounters with the world, necessitating the filtering and selection of responses to this complex stimuli, that selectivity constituting civilized culture enabling people live harmoniously in society.
The Erotic as Spiritual Matrix
--On Wed, 30 Oct 2019 at 21:57, Salimonu Kadiri <ogunlakaiye@hotmail.com> wrote:
--Are you, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, sexually perverse and vulgar? I ask you this question because of your two previous posts on this forum, preceding this Beauties of Lagos. When the debate on the case of sex for mark at OA University, Ife, involving a professor and a female student raged you, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, posted on this forum that there should be State brothel in Nigeria where men could go and ''rock off.'' You were of the opinion that the Professor who was a married pastor with children should have access to brothels to quench his sexual hunger. When in response to his counsel, I asked if you would allow your daughter or sister to serve in the brothel so that men could ''rock off'' on them, you kept quiet.
On Thursday, 6 September 2018, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju posted on this forum what you title as Essay on Masculinity in the Context of Male Eroticism. The essay was accompanied by a photograph pictures of one so-named Julian Phillips with his penis erected gushing out sperm. The photographs were marked, Julian Phillips and Ideals of Manhood (Contains Explicit Erotic Images). Olayinka Agbetuyi in his post of Friday, 7 Sept. 2018, protested against the display of perverse pornographic pictures on this forum and appealed to you to show respect for forum members, especially women. On the same day, you titled your response to Olayinka Agbetuyi thus, "Convergences of the Erotic, the Philosophical and the Spiritual in Yoruba and Hindu Thought.'' Therein, you queried Olayinka Agbetuyi thus, "What is the moral difference in sculpted erotica and the display of such erotica in the human body which is the model for the sculpted form.'' Mr. Agbetuyi responded adequately to your justification of pornographic pictures posted on this list serve as follows, "When the Yoruba for instance use erotic image, it is sculpted and NEVER personally displayed (as with your Julian Phillips). The parenthesis is my own addition. I have waited in vain for one year and one month for you, in the name of freedom of speech and expression, to fulfil the hope of Olayinka Agbetuyi by displaying your genitalia as your mate, Julian Phillips.
As if addicted to sex, you posted on this forum what you termed, Beauties of Lagos. What constituted beauties of Lagos for you is photograph stocked into trousers like a sack of cocoa beans and standing in front a hawker's shed. Behind her was a metre wide gutter with stagnant rain and household waste water. The gutter that probably end up at another residential building was constructed by civil engineers who obtained their degrees in town planning buy paying money and sexual briberies to their professors and lecturers. The stagnant water in the gutter looks like mosquitoes' parliament where bills of malaria are passed to the inhabitants in the area. The sweater girl with stored buttocks in trousers stood alone in front of plastic rapped bakeries with no attendant in sight. The hawker, probably, ran away on seeing the camera man mistaking him for bribe-taking Nigerian official. The sweater wearing (girl) woman stocked into trousers showing outwardly protruded buttocks was labelled in your 'Beauties of Lagos' as *A chock of Discovery.* Traditionally, judging beauty of humans in Nigeria always start from the facial outlook, but your photographed beauty in Lagos was faceless. Your notion of beauty of a (girl) woman is limited to the size of her buttocks. As a result of what seems to be your obsession to huge lady's buttocks you posted a second picture of the faceless lady with the huge buttocks crossing over a gutter and you remarked, *Carrying the treasure across the road.* To you, the treasure was the girl's huge buttocks stocked in European trousers and on top wearing a sweater in a 32 Celsius degree warm temperature.
Clothes are meant to cover one's nakedness and to serve as a protective function against hash weather, cold or hot. Nigerian indigenous (native) attires make both slender and fat persons look elegant and naturally beautiful. At no time in the history of Nigeria did our mothers wear clothes with the intention to attract men for sexual intercourse. Our mothers in those days never wore clothes to exhibit their buttocks to men with explicit sexual invitation to men that, if you like my buttocks come and mount on me. Men and women looked forward to marriage where sexual intercourse was instituted for the purpose of
purpose of regenerating. In explainable cases where there were more girls (women) than boys (men) a man was allowed to marry more than a wife if he could support them as the bread winner of the family. The practice of polygamy was not to satisfy the sexual appetite of the man but not to deprive any woman the chance of child birth. Even, as racist as Fredrick Lugard was in his 'The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa,' he did not fail to observe that polygamy in Africa ensured that every female is mated. And importantly, he observed, "The custom, which seems fairly general among the negro tribes, of suckling a child for two or three years, during which a woman lives apart from her husband, tends to decrease population (p.66).'' That shows that African men of yesteryears exercised self-discipline and control in matters of sex. They never regarded sex as leisure hour recreation. I don't know what you gain by staring at a woman's large and stored buttocks inside a trousers. However, I am puzzled that you regard her buttock as a shocking discovery and a treasure in disregard of the environment in which the two of you found yourself. If animals are put in the same environment in Europe or America the perpetrated would be jailed for cruelty to animals. In a world where every Nigerian man is presumed to be a pimp and every Nigerian woman is a prostitute, I think we should be mindful of what we write and publish. They call us thieves and we dance in the market square carrying goat. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5918209/NHS-nurse-jailed-14-years-using-voodoo-force-Nigerian-women-work-prostitutes.html
S. Kadiri
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Skickat: den 27 oktober 2019 20:10
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Ämne: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Beauties of Lagos: Meeting Kant in the Metropolis--Walking in Lagos, I saw something striking.
The form unmistakable. The environment an effort in development, yet a long way to go from perfection.
The intelligence of nature again compelling.
Which came first, beauty or the ability to perceive it?
This morning, I sent the picture below to a number of listserves to which I belong.
But almost all these groups are not set up to cater for pictures of women with striking physiques, unlike one of them, Big Booty Support Group, which is dedicated to celebrating big bodied, big bottomed Black, often African-American women, a demographic with a very rich place in the politics of body aesthetics in the US, particularly in relation to African-Americans and their intersections with the larger community.
These correlations are demonstrated by the celebration in the article "First Lady's Got Back", of the dynamics of the posterior of then First Lady Michelle Obama and the resulting furor over what some saw as a focus on externalities as opposed to substance, to which the writer responded that the Black woman's bottom has long been central to the paradoxical perceptions of the Black woman in the US, both alluring and denigrated, so that the emergence of a First Lady with a dynamic derriere was a victory for the aesthetics of the Black woman, and for Black people in general, a victory in an ongoing struggle where physical characteristics are central to identity.
This is a struggle in which in which Krissah Thompson's "Michelle Obama's Posterior Again the Subject of a Public Rant" and Michelle Bernard's "Michelle Obama and the Broadsides on the Black Woman's Backside" are later developments.
This struggle is correlative with another struggle within the Caucasian community, the highlighting of feminine beauty as emerging in a variety of forms, from the full bodied and big to the slim and thin, unlike the dominance of women with bodies like those of slender teenage boys in modelling of at least the past ten years.
A shock of discovery
The picture above, however, was not taken in the US but in Lagos, the commercial capital of Nigeria, a country of Black people, where the robust female backside has long been a staple of female centred aesthetics.
So, what could I possibly have to say about that picture that could rescue me from the sad place to which the celebration of the intersection of female aesthetics and female sexuality has been too often consigned, the zone of caution lest one be seen as negatively indulging, particularly in terms of my practice of surreptitious shots taken at random as the eye is surprised by a flash of beauty that might never be seen again?
Carrying the treasure across the road
It is the manner in which the perfectly chosen clothes mould her contours, a perfection amplified by impressive grooming, that strikes me. On second thought, the picture's projection of contrast between Nigerians' efforts at self care and the character of their environment also moves me.
The perfectly sculpted form beside the open drain which she has crossed using the old planks on top of the drains, standing in exquisitely shaping clothes in front of the makeshift food stand beside a shanty structure.
The picture says a lot about contrasts between natural and human engineering, between human body and human environment, between the glory of the human form and its enhancing by human hands, between the inalienable summit achieved in the human person by evolution and the struggles of the human being to shape their material reality.
So, have I rescued myself, through philosophizing, from suspicions of perversion?
May I now return in peace to enjoying my picture of that magnificent form, buttocks like hillocks, as the Hindu "Tripurasundari Ashtakam" declares of the Goddess Tripurasundari, the curves of the upper body sitting lightly on the symmetric flaring of the lower regions, magics of the body rife in Africa but perhaps not so readily prominent elsewhere?
The sight vanishes, leaving an aftertaste in the air
"That which is created through thought, but which is beyond the power of thought to fully understand and express.
That created by nature, dwarfing and yet elevating the self, humility before the awesome and expansion enabled by contact with that beyond the mundane."
Adaptions of German philosopher Immanuel Kant on the Sublime in his Critique of Judgement.
You may also see this in
in dynamic images and music on YouTube
the visual and verbal minimalism of Twitter
in a photo album with others like it on Pinterest
the crystalline essence generated by a Facebook photo album
the visual unfolding and verbal elaboration of a Facebook Note and The Female Presence blog
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