The sixteenth major odu [Ofun Meji,an organisational category and active agent in the Ifa system of knowledge and divination],container of all mysteries,the complete calabsh of Oduduwa as formulated in the language of Ifa,is all but inaccessible-placed out of the way and out of ordinary thought processes.What was lost at the "time" of Ose Meji must be regained,but how?The redemptive process might said to begin with the final episode in the saga of witches :Oshe Oyeku. Odu,the female principle imagined as a container,the fourth elemental being to issue forth from the python's egg,having grown too "old",expresses her desire to go underground.Seated on her mysterious cylinder box,she calls her four advisors-Obatala,Babaluaye,Ogun,and Oduduwa (an active emanation of her self )-and gets them to agree to her departure by promising revelations to those of their children who come to solicit,to adore her properly in her house in the forest. This house has become the ceremonial apare-box containing a calsbh (her body),which contains in turn (or is surrounded by )the four calabashes given to her on that occasion by the four advisors. Obatala gives a calabash of chalk, Babaluaye offers his favorite substance, ssun (red powder),Ogun-charcoal powder,and Ododuwa-mud.These gifts imply four roads,four corners of the universe. They are the original four major signs. From one of them will be born another forest principle, as once Odu from the python’s egg. Ofun,the calabash of chalk (efun) who gives (fun)himself,produces Obatala,the white divinity as Orisan-nla,greater than,the beginning and the end,first and last,the container of them all.The egg within becomes the womb,passivity becomes creativity personified.Surely this is part of the meaning of the orisha Obatala as Ofun. Igadu (igba, "calabash",and Odu )becomes an orisha,the divinty worshipped by diviners who have attained the highest degree of self knowledge-that is,the profoundest understanding of Ifa.Only such diviners may install the terribly powerful calabash of existence,once closed never to be reopened except under horrific circumstances, "symbol of the sky and earth in their fecund union,container of the supreme wisdom of Ifa, [the installation of which validates ]an esoteric principle of universal symbiosis". Judith Gleason,A Recitation of Ifa: Oracle of the Yoruba (New York:Grossman,1973)188-191. The Calabash and the Pot Concavity, Circularity and the Dialectic of Exterior and Interior as Cognitive Metaphors Mazisi Kunene’s characterisation of Classical Zulu epistemology and its correlation with metaphysics is related to the subject of achieving a synthesis of knowledgeHis focus is on the conception he attributes to Zulu thought on the human mind as operating in terms of two contrastive but ultimately correlative forms of knowing, the precision mind and the cosmic mind . “While the precision mind analyses and reorganises the details of the material environment, the cosmic mind synthesises fragments of information to create a universally significant body of knowledge” .
The precision mind represents the ability to arrive at discrete forms of knowledge while the cosmic mind consists in the capacity of integrating these discrete forms in a manner that demonstrates their universal significance. “At the highest point of reasoning, significant units of information merge with universal concepts...” At its most penetrative, this synthesis enables an initiation into the convergence of past, present and future, of life and death, in a unified awareness. “When the cosmic mind grinds its elements of experience into a totality of knowledge, it acquires a discipline which ...erases the boundaries between the past and the present, the living and the dead, the physical and the non-physical. The individual initiate acquires, like a chameleon’s all-round vision, the power to conceptualise the totality of life at once.” This synoptic scope is symbolised by the circularity and amplitude of a calabash. The circularity of the calabash could be understood as evocative of cognitive range as developed in terms of the cognitive integration of different aspects of existence into a unity that is expressive of unity of being.
The amplitude of the calabash may be understood in relation to a cognitive depth that represents a penetrative grasp of particular aspects of being in terms of their central aspects as well as their constituents, and the relationships between these two units. The calabash being a ubiquitous form in sub-Saharan Africa, it is understood in different African cultures in terms of a range of symbolism. The calabash also demonstrates similarities of form and symbolism with pottery in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Europe. One of these symbolic correlations between the calabash and pottery relates directly to the imagery of fire that correlates the Upanishadic and the Kunene texts.
Another emerges in terms of the associations between the concavity that constitutes the internal shape of the calabash and the pot and the swelling of the stomach of the pregnant woman, and thereby, the womb and the child within it which create that swelling, an imaginative correlation which is developed in terms of ideas of generative possibility, from the human to the cosmic. This line of thought is expanded in linking the associations inspired by the human generative space of the womb with any empty space, empty space being understood in this context as evoking in its emptiness a potentiality for fecundation by activity which could be kinetic, auditory, static or mental. This activity could involve space as a medium traversed in kinetic activity. It could emerge in the actualisation of its acoustic possibilities through the presence of sound. The space could demonstrate functionality as a location for forms, living or non-living. Or it could simply be understood as a template inspiring imaginative activity which is motivated by the emptiness of that space to engage with it mentally, perhaps peopling it with activity, entities and meaning solely through the agency of the mind. Other associations relate to the conception of the spatial amplitude of the calabash and pottery in relation to their solid form in terms of a dialectic of space and form that reinforces and amplifies the vision of integrative metaphysical knowledge their shapes are understood as symbolising. This dialectic also suggests the ambiguities and paradoxes possible in relation to this conjunction between a visual symbol and its correlative cognitive aspiration. As the potter shapes the clay that will become the concrete form of the pot, and indirectly forms the contours of the interior space bounded by that concrete shape, natural processes shape the forms that constitute both the organs of the human body and the processes that animate this body, enabling its growth. The amplitude of the pot, shaped by human hands, possibly using natural materials like clay, and that of the calabash, shaped by arboreal nature, are continuous with the growth of the mind in the soft planet of brain, pulsing with thought, creating connections between synapses as neurons are fired as the potter fires the clay that becomes the pot. The malleability of clay is related to the malleability of the mind as it grows to maturity, and even after that stage of life it can become emblematic of the malleability cultivated by the person, who, like the conception of the master in the Chinese adage as a person who knows how to learn, in the words of the Fulani narrative Kaidara becomes “the wise [person who ] seeks to learn rather than teach [never claiming] to have all knowledge [always seeing themselves] as ignorant [approaching] studies like a pupil [never] contradicting another’s truths][always admitting ] to [ one’s] own errors”. The agency of the potter as they shape the clay that will become the pot, as they fire this material after shaping it into a container that can serve a variety of purposes, from the purely aesthetic, to the aesthetic and utilitarian, in eating, drinking or as a storage place, resonates with the agency of the individual as they cultivate the attitudes and persist in the activities through which particular forms of understanding are cultivated and the cognitive permutations that constitute the mind are realised. The concavity of the calabash and the pot become the womb of becoming, evocative of primary generative space, from the womb of the human female to the space of brain and mind, up to cosmic figurations in which the space of the human womb and the source of existence are conjoined in a symbolic unity. Beyond conceptions of unity of being and of generative possibilities suggested by associations between the concavity of the calabash and the pot and the shape of the human womb in which the growing child is conceived and shaped, the forms of the pot and the calabash are also understood as suggesting ambiguities and paradoxes emerging in contrast to those more explicit associations. “Which comes first, the pot or the space inside it?” is a conundrum posed by Susanne Wenger. Its ontological implications, its provocation of enquiry about the distinctive being of the pot in relation to the character of the universal extension constituted by space is inspired perhaps by her conjunction of the paradoxes of the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu with Classical Yoruba thought. Lao Tzu writes of the necessity of emptiness of forms to their value, such as the empty spaces constituted by the rooms of a house or the centre of a bicycle wheel. Wenger is inspired by the iconography of the Yoruba Orisa or deity Iya Mopo, who, in Wenger’s words, is patroness of women’s art’s, including their erotic vocations of conception and child birth and a potter who shapes forms around “pre-existent space”. The mutuality of being shared by both concreteness and emptiness of form in the pot also resonate in the visual characterisation of the relationship between consciousness and the ground of being in a particular characterisation of this relationship by a Buddhist thinker. On account of the transcendence of all human categories represented by ultimate being, ultimate being is understood in Buddhism as the Void. The French writer Daniel Odier describes his Indian teacher, Lolita Devi, who seems to combine both Buddhist and Hindu ideas, as describing the relationship between human consciousness, understood as an expression of and thereby as fundamentally identical with the ground of being, and the void,which is metaphoric for this ontological ground, in terms of the mutually of being between the empty space of the pot and its concrete form. To her, the potter’s hands ride the “clay around the void [fashioning] wonderful objects out of emptiness” . In becoming a potter, she ... began to make pots and jars, thinking all the time of the wonderful void that contained my consciousness and my wonderful consciousness that contained the void. I came to understand little by little that the void was full, that fullness was empty, that the void was rooted in the clay, and that if the clay did not recognise the void, it could never become a pot or a jar. [Ws the inside of the jar empty or full?] ..it was full of emptiness...the void is the bone and marrow of each being, of each thing. Without the void, nothing would be possible . Levi’s correlations between the art of pottery and the art of cognition suggest a cognitive discipline that enables the self to reshape or discard the conceptual structures through which it relates with itself and the world through a contemplation of the relationships within and between these structures and the world . This recreative activity is symbolised by the symbolism of the pot, particularly the process of its shaping which effects a mutuality between concreteness and formlessness. The agency of the potter who may widen the pot or smash it to start afresh with the process of shaping becomes suggestive of the agency of the self in expanding its cognitive preoccupations to relate with a keener sensitivity to itself and the world to which it belongs. The reshaping or discarding of old conceptions is a kind of death, equatable with emptiness understood both as absence and as opportunity. Lao Tzu, the Chinese thinker, puts this dialectical relationship between possession of the concreteness represented by understanding and the continual recasting and discarding necessary for growth of knowledge in the following way: The one who devotes himself to learning acquires something daily. The one who devotes himself to the Tao divests of something daily. The act of shaping the pot becomes correlative with the effort to shape the universe, as far as it can be shaped through individual thought and action: The universe is a great pot that we never stop shaping with our flesh, our hearts, our thought... .It’s like the air inside of a pot. The air inside says to itself, ‘The universe is tiny. I see only a small circle of sky around me. Around me, a wall of earth marks the boundaries of my life. What’s outside?’ On the other hand, one may regard the pot that represents the structures of thought that make apprehension of the world possible and the social structures in terms of which one lives, not as unchangeable forms but as malleable, in the spirit of the potter who is free to reshape the pot: While the man thinks, the tantrika makes a pot. While the man confines his consciousness, the tantrika widens the opening of the pot and lets his consciousness experience the void. Distinguishing between what’s inside the pot and what’s outside is possible only if you forget that the pot needs an opening, without which there is seclusion, rot and decay . Devi describes ultimate cognitive possibility in terms of the smashing of the pot, enabling the reintegration of the bounded space that constitutes the formless part of the pot’s interior with the boundless space outside the pot “Suddenly Shiva comes and smashes the pot. The air that was imprisoned by restrictive thought is instantly merged with the universal air mass” . This metaphorical description of unity through the locational and ontological relationships between the air inside the pot and that outside it, and by implication, the space within and without it, is correlative with the cognitive and ontological unity evoked by the Upanishadic passage which prefigures the union of the individual self and the universal self. Kunene, on the other hand, depicts the transcendence of boundaries which the metaphor of Levi’s smashed pot evokes, and which is resonant with the Upanishadic evocation of an awareness of ontological identity arrived at through the transformation of the self by the cognitive intensity reminiscent of flame, in terms of a combustive process, in which the calabash of unified vision is shaped through the fashioning of the fire that fires the pot, achieving through fusion of all polarities into a seamless unity represented by the circularity of the calabash the ontological convergence between self and supposed other which Levi suggests in the smashing of the calabash that actualises the unhindered flow of air.
The Opon Ifa is a special tray used in the Ifa system of knowledge and divination first developed by the Yoruba ethnic group of Southern Nigeria. The central purpose of the tray is that of a consecrated space at the center of which the diviner casts the d...ivinatory instruments.The images carved on the tray could also suggest aspects of the world view that underlies the divinatory system.The face at the top of the tray is an invariable feature of every Opon Ifa.It represents Eshu,the Orisa (deity)who is an agent for Orunmila,whose wisdom the divinatory process draws upon. These pictures present some of my favourite Opon Ifa and other images traditionally associated with Ifa as well as other visual forms that represent my own understanding of the system.The accompanying notes describe both the classical symbolism of the tray and my own interpretations as well as the sources that have contributed to those interpretations.The first ten images are images of Opon Ifa. Each Opon Ifa demonstrates both the invariable or constant as well as the variable features in the composition and carving of the Ifa tray. One unvarying feature is the face at the top of the tray facing outwards from the surface. Another is the empty space at the centre of the tray. The last is the border that encloses the empty centre. The variable aspect of the form is the circular shape of the entire structure. The Opon Ifa could be either circular or square or both,as in a square circumference enclosing circular centre. Each of the invariable elements in the composition of the Ifa tray represents an aspect of the metaphysical structure that underlies the divinatory process. Taken together, they encapsulate the interrelationship of these metaphysical conceptions in constituting the hermeneutic process through which Ifa divination is actualised. Even when the Ifa priest does not use the tray in divining, these metaphysical elements are understood to remain constitutive of the divinatory process. The face at the top could be carved in various ways but always with the eyes wide open as if looking at the priest as he divines.They seem to oversee the divinatory process. It is the face of the orisha Eshu. What is he and why is his representation so prominent here? His role and its significance can be described in terms of a scale of concreteness and abstraction, from the most basic to the most abstract and comprehensive metaphysical significations. He is the messenger of Ifa, an executive agent who carries out wishes empowered by Ifa. He carries sacrifices from Ifa to the other Orisa. He is a guide to unravelling the complexities of Ifa’s messages in response to divinatory queries. He is the trickster, the unanticipated possibility that must be sacrificed to, that must be accounted for, if divinatory enquiries and actions taken in response to them are to succeed. His work in all these capacities is facilitated by his possession of the ase, the creative force with which Olodumare, the Supreme Being, created the universe and through which change, development and transformation take place. He embodies creative chaos existing in a dialectical relationship with the order represented by Ifa. He is the catastrophe which upsets order but which could open the way to newer, more dynamic configurations. He reflects the perception of the coexistence of contraries that enables the understanding of the complexity of the universe in its multidimensionality of possibilities. Action in time that is unbound by the conventional understanding of the limitations of time is his forte: "He throws a stone today/ And kills a bird yesterday!". The insight into the space of possibilities that contradicts the wisdom of the obvious is his field: The veranda was too small for him, the interior of the house was too small for him, but in a groundnut shell...at last he could stretch himself.The laws of nature are refracted in the transfigurative space he delineates: "He hits a stone until it bleeds/ He sits on the skin of an ant". The relative significance of one’s actions emerge with greater clarity in the light of new perspectives afforded by the unfolding landscape of one’s life. The kaleidoscope of intentions, both covert and overt, of actions and of consequences that shape human life emerge into greater clarity in the landscape of memory, enabling, among other insights, the realisation in T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding of “things ill done and done to other’s harm which one once took for exercise of virtue”, in the spirit expressed by Eshu [turning] "right into wrong and wrong into right”.He can also be understood in relation to the ironic juxtaposition of action and purpose as dramatised in Eliot's evocation: "...And what you thought you came for Is only a shell, a husk of meaning From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled If at all. Either you had no purpose Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured And is altered in fulfilment". Eshu realizes the transformative understanding in the light of which the underlying patterns of meaning that animate the individual’s life are perceptible through fractures, distortions and temporal linearity ,the confluence of accident and design that generates the surface of individual biography, a hermeneutic role that makes him the “unraveller of the knots” of Ifa’s primordial wisdom in its application to the concrete particulars of human life represented by the activation of the Odu in divination. The empty space at the centre of the tray is the space where the divinatory instruments are thrown to enable their configuration spell out Ifa's response to the querent's questions.The empty space becomes a womb of becoming,where the divinatory patterns,the Odu, emerge and re-emerge into the multiplicity of identities they are capable of realizing.The field of combinatory possibilities of the Odu is realized through its interaction with the deepest self of the querent whose sense of direction shapes the opportunities available to the individual.The Ori or sense of self,ultimate possibility and direction of the Odu, and the Ori of the querent interact in a dialogue that generates the Odu patterns that emerge in the divinatory session.
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