The Yoni (Sanskrit for vagina) is one of the most ancient and charged images in the iconographic history of humanity.The long human story, across time and space, of making and interpreting images, is illuminated by the light that shines from that wonderful place.The space that enables such stunning pleasure,the cave through which the possibility of life enters,the portal to the zone of its gestatation,the matrix of its emergence...
What would we do without this most wondrous possibility of being?Artists from pre-historic times to the present,from cave paintings to Gustav Courbet's "The Origin of the World", to Picasso's nubile nudes and Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party"where the Pudenda embodies female figures from earliest myth to modern history,from Tibetan Buddhist Dakini's whose erotic presence is vital to spiritual enlightenment, to the Western esoteric art of Mark Dunn's Yoni Triangle of Art which enables travels between dimensions,empowering the immaterial to be given form in the material,from Asian Tantra to the erotic spirituality of Margo Anand,from ancient African-Yoruba thought,where the Great Mother,Iyan Nla,the Earth,whose vagina suffocates like dry yam in the throat,the roaring of mighty waters, to Luce Irigaray,whose doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne was structured as a vagina...
all these celebrate the Yoni,the Pudenda,the Cunt,the Space of Life,the Cave of Pleasure,La Petite Mort,the Place of the "Little Death" (French),Obo (Yoruba),That which no one sees and remains unsmiling(Nigerian-Bini proverb),the darkness in which I wish to die and be reborn,the multiplier of pleasure that has led to the downfall of so many...
I salute you,O Mother,O lover,O Child,Ever Youthful and Yet Source of All that Is,I do homage to that which is heaven on earth,earth in heaven...
In the passionate engagement of the text above,its correlation of the biological with the life force without which there would be nothing in existence,whether human or non-human, its association of the erotic with the rise and fall of fortunes,with cosmological symbolism,all expressed in a sense both of delighted recognition and genuine wonder,and even veneration,the text can be said to transcend voyeurism.
It is actually a recognition of power,one of the greatest on this planet.The power that enables the propagation of the human species and of all mammals.A power that is capable of great good and great destruction. Of the latter, the story of the Illiad,though fictional,is instructive. The experience of the US Preseident who was impeached is also enlightening.
If one takes pains to reflect on the most well known activity which the text speaks of,one may observe elements of the mystical,unusual states of mind in which thought undergoes modifications not readily experienced otherwise,in which its permutatiions may be transcended through silence,reached through momentary withdrawal from the fever of existence,enabling the self both to come to peace with itself and to trascend itself,where the self is forgotten through the immersion that emerges from the fibres of inflamed nerves,where for a brief time,the cage that binds most people into the limitations that contribute to constituting the individual self are melted and the intensity of being can be experienced in gratuitous grace.
The most profund reflections I have encountered on this subject are in Hinduism and Buddism,particularl y in Tantra,a related body of ideas and practices in both traditions.The Orisa tradition also has a rich store of insights that draw upon such earthy but potent conceptions in developing some of the most profound ideas,as is evident in the veneration of the feminine in Ogboni thought,Ifa, Gelede,in relation to IyanNla,Osun, Olokun,the Aje, Awon Iya Wa Osoronga.
A post I will make shortly will put together in a tentative way some of my explorations along these lines in the Orisa tradition,in its Classical and more recent manifestations. Its something I compiled some weeks ago.
Please allow me to take my leave for now with some words from Babatunde Lawal,a master in the sacralisation of gender and sexuality in the Orisa tradition,as evident in "A Ya gbo, A Ya To: New Perspective on Edan Ogboni", "Ejiwapo: the dialectics of twoness in Yoruba art and culture", "Orilonise: The Hermeneutics of the Head and Hairstyles among the Yoruba" and The Gelede Spectacle:
On the Orisa Yemoja:
Iya olo yon oruba
Onirun abev osiki
Abobo fun ni l orun bi egbe isu.
The pot breasted mother
With much hair on her private parts;
The owner of a vagina that suffocates like dry yam in the throat
On the Orisa Olokun,Mistress of all Waters:
Olokun Ajetiaye, Alagbalugbu omi
Ajawo okoto
Afailorogun pariwo
See see ni gbede
[Olokun] the inexhaustible sea, immense water,
Roaring eddy of sea shells,
Querulous, though she has no rival
Vibrations from the deep.
From The Gelede Spectacle
These poems represent images of majestic power, as in that of the water deity and in the Yemoja characterization, the conjunction of reassuring image of motherhood in the ample breasts with taboo images of the mother’s genitalia culminating in the evocation of its deadliness.
In [his commentary ] interpreting “vibrations from the deep” in terms of “the mystery associated with female genitalia” Lawal relates imaginatively to the Olokun poem in terms of it’s subliminal symbolism that provokes correlations between ideas of space, procreative and spiritual power, in relation to nourishing fluids, particularly water, and by extension, blood.
and
in Hinduism,
Srikrisha Das on Tripourra Sundari,an expression of Sakti,the feminine force that created and which sustains the universe,who yet addresses fundamental human needs:
Damsels in hndreds,with their locks dishevelled, their sarees [clothes]flying off their figures,their girdles bursting asunder with force,their silk garments slipping down,run after a decrepit,ugly and impotent man,who falls within the range of Thy side glances.
from
Meditation on Siva-Sakti
What would we do without this most wondrous possibility of being?Artists from pre-historic times to the present,from cave paintings to Gustav Courbet's "The Origin of the World", to Picasso's nubile nudes and Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party"where the Pudenda embodies female figures from earliest myth to modern history,from Tibetan Buddhist Dakini's whose erotic presence is vital to spiritual enlightenment, to the Western esoteric art of Mark Dunn's Yoni Triangle of Art which enables travels between dimensions,empowering the immaterial to be given form in the material,from Asian Tantra to the erotic spirituality of Margo Anand,from ancient African-Yoruba thought,where the Great Mother,Iyan Nla,the Earth,whose vagina suffocates like dry yam in the throat,the roaring of mighty waters, to Luce Irigaray,whose doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne was structured as a vagina...
all these celebrate the Yoni,the Pudenda,the Cunt,the Space of Life,the Cave of Pleasure,La Petite Mort,the Place of the "Little Death" (French),Obo (Yoruba),That which no one sees and remains unsmiling(Nigerian-Bini proverb),the darkness in which I wish to die and be reborn,the multiplier of pleasure that has led to the downfall of so many...
I salute you,O Mother,O lover,O Child,Ever Youthful and Yet Source of All that Is,I do homage to that which is heaven on earth,earth in heaven...
In the passionate engagement of the text above,its correlation of the biological with the life force without which there would be nothing in existence,whether human or non-human, its association of the erotic with the rise and fall of fortunes,with cosmological symbolism,all expressed in a sense both of delighted recognition and genuine wonder,and even veneration,the text can be said to transcend voyeurism.
It is actually a recognition of power,one of the greatest on this planet.The power that enables the propagation of the human species and of all mammals.A power that is capable of great good and great destruction. Of the latter, the story of the Illiad,though fictional,is instructive. The experience of the US Preseident who was impeached is also enlightening.
If one takes pains to reflect on the most well known activity which the text speaks of,one may observe elements of the mystical,unusual states of mind in which thought undergoes modifications not readily experienced otherwise,in which its permutatiions may be transcended through silence,reached through momentary withdrawal from the fever of existence,enabling the self both to come to peace with itself and to trascend itself,where the self is forgotten through the immersion that emerges from the fibres of inflamed nerves,where for a brief time,the cage that binds most people into the limitations that contribute to constituting the individual self are melted and the intensity of being can be experienced in gratuitous grace.
The most profund reflections I have encountered on this subject are in Hinduism and Buddism,particularl y in Tantra,a related body of ideas and practices in both traditions.The Orisa tradition also has a rich store of insights that draw upon such earthy but potent conceptions in developing some of the most profound ideas,as is evident in the veneration of the feminine in Ogboni thought,Ifa, Gelede,in relation to IyanNla,Osun, Olokun,the Aje, Awon Iya Wa Osoronga.
A post I will make shortly will put together in a tentative way some of my explorations along these lines in the Orisa tradition,in its Classical and more recent manifestations. Its something I compiled some weeks ago.
Please allow me to take my leave for now with some words from Babatunde Lawal,a master in the sacralisation of gender and sexuality in the Orisa tradition,as evident in "A Ya gbo, A Ya To: New Perspective on Edan Ogboni", "Ejiwapo: the dialectics of twoness in Yoruba art and culture", "Orilonise: The Hermeneutics of the Head and Hairstyles among the Yoruba" and The Gelede Spectacle:
On the Orisa Yemoja:
Iya olo yon oruba
Onirun abev osiki
Abobo fun ni l orun bi egbe isu.
The pot breasted mother
With much hair on her private parts;
The owner of a vagina that suffocates like dry yam in the throat
On the Orisa Olokun,Mistress of all Waters:
Olokun Ajetiaye, Alagbalugbu omi
Ajawo okoto
Afailorogun pariwo
See see ni gbede
[Olokun] the inexhaustible sea, immense water,
Roaring eddy of sea shells,
Querulous, though she has no rival
Vibrations from the deep.
From The Gelede Spectacle
These poems represent images of majestic power, as in that of the water deity and in the Yemoja characterization, the conjunction of reassuring image of motherhood in the ample breasts with taboo images of the mother’s genitalia culminating in the evocation of its deadliness.
In [his commentary ] interpreting “vibrations from the deep” in terms of “the mystery associated with female genitalia” Lawal relates imaginatively to the Olokun poem in terms of it’s subliminal symbolism that provokes correlations between ideas of space, procreative and spiritual power, in relation to nourishing fluids, particularly water, and by extension, blood.
and
in Hinduism,
Srikrisha Das on Tripourra Sundari,an expression of Sakti,the feminine force that created and which sustains the universe,who yet addresses fundamental human needs:
Damsels in hndreds,with their locks dishevelled, their sarees [clothes]flying off their figures,their girdles bursting asunder with force,their silk garments slipping down,run after a decrepit,ugly and impotent man,who falls within the range of Thy side glances.
from
Meditation on Siva-Sakti
