Art and Ashe in the Yoruba Tradition
Why do we believe angels prefer angelic persons? Why assume that the genius (activating spirit) wants only to be with geniuses? Maybe the invisibles are interested in our lives for the sake of their realization and as such are inherently democratic: Anyone will do. Maybe they do not recognize the concept mediocre. The daimon gives importance to each, not only to the Important. Moreover, they and we are linked in the same myth. We are divine and mortal twins, and so they are in service to the same social realities as we. Because of this linkage, the angel has no way of descent into the streets of the public common except via our lives. In the film Wings of Desire, angels fall in love with life, the street life of ordinary human predicaments.
– James Hillman, from The Soul's Code [1]
According to the Yoruba, Ashe is the foundational energy of this world and the other, existing from a time before the worlds themselves were created. Without ashe, the orishas – the gods or active powers of creation – would be shadows hovering on the edge of nonexistence, the human body would be a corpse, words would be random noises, the greatest work of art would be a shell. When Oludumare spoke the primordial names, by which the orishas and the stars and planets were conjured into the first light of visibility, without the power of ashe the body of creation would have been unable to stand or move.[2] It would have remained trapped in the memory of worlds before our own, a sad and impotent idea. The great Oludumare himself, eldest of the orishas, would have less importance than an ant.
Millennia came and went like days, whole ages like weeks. The one-eyed, one-armed, one-legged keeper of the secrets, Osanyin, asked: Does your mouth open? Do you speak ifa? The first man answered: Yes, I understand the code. My body has chosen the head it is to wear. I sweat with joy. Oludumare breathes me. It is necessary that I pour my own blood on the work.
In Yoruba thought, cosmology and aesthetics go hand in hand. Each clarifies the half-seen purposes of the other. Time moves in cycles, in which species and the stage sets they inhabit may evolve, yes, in that patterns grow from earlier versions of the same, but the Rorschach blot of creation is not at all a random accretion. It is, from its inception, a work of conscious art. Human art is a much later variation of the prototypes. The light inside the void speaks. The myth gets physical. An act of interpretation opens the key signatures, collapsing the wave function and altering time/space. Ashe turns the kaleidoscope of a-causal correspondences. The planets dance. They explode with songs of celebration.
Nature collaborates with the energies of supernature to complete each task that she is scheduled to perform. The world is beautiful. It is almost certain, however, that any ultimate perfection of the artwork would be death. No story would have a beginning, a middle, or an end. It would not be possible to keep any gift in circulation.
There would be no wound to heal. Ashe would not have a catastrophe to remove. The lightning that once transported us would not be cooler than the sun, or as slow as the year is long. Earth with all her oceans would not be bigger than a pinhead. Wave upon wave, birth would not have contracted the full range of our superconductive memory, as hands cut us from an earlier but still beating state of connection. A chicken would not have descended with Obatala on a chain, to then scratch from the ocean the lost continent of Pangaea.
A bata drum summons the other bodies we inhabited. A piece of seaweed must be taken from one’s hair. Such an evolution of live memories is not distinct from repetition, as rerouted by the principle of uncertainty, and is perhaps governed by a return of the repressed.
Says Reginaldo Prandi: What happens to us today and what is about to happen in the near future has been experienced before by another human being, by an ancestor, or by the Orishas themselves … The mythical past, which is remade at every moment in the present, is narrated by the oddus of the ifa oracle.[3]
Aimed like weapons at the navel of the Earth, the concepts of chance and chaos do exist for the Yoruba, but each plays a role that is integral to a process. Without these subversive agents of the trickster, there would be no split between the future and the past. There would be no opening through which our language could emerge. The method by which order and disorder interact is the very thing that makes divination possible, that generates the occult potency of ifa.
The Yoruba say: It takes a little bit of everything to make the world.
By a casting of the opele, the eight-linked iron chain that joins eight pieces of a coconut, the orishas too must struggle to interpret the strange language of ifa, of which Eshu is the only native speaker. Each throw results in either a zero or a one. These are written in two columns of four within a book, or if palm nuts are used instead of the opele, upon the table of ifa. Eight x eight links correspond to the 64 codons of the DNA spiral. Eight links x 32 give rise to the 256 oddus, or configurations of the binary code. Each complex oddu can be subdivided into another 16 subjects, forming a total of 4,099 oddus, and so forth, until we reach a temporary limit of 65,636 oddus. Furthermore, each oddu has 1,680 interpretations.[4]
Our view is necessarily partial. To act is to remove one’s full attention from the whole. The most complex of equations are contained within the zero and the one. In the eight-spoked wheel of the city, we should always leave at least one gate open to fresh energies from the bush. Movement gives form to the story that is waiting to be spoken. It is our lack of knowledge that potentiates the fixed signs of the time-cycle.
When the movement of the worlds had once ground to a halt, Oludumare went to Eshu, the orisha of the crossroads, the trickster who is the guardian of ashe, to beg him to unblock the circuits, to reestablish the connections between each of the orishas, between orishas and their human vehicles, between the upper and the lower worlds. Eshu saw his chance. He who would often appear as a young boy or a wandering beggar would remind others of his importance. He would become ubiquitous, as honored in art and ritual as he was indispensable in fact. He agreed to carry out the task, on condition that he be granted a portion of the offerings made to each of the other orishas. Since that day, all rituals must begin and end with an invocation to Eshu, that is, with the generation and integration of ashe.[5]
Ashe is the power to connect. Imagine the state of a human being before he or she is born: a sperm, an egg and a human soul each exist in their separate dimensions. Human DNA can be seen as one version of the chain by which a race of primogenitors had once descended to the ocean. Its links connect Ikole Aiye, the House of Earth, to Ikole Orun, the House of Heaven. It is not so much that ashe creates something out of nothing. It rather brings what separately exists into a new and pregnant conjunction. A rhythm is generated, a meeting place opened, information is translated into form, a system of exchange established, a work of art, first almost inert and then more and more alive, produced.
The human being erupts, loud and kicking, as a three-dimensional object into the world. In the same way a ritual sculpture allows the orisha a window that opens onto the Earth, a fuel depot, a base of operations from which it can carry out its agenda.
Ashe means literally it is so, or may it be so. It is sometimes defined as power, authority, command, scepter [6], a coming to pass … effect, imprecation.[7] It is neither a moral nor an immoral force, but simply the force, by which all things are brought into manifest existence.[8]
Ulli Beier explains: Yoruba believe strongly in the power of the word, or rather in a mysterious force called ashe…that quality in a man's personality which makes his words- once uttered- come true.9 Says Raymond Prince: It would appear that their background conception is that to utter the name of something may draw that something into actual existence…not only within the mind and body of he who utters and he who hears the word, but also in the physical world as well.[10]
Without ohun, voice, the verbalization or performance or the word, ashe would not be able to operate.[11] This formative action is the human being's contribution to the equilibrium of the worlds.[12 The Yoruba do not distinguish between the efficacy of the different forms of art. Music, dance, invocation, story, sculpture, costume, and myth interact as a dynamic whole.
A person who has learned to harness and to work with the force is referred to as an alaase.[13] The sender aims his or her ashe at the targeted object.[14] This is like the call part of a call and response chant. The initiator asks: Is it right that you should exist? Am I doing what my soul, at this time and in this place, demands? If the work of art is successful it will not just sit there on the ground, hang there on the lips, or project itself mechanically through space.
The living work is said to possess iluti, or good hearing.[15] It does what it has been asked to do. It should not only inspire or satisfy the aesthetic appetite. It should be able to communicate with its creator(s) as an almost independent being, to answer, je, and to respond, dahun.[16] The work of arts says: Yes. It is right that I should exist. This is no doubt the beginning of a beautiful relationship, for both the upper and the lower worlds. Here I am. It will be so.
Art allows the ashe of the upper worlds to become available for use. It sweetens the ambivalence of the trickster. It focuses the attention, so that the viewer is better able to withstand the influx of other-dimensional force. Ashe, however indispensable for any form of action, is also volatile. It is both the rocket fuel and the chariot of the gods. Eshu wears a hat that is red on one side, black on the other. The force he guards operates in many ways, in many places, and its action never looks quite the same to any two humans. Safe access comes only at the price of calm attention, if the law of unintended consequences is to be avoided. The work of art should possess the dynamic symmetry inherent in the structure of the cosmos from the start. It should act as a landing pad where the mind can luxuriate in coolness. At the same time it should expand the mind by stealth, test it, and provoke it to jump beyond itself.
Lawal asserts: To tame or pacify is to cool the face (tu l'oju). Thus, providing the non-figurative symbol of an orisha with sculptured face facilitates the pacification of that orisha, for what has a face is controllable.[17] Steve Quintana, a Cuban santero and the godfather to my daughter, would laugh at the idea that an orisha could be controlled. One might just as well talk of controlling the currents of the sea, associated with Yemaya, the flow of lava from a volcano, associated with Agayu, or the precise tilt of a tornado, associated with Oya. If the energy of the orishas cannot be controlled it can, however, be invoked. A relationship can be established. Energy can be transduced, through the coils or ritual and art, from one state to another.
If the orishas act on our behalf it is because, having first established a good rapport, having learned to speak a few words in the language of Ifa, having welcomed, fed and tended to them as beloved guests in our houses, we have then politely asked. A bow and the string of an instrument are brought together at cross purposes, as Heraclitus says.[18] A human hand makes contact with the skin of the bata drum. The membrane of the interactive network vibrates like an ear. Feet stomp. Eyes pop open. Breathing swells. Some trauma from a past life bars full access to the hypersphere. Trespassers will be violated. The bald doctor who was old before the deluge pulls one’s hair. Our concept of what it is to breathe should then undergo an upheaval. Again, the mother drum breathes us. There is no self to fear death. The praise song can be heard at least as far as Saturn, beyond which interest in our baby steps becomes steadily more sporadic.
Our other-dimensional counterparts have business to take care of. Like us, they have worlds to make before they sleep. Thus, it is lucky that the influx of ashe is not required to make sense. Polyrhythms open the ecstatic body like a book. Its pages are the strata of the worlds before our own. Each participant in the bembe should feel free to bend or modernize the laws of nature.
The bond between the human and the other, brought into the present, grows. Since the Yoruba idea of hierarchy does not involve a lesser or a greater, it will at the end be a relationship among equals.[17] Each can offer the other what is needed for a more complete fulfillment of the work at hand.
We can offer to the past an alternate history of our species. A glass of rum should be left to wash it down. We can offer an experience in biology to the powers who have almost forgotten the great promise of Pangaea. We can add one piece to the puzzles left unassembled by many an alien civilization.
It is ashe that weaves the threads of potential into the many colored fabric of existence. Clothes teleported from the upper worlds create a sensation on the Earth. Fashions lifted from the Earth provoke a corresponding stir above. The logarithmic spiral is in charge of a secret system of sizes; one superconscious dream fits all. Ashe connects. By fertilizing the separate, it creates both parts anew. Ashe builds a translucent bridge from the human to the orishas, from the Earth to the ancestors, from the ego to the occluded parts of the soul.
A scent of sacrificial blood has returned across the ocean to lap the star hub of the 8-spoked city. It is ashe that yokes the worlds in a constant wheel of communication, a reciprocal exchange of gifts.
Yoruba Divination Tray, Hamill Gallery
Endnotes
Illustration at top: Eshu, Unknown Artist, 1880-1920, Museum of Science, London
1) James Hillman, The Soul's Code, Random House, Inc., New York, 1996, page 255
2) Migene Gonzales-Wippler, Santeria, The Religion: A Legacy of Faith, Rites, and Magic, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York/ 1989/ page 5
3) Reginaldo Prandi, Candomble and Time, Brazillian Review of Social Sciences, number 2, October 2002, pages 9-12
4) Santeria, pages 96-97
5) Judith Illsley Gleason, Clever Eshu, Parabola (Fall), Crossroads Issue, 1993, Pages 41-42
6) R.C. Abraham, The Dictionary of Modern Yoruba, University of London press, 1958
7) Samuel Crowther, A Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language, Seeleys, London, 1852
8) Henry John Drewel and Margaret Thompson Drewel, Gelede, Art and Female Power Among the Yoruba, Indiana University Press,1990, page 5
9) H.U. Beier, Yoruba Poetry, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/ 1970, Page 49
10) R. Prince, Curse, Invocation and Mental Health Among the Yoruba, Canadian Psychiatric Journal 5, 1960, page 66
11) Richard Abiodun, Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics, The Concept of Ase/ African Arts, July, 1994, page 73
12) George Brandon, Santeria, from Africa to the New World, The Dead Sell Memories, Indiana University Press, 1993, page 17
13) John Drewel, John Pemberton III, Rowland Boiodun, Yoruba; Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, The Center for African Art and Abrams, Inc., New York/ 1989, page 16
14) Abiodun, page 74
15) Abiodun, page 73
16) Abiodun, page 73
17) Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy, Random House, Inc., New York, 1984, page 12
18) Philip John Neimark, The Way of the Orisa, Harper, San Francisco, 1993, page 12
19) John Drewel, John Pemberton III, Rowland Boiodun, Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, The Center for African Art and Abrams, Inc., New York/ 1989, page 18
- 6-4-08
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Bobby Kaufman
I had read his books of poetry, Golden Sardine was a pocket book, I met Harry at a local poetry reading, he was about 49 and we ended up drinking cheap red vermouth together, his favorite, I found out he had been a best friend of Bobby.Harry told me stories about him and Bob, they had been in the merchant marines., and later they lived together in Greenwich Village and hung out with artists and poets in the 50's.Years later when i actually met Bobby one night in Vesuvio Cafe in North Beach, and i bought him a drink and told him i knew Harry, and he got that twinkle in his eyes, and he began speaking in the almost impossible way of his to understand his words, but i got most of it. Bobby was half Jewish and half African American, he was from New Orleans, He was known as the black Rimbaud in Europe, and had taken Buddhist a vow of silence that he kept until the end of the Vietnam war.I met him in around 75, but i had been living in North Beach area for a few months in 73, and use to see Bobby in City Lights and walking around North Beach, like some wild figure with poetry dripping from his pockets. Bob's face was like half voodoo magic and half like time carved streets were written over his cheeks as if jazz parades in New Orleans dawns and a face that look deep into ocean waves and saw mermaids and his grandmother's offerings to Erzulie.When i saw that wild twinkle in Bobby's eyes it was the same look i saw in Harry's half Indian half Scottish eyes.
Bobby was talkin in some other world language, it was like his words kinda bounced off the walls of Vesuvio and sliped around the room and told me stories of Beat poets in deep Dave Brubeck Time out of Space night's, the stories of Bobby being 86ed over and over but here he was again standing at the bar, smiling like a Native son that had walked in underground alleys of African masks telling him about the powers of the snakin sound in the music that was called jazz but came from the roots of the belly of the heart of the mother of river source Nile tongue.He looked up at the mirror on the otherside of the bar and reflected on the ten thousand warrior medicine men of his ancesters, and his Jewish father past gave him some sense of that precarious position of wandering tribe.
Bobby laughed and i know he shared this words that last night with Richard Brautigan, and things that Bobby knew, he was revealing now, on some level i just let his words just pass into me, and when he said something about the sun blowing stars into the moon, i saw world changes, and great poets shining stars in in the reflection in the bar mirror like golden tears of ancient rain of his language.We were in the alley between Vesuvio and City lights, and somebody lit a joint, and i saw Bobby dancing like an elf like i use to see Harry do, i swear he disappeared for a moment like a puff of magic and the land of a thousand dances, and then he was there again and the Frisco wind night was his body of light.
Why Eshu Lives Outside
Hi CJ,
Thanks so much for your rhapsodic improvisation. Bobby Kaufman, as you describe him, appears to have been a true child of Eshu, and the style of your piece is a tribute to the same type of wandering ecstatic energy that he embodied. This homelessness is the paradox of Eshu- that while his energy is essential to all transactions at every level of creation, he cannot be in any way contained or defined by any structure; Eshu is the permanent outsider. He is the guardian of the crossroads, where all contradictions meet.
I especially loved the last part of your piece, where Bobby is dancing in and out of manifestation:
“We were in the alley between Vesuvio and City lights, and somebody lit a joint, and i saw Bobby dancing like an elf like i use to see Harry do, i swear he disappeared for a moment like a puff of magic and the land of a thousand dances, and then he was there again and the Frisco wind night was his body of light.”
This reminded me of a number of sections of a piece that I wrote several years ago called “Why Eshu Lives Outside”, which is my retelling of a Yoruba parable. Here are three excerpts from the piece that play with the idea of energy slipping back and forth across the threshold of invisibility:
“So: slowly the movements of the living Earth were snapping into focus. Clouds coiled like snakes. The human mind was outside of the body. Species floated and intermingled. South was north. Prototypes blew like filaments from pods. Revolutionary information shot like rocks from a volcano. The globe was an almost hollow theatre, like an egg, around which stars made bets and fought for areas of influence.
Time came and went like a drunken guest. Space fed uninvited at the table set for the society of ancient dreams, the table of Ifa. Years were like transparencies that a child could superimpose. The element of water was in charge.”
“Like an inverted tornado, the cone hat of unspeakable knowledge rests lightly on his head. It was Eshu's fear, in those days, that the flat globe would be swallowed by an oceanic flux. With no individuated egos, on whom could tricks be played? He needed new ideas. Staring, he flew on an expedition to the dark side of the sun. He traveled like a sneeze to an asteroid beyond Pluto, and almost immediately returned to where he sat, to the crossroads where you see him now.”
“The trickster Eshu turns right into wrong. By a double reversal he then turns wrong into right. Eshu wandered through a peanut farm. A tuft of his hair was just visible. If it had not been for his enormous size would you have noticed him at all?”
the king of the dark bird
On the great wooden throne the juju heads and tails placed in perfect arrangement to one another, the dimensions to each to each fetish that holds the energy in zones of color and shape,the black and the white have no more then the other yet the great drum sits next to the empty seat with the bird feathers and canopy of stars, rhythms dance all around the silent space that speaks its voices of the animal objects that rise and fall in the voids exist between the games that tell the names as they walk across the board of each piece of the power, that only hollows through the horns and the vast winding tube of spirit sounds that rest in tusks of mountains and ancester flowers grow through absolute sacred doors that are placed at the beak corners of the lolo land and the directions on eight with the serpent pillars marked with fierce signs, that go running in passages standing on legs of eternal statues and rivers, in the center of the devil like whole the parts open and close with giant leaves and diamonds of wind, the dark heart rests on the chair with zaa-zoo spears and oval zig-zag thunder shields,grass all around in concentric circles flag the clouds rain voices...
this is so also it crashes in thick rum sounds and cheap trinkets of offering rattle with whiping shadows cast through the paper masks laughting at woman mirrors that are hung like gold pieces on the tubes that rise and fall like holy zeros and ones that at different moments sing strange visions that shoot up and down, as the moon floats in the glass that answers the fortune of the fountian, dancing lights hop on one foot with nu-nu nuts from the earth tree that holds the haha heavens and the hehe below worlds deep in john de conk roots of ash and taboo boo powders of no-no words that wait in the undergrounds for the skies to drop seeds of love.
Ashe-
While not much for intermediary intercessors, nor perceiving the Hierarchy of Elementals as a group to be contacted/interacted with directly, I do find the ideas rather interesting.
Apparently I am a shadow of the Oya archetype, and 'her' portfolio, and that of Oya's husband, Shango certainly do resonate with my core nature, so I can obliquely interface with that angle.
As far as the power of breath, and the everyday magick of words, I'm all there. But, is it us who are invoking the Powers, or are we resonating down the line and manifesting the Higher Order upon the material plane? I am much more of that bent.
Always interesting reading your writings, Brian. Lots of light and love.
-Kynkrea
Art as People
1. I found "Art and Ashe in the Yoruba Tradition" beautiful, and worth rereading and re-digesting. I am quite aware of my existence being in between this world and the other (that of the orishas). To know that there is a whole religious, philosophical, metaphysical system structured around the intermediary state where I exist is edifying.
2. In the context of the Yoruba system people appear as ongoing works of art rather than jumbles of ego, role-fillers, consumers, or citizens.
3. The concept of ohun – voice – strikes me as commensurate to the Word of Judeo-Christianity.
4. Lawal’s assertion that a sculpted face of an orisha pacifies the orisha because “what a face has is controllable,” is not, to me, necessarily inaccurate. You write: “One might just as well talk of controlling the currents of the sea.” Yet, personages are applied to such things all the time: In a painting a human face blows to show the origin of the wind. A person is said to be “in God’s hands.” Are such representations not like the sculpting of the face an orisha?
Perhaps in “controllable,” Lawal’s word choice was poor. Maybe “relateable” would have been better. Of course, when something is too relateable, a person projects themselves, their father and/or mother onto it, and then doesn’t see it – which is why it is efficacious for there to be a religious system (Islam) which prohibits images of people.
Pacification of the Face
Hi Amy,
You raise some excellent points about the ideas of “representation” and “control” in Yoruba art. I think, however, that there may be a simpler way of looking at the issue.
In the Yoruba creation myth that I paraphrase near the beginning of the essay, each body is allowed to choose the head it is to wear. In this context, the “head” represents the primordial energy of an orisha and the “body” is perhaps better termed the “ego.” This act of choice implies a partnership rather than the subjection of the human to the orisha.
Since both collaborate on a common task, there is no need to reverse a perceived imbalance of power through the use of some magical apparatus of control. Communication between these different aspects of one energy is only partly a relationship between the self and other; it can also be seen as a shift between the contracted and expanded aspects of the self.
A human being is the incarnate form of the archetypal energy that the orisha represents. Each plays out, on his or her own level, some particular aspect of a story that was first told long ago.
world-bridging
I see. So it is like orishas live through a person, so much as the person is able to allow. The person is an avatar to orishas, like a glove to a hand, only the glove can fuse with the hand to become it. It seems that the religion is more structured for directly bridging this world to the other than other religions. Would you agree?
The Self/orisha being to the head as the ego is to the body is antithetic to how it has been in my mind, but it suits me. Dualities become whole with a polar flip.
Each night they rearrange the buildings of the city
Hi Amy,
As you point out, the idea of a polar reversal between opposites, or “enantiadromia”, can be important; it allows us to bypass what might otherwise be insurmountable conflicts between systems.
In Lukumi, practitioners sometimes talk of an orisha “mounting” his/her human vehicle. So in this sense, the individual body/psyche could be seen as the means by which the activating potency is expressed. In this trance state, the ego is removed from its central location in the solar system, becoming an observer rather than a participant in the action.
On the other hand, when it comes to “the street life of ordinary human predicaments”, in James Hillman’s phrase, it is we who are the actors and the orishas who become the vicariously involved members of an audience. This division of labor is perhaps no more than a matter of convenience. It may not describe, after all, a hard and fast opposition.
In terms of this particular Yoruba myth, I was only attempting to determine what the “body” meant in this context. It really depends upon the dimension that you are attempting to understand. On each level, there are formed and unformed, contracted and expanded aspects to each energy; as you move, the roles of the component parts can easily flip over, and the realities that each name denotes can be rearranged. (In the movie “Dark City”, an alien race would move around all of the architecture of the city overnight, leaving citizens none the wiser in the morning.)
For example, the “psyche” is a more open and amorphous field of energy than the “ego”, but perhaps, in relation to the “spirit”, the terms of the opposition are reversed, and the “psyche” acts out this same contractive function. Psychic darkness sets a boundary to the spirit’s limitless illumination. This action separates one circle from another, and enfolds the darkness of the first one in the second. This darkness functions as a kind of womb, an alchemical vessel in which contradictions meet, from whose flux some radical new potential can be born.
The glyphs of a lost world collaborate with symbols flashing from the future, to position the third ring of the metaphysical target.
On one level, as I have said, human beings can be viewed as incarnate versions of the orishas- to the extent that the contracted and expanded aspects of one energy have joined hands in their common project. On a different level, the orishas themselves might be viewed as the incarnate versions of even larger and more fundamental energies.
It is significant, I think, that “inspiration” is something breathed in from without; we inhale the power to “express” the self. The alien force of the “genius” takes possession of the “ego”, and a relationship may or may not be established.
"This world is the marketplace, the other world is home..."
First, cj moore, you are some kind of poet! You are breathing the spirit!
Kynkrea, you wrote, "is it us who are invoking the Powers, or are we resonating down the line and manifesting the Higher Order upon the material plane?" As an initiated priestess of Oshun for 18 years now, I can tell you-it's both! Its a two way street, a direct connection to that portion of the creation...of God, that you are in tune with. It is said that shortly before birth, when our soul will join with our new body, we are summonded before Olodumare (one of the names of the Creator) and asked to pick a head (a destiny) from among those assembled. Will we pick a desireable/easy destiny or an undesireable/hard one? whatever we choose, it will be up to us as we move through our journey, to find a way to make our destiny the best that it can be. Orisha can be translated as "select head" and when we choose our destiny we also chose our spiritual pathway/channel/frequency/guide/Orisha that is in tune with us. We come to the world, after a period of refreshment "at home" ready to discover and make the most of our "God-given" talents, and to work toward overcoming our flaws. All living things (with DNA) as well as the living rivers, seas, mountains, deserts, volcanos, rocks, snows, etc...have the ashe of an Orisha, a frequency perhaps, for those not spiritually inclined. Those with an affinity to the ashe of the river have an affinity and connection to Oshun or one of the other Orishas connected to rivers, and those with a connection to fiery places like volcaos and deserts may have an affinity to Agayu. What I have learned is that ashe is neutral. It contains all colors, like white light, but also shadow and darkness. It is the power to manifest all... The Yoruba say it takes a little bit of everything to make a world.
Amy George, as to "what has a face can be controlled," I'm with Brian in that we can no sooner control the orishas than a hurricane or the coming of Spring. However, as in many spiritual paths, a carved face can become a beacon, a living prayer, a doorway to the divine. Certainly the Yoruba approach the carved face of an Orisha as a prayer and an offering, a rest stop for a force filled with ashe, on its rounds, keeping the world running, building and destroying. I find it interesting that in the new world, there is far less anthropomorphism of the Orishas...my Oshun resides in and is represented to the outside world by an ornate Chinese lidded vessel. She is "dressed up" with fine cloths and beads. This non-representational approach is more like that in Islam. As an aspiring artist, I have often wanted to use the stories or energies of the Orishas as my inspiration, but I get hung-up on how to represent them.
Brian, thanks for your essay, you show a strong understanding of some heady stuff.
May the ashe be with you!
Clarification-
okantomi,
I can see what you are saying.
My own perspective is perhaps better expressed in a reversal of the Avaita Vedanta statement, of 'This Atman = Brahman.' I see, instead, that the Monad/G-d is the only reality, and emanates into Its creation, as an immanent yet transcendant Life which through the Ruach or Breath, animates the beasts / humans in an indwelling, while the other minerological and non-sentient components subsist within this Life.
Thus, in this understanding, my Jiva is only a body animated by the Breath, which makes me an Atman (Soul). This Soul is noneother than Brahman/Monad/G-d projected into/extruded into the material creation. You, Brian, C.J., i, et al., are but one nature expressed in different (wave-)forms which arise out of the quantum foam of 'reality', and operated by the same Life, and each for its own purpose/path.
Perhaps we are saying the same thing, with different lexicoi to provide our palates of colour/words?
Love & Light,
-Kynkrea
i don't know where to begin
but, and it is so fraught with life's crossroadesqueness that to even begin it is like doing some series of purification and secert of secret opening and closing of the eyes and all the orifaces, it is at once concealed and exposed in some washing and ash poured like sprinkled with holy water and rum, or playing John Coltrane's Om with rattling bells and wind chimes, sound like rain sticks in metal sax and then jump through the space created...
When i come in, Volcanoes are knocking at he door of king fisher wings flapping that contain the entire moon resting on the foundation of this and all creations, we are entering the past like all shadows cast through the torn veil as hurricane rains sweep the face of cities riding the flood of gateways, churning the great votive offerings of candle flames rising in the midnights of eternal great masks painted on the air with brush strokes brought all the way from Cathai, with flourishes of one hand that whisper the fog blanketed mountain of hollow mirrors that opens like a bamboo blossom in the deep forest ephemeral wandering mists whose spirits sigh on the breeze through primordial days and nights drifting down silent stream rushing toward Tao dots that translate into the other side,
where the names of things have been named in cycles of cycles of ages that are only a feint wisp of dark matter that was only another stroke of the brush of the immortal ones,
that answer to no one, and speak to all, with the breath of openings that lives in a cave in the object of exquisite silences and all is made and nothing is done, where crystal shaped signs were marked on silk skies that live in the deep dark interior of the first sound that formed from the mass of energy that gathered every possible imagination in great bowls that rest on the shelf of the constellation alter, before inert totality texts made the ocean rest on the temple stone in the middle of vast earth mother eyes seeing the stick carved out of the cloud beard where the crown lips have never said a word, except always appear about to tell the story,
the lips like two fishes swiming sideways together around and round.Like two drums each to each about to beat the message through the sanguine village of the stars.
reunification of the orishas
Last night, before sleep, I was pondering the orishas, and feeling potent energies around me, as if they had been conjured. A female presence centered over my solar plexus – a hurt place – and said, “I can heal you.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
I did not feel the least imbalanced in the presence of the energies/orishas. Then I had this dream: T is taking a literature class that he is getting something out of. D was supposed to come over, but it’s getting too late. T unintentionally invites bears to the house. I run around in a panic trying to lock it up, keeping them out. He doesn’t understand what he’s done.
T is my longest-standing friend – from first grade. If you are familiar with the Simpsons, I was to Millhouse as he was to Bart.
The literature class T is taking parallels my involvement as reader and commenter on your Yoruba piece.
Like T not knowing he was inviting a bear attack, I did not know what I was doing in opening myself to the orishas. From this, plus the dream, I learned it is best that any opening of myself (to anything) comes through Christ; Christ as unifier – of the orishas, of the gods, of the world.
The D character from the dream is another long-standing waking-life friend, a guy who acted as my guide as I first encountered the numen of Christ, ten years ago.
When I encounter a new aspect of spirituality, such as the Yoruba, I first examine it comparatively. One of the first parallels to the Yoruba system that comes to mind is Hinduism. Both have a divine pantheon that eloquently and beautifully arranges primordial unity.
The arrangement conveniently invites one to step into it. For many people this could be a step into order. For me, it would be a step into disorder because my order is through Christ consciousness, which reconciles the orishas and the gods, permitting delivery from karma, granting Redemption.
I don’t think the elegance of Christ can be known till the elegance of all religion is duly appreciated.
The third ring of the metaphysical target
Hi Amy,
As I was posting a response to your RS comment from Sunday, I noticed that you had just put up another one. Interestingly, my response deals with the idea of participants and observers, as this relates to the contracted and expanded aspects of the self.
There is a maxim by Heraclitus that applies. It goes, “Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals; the one living the other’s death and dying the other’s life.” This apparent alternation traces the first two rings of a paradox. Another synchronicity- your idea of the Cosmic Christ as the reconciler of opposites- relates to what I have termed "the third ring of the metaphysical target."
I would argue, however, that no savior is required to “reunify” the gods, or fix a circle that was never broken.
Steve Quintana, the santero who is mentioned in the essay, was an altar boy when he was growing up in Cuba, and many Lukumi practitioners are also practicing Catholics. Or in Nigeria, a good number of Yoruba priests are also followers of Islam. In the New World, as a matter of survival, practitioners of West African derived religions have had to put aside the idea of “ether/or” belief systems, and, as a result, have developed a great talent for spiritual acrobatics.
Necessity has demanded the development of the capacity to exist both here and there, to conceal one reality behind the appearance of another, and to act on a great many levels at once.
I should perhaps point out that although my wife, Deni, is a priestess of Lukumi, I am not myself a practitioner, or in any sense an expert on the Yoruba/Lukumi tradition. My goal in this essay was to explore those aspects of the tradition that connect to my own spiritual explorations, and that I can validate, at least partially, by reference to direct experience. As with all traditions, I am simultaneously inside and outside- a position that I would not recommend to others, but which is essential to my role as a visionary artist.
Through the years, I have learned much from the priests of the diaspora about the craft of conceptual bilocation, and the effectiveness of “both/and” systems of belief.
In “Shifting to a Psychedelic World Culture”, Diana Reed Slattery writes of the importance of “silence, exile and cunning” for someone who would bridge and act within two contradictory realities. In a comment that I posted on this piece I wrote, “I make sounds in acknowledgement when my neighbors talk about baseball. I do not quote any poems by Rimbaud. As Diana describes, I learned long ago to hide the greater part of my being, to think strategically and to operate by stealth.”
There was also a terrific piece by Jay Michaelson a while back called “Polytheism and Nonduality”, in which Jay argues that some polytheistic traditions are actually more expressive than monotheism of the concept of nonduality. Any fixed belief can become an idol. On one level, it can be said that we create the world with our beliefs. On a different, and perhaps deeper, level, it can be said that the world is an indestructible whole, and that it is only our perception of this oneness that is partial.
As I say in the above essay, “Ashe connects. By fertilizing the separate, it creates both parts anew.” It is possible that energy, and not worship, is the key. We must get from here to there, where the war between the worlds can be read as a kind of play.
Primordial oneness is reluctant to choose between his/her many children.
both/and & then some
Hi Brian, In December 1999 I dreamed “Jesus marries his mother.” In this marriage, Ashe is necessarily a connector, but above and beyond Ashe as connector is Divine Love and purpose, namely the scripting of the play that brings peace to the wars between the worlds. Cosmic Christ does not require worship to manifest this purpose so much as an individual’s accession to marry him existentially, integrating him atomically, ethically, kinesthetically, philosophically, in the heart. Through his mind comes eternity. It can’t come through ours no matter how unified we become without him.
Yes, “Primordial oneness is reluctant to choose between his/her many children.” And it wouldn’t choose Christians over pagans. Multiplicity edifies it. Primordial oneness is edified further when multiplicity functions with the oneness of pre-primordial perspective.
“Pre-primordial” refers to Creation’s ultimate aims before it set itself into motion, aims which gods are unable to catalyze – these aims being the sacredness of flesh, Everlasting Life in the physical body, the lion lying down with the lamb, the New Kingdom, and unity with the Self as a template pre-existent to humanity’s Creation. Pre-primordial is mirrored by post-apocalyptic.
I agree that no savior is necessary to reunify the gods within exceptional individuals. Christ is necessary as a teacher, as a parable of how to receive one’s eternal Self.
You wrote: “Necessity has demanded the development of the capacity to exist both here and there, to conceal one reality behind the appearance of another, and to act on a great many levels at once.” Christ would advocate this. It is a hallmark of consciousness. Christ is not either/or. Christ is both/and, and then some.
creation myths
African creation myths, one begins with a tree, with the power of the word,thee word was a force. the rest of the story follows. all these ancient stories, have a different story,a range of diversity, but there is also a similar ring to all the stories.
no matter, what part of the planet, they come from.
I don't know if divinatory systems and creation myth are really one and the same, but they show the same diversity within the circle.
on another note, William Blake, said: Church &State, the Beast and the Whore.( how do we relate to the perversity?)
These myths, the polymorphous gods, the play of the sticks, coins, or stones.The word.
Stones don't have children, but if you listen.
the stones speak.
who are the witch doctors, who listens to the other part of matter, the stones?How do we interpret the stories, the myths, the essence, who or what was Heraclitus listening to?
the fire, the flux? the river? the logos?
listening to how nature loves to hide?
how many Buddhas,how many warriors, how many stories of Isis and Osiris? of the gag of the Gods?
how far do the poets go, how deep do they dig? you dig?
can i show you the face of Katrina? of 9/11?
can i show you the mind of Plato? Did the ideal wise men fear the chaos of order, the order of chaos, did they see beyond the myth of religion, and the worship of ideals, Did Nietzsche speak of the Twilight of the Idols?
does Civilization seem like a nice idea?
do the creation myths tell us what is going to happen? within a certain amount of possibilities? Will quantum Zero Hero save us in time?
are the Ascended masters, various Orishas? are Anubis and Nephthys?
Spiritual, but not religious!