The Progression of the Initiate in the Universal Ogboni Fraternity:Seeking Self Actualization through an African Esoteric Order

“The Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order is a group of people united in their secret deliberations by their belief in Earth as universal mother”.

“Interesting. Even if their discussions are largely secret one can appreciate their veneration of Earth as an effort to make meaning of terrestrial existence”.

“True. Life on Earth can be seen as brief and puzzling, at times requiring some reassurance to persist with”.

“Absolutely. We find ourselves here without any known prior agreement of ours to come here, ignorant of any identity we might have had, any place we might have been in before entry into the Earth, and where we shall go after that. Various answers are provided to these questions, none of definitive value or universally accepted”.

“A perplexing situation indeed”.

“The human being grows in physical and mental powers, reaches a climax in both, though at different times, then descends in strength of those powers, until they break down totally, leading to their leaving the Earth, the body interred in soil. A distressing prospect, a bird flying swiftly through a lighted room and out again into the dark, the dark of a cold, winter night, as Bede describes human life in his Ecclesiastical History of England”.

“Interestingly this sensitivity to transience is core to Ogboni thought. ‘In the light of life being bracketed by the two great immensities of birth and death, how should a person live?’, is a question that drives their philosophy”.

“True?’

“Yes”

“How does their philosophy respond to this question?”

“It responds by transposing the understanding of nature into the human realm. Ogboni is the product of a forest civilization, a world surrounded by forest, a society built by shaping space for humanity out of forest space, relating with the forest as a zone from which to win ground and livelihood as well as an immensity that inspires awe.”

“Interesting”.

“Exploring the variety and wonder of the forest, its conglomeration of various forms of existence, the forest came to stand for ‘the universe, inhabited by obscure forces to which the human being stands in a dynamic moral and spiritual relationship and with which his destiny is involved’ as Abiola Irele describes the vision of Ijala, Yoruba hunter’s poetry, in his “Tradition and the Yoruba Writer”.

“An intriguing perspective”.

“Exploring the forest facilitated an appreciation of ‘animal and plant life, of the essence and relationships of growing things and the insights they enable into the secrets of the universe’, as Wole Soyinka sums up on Ijala in Myth, Literature and the African World ”.

“Magnificent. Particularly in an agrarian and hunting civilization as Yoruba societies were for a long time. But with the eventual development of high levels of urbanization, do such ideas have practical value?

“They do. The forest is then transposed in terms of the everyday world, the cosmos constituted by the office and the school, the crossing of traffic lights and the buying of food in the market, the movements in space and the navigations of individual and social reality that constitutes the modern world”.

“How is that possible?”

“One thinker puts it this way. ‘People walk through the forest. They see leaves, trees, insects, sometimes a small animal, perhaps a snake. They see many things. But they see little. They hear many forest sounds. But they hear little.”

“Rich.”

“In the universe there are so many signs”, he continues. “A few we understand, the way farmers know what clouds mean, and fishermen understand the stars. But most signs mean nothing to us because we aren’t prepared to understand them”, spoken by the healer Damfo in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Healers, which Armah described to me in an email as adapted from ideas from the Akan of Ghana, a civilization emerging from forest like the Yoruba of Nigeria and neighboring countries.“

“Really? So, how does this style of thinking move from signs in nature to signs in social life?”

“This understanding of learning is based on the view that the experiential context of human life, a context that is both human and non-human, continuously provides opportunities for learning.”

“That makes sense. Please continue”.

“Good. This style of thinking sees these human life situations as embodying possibilities of interpretation through which people shape their lives”.

“Okay”.

“This relevance emerges at various levels of inclusiveness, from signs that enable one cross the street safely to the personal significance of particular spatial and social contexts to aspects of the life of the individual or group that indicate the general orientation of that social entity.”

“Hmmm…”

“Within this perspective of active learning, human existence is perceived as a theatre of understanding where the self is developed”.

“Intriguing. So, how is this development described as taking place?”

“The self is seen as growing through interpreting its experiences as demonstrations of the working out in the phenomenal universe of the metaphysical structure of the cosmos.”

“Wow. Bold. But what are the specific contexts in which this working out take place?”

“In the psychological, social and material frameworks of human existence”.

“Truly?”

“Yes. These are seen as learning situations through which the individual is presented with challenges that facilitate their understanding of themselves and the universe”.

“Interesting”.

“Through such sensitivity, they are better positioned to self consciously work towards an understanding of self and cosmos that is more self consciously realized and accurate than derivative and illusory.”

“Challenging. Potentially inspiring. But how does this relate to the general relation of Ogboni with magical powers? What role have such philosophies to do with the more immediate concerns of magic?”

“Ogboni magic is related to the business of making life meaningful through relationship with Earth”.

“How does that work?”

“The power of Earth as mother is called upon to strengthen and guide the Ogboni initiate on their journey”.

“How is this done?”

“Through veneration of the great mother, Ile, Earth, through spending time in her company in inspiring natural locations, through forms and images representing her, calling her power into such forms, filtering that potency into the human being, to act as conduits of her immense presence, images known traditionally as edan ogboni”.

“Edan ogboni?”

“Yes, often magnificent works of art. But, in the light of the universal resonance of Ogboni, coming into being at the emergence of matter and energy, waiting through the aeons for recognition through the development of consciousness, now known to us thorough this name, Ogboni, that echoes with other names across time and space, the identification edan ogboni, as a material embodiment of the presence of she, may also be adapted to various evocations of one on whom we tread, who holds us aloft in space, who nourishes us in rain, through earth, water, air and fire, the celestial configuration that is terra firma, ‘vibrations from the deep’, Earth, Ogere, who combs her hair with a hoe, the great pot that rolls on and on without breaking, vagina of abundant pubic hair that suffocates like dry yam in the throat, who enables our existence in this place beneath the stars, the reference to the stars adapting J.R.R. Tolkien’s celebration of her many forms in The Lord of the Rings, complementing the previous salutations drawn from Babatunde Lawal’s The Gelede Spectacle.”

Image Above

My favourite edan ogboni, for its sheer beauty, artistic creativity in generating balance between variously stylized forms, forms deviating from the natural appearance of the human body but still elegantly realized within a rich suggestion of something both solemn and beautiful, elevating and arcane yet erotically potent.

The sculpture evokes Ile, Earth, in her wild beauty, suggested by the horns on her head and the elegant symmetry of her form, embodying an exquisitely explosive power represented by female sexuality symbolized by the visibility of her clitoris.

Her erotic and maternal radiance is demonstrated by her pointed breasts. Her hands are held in the Ogboni gesture of cradling a finger within fists held on top of each other, evoking an esoteric core, concealed behind the visible configurations represented by the enclosing fist.

“Interesting. But the ideas you presented earlier are essentially intellectual. Yet you are now combining the intellectual with the spiritual.”

“Which comes first, the pot or the space inside it?” asks Susanne Wenger, a great Ogboni initiate, in her A Life with the Gods. “Which is prior, relationship with the patient immensity of earth, adapting the words of Soyinka on cosmic immensity in Myth, or efforts to think through how to live from day to day on this globe in the course of a lifespan and the several lifespans of various generations?”

“Hmmm…”

“The origins of the relationships between Ogboni philosophy, Ogboni spirituality, Ogboni ritual and Ogboni art are lost in the roots of time”.

“Really?”

“Yes. The best one can do now is build on the ancient foundations”.

“Interesting. How much of what you have told me is your own building on those foundations and how much represents the views of that foundation as you understand them?”

“That Ogboni venerate Earth is known to scholars of Ogboni. The symbolism of edan has also been studied. I build upon these in our discussion in developing a philosophy of relationships between nature and humanity, ideas drawn from Yoruba and Akan inspired thought and alluding to English writer J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, inspired by conceptions of nature and of magic.”

“Interesting. What do you call this style of Ogboni you are developing?’

“I call it the Universal Ogboni Fraternity”.

“Why ‘universal’?”

“Universal because it organizes a global constellation of ideas, some of which are briefly presented here, around Ogboni and its roots in classical Yoruba philosophy and spirituality”.

Learning More About the Universal Ogboni Fraternity

To know more about the vision of the Universal Ogboni Fraternity, you may see

the Universal Ogboni Fraternity Facebook page

the Universal Ogboni Fraternity Facebook group

and the Ogboni Explorations blog

To further appreciate the relationships between its vision and its methods, between its theory and practice, you may acquire, for a donation of any amount of your choice, the book Initiation and Practice in the Universal Ogboni Fraternity.

You may contact me on Facebook Messenger, by email at toyin.adepoju@gmail.com or by text and on whatsapp at +234 805 143 9554.