Oracle Quest 1
The Discovery of Oracle I
Bruce Onobrakpeya's Circle of Being and Becoming
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
The time is a thousand years from now. The Oracle series of mixed media works by the 20th-21st century artist Bruce Onobrakpeya, first presented in the 2015 book Onobrakpeya: Masks of the Flaming Arrows, and adapting the visual structure of the opon ifa, a central symbolic and functional form of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge and divination, have long been missing, rumoured to have been scattered to unknown locations across the world in order to prevent the arcane knowledge they embody being available to any one person,so dangerous these perceptions are whispered to be.
Someone, however, determines to track them down and unearth the mysterious cognition they enable. This series, combining art criticism, art theory and broader philosophical reflection within the compressed evocative and narrative power of the short story and rich in detailed visual and verbal engagements with each element in each of these works of art, represent this person's account of the quest.
Stumbling on Oracle I in a cave in India, the suggestive force of its balance of geometry and seemingly random assemblage in striking colour symmetries inspires probing into the role of geometry in cosmological investigations in various thought systems, beginning from a comparison between the goals and methods of Ifa divination and cosmological physics, the latter represented by the theories of Albert Einstein on matter, energy, space and time.
I eventually found, after much searching, the fabulous Oracle 1, created centuries ago by the great 20th-21st century artist Bruce Onobrakpeya, a structure believed to facilitate entry into the pivot of the cosmos, the locus at which the human mind converges with infinity.
The dust fell in light flakes on the cavern floor, its ancient rest disturbed by my entry into a place I had spent most of my life seeking. I carried the sacred object to a corner free from the dust descent and examined my find.
Oracle 1, 1993-2010, mixed media, 94 cm diameter, by Bruce Onobrakpeya. Courtesy of the Onobrakpeya Foundation.
This was indeed it, one of the last of the great constructs of a mind shaping skill now lost to the world. A magnificent adaptation of the circular symbolism of the opon ifa, a central functional and symbolic form of the Yoruba origin Ifa system. The artist had remade the inspirational construct in terms of an individualistic visual universe, creating a superb synergy of structural and colour symmetry through the correlation of three concentric circles, the deep blue of the central circle and the lighter colour of the surrounding circles reinforcing each other.
The colour depth of the innermost circle and the darkening, as if in shadow, of sections of the surface suggest a further visual range, a sense of plumbing in which colour gradations evoke spatial depth, spatial depth in turn suggesting cognitive depth, vistas of arcane knowledge represented by the playfully cryptic squiggles that cover the surface of the deepest circle.
The playfully mysterious squiggles of Oracle I, flanking the seemingly random sequence of stringed objects, the strings of probability
At the time of the ancient civilizations in which Onobrakpeya's creativity enabled this artefact, geometric forms had been central for millennia to efforts to visualize phenomena in terms of a unity. Can works such as this find lead us back to this fundamental knowledge?
Albert Einstein,"left to the world of physics a new viewpoint : the aim of the geometrisation of physics", I recalled from my reading of the essay on the 20th century scientist in the now battered but priceless volumes of the the 1971 Encyclopedia Britannica in our family library that had introduced me, as a teenager, to the world of deep scholarship.
The physicist searches for the most fundamental descriptions of the universe in terms of measurable quantities represented by matter and energy and the interactions between them. Einstein pursued the development of unified field theories, deriving the basic structures of nature represented by gravity and electromagnetism from the unity of time and space known as space-time.
The opon ifa artists and Ifa practitioners whose work Onobrakpeya adapts, also aspire, through their own distinctive methods, to understanding and working with the interrelationships of fundamental cosmic principles. Through the figure of Esu, an agent of Olodumare, the creator of the universe, a figure carved on the opon ifa, they evoke the integration and transcendence of opposites, time and space, good and evil. The face of this conjunctive figure looks down on the opon ifa from the top centre of the geometric structure of the divination tray, a face Onobrakpeya represents through the miniature form of a magnificent head of the kind that is one of the luminaries of art from the Yoruba city of Ife.
Face of Esu as Ife head
The face of the unifier of dimensions, who throws a stone today and hits a bird yesterday, so tall he cannot look into the cooking pot, lying down, his head hits the roof, as a rich oriki, a Yoruba praise poem, describes him, embodiment of the dynamism of being and becoming, majestic in the careful modelling of his idealized features, his head circled by royal beads convergent in the horizontal pyramid rising from his brow, presides over the the ensemble of multifarious forms embraced by the circumscription and concentration of space shaped by the concentric circles in Onobrakpeya's visualization.
Esu, as Ife head, presiding over the strings of probability, represented by the ostensibly random collection of forms that constitute the strings
Elegantly detailed, carefully wrought images line the circumference of the outermost circle, some of them human faces, others concrete, non-human forms, a procession of possibility in which the human person is involved as the most evidently sentient being on Earth, his self awareness expressed in the distinctive light of his eyes and the personality projected by his face, his creativity visible in the forms he constructs.
Elaborately incised circumference of Oracle I,top left side
Exquisitely carved circumference of Oracle I, right side
Streaming from beneath the Ife head occupying the traditional place of Esu in opon ifa iconography, is a collection of assorted materials, from cowries, to spark plugs and spirals, this ordered, yet seeming randomness being a transposition of the opele, the divining chain cast on the centre of the opon ifa to enable its configurations reveal the response of Ifa to the query addressed to the oracle.
The strings of probability, composed of an ostensibly random selection of things in the context of the spiral of being and becoming, the alinear strategy of wisdom seeking through Ifa's oracular wisdom, as inimitably evoked in Oracle I
In recognizing the ingenious character of Onobrakpeya's recreation of the opele, my mind goes to another effort, using other techniques, in exploring the convergence of different aspects of being, as the opele is employed in probing intersections between divine mind represented by Ifa and terrestrial circumstances.
Einstein is described as reconciling novel understanding of how movement takes place, the laws of motion, with new knowledge about energy, the laws of the electromagnetic field, in his 1905 Special Theory of Relativity, thus specifying " general conditions which theories must satisfy to be deemed laws of nature", as I recalled from the same essay on Einstein that had touched me so deeply.
Among the assortment resulting in the arcane beauty of the strings of small objects that hang downwards from the central figurine in the Onobrakpeya artefact are cowrie shells, a form of currency in classical African cultures, thereafter used as ritual forms. In this context, they may suggest commerce evocative of the transactions in Ifa divination between realms of being represented by aspects of the self, and between the self and possibilities beyond the self.
The cowrie of exchange, the currency at the great market of life, the means of transaction in interactions between forms and states of being
The inclusion of the spark plug in this assemblage is striking in being perhaps alone among the constituents of Oracle I in evidencing a technological leap beyond the achievement of the civilization that birthed the opon ifa, its parent form. This transgressive quality foregrounds the construct's projection of values that rise from a cultural matrix to transcend cultural particularity. The spark plug demonstrates the human being's harnessing of energy to power mechanical equipment, evoking human creativity and its expression of the "spark of existence", the creative vitality that makes possible existence and change within and across states of being, and expressed most dramatically in life and consciousness and their potential for enabling reconstructions of reality.
Spark plugs, the energy that enables Something in place of Nothing, the fire of life and recreation
This potency is mobilized, in this context, through the choice, shaping and organization of forms in creating what is in effect a portable shrine structure, a matrix for influencing the sensitive respondent to what the artist describes in the 2015 book Onobrakpeya : Masks of the Flaming Arrows, where this work may have first been pictured, as the "aesthetic charm, magic or manna that the combination of objects radiates", and, as he put it, inspiring entry into the wisdom and knowledge with which they are ingrained from the culture that created the opon ifa, its inspirational source, as this culture is re-imagined in terms of what was then modern art, thereby potentially catalyzing future artistic development.
Directly under the Ife head is a cowrie shell. Immediately below that is a figure that, with its bulging eyes and vertically compacted form looks like a version of an edan ogboni, the most visible symbol and magical form in scholarship of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order, an object reported by scholars to be very visible on most of Onobrakpeya's Oracle series. The bulging eyes in classical Yoruba sculpture are described by a scholar whose name I don't recall as evoking esoteric perception, vision beyond the scope of corporeal sight, while the rough compression of the figure is apt for the description of the edan as a vehicle of a spiritual entity, which though focused through the very limited dimensions of the figurine, is able to move across space, coming and going from its physical vehicle, in service to the interests of the Ogboni initiate to whom the edan has been consecrated, as described, among other sources, in Dennis Williams 1964 essay "The Iconology of the Yoruba "Edan Ogboni" .
Edan ogboni figurine? Bulbous eyes seeing into both matter and spirit, concentrated power suggested through crude compression of form
Spirals are also recognizable in these strings of diverse objects. The outward curve of a spiral from a centre in expanding loops may be seen as projecting relationships between stability and change, eternity and time, between the core of being in its unfathomable essence and the various transformations in terms of which it is expressed, most of these values made explicit in symbol systems cognate with Ifa, these being the Yoruba Ogboni institution, as described by Babatunde Lawal in his 1995 essay "À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New Perspectives on Edan Ògbóni" and in the related Nigerian Cross River Nsibidi symbolism, as depicted in the 2007 exhibition Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art.
The spiral of being and becoming
The struggle to understand the patterns that shape existence also emerges in Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, a " powerful guiding principle in our search for the laws of nature", one of its results being the equivalence of mass and energy, the disappearance of m units of mass leading to the liberation of mc² units of energy, c being the speed of light, the fastest speed in the universe, the speed at which the transformation occurs. In this way, masses of nuclei furnish the large amounts of energy supplied by nuclear reactions, the main energy source of stars, the words of that insightful essay on Einstein coming almost verbatim to memory.
The opon's surface in the Onobrakpeya transposition is covered with undecipherable scribbles, beautifully meaningless to most because unrelated to any known symbol system, yet lyrical in their visual dynamism, playfully random but evocative, in their opaqueness to meaning, of the oracular speech, the ese ifa, the opon ifa is a key agent in invoking. These semiotic sequences, scribbles and oracular verbalisations, demonstrate the tension between various zones of cognitive possibility, between what is within the scope of existing human knowledge, what is beyond the totality of human knowledge but is ultimately accessible to awareness and what is outside human knowing, and its accessibility to understanding by humanity remaining questionable.
Semiotic possibilities arising from a primeval unformedness. Is the cosmos aware of itself?
The cognitive courage of the human being, the drive to transcend our limitations through the quest for knowledge, emerges also in Einstein's 1907 -1915 General Theory of Relativity, in which the "laws of physics are the laws of geometry in four dimensions, and these laws in turn are determined by the distribution of matter and energy in the universe", that memorable essay sums up.
Continuities between primeval and present shapings of matter to tell stories for the human being?
The relatively uneven modelling of the inner circumference of the innermost circle in Oracle I, in harmony with the look of rugged stone created by the surface and colouring of the concentric circles, suggests an ancient artefact.
From Kenya's Olduvai gorge to the modern metropolis, the first humans and the latest humans, distanced by vast worlds of experience, but linked across time and space by the same quest to make meaning of the fortune of finding oneself alive on the third planet from a particular dwarf star
The forms inscribed on the outermost circumference, may thus suggest ancestors, not only in the sense of ancestors in the discipline of Ifa, as in classical opon ifa iconography, as described in Henry John Drewal at al's 1989 Yoruba : Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, but also in the spirit of the 2016 Panache Digital Games production, Ancestors : The Humankind Odyssey, depicting landmarks in humanity's struggle to shape its own history.
The circle of probability, humans and human created forms, enclosing the strings of probability, left side of Oracle I
Central to these achievements are cosmological conceptions, accounts of the properties of the cosmos in its broadest scope, such as Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, described as demonstrating the paradoxical possibility of a spatially finite though unbounded universe, as depicted by the essay that consistently counterpointed my encounter with Onobrakpeya's recreation of a cosmological structure from the different disciplinary context of Ifa.
The circle of probability, humans and human created forms, enclosing the strings of probability, right side of Oracle I
Onobrakpeya's Oracle I is a relatively small work, but it is great in its choice and combination of constituents, and the quality demonstrated by the crafting of those elements, an achievement that enables it encapsulate effortlessly a cosmological scope of associations, integrating beauty and power of construction and evocative force as a unified projection.
The artist describes this work as an "oracle" beceause it connotes "aesthetic charm, magic or manna that the combination of objects radiates". Central to this assemblage is the disparate collection of objects hanging as strings from the Ife head. The seeming irrationality, the inaccessible logic, of this collection is central to the work's combination of strangeness and beauty, the arcane and the conventional, the latter represented by the universal motif of the circle, the resulting ensemble rising, through this combination, to the level of the sublime.
What are the foundations of being and becoming?
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