Self Initiation into the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality 7: The Ògbóni Quest

                                                                          

Introduction

This is the seventh 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.

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

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

Possible stages on the path of growth in this spirituality and philosophy are suggested in this part by the complementarity of the images of a horseman from Ògbóni sculpture with text indicating progressions on the journey. The journey is described as a penetration into áwo, a Yoruba term indicating the mystery or mysteries at the foundation of existence, symbolised, in this context, by darkness, the darkness of the interior of the Earth, the mother venerated by Ògbóni.

“Knowing you from the outside is just a way to strengthen us for the world, but what is most profound comes from your intimate Being ... Oh! Wonderful Creature ... Born of Divine Love that supports us at all times of our Living! What else could we want? We pray with all our might that the Yabás bless all mothers [ even though] we can’t always be with you until your memory makes us relive… how wonderful…”

Salutation in quotation marks above adapted for Ilè, Earth, from a post on Pickuki.com by Umbanda Ponta de Luz do Caboclo Cobra Coral, a group in the Brazilian religion Umbanda.

The initiation into this philosophy and spirituality was completed in part 4 of this series.

Here are parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

What follows after part 4 are invocations and meditations complementing the previous parts.

The logic of the ritual and of the invocations and meditations, the sources and reasons for the choices of elements included and why they are used the way they are, is presented in the footnotes. Identification of the texts referenced in the footnotes are provided in the various parts of the text, beginning from part 1. All texts will be further refined to take care of any omissions.

The images come from various sources online. I will provide the credits later. Great thanks to the creators of the images and those who uploaded them.

The Journey Begins: Entry into Ògbóni Áwo

The Ògbóni Quest[1]

A small child works his way off the edges of his sleeping mat

a bird soars high above it all[2]

looked into the mirror of Ifa

seeking the sprouts of tomorrow in the seeds of today

seeking to shape the spaces of the days to come

through cultivating today’s earth.

“Where do you go?”

“Why do you go?”

How best may we live within this mystery

this journey on which we find ourselves

origin unknown

destination unknown?

What are the ultimate possibilities of human knowledge?

How may we explore this scope?

How can we understand ourselves,

the universe,

what it contains

and, what, if anything, is behind the cosmos

responsible for its existence?[3]

Do we go from orun to ayé

from the world of ultimate origins to the world of Earth

from the zone beyond space and time

to the material cosmos shaped by time and space?

Do we come from the space of absolute potential

to the expression of that potential

in the space of earth and water, air and fire?

I come with they seeking wisdom.

I come seeking the source of the great river.

Can the path cross the river?

The river cross the path?

Which is the elder?

Could we make the path and find the river

the river from long ago

the river from the creator of the universe?[4]

The Journey Continues: Penetrating into Ògbóni Áwo

The journey from orun to ayé and from ayé to orun is undertaken every moment in the life of the Ògbóni initiate. This transformative voyage is inspired by the spirit of the Yoruba expression “babini ko to ka tura eni bi,” “being born is not as significant as giving birth to oneself anew.”[5]

A Yoruba saying goes “ayé l’ọjá, orun ni le,” “ayé, the world, is a market place, orun, the zone of ultimate origins, is home,” but who is to say where ayé ends and orun begins in a universe where every point in time and every location in space is a site of intersection of orun and ayé?[6]

Without the originating forces of orun, would ayé exist?

Without the dynamism of ayé, how would the potential of orun be realized?

In the journey between these realms, the visible and the invisible, ultimate potentiality and finite actualization, existence is constituted.

Slowly and patiently, I get on my feet.

Slowly and patiently I get on my feet.

Firampon!

Otweaduampon Nyame,

the Ancient God.

The Heavens are wide, exceedingly wide.

The Earth is wide, very very wide.

We have lifted it and taken it away.

We have lifted it and brought it back,

From time immemorial.[7]

The Journey Unfolds: Light Shines on the Path to Ògbóni Áwo

[1] This is a reworking of Kolawole Ositola’s narration of a poem from the Yorùbá origin Ifá system of knowledge, providing an interpretive matrix for the journey of learning represented by the life of the initiate of Òṣùgbò, a version of the Yorùbá origin Ògbóni esoteric order, as presented in Margaret Thompson Drewal’s Yorùbá Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992, 33) in a discussion that runs from pages 32-38, embedded within chapter 3, “The Ontological Journey”, within the context of the book’s grounding in the idea from Yorùbá thought, of ritual as journey, in which ritual is microcosmic of human life progression as a transformative process, actualized, as Drewal interprets it, in terms of spiral rhythm representing Yorùbá spirituality’s understanding of life as a continuous transition between birth on Earth, leaving Earth and rebirth on Earth (46-47). I am most fortunate to have been directed to this text by Adriano Migliavacca Migliavaccato.

[2] This opening quotes the first two lines of the poem from Ositola. I rework the rest of the poem, in lines either composed by myself or adapted from other sources, as well as adapt his exposition of the poem.

One of the delights of Ifá literature, particularly those collected by Wande Abimbola, as in Ifa Divination Poetry, An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus and Sixteen Great Poems of Ifa, is the use of ingenious opening lines that have no obvious connection with the poem, and describing these lines as the babalawo, the Ifá diviner who made the Ifá divinatory consultation the initiation and outcome of which are described in the poem. These references are striking because these lines refer to non-animate phenomena, at times depicting situations, like these ones above or truisms, such as “No man no matter how wise can tie water into a knot in his pocket.”

Ositola interprets the opening first two lines of this poem as suggesting the need for humility like that of a child in order to reach the elevation suggested by the bird.

While that interpretation demonstrates a tenuous link with the poem, I see those lines as the poet simply exercising their skill in creating incongruous juxtapositions with no particular overarching semantic intention except to generate the quality of what James Joyce, in another context, in his novel Ulysses, describes as the ‘jocoserious,’ the presentation of serious issues in a jocular manner that, incidentally, often defines Ifá poetry, a demonstration of the humanism of the Orisa tradition to which Ifá belongs, a tradition where human and deity, the mundane and the sacred are intertwined.

The Journey Progresses : Immersion in Ògbóni Áwo

[3] A summation of the philosophical fields of epistemology “a critical enquiry into the nature, foundations, limits and possibilities of knowledge” (29) and metaphysics which explores “the nature and structure of reality as a whole as well as the place of humans in the universe”(29), as defined by Adegboyega Oyekunle Oluwayemisi and rightly described by him as “fundamental in the ultimate aim of human kind to understand and unravel the reality that surrounds their existence” (39) in the effort to address the most strategic questions of human life represented by “ ‘Who am I?,’ ‘Where am I coming from?,’ ‘Where am I?,’ ‘What can I do?[ How should I live?,’ ‘Where am I going to?’ ” (29) in “The Metaphysical and Epistemological Relevance of Ifá Corpus”, International Journal of History and Philosophical Research, Vol.5. 1. Feb. 2017.28-40.

Though Oluwayemisi’s succinct analysis helps frame the poetic expressions, the expressions were inspired by David Bell’’s summation of German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s central project in “Kant” in The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy. Ed. Nicholas Bunnin and E.P.Tsui-James. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. 589-606, 590 and by Peter Jones on English philosopher David Hume’s key themes in the same book (571-588, 573).

[4] From “The river has crossed the path” to “The river from the creator of the universe” are adaptations of quotations from “Akan Poetry” by Kwabena Nketia in Ulli Beier’s edited Introduction to African Literature. London: Longman, 1980, 23-33.30-31.

[5] Against the background of my other exposure to this idea within and beyond Yorùbá contexts and crystallized in my essay “Between the Calabash and the Infinity Symbol: Contrastive and Complementary Cosmographic Images from Yorùbá Thought”, I interpret the journey between orun and ayé in terms that emphasize cognitive motion between both realms rather than limiting these mediations to the physical transitions of birth and death or of journeys from orun to ayé at the beginning of time.

The reference to the Igbo version of the Yorùbá expression “ayé loja, orun ni le”, “ayé, the world, is a market place, orun, the zone of ultimate origins, is home” is to Nkeonye Otakpor’s “The World as a Marketplace” where he discusses the Igbo version of a similar understanding.

The allusion to the occurrence of the same perspective in the ideas of other African philosophies is inspired by the graphic dramatization of this conception in the Akan lament for a loved one passing away early “What were your wares that they sold out so quickly?” from the same essay by Nketia (24) depicting life on Earth as a process of selling and perhaps buying, in which people depart from Earth when the wares they are selling have been sold out.

The Journey Expanding : Actualization in Ògbóni Áwo

[6] The idea of “a universe where every point in time and every location in space is a site of intersection of orun and ayé” is most powerfully realized for me in the African context by the image of the crossroads, represented, particularly forcefully by Norma Rosen’s superb description, in “Chalk Art in Olokun Worship” of igha-ede, a particular motif in Benin-City Olokun chalk art, used as a means of mapping intersections between material and non-material space and time and between temporality and infinity. I am also inspired by T.S. Eliot, at the intersection of Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, dramatizing a similar idea of trans-dimensional intersections in his Four Quartets.

This idea generates further momentum for me in being represented in various spiritualities, as in the Jewish Kabbalistic expression, “Kether, the zone of primary cosmic manifestation, is in Malkuth, the material universe and Malkuth is in Kether” and the Buddhist maxim “ Nirvana, the awareness of the source of existence, beyond time and space, is in sangsara, understanding of the universe shaped by the limitations of time and space.”

[7] From “Slowly and patiently, I get on my feet” to “From time immemorial” further down in the poem are quotations from Nketia, 30-31.

In my forthcoming Adinkra Cosmos: An Exploration of Being through Meditations on the Adinkra Symbol Kuntunkantan, I interpret those lines of Akan drum poetry, “The Heavens are wide, exceedingly wide/The Earth is wide, very, very wide/We have lifted it and taken it away/ We have lifted it and brought it back/From time immemorial,” in terms of the process of combining various interpretive possibilities of phenomena, deconstructing and reconstructing them:

“The transformative processes made possible by human cognitive capacity become a lever for “lifting” the earth, taking it away and bringing it back, metaphorically speaking. The earth may thus be conceived in this context as the cognitive image that constitutes each person’s understanding of the world.

The act of lifting and taking it away is embodied in the process of examining its components, dismantling them, as it were, deconstructing them in order to examine their relative validity in relation to each other or to an overarching conception of reality.

This process could also involve an examination of the contingent character of human understanding as dependent on factors defined by environment, and, which, in various contexts, make possible diverse interpretive possibilities.

So the person who would lift and take away their own world examines its constituents and possibly reconstitutes them so as to imagine what it could be to experience other perspectives on existence, in their particulars and general structure, orientations perhaps inspired by environmental possibilities different from those that have shaped their own conceptions.

The person therefore opens a window into other possibilities of seeing the universe within the otherwise significantly homogenous and yet endogenously grounded conceptions of the cosmos that characterize human thought in various cultures.

The act of “bringing back the world” which had been “lifted and taken away” may thus involve reassembling the constituents of one’s own view on the world, in relation to whatever modifications have occurred within it in relation to the re-examination of its constituents and general structure.

Within these cognitive exercises, the conception of Otweaduampon Nyame as the pivot of existence can be variously understood. It could be approached as a cognitive tool that facilitates efforts to develop a relational integrity in one’s understanding of the universe, as well as a sensitivity to differing conceptions of the world in its particulars and as a whole.

Otweaduampon Nyame could also be approached as representing an actual factor that IS in its own right, a factor that participates in the constitution of consciousness, either as its originating ground or as an aspect of its nature.

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The Journey Infinite : Consummation in Ògbóni Áwo