The relationships between the erotic,religion,philosophy and great literature and art do not seem to be very well known even though different cultures have a long tradition of developing these conjunctions.I get the impression that it is a central stream in Classical Yoruba thought,but its delineation might take patient and broad study,reading between the lines and making conjunctions not always slept out.The metaphors emanating from male/female polarities and the sexual and generative potential of these polarities seems to be central to the symbolism and perhaps the ritual of the Aboriginal Ogboni,one of the central institutions in Classical Yoruba culture as well as to the hermeneutic process through which reality is engaged with in Ifa divination.
The Odu of Ifa are collectively understood as female and as the wife of Orunmila,the Orisa-deity-whose mandate underlies the divinatory system.This feminine identity resonates in the symbolism of the empty centre of the divination tray,the physical and symbolic template for divinatory quests into hidden knowledge.The symbolic configurations that emerge on this empty surface when the diviner casts their divinatory instruments on the surface of the tray can be understood in terms of the emergence of meaning from the conjunction of the cosmic associations of Orunmila,who is understood as having participated in the creation of the cosmos and the terrestrial resonance of Odu,whose associations extend from the primordial Mothers,the forces who embody the capacity for creation and destruction represented by the power and volatility of life,to the primordial One who predates all--Odua-Odu-the sacred python-,to the calabash whose bottom and top represrent the cosmos.I have developed some of these associations on my own intiative but the evidence to back it up in the Classical network of symbolism is abundant.
Associations evoking male,female polarities are explicit in Hinduism,as in the relationship of Shiva and his wife Shakti.Shiva represents a passive but underlying energy while Sshakiti embodies an active,directly creative energy[I think I am liley to be getting it right].This correlation is visualised by images of Shakti standing on the prone body of Shiva.
These correlations between the masculine and the feminine are particularly
striking so in the symbolism of Sri Yantra in Hinduism.A yantra is a geometric form that suggests the ontological identity of a cosmic force.It is understood as the mid-point in the various levels of abstraction in the depiction of such forces,with an anthropomorphic depiction being the most basic,the yanytra being the next most sophisticated and thse representations culminating in the expression of the force in terms of sound,the most abstract formulation.
The Sri Yantra is composed of four triangles facing upwards ,superimposed on five circles facing downward.This structure is surrounded by a sequence of three concentric circles,which might have a sequence of eight,downward facing crescents in the space between the first circle and the second,and sixteen crescents in the space between the second circle and the third.The entire ensemble is enclosed in a rectangle,a foursided figure with sides of unequal length,with four extrusions that give the structure the sense of solidity and stability of a mansion.
The conjunction of upward facing and downward facing triangles represents the conjunction of masculine and feminine forces in bringing the universe into being.The upward facing circles represent the masculine polarity while the downward facing cricles stand for the feminine polarity.The primordial state of the universe is represented by a point at the centre of the empty space defoined by the intersection of all the triangles.
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