Self Initiation into the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality 2: Invocation of Ògbóni Philosophers and Thinkers on Ògbóni

 

This is the second part of a ritual for relating oneself to the foundational spiritual powers and ethical vision of the Earth and humanity centred Yorùbá origin Ògbóni esoteric order.

This is part 1 of the ritual.

The ritual is based on an understanding of Ògbóni developed from scholarly research on the esoteric school.

This foundation is developed in terms of the grounding of Ògbóni within classical Yorùbá philosophy and spirituality. These conjunctions are further correlated with philosophical, religious and artistic expressions from Africa, Asia and the West.

This is the first initiatory text of a new school of Ògbóni I am developing, the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality.

The goal of this new school of thought and action is that of publicly demonstrating how to take advantage of the contemporary and timeless significance of Ògbóni thought and culture.

These values are evident to me even as a non-member of conventional Ògbóni who prefers to work out an individualistic approach to Ògbóni thought and culture rather than join an Ògbóni group.

The logic of the ritual, the sources and reasons for the choices of elements included and why they are used the way they are, is presented in the footnotes.

Ritual

Invocation of Ògbóni Philosophers and Philosophers of Ògbóni [1]

Declare:

I call upon Ògbóni philosophers.

I call upon philosophers of Ògbóni.

Margaret Thompson Drewal

expositor of the Ògbóni journey

the spiral dance of being and becoming

of birth, death and rebirth[2].

Wole Soyinka

sublime poet of the glory of Earth, centre of Ògbóni veneration: [3]

[ Celebrating deity and]animal and plant life…the essence and relationships of growing things and the insights of man into the secrets of the universe.

Honour to the Ancestors. If blood flows in you, tears run, bile courses, if the soft planet of brain pulses with thought and sensing, and earth consumes you in the end, then you, with your ancestors, are one with the fluid elements.

If the beast knows what herbs of the forest are his friends, what plea shall man make that boasts superior knowledge, yet knows no empathy with moisture of the air he breathes, the juice of leaves, the sap in his roots to earth, or the waters that nourish his being?

Man may speak Oya, Osun, Orisa-oko [ nature deities in Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology] yet mind and spirit encompass more than a mere litany of names. Knowledge is Orisa.

…

Without the knowing of divinity by man, can Deity survive?...Orisa reveals Destiny as -Self-destination.

Image Above

Ògbóni philosophers and philosophers of Ògbóni, in conclave beyond time and space, within naturespace, a central Ògbóni inspirational zone.

Background image: language and culture scholar Kola Tubosun walking with philosopher of Ògbóni, Wole Soyinka, in the grounds of Soyinka’s forest home.

Picture by Kola Tuboson and Abiola Balogun from “Inside Wole Soyinka’s Art-Filled House in Abeokuta Forest,” Brittle Paper, October 8, 2018.

Top left : Ògbóni philosopher Margaret Thompson Drewal.

Picture from Northwestern University School of Communication.

Clockwise, after Drewal : philosopher of Ògbóni Babatunde Lawal.

Picture from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Clockwise after Lawal : Ògbóni philosopher Kolawole Ositola.

Picture from “Ifa Divination” by John Pemberton III.

Clockwise after Ositola : Ògbóni philosopher Susanne Wenger.
Picture from “Susanne Wenger, a Decade after the Glow” at Abuja Times.

Bottom, extreme left : Wole Soyinka.

Picture from Getty Images.

Clockwise, after Soyinka : philosopher of Ògbóni Ulli Beier.

Picture from “Ulli Beier” in The Times, April 23, 2011.

Bottom, extreme right : philosopher of Ògbóni Denis Williams.

Picture from “Denis Williams,” Wikipedia.

Kolawole Ositola

ever blazing flame

revealer of Ògbóni existence as a continuous journey

between orun and ayé

between Earth and the ultimate[4].

Babatunde Lawal

describer extraordinaire of Ògbóni imaginative power

articulator supreme of the Ògbóni universe

of Ilè, edan and Onile

magnificent ideas and art of Ògbóni[5].

Susanne Wenger[6] and Ulli Beier

alive in my soul

companions in quests for mysteries at the heart of being

evocators of Ògbóni awo

hidden behind veils of mystery

yet pulsating with living power

“I had never seen anything like it,” you declared, Ulli, of your first contact with art of the esoteric order, “a magnificent Ògbóni brass figure about some 30 cm long. [ I ] had no idea what it meant or where it came from but was overwhelmed by a feeling of awe as I held in my hand the heavy object, emanating so much power and ancient wisdom.”[7]

“Earth existed before the orisa, and the Ògbóni cult before kingship.”

Here I am, one with the water: I think and feel like the river, my blood flows like the river, to the rhythm of its waves, otherwise the trees and the animals would not be such allies.

I am here in the trees, in the river, in my creative phase, not only when I am here physically but forever-even when I happen to be travelling-hidden beyond time and suffering, in the spiritual entities, which, because they are real in many ways, present ever new features.

I feel sheltered by them-in them-because I am so very fond of trees and running water-and all the gods of the world are trees and animals long, long before they entrusted their sacrosanct magnificence to a human figure.

Susanne Wenger of the pristine illumination

light our path.

Denis Williams

shaper of myself

you whose words penetrate the living darkness

the palpitating veiled life of Ògbóni

revealer of the cosmic vision

unifying the ultimate creator, Earth, blood and the human being : [8]

…in the Yoruba Ogboni cult, lIle-the Earth Principle-is localised, buried in the inner sanctuary, indwelling in such substances as chalk, mud, camwood, charcoal and the skulls of various animal sacrifices.

These are the ultimate determinants of the sanctification of the shrine[ symbolizing] the four elements in the Ogboni system-Olorun [Owner of Orun, the zone of ultimate origins, symbolized by the sky in its seeming infinity, depth and translucent beauty], Ille (Earth), blood (judgement),and human being, respectively represented by powdered chalk, pure black mud from the river, powdered camwood, and powdered charcoal collected from fires on which food has been cooked for members of the cult. These substances are gathered together in four calabashes previously used by members.

Verger has described such substances as ‘objects which transmit from generation to generation those secrets which gave the first priest power over the Orisa: coercive words pronounced at the time of the cult’s establishment, elements which enter its mystical constitution-leaves, earth, animal bones, etc’.

[They are] the aboriginal material in which the spirit of the orisa, or god, having been first invoked in the cult, assumed spatial identity….an expression in matter of various attributes of the Orisa-attributes which are thought of as being inherently contained in certain substances …. buried in the earth floor or the earth wall of the shrine[ and] held to contain the spirit of the Orisa; they localize this spirit and render it open to communication and control.

[Generating a power emanating from the ground yet] ‘One does not know what it is [ a] force that goes about in the [shrine]’.

Your inspiration, my own.

May your insights penetrate us

who follow after you.

May the luminosity of your vision

burn perpetually within us on this voyage

into the depths of the seekers of wisdom

where darkness pulsates.

Sustain us on this quest.

Dwell in my chant

your words vibrating in my depths.

May my work project the glorious essences

you expositors on Ògbóni and related ideas

let loose into the world

the fire inflaming you my guide

your examples radiating into eternity.

Àse.

[1] This invocation is inspired by the opening stanzas of Hindu sage Abhinavagupta’s Tantraloka. He first invokes the central deities of his Trika Shaivite school in a way that defines the ideational parameters of this school of thought whose ideas will be expounded in the text, an example I have followed in part 1 of this ritual.

He then salutes his gurus, those teachers who have inspired him and whose guidance he is building on, as I also do in this second part of this ritual. I thus map particular inspirational sources, though not all, in my Ògbóni journey.

This invocation is also motivated by Buddhist hermit poet Jetsun Milarepa’s guru veneration and Ifa babalawo Kolawole Ositola’s invocation of Ifa diviners and by other invocators of creative influences, as described in note 2 of part 1 of this initiation text.

I describe as Ògbóni philosophers and philosophers of Ògbóni writers whose work is central to the understanding of Ògbóni philosophy and its appeal, on account of the manner of their presentation of the subject or, like Wole Soyinka, of ideas in the context of Yorùbá thought relevant to Ògbóni.

Among these, Ògbóni philosophers are those who are self declared Ògbóni members,
represented, in this invocation, by Kolawole Ositola, Margaret Thompson Drewal and Susanne Wenger.

Philosophers of Ògbóni are those who are not known as Ògbóni members, but who project, not only information about Ògbóni, but an inspirational spirit through the ideas presented, as demonstrated by Babatunde Lawal, Ulli Beier and Denis Williams, or who might not reference Ògbóni but discuss related ideas from Yoruba thought that may be understood as relevant to Ògbóni, as is done by Wole Soyinka.

The list of those referenced here whose work bears directly on Ògbóni is restricted to those whose work was particularly influential in this essay. Others not referenced here include Evelyne Roache Selke, L.E. Roache, Henry John Drewal and Peter Morton-Williams among the writers on Ògbóni whose work I have read so far and who inspire me. I am yet to read Hans Witte and others I know about.

[2] Margaret Thompson Drewal, in her Yorùbá Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency, presents Ògbóni elder Kolawole Ositola’s account of the life journey of the Ògbóni initiate and contextualises it within her interpretation of the classical Yorùbá understanding of the human journey in a cosmic context as a spiral progression of birth, death and rebirth.

This motif of journey, based on the work of Ositola, is also central to her essay in The Yorùbá Artist : New Theoretical Perspectives in African Arts. Ositola himself has authored “On Ritual Performance: A Practitioner's View.” Margaret Thompson Drewal and Henry Drewal also worked together with Ositola in the research for the splendid essay “ An Ifá Diviner’s Shrine in Ijebuland,” Ositola being also a diviner in the Yorùbá origin Ifá tradition.

The entire ensemble of Margaret Thompson Drewal’s work is very useful to Ògbóni Studies while Henry Drewall is one of the luminaries of this subject. His entire body of work, extending beyond this field, is of particularly strategic value in Yorùbá Studies. With Margaret, he has done superb work on a female centred Yorùbá spirituality, Gelede, that is both complementary to and contrastive with the feminine principle in Ògbóni , Gelede: Art and Female Power Among the Yoruba.

[3] The richest evocation of the significance of Earth in the Yorùbá context known to me comes from Soyinka’s concluding poem to his book/essay The Credo of Being and Nothingness, a poem later published as The Seven Signposts of Existence, a celebration of Earth quoted here in the italicized lines after the first two italicized lines in the salutation to him.

His sublime description, in Myth, Literature and the African World, of Ijala poetry, Yorùbá poetry of hunters, in terms of the cosmic contextualization of Yorùbá nature philosophy, is quoted in the first two italicized lines in the salutation to him.

These insights in his work are complemented by his description of the Earth grounded character of classical Yorùbá spirituality in Myth. So, even though Soyinka only references Ògbóni in passing and without any elaboration in his works I have read ( Ake :The Years of Childhood and Death and the Kings Horseman) his writing is one of the richest sources for values central to Ògbóni thought.

[4] Ògbóni elder Kolawole Ositola, in a deeply moving account, describes the life journey of the Ògbóni initiate as a quest for knowledge, truth and justice, a journey between orun and aye, the world of ultimate origins and Earth, a journey, that, in my view, may be perceived in metaphorical terms as an oscillation between the ultimate and the contingent, between the material and the spiritual.

Ositola depicts this quest as an intergenerational journey, subsisting through the challenges represented by the life cycle of each initiate and moving beyond that to encompass generations of seekers after wisdom, as exemplified in his own family lineage.

His account is presented in Margaret Thompson Drewal’s, Yorùbá Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992, 32-38.

Great thanks to Adriano Migliavacca for directing me to that sublime piece.

[5] The most comprehensive essay on Ògbóni known to me is Lawal’s “À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New Perspectives on Edan Ògbóni.” It is also the richest work on Ògbóni I have read so far.
Lawal’s work inspired me to coin the term “philosopher of Ògbóni” on account of “À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó”s dramatization of Ogboni vision through poetry of expression, analytical depth, ideational range and artistic sensitivity, projecting a passion that lifts to the mind's eye the glory of his subject.

Representative examples of his scholarly work may also be seen as demonstrating an inter-relationality, a coherence of subjects and of perspectives on those subjects, suggesting an Ògbóni vision, even though he is not known as an Ògbóni initiate, as I demonstrate in “Classics in Ogboni Studies : Babatunde Lawal, Philosopher of Ogboni.”

[6] Every statement by Ògbóni elder Susanne Wenger on practically any aspect of Yorùbá spirituality is piercingly insightful, unforgettable in its profound harmony of the traditional ideational matrix and her transformatively original perceptions.

Her few comments, in different contexts, on Ògbóni, known to me, are not systematized but are thrillingly perceptive on the metaphysical significance of the concealed, of secrecy as beyond the non-disclosure of information, instead demonstrating a recognition of aspects of being to be approached with the utmost discretion, an idea also evident in other comments of hers on the significance of darkness and concealment as nurturing space for deities in shrines and the human mind.

She states:

“[ In Ògbóni ]it is taken for granted that the earth is not just the soil in which the farmer plants and harvests his crops, it is also the soil in which we plant and harvest in a metaphysical sense. The Ògbóni know that matter is a dimension of the spirit.”

( From “The Oshun Grove of Oshogbo: Symbol of the Crisis of Yorùbá Culture: Conversations between Susanne Wenger and Ulli Beier”, Redefining Yorùbá Culture and Identity,27-36.35).

Wenger’s depiction, in A Life with the Gods, of the spiritual significance of yam, growing under the earth and harvested from there for consumption by humans, develops this idea of matter as a dimension of spirit, a unity emblematized by growth within the darkness of Earth which yet nourishes those living above the Earth:

“Orisa Oginyon is the god of the yam, which means that he is the yam. And he is [also the orisa] Obàtala, the author of all inspired life. Through being the yam he is the sacred sustenance of matter; through being Obàtala he is the transcendent light dimension of that same matter. The yam is dark and grows and rests in darkness; but it is white inside, where it is sweet sustenance” ( 113).

As I state in “Ògbóni : From Myth to Physics : Yorùbá Esotericism at the Matrix of Disciplines”:

“Thus, earth, in the Ògbóni context, is believed to embody powers of sustenance, biological and spiritual, which Ògbóni call upon in ritual. Thus, the Ògbóni ritual burial of symbolic forms in the earth is central to the efficacy of the ritual process, a process meant to distill these powers through maximum proximity to the terrestrial presence.

Reinforcing the order’s relationship with Ile, Earth, as a unified, sentient identity, a venerated mother, Ògbóni are also understood as relating with expressions of Ile, Earth represented by spirits that emanate from the earth ( Peter Morton-Williams, “The Yorùbá Ogboni Cult in Oyo”, 369 ).

Ulli Beier’s The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger, 1975, 79-80, amplifies this understanding in describing the symbolism of the stylized roof of Iledi Ontoto, the Oshogbo Ògbóni meeting house reconstructed by Wenger and her artistic team, an account I present on page 12 of my “Cosmogeographic Explorations: Metaphysical Mapping of Landscape at the Oshun Forest and Glastonbury”:

‘Three enormous thatch roofs rise against the sky like three giant lizards.’ The reptilian forms suggested by the sweep of the thatch huts as well as by the dynamic thrust of the elongated sculptural forms they contain ‘symbolize the forces that inhabited the earth before [humanity], already charged with magical forces, which [humankind] tries to filter and use in [their] rituals for Ile, the earth spirit…’

Wenger’s work constantly references the spiritual power of Earth and the need to integrate this power into art.

Rich, though not always elaborate descriptions of the logic of ritual similar to that of the Ògbóni iledi ritual configuration are provided by Wenger in describing her own correlation of art and ritual with her team at the Oshun forest in Oshogbo, in Yorubaland in South-West Nigeria.

A particularly telling example is the following passage from her book with Gert Chesi, A Life With the Gods in their Yorùbá Homeland, Wörgl: Perlinger, 1983:

‘Wine ferments only in the barrel; so sacred force ripens, secluded in the heart of matter. Our shrines and sculptures [are not primarily means of narrating myths, instead] Like wine barrels, they seclude the god’s identity so it can once again ferment into some primal manifestation.

[These] shrines, walls and sacred art [are] a bridge between the gods and the human perceptive imagination, in order to create themselves anew in the image of anyone’s own spiritual demands’ (138).

‘The essential aim [ in constructing sacred art at the Oshun forest] was to create coordinating centres of sacred force accumulation. To give the gods strength through stillness and to secure their dynamism’s undisrupted presence in the meditative serenity of their forest home, we erected walls’ (135).

These lines are beautiful in describing sacred activity in terms normally reserved for humans- the incubation of identity, of power, through contemplative withdrawal, often likened, in the human context, to a descent into darkness, darkness represented by insulation from external activity, an insulation generated, in this instance, though, seclusion in ‘the heart of matter’ suggesting immersion within a material substance, perhaps the earth.

What is being described seems to be the recognition and intensification of a quality in nature understood as divine, as suggested by the reference to the ‘meditative serenity’ of the forest homes of the gods. A serenity safeguarded through the creation of human made structures secluding these centres of divine presence, so as facilitate the accumulation of sacred force, as Wenger puts it.

This description of art as ritual is not identical with the creation of the Ògbóni iledi ritual space, since the focus in the Ògbóni space is not on a zone perceived as demonstrating any special quality, but simply on a spot on the earth of the iledi as a location in which symbolic forms are buried in the context of ritual.

The Ògbóni context suggests human creation of sacred space. Wenger’s emphasizes both the recognition and safeguarding of sacred space in nature and the human facilitation of the activity of spirit by creating sacred space.

The similarity between seclusion within the earth in the Ògbóni context and the emphasis on nature in terms of concealed depths in Wenger’s account, suggests a related logic is at play in both situations.

The Ògbóni ritual complex is meant to represent the presence of Ile, Earth, at a spot. This representation concentrates the globally diffused identity of Earth at that location. This idea of concentration can be taken metaphorically, simply as an aid to the mind to focus attention on the idea of Ile, Earth, as an entity to which the Ògbóni relate.

It can also be taken literally, in the sense of inviting an intensification of the identity of Earth as a sentient entity, as an agentive force, as a personality, into that spot of the iledi, the better to permeate the environment with her presence and facilitate communication with her devotees.

The following passages from my “Tales of Mystery and Power from the Ògbóni Esoteric Order:The Mystery that is the Material Universe:The Tree Crowned by Cloud” are significantly inspired by Wenger:

“Does the unknowable exist?

If it does, would it be a human creation?

What is the core of Ògbóni awó?

Awó, understood in Yorùbá thought as beyond secrecy as the concealment of information, is the entry into something whose hiddenness goes beyond human effort, something at the intersection of the foundations of existence and human knowledge.

Ògbóni awó is an awó of Earth, both local to Ògbóni and universal to humanity, rightly recognized by Ògbóni as children of Earth.

What is the relationship, in Ògbóni, between eewo and àwòránin , central Yorùbá conceptions of relationships between the hidden and the known? Between taboo and revelation, between the forbidden and the knowing gaze?

Is it as the dark cloud illumining the night, as the man from Toledo put it of the mysteries of his own faith? The silence that ripens into understanding in soledad sonora, resounding solitude as rendered in his native Spanish?

​What is the unique insight of Ògbóni among other Earth centred spiritualities? Can such an insight be communicated in words? Can words do more than point to something that must be experienced by oneself? Does Ògbóni, therefore, not go beyond the specifics of ritual and other constructs which anyone exposed to them can perceive, to encounters with powers of Earth that have to be experienced to be truly understood, experiences shaping each person in a unique way?”

Wenger states:
“The Yoruba have two terms for that which we simplistically call “secret.” In the Ifa Oracle, Awo is that which is hidden, bit which Babalawo learn to see through his ritual.

But when the Ogboni processions proceed through the town at night, a priest walks ahead with a brass staff and cries: Asiri-that refers to the things we will not try to know. Olodumare, the highest being, remains protected in Yoruba religion by this Asiri. We vaguely describe with oriki [ praise poetry] but there is no ritual.”

( From “The Oshun Grove of Oshogbo: Symbol of the Crisis of Yorùbá Culture: Conversations between Susanne Wenger and Ulli Beier”.35).

Wenger is a prime example of an Ògbóni initiate, as she describes herself, who does not elaborate at length on Ògbóni, but whose work is keenly sensitive to the values of Ògbóni she verbally expounds, making it a demonstration of a vision aligned with Ogboni thought, describable as an Ògbóni vision, as realized by the initiate in question.”

She is quoted here from Adunni: A Portrait of Susanne Wenger by Rolf Brockman and Gerd Hotter, in the italicized lines after the quote from Ulli Beier.

[7] From Ulli Beier, “In a Colonial University” ( Iwalewa Haus, University of Bayreuth, 1993, 1-24.6.).

[8] Williams’ work on Ògbóni in “The Iconology of the Yoruba Edan Ogboni” and in his book Icon and Image: A Study of Sacred and Secular Forms of African Classical Art, from where the italicized quotations in the salutation of him come, is dense in ideas, profoundly evocative of the numinous in Ògbóni and remarkable for insights perhaps unique to his work on Ògbóni cosmology and ethos.

His is the only presentation known to me of Ògbóni cosmology in its use in ritual, what I name the Ògbóni cosmogram, a symbolic depiction of human creativity in the context of Earth and its cosmic framework, discussed in note 7 of part 1 of this ritual and in other parts of the ritual, particularly in the invocation of Onile.

He also provides a brief but rich description of Ògbóni initiation from an Ògbóni elder, the only account of that scope known to me, an account presented in note 10 of part 1 of this ritual.

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