The Journey towards Our Happy Fate

I believe we all seek to be happy, to be fulfilled and to live life as the hero in our own journey. This journey is a series of choices, a dance between fortune and misfortune where we embrace the curse and the blessing with equal acceptance. When the flow is good we revel and when the hooks and crooks of the path and the sandbanks in the river entangle us, asking us to stop, rest or make choices a state Ifá calls Òwónrín arises. Òwónrín is a form of internal turbulence, a transformative power, which forces us to make a choice. The more agitated we are in the choice the more we tend to make choices of desire and by consequence some form of misfortune or setback is instigated. It is natural for the human being to immediately looking for scapegoats when we make the wrong choice. Ifá tells us that it is from Òwónrín that the Orìsá Èsú is taking his ase – or power.  This means that Èsú is a force we will meet constantly in our journey on earth.  

Ifá consider our soul, our consciousness to be a young, beautiful, curious and restless woman and our choices can bring growth and wisdom to our consciousness – or the opposite. The goal is however to mature this young and beautiful woman so the experience of life can be as wonderful  as fate intended. Because if the right choices are made we can be sure that our journey will be a happy one, veiled in understanding, experience and growth of knowledge.

Àjé - The Birds of the Souls Darker Nights

The Yoruba term àjé, carry associations to movement and trade – we might understand it as a marketplace of night unfolding in silver rays. This nocturnal marketplace is conceived of as a gathering of long beaked and predatory birds.

The concept of àjé has in the New World and the Modern West been equaled with ‘witch’ – and this is true, in so far as we understand what a witch is – on African premises. Àjé is considered a power some people have by inheritance, initiation or by birth. It is considered to be an excess of àse (natural power) – and therefore it must be kept under control and in balance to avoid damage to the wielder of àjé and the community itself.  Àjé is the primordial emotional depths of womanhood. It is not a generative force – on the contrary. Honeysweet Òsún is the generative powers and fertility. Àjé and their mother Ìyàmí Òsòròngà is the barrenness and otherness, the femaleness prior to the first blood and the lament upon the last blood. This means that the powers of àjé play themselves out upon the field of possibility. Àjé is like the rhizomes of a fungi or a lotus crawling miles under ground, manifesting in peaks of power here and there – but its true essence is a phosphorous networks of subterranean possibilities that may or may not come into manifestation. 

Ifá tells us that it was in the divine vibration known as Odú Òsá Méjí the power known as àjé came to earth. This odú also speaks about how two male Òrìsà, Obàtálá and Ògún and one female, Òdù came to earth to sculpt and mold it. Olodumare gave to Obàtálá the power of sculpting and artistry and to Ògún the power of metallurgy.  To Òdù he gave the power of giving life – he gave motherhood and told her she was the sustainer of the world. She would sustain the world with a particular calabash. Inside this calabash was a bird. She declared that she would use this magnificent àse to fight those who disrespected her and to defend those who adored her. This bird was àjé – and Òdú taking hold of this bird becomes Ìyàmí Òsòròngà, which we can understand to mean “My Mysterious Mother; Owner of the Birds of Night”.

The Cult of the Sacred Cow

In the modern vernacular to refer to something or someone as a sacred or holy cow, is to state that what is spoken of is undisputed in its authority, it takes on the features of a monist God. Usually this term is used about a person considered to be in a position of untouchable power or an organization that makes common man helpless if he wishes to agitate against it. Confronted with sacred cows we find that in their field of authority grows paranoia, fear, brutality both within the cow itself as much as without. It is a form of symmetry at play here that leads to games of secrecy, espionage and leaking of information from within the sacred cow and from without feelings of oppression and theories of conspiracy that gives the sacred cow even more of the often illusory power it holds.

The sacred cow can be about people in powerful positions, about organizations considered to be powerful – but the sacred cows can also touch the kingdom of Self and Ego. The most frequent statement of the sacred cows within the confinements of one’s own ego lain fortress is when we define our helplessness or our vices by referring to parts of the picture invested with an enormous importance. For instance, ‘because of my upbringing’, ‘because of the violence I suffered’, ‘because I was misunderstood’, ‘because my bipolar condition…, ‘because my star sign says…’ There is fatalism at play here in our fortress of ego which we guard very well. In fact it is more important for the human organism to be consistent that to be good. We are constantly searching for affirmation of the self concept we are holding. Any attempt of defying it will be met with resistance conscientious or not. This is why it is at times so hard to convince a good person falling victim for negative patterns, about the predominant and forgotten goodness within. The explanation for the negative self concept has turned into a sacred cow.