The Cosmos in a Staff : The Glory of Ọpa Ọsanyin: An Understudied Example of Great Yoruba Art : Part 2 : Interpretive Contexts
Abstract
This essay is a brief examination of the interpretive contexts, embracing Yorùbá verbal and visual art, philosophy and spirituality, that converge in the construction and associative power of Ọpa Ọsanyin, a metal structure made up of a pole with birds clustered round it and a bird surmounting the pole or of only a single bird on top of the pole, a dramatization of the beauty of nature and its evocative force representing Ọsanyin, the Yorùbá origin Òrìsà cosmology deity of the spiritual and biological power of plants.
Continued from Part 1.
Image Above
Perched on a pole marked by raffia grass, the elegant bird looks out over the landscape of possibility represented by the staff of which it is the summit.
Grass and its vegetative associations in relation to nature in general. The pole, upright like a tree on which a bird is perched. A tree reaching deep into Earth and towards the sky.
Its branches, the possibilities of existence. Its roots, the source, its crown, the cosmos. Its trunk, the link between them all.
Its branches, the possibilities of existence. Its roots, the source, its crown, the cosmos. Its trunk, the link between them all.
The babaláwo, adept in the networks of possibility emerging from the intersection of spirit and matter as understood in the Yorùbá origin Ifá system of knowledge, and the Iyáláwo, his female counterpart, as named in Ayodeji Ogunnaike’s “Mamalawo? The Controversy Over Women Practicing Ifa Divination” ( 2018, 20), climb this tree as they explore these intersections, seeking answers to human queries at the points where the branches grow out of the trunk, where cosmic possibility and material reality converge.
In climbing the tree, they aspire to stand poised at its apex, surveying the universe of possibilities, of being and becoming, existence and change, directing it as they can.At times, these adventurers are imaged as chameleons, adapters to various environments, diverse but interrelated domains of existence, climbing the pole towards the summit.
This is one approach to interpreting the staff above, integrating ideas from various sources in terms of my own perspectives. The staff is described at its Facebook source as an Opa Osanyin, representing Ọsanyin, the Yorùbá origin Òrìsà cosmology deity of the spiritual and biological power of plants.
It is similar in appearance, however, to an Osun Babalawo, a staff representing the spiritual allies of a babalawo, as shown in the image below a babalawo holding a similar staff from Henry John Drewal et al's Yoruba:Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (1989, 41).
Avian imagery in association with staffs, is the shaping character of Opa Osanyin and Osun Babaláwo, and share significant associational convergences, as this essay demonstrates.
Acknowledgements
Great thanks to Henry John Drewal,
projecting varied lifeways of diverse peoples, writer of ever restless creativity,
scholar majestic,
journeyer intrepid into regions recondite,
as we journey to and fro seeking this and that in this landscape of knowing,
where does your voice not resound, digger into the world of water spirits and their human companions,
expositor of the beauty and meanings of beads in the Yoruba cosmos,
master of Striking Iron,
dweller in ideas yet demonstrator of the unity of body/mind,
collaborator extraordinare,
only God knows how you are able to organise those glorious once-in-a-lifetime art exhibitions,
we salute you for this journey you are walking,
entering unto this planet well before our eyes opened to the light of this world and clearing the way for the likes of us decades before they expanded to the glory of this search,
O master, adepto cognitio,
your name penetrates everywhere are assembled those who rightly know,
may all who seek to explore the cosmos of Yoruba and African arts enjoy the privilege of your guidance and that of your collaborators, among whom we salute the particular prominence of Rowland Abiodun, Margaret Thompson Drewal, John Pemberton III and John Mason.
Great thanks for your consistent goodwill represented by sending me your essay with Rowland Abiodun, "Ogun/Gu's Resonance in Yoruba, Edo, and Fon Worlds," which confirmed my speculations on Opa Osanyin and Osun Babalawo.
Great thanks too to Seyi Ogunfuwa for his call one morning, describing his quest for knowledge across various spiritualities and secular systems of knowledge as he develops his own philosophy, encouraging my work on the study of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order in creating a new school of this body of ideas and practices.
Great thanks to Akin Akinsola Abiodun Solanke for his contributions to translations from Yorùbá in this essay.
Such interactions represent my sustaining community as an Independent Scholar.
The Grandeur of Ọpa Ọsanyin and Limitations in its Study
Ọpa Ọsanyin is one of the greatest examples of Yorùbá art, yet this construct, pictures of many varied examples of it readily available online from art dealers in different parts of the world, is little studied in the literature in English on Ọsanyin and associated art, to the best of my knowledge of writings in Yorùbá Studies, which I know as embracing Yorùbá, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, although I think the paucity of information on the subject in texts in English is likely to suggest a similar state in other languages.
Awo Fategbe's '' Ọsanyin'' and Don Egbelade's “Yorùbá Ọpa Ọsanyin Erinle Herbalists Staff", both on Facebook, John Mason on Ọsanyin in Black Gods : Òrìsà Studies in the New World (1998, 36-39), Nicholas De Mattos Frisvold's Ifa : A Forest of Mystery (2016, 43-8) are priceless on Ọpa Ọsanyin symbolism.
They are complemented by Henry John Drewal and Rowland Abiodun's "Ogun/Gu's Resonance in Yoruba, Edo, and Fon Worlds,'' from Allen Roberts' et al's Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths ( 2019, 278-307) which discusses Ọpa Ọsanyin and the similar Osun Babalawo, staff of the babalawo, adept in the esoterica of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge.
The interpretations from these texts, being those readily available to me and brief yet richly insightful, will be used here in constructing a unification of perspectives on this art and expanding those interpretive examples.
Henry John Drewal et al in Yorùbá: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (34) represent one of the few examples known to me of response to the technical genius of what might be an instantiation of this artistic form, describing the “simple, graceful lines and energetic interplay of curves’’ in a particular example of a pole topped by birds, which may be an Ọpa Ọsanyin. This effort is inspirational for developing sensitivity to the skill demonstrated in the imaginative manipulation of metal evident in Ọpa Ọsanyin art, a sensitivity which needs to be further cultivated and highlighted.
The only texts I know which discuss Ọpa Ọsanyin at some length are Robert Farris Thompson's “Icons of the Mind: Yorùbá Herbalism Arts in Atlantic Perspective,” (African Arts, Vol.8. No.3. 1975. 52-59+89-90) and the Barakat Gallery notes on Osanyin and Osun staffs in the section of their website on Yoruba Staffs.
Thompson's “Icons of the Mind'' is a superb essay on the relationship between Ọsanyin beliefs and Ọsanyin art, providing a tantalizing and foundational description of the symbolic possibilities of this creativity within the Yorùbá cultural universe and its diasporic expressions.
This foundational account needs to be built upon. The associative values of this sculpture beyond its originating frameworks, speaking to the human experience in other contexts, also needs to be developed.
The Barakat Gallery notes on Osanyin and Osun staffs are the most sustained verbal response known to me to the interrelations between the associative values of Ọpa Ọsanyin in relation to Yoruba culture and the artistry of the staffs.
These descriptions are priceless expositions of how the technical dexterity of these works is inspired by and projects an ideational universe, a cosmology unifying the natural and the supernatural, spirit and matter, humans, deities and the arcane personalities who unify these possibilities of existence, witches, portrayed as birds and diviners, depicted as both birds and chameleons.
Magnificent as these expositions are however, they represent one strand of possible interpretations of Opa Ọsanyin and Osun Babalawo and their interrelationship, a singular perspective that needs to be complemented by others, as I try to do in this essay, guided, among other sources, by the Barakat Gallery notes which I reproduce in a collage of quotes in a subsequent part of this essay, quotes slightly edited by myself to create a unified text while retaining their distinctive language and expressive force.
The associative values and imaginative and technical genius of the Ọpa Ọsanyin sculptural corpus cry out for better understanding within their perception as an open ended development of artistic potential, a majestic demonstration of creativity within a very basic yet imaginatively inspiring and infinitely evocative tradition, in which variations are developed within a fixed set of possibilities represented by the bird motif.
Image Above
The sinuous flow from the exquisitely pointed beak to the neck and body, streamlined for flight, may recall English writer John Milton's description of "the poet, soaring in the high regions of his fancies, with his garlands and singing robes about him, " an avian metaphor also relevant for Rowland Abiodun's description of the role of poetic, imaginative expression in the quest for and the creation of meaning, derived from the thought of thinkers in the classical Yoruba tradition, as he presents these ideas and his synthesis of them in Yoruba Art and Language( 2014).
He depicts imaginative creativity in terms of a journey between the ultimate source of cognitive possibility and the material contexts of human existence, between the origin of these possibilities in divine mind and the manifestation of these possibilities in human experience, between the nakedness of this incandescent force, divine in origin but migrant in human thought and action, a reality the core of which is dangerous for unmediated encounter with the human mind but is best approached through the indirection of metaphoric expression, a lofty vision of the essence of human creativity which is in effect a Yoruba version of a universally recurring idea of the divine origins of human reflective and expressive powers, from Jewish, Christian and Hindu ideas of creation being effected though language to English poet S.T. Coleridge's depiction of the ''primary Imagination [as] the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.''
Responding to the Inspiration of Ọpa Ọsanyin
I am drawn to Ọpa Ọsanyin on account of its combination of relatively minimalist structure and use of the humble but deeply evocative images of birds, desisting from employing the more obvious evocative values of such grand birds as the eagle, focusing instead on the structural beauty and elegance in flight of birds in general, often crafting superb depictions of the graceful curve of a bird's neck, deploying these visualizations in ways that may be seen as suggesting far reaching implications in Yorùbá cosmology, unifying humanity, nature and cosmos.
Interpretive Contexts
As demonstrated in relation to an example of Ọpa Ọsanyin in the first part of this essay series, Ọpa Ọsanyin demonstrates great imaginative creativity, technical genius and associative range within and beyond the universe of Yorùbá culture, leading to the questions that concluded the essay-
What, exactly, is Ọpa Ọsanyin?
What is its inspiration and the logic of its construction?
Why is it crafted in a manner that can evoke values of such universal penetration?
Ọpa Ọsanyin as an Example of Yorùbá Arts of Nature
The Bird Motif as Evocative of the Dynamism of Àse, Creative Cosmic Force,
in Ọpa Ọsanyin, Osùn Babaláwo and Ọpa Erinlè
in Ọpa Ọsanyin, Osùn Babaláwo and Ọpa Erinlè
Ọpa Ọsanyin is an example of Yorùbá arts of nature as these are demonstrated across various literary genres and visual expressions.
These run from those literary forms strategic for depictions of animals, such as Ijálá, Yorùbá hunters poetry, and ese ifa, poetry of the Yorùbá origin Ifa system of knowledge, to the sculptural forms Opa Osun or Osun Babalawo, “staff of the master of esoteric knowledge,’’ used by babalawo, adepts in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa to Ọpa Erinlè, a staff representing Erinlè, the deity of the forest and the powers of nature in general and Ọpa Ọsanyin, all three staffs marked by birds topping a pole.
Adapting Robert Farris Thompson's example in “Icons of the Mind” the study of any one of these similar sculptural forms benefits from doing so in comparison with the others.
Each of these kinds of metal structure is interpretable in terms of elegant evocations of birds suggesting the quickening of life and its creative capacities through the dynamism of àse, creative, cosmic force, as understood in Òrìsà cosmology represented, in these images, by the mobility of birds.
Bird symbolism is particularly used in Yoruba iconography, its visual symbolism, in representing the embodiment of àse, creative, cosmic force, by women, primary enablers, through their procreative powers, of the union of materiality and life that is a human being, powers understood as distilled in blood and therefore particularly concentrated in post- menopausal women who do not lose blood through monthly cycles.
Ìwà : Between the Intrinsic Character of a Phenomenon and its Associative
Values
Values
These animal depictions demonstrate a strand of humanity's sensitivity to nature as both valuable in and of itself, and suggestive of values beyond itself. These orientations are suggested by two Yorùbá expressions which Rowland Abiodun makes central to his Yoruba Art and Language.
The first of these expressions is ''mọ ìwà fún oníwà, '' which may be translated as ''I grant each existent its right to its own individuality,'' ''iwa'' being open to rendering as ''essential being,'' individuality of existence, fundamental character, understood in terms of the dynamic and yet stable nature of personality as well as of the material qualities that define a particular kind of existence.
Ọpa Ọsanyin projects, through sculpture, the unique beauty of birds, in their individuality of form within particular species as well as in terms of the beauty they demonstrate when gathered as a flock.
Òwe, Imaginative Expression, and Òrò, the Unity of Thought and Expression,
as Correlative Horses of Discourse
as Correlative Horses of Discourse
These intrinsic beauties also project interpretive possibilities that go beyond the avian world, implicating human existence. These extrinsic values include the beauty of the bird universe, and the question of how appreciation of beauty is developed, a development in which the character of nature on Earth, in particular, and the larger cosmos, in general, plays a strategic role, as John Barrow argues for the imprinting of cosmos on the human self in The Artful Universe ( 1995).
Aligned with these harmonies between the physical character of nature and human perception, is humanity's discernment of associative values in the avian cosmos.
These are metaphorical and symbolic projections in terms of which people see the forms of birds and their behaviour. This tendency of human beings to interpret phenomena in terms of ideas not explicitly indicated by those phenomena is suggested by the following Yoruba conception, quoted from Agogo-Èdè on Facebook which expands Abiodun’s rendering (30-1) of the basic formulation of the proverb. Tone marks for the last two lines are provided by Akinsola Abiodun Solanke:
“Òwe l’ẹṣin Òrò.
Òrò l’e ẹṣin òwe.
Ti Òrò bá sọnù
òwe la fií wáa.
Ti òwe bá sọnù
Òrò la fií wáa.
Nítórīwípé àwọn méjèjì
jõún gūn ãrã wõn l'ẹ́sīn nī.”
This expression may be translated as in the following largely non-literal interpretation, with the last stanza being a slightly modified version of Solanke's rendering given in a personal communication :
“Òwe, metaphorical expressions
are the steeds of thought and expression,
swift vehicles of discourse.
Reflection and communication
are the horses of imaginative projection
subjects of interest, activities, in which imagination is at play.
When thought and expression go astray,
we seek them out through imaginative exploration.
When imaginative communication loses its way
reflection and refinement of expression are invoked as means of discovery.
Both of them ride on each other
as horses
in the journey to the unfolding of the great destination.
As imaginative forms are like horses to thought
thought also serves the same purpose to imagination
each riding on the other as vehicles to trace out the deep meaning each conveys.”
This expression suggests the cardinal significance of imaginative, associative, evocative reflection and expression for teasing out possibilities of understanding beyond that accessible through plain communication.
Òwe, imaginative expressions, extend beyond language, to include all artistic forms (Abiọdun, 50). They reach even beyond the deliberately evocative structuring of art to integrate all possibilities of experience as these suggest interpretive possibilities beyond themselves, templates for understanding human experience in general or particular aspects of experience, as Abiọdun (50) demonstrates through the following idea:
“Ìjà ló dé l’orín d’ òwe” (It is because people are quarrelling that a song innocently sung, becomes an Òwe ).”
This expression suggests that the evocative qualities of particular contexts, represented by such commonplace life situations as quarrels, may suggest to peoples’ minds a song innocently sung in such a context as becoming proverbial for the life situation being played out by the quarrel.
Such a resonant artistic form, the song, may transform people’s awareness of the commonplace context they associate it with, making it a metaphorical expression illuminating a broader range of situations beyond that inspirational framework.
Bird Imagery and the Fascination of the Forest
Along similar terms, avian form and flight, representing the logic of nature actualized in birds, may characterize to the human being values beyond the intrinsic character of the lives of birds. This relationship between the intrinsic, the beauty of birds in terms of both structure and flight, as well as the extrinsic, evocative possibilities of these beyond the bird universe, are the inspirational matrix of classical Yoruba bird sculpture in the cognate traditions of Ọpa Ọsanyin, Ọpa Erinlè, and Osùn Babaláwo.
These artistic forms are avian depictions related to the lives of the Yorùbá people as emerging from a forest region. The vegetative density and variety and animal profusion of the forest have proven central in the development of Yorùbá visual and verbal symbolism, philosophy and spirituality.
The Yoruba experience exemplifies the forest as one of humanity's most enduring fascinations, forbidding and alluring, alien and compelling, a primordial ancestor, as it were, inspiring various peoples across the centuries to create images evoking the universe of the forest and the ways of life it has inspired.
Ọsanyin, Dweller in the Forest, Master of Plant Lore
One of these depictions is the figure of Ọsanyin, the Òrìsà or deity of the spiritual and biological power of plants as understood in Òrìsà cosmology from the Yorùbá of West Africa and their migrant cultures in the Americas, surviving the horrors of the brutal journey of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to thrive in Cuba, Brazil and the United States.
Ọsanyin is described as dwelling in the remotest parts of the forest and as adept in the most recondite distillations of the spiritual and biological powers of plants, as described by Don Egbelade in “Yoruba Opa Osanyin Erinle Herbalists Staff.”
He is deity of “the esoteric powers of plants and their use to generate àse [creative, cosmic force] for praying, cursing, healing, or compelling others to obey one’s command,’’ as described by Babatunde Lawal in "Embodying the Sacred in Yoruba Art’’ (2012, 17).
Ọsanyin's magic is understood as "so powerful that ....he is petitioned for any purpose where unconquerable magic is required," as Egbelade puts it, his knowledge of leaves indispensable for constructing shrines to the various deities of Òrìsà spirituality, because, as described by Thompson in ''Icons of the Mind,'' (53) and by Ulli Beier in The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger, every orisha or deity is associated with particular leaves or herbal combinations, making the forest a microcosm of the cosmos as embodied by the orisa, each orisa, as depicted by Beier, perceivable as the universe as seen from a particular perspective, with the totality of the perceptual possibilities being Olodumare, creator and sustainer of the universe.
Image Above
A Journey from Knowing to Knowing
In the journey across landscapes of interpretive possibility, one's progression could be described in vertical terms, moving from the most basic to the most profound of perceptions, climaxing in a summative awareness akin to the position of the bird poised atop the Osùn Babaláwo.
A unity of construct, constructor and perceiver of the construct, of àwòrán, awòran and ìwòran, the perceived, the perceiver and the process of perception, of metal and the fire through which it is shaped, of metal, fire and constructing mind, of mind, metal, fire and structuring hands, such may be the summit of possibility projected by the Osùn Babaláwo, evocative of the union of spirit and evocative form, analogous to possibilities dramatized by the texts of terrestrial becoming
within cosmic embrace that is ese ifá, expressions of the matrices of possibility that are a central interaction of the
babaláwo.
Cosmos as text, Josipovici to Orsbon, Dante to Odu Ifá, climbing from the Awó of Earth to the Awó of Mid Air to the Awó of Òrun, I at last arrived where all possibilities of awareness exist as one simple light.
Note
The last sentence conjoins Italian writer Dante Alighieri's summative vision of the cosmos in his Paradiso with Gabriel Josipovici's ( The World and the Book, 1971) and David Orsbon's '"The Universe as Book: Dante’s Commedia as an Image of the Divine Mind," 2014)in their characterization of a central element of Dante's vision with images from an ese ifá, an Ifá literary form, narrated by Abiodun in Yoruba Art and Language (27-8).
That sentence complements the previous one, itself a depiction of mystical vision similar to but not identical to Dante's, a depiction in terms of Babatunde Lawal's description of a theory of perception from Yorùbá thought in “Àwòrán: Representing the Self and Its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art’ ( 2001 )" represented by àwòrán, awòran and ìwòran, the perceived, the perceiver and the process of perception, fusing these with the idea of unity between the sculpture and the spirit invoked into an edan ògbóni, a sculpture of the Yorùbá origin Ògbóni esoteric order, as described by Evelyn Roche-Selk in From the Womb of Earth: An Appreciation of Yorùbá Bronze Art ( 1978), a fusion effected in those lines through ideas of perceptual unity derived from a cross-cultural range of accounts of unity of elements of perception, subsumed within echoes of Mazisi Kunene's description of such unity in terms of Zulu thought, using the imagery of fire, in Anthem of the Decades ( 1981, xxiii-xxiv).
Both sentences amplify the image of the bird on top of the pole in the first sentence. The entire sequence is a fusion of a technological and artistic mysticism, in the smelting of metal to create art, a unity of self and ultimate origination through technological and artistic creativity and a perceptual mysticism, unity of self and the ultimate through processes of perception, subsumed by a unitive mysticism, union of self and the ground of being.
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