which comes first,the hole or the pot?: conceptions of cocreativity between idea and mind in the...

8/14/2019 WHICH COMES FIRST,THE HOLE OR THE POT?: CONCEPTIONS OF COCREATIVITY BETWEEN IDEA AND MIND IN THE

1/37

CENTRECATH PAPER

LOGISTICAL DETAILS OF PRESENTATION AND OF PRESENTER

Presented in Panel 1: Creativity, Imaginary (Saturday 15th January) in the conference at

CentreCathThe Sacred and the Feminine: Image, Music, Text, Space held on 14 -16 January

2005, at the University of Leeds, England.

by

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,

Department of French,University College,London.

Email:

[email protected]

Mobile:

07837361084

Mailing address:

29 Clifford Pugh House,

5-7 Lancaster Grove,

Hampstead.

NW3 4EU

1


2/37

Which Comes First, the Hole or the Pot? : Conceptions of Cocreativity

Between Idea and Mind in the Work of Wenger and Maltwood

This paper explores interventions in landscape by Susan Wenger and Katherine Maltwood in

relation to conceptions of creativity. The paper argues that the manner in which Wenger and

Maltwood engage with, and are engaged by, the landscapes of the Oshun Forest in Nigeria, and of

Glastonbury, in England, respectively, provoke questions that suggest a conception of creativity

that could be seen as illuminating in relation to creative practice across disciplines. The

achievements of these imaginative workers provoke questions about issues of agency and

mutuality, in terms of the relationship between subject and object. These questions provide a

vantage point for an analysis of the relative significance of conceptions of creativity. These are

explored here primarily in terms of the relationship between the creative mind and the subject

matter it explores, and the ideas and forms through which it does this. Within the framework we

develop here, imaginative work is understood as a collaborative endeavour in which the sources

of inspiration as well as the inspired individual are interpreted as cocreators in the creative

enterprise1.

This understanding of creativity is inspired by our interpretation of the hermeneutic and epistemic

framework that informs the divinatory processes of the Ifa system of knowledge and divination,

which has its origins in Southern Nigeria. The disciplinary formations that constitute the Ifa

system, as represented by the epistemic and ontological foundations that underlie the forms of the

1Key works on Wengers achievement are Ulli Beier, The Return of the Gods: the Sacred Art ofSusanne Wenger(London : Cambridge University Press, 1975);Susanne Wenger and Gert Chesi, A

Life with the Gods in their Yoruba HomelandBrixentaller Strasse:Perlinger Verlag,1983);Susanne

Wenger,The Timeless Mind of the Sacred : itsNew Manifestation in the Osun Groves (Ibadan :

Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 1977);Rolf Bruckman and Gerd Hotter, Adunni:A

Portrait of Susanne Wenger(Munchen:Trickster Verag,1994);Susanne Wenger,The Sacred Groves of

Osogbo;those on Maltwoods ideas include Katherine Matwood,A Guide to Glastonbury's Temple of

the Stars (Cambridge:James Clarke,1964);Mary Caine; The Glastonbury Zodiac: Key to the

Mysteries of Britain (Grael Communications,1978).

2


3/37

system, and well as the mode of training its practitioners undergo, imply conceptions of

interaction between the human mind and the ideas it works with, that suggest a mode of

interpreting the creative activity represented by the achievement of Wenger and Maltwood 2. The

correlations between this system and the creative activity of these individuals also inspire

questions that extend questions of creativity from the domain of the character of the creative

process to that of the relationship of creative activity to the total context of meaning realised by

the progression of the life of the creative individual. This relationship emerges in terms of the

sense of vocation and compelling purpose that is often associated with highly creative persons.

Creative Ideas and the Shaping of Biographical Progression

These conceptions of self in relation to the progression of human life inspire questions about

innate potential or talent in relation to the cultivation of ability. It also inspires questions about

the source of talent. Is it an accident of biology, a genetically acquired predisposition or does it

have a spiritual origin? What is the fundamental source of the drive that inspires highly motivated

people like van Gogh to devote themselves to a program of action that promises no immediate

reward but suffering for many years? Is sheer effort alone enough to account for the eventual

astounding success of people like himself?3

2The conception of a discipline implied in this statement is one in which a discipline consist in cognitiveprocesses as well as the knowledge arrived at through the application of or participation in this processes,

along with the training that enables a participation in such processes, in terms of generating new knowledge

through the use of or engagement with the knowledge already developed through their application.

Disciplinary formations are, therefore, understood as the conceptions of the character of knowledge and

modes of gaining access to it, along with the training in applying these cognitive modes and engaging with

what has been developed through their use, specific to particular disciplines, as well as to discursiveformations united by similar epistemic characterisations. This conception of epistemic formations is related

to a similar characterization of what he describes as the forms of knowledge developed by Paul Hirst, inKnowledge and the Curriculum(London: Routledge, 1974).3 Van Goghs Complete Letters (London: Thames and Hudson, 1958), attests to the rigour of his

apprenticeship, as he struggled for ten years against economic, health and social challenges in his effort to

discipline and develop his faculties towards the actualisation of his artistic vision, a struggle from which

some of the worlds great and most prized works of art have emerged, but which eventually ended in his

suicide, in despair, while still a struggling artist, as he fought against epilepsy, attended by fainting spells,

which took him in and out of sanatoria.

3


4/37

We employ the Ifa epistemology and hermeneutics as a matrix through which to explore

questions of innate, as opposed to cultivated ability, particularly in relation to the development of

vocation and the relationship between individual will and its conditioning factors in the shaping

of the individuals life.

The questions we ask include the following: What is the significance of the compulsion that ideas

often exercise in relation to creative individuals? Contemporary Western thought does not ascribe

agency and volition to nonmammalian forms, but may we not relate this sense of ideas as

exercising a compulsion that shapes the individuals biographical progression to the notion in Ifa

of the Odu, the organizing categories of the system as sentient forms, each demonstrating their

own Ori or centre of spiritual guidance, which collaborate with the Ori, or spiritual centre of the

diviners client to determine the configuration assumed by the divinatory instruments?

We might not accept such conceptions but they could help sagest models which could evoke

possibilities for thinking in new ways in relation to current knowledge about creative experience

and the vocations inspired by creative activity. Cognitive models do not have to function as

definitive interpretations of the phenomena that they engage with. One needs to remain sensitive

to the essentially heuristic character of explanatory models. One may not also wish to draw out

the full range of implications of a particular explanatory model but maintain a sensitive restriction

of its explanatory capacity. Along these lines, we suggest that the Ifa model of the organising

categories of the system as demonstrating a collaborative relationship with the suprarational

centre of direction of the individual in the development of meaning in the hermeneutic process at

play in Ifa divination, could provide a model that could suggest a perspective, carefully

modulated, about how ideas work in relation to creative individuals, in relation to specific

experiences of inspiration, as well as in relation to the shaping of the individuals sense of

biographical direction by the compelling force of these ideas.

4


5/37

Along these lines, we observe accounts of creative experience in which ideas are depicted as

emerging into the mind of the individual, at times without any prior reflection that could have

inspired them, and often exercising such a compelling attraction on the mind that the individuals

sense of vocation is henceforth shaped by them in manner that amounts to the compulsive

cultivation of a vocation which consists in actualizing the implications of those ideas. We might

not argue, as the Ifa system does, for the notion of volition and a centre of ultimate direction in

relation to the ideas that inspire people, but we might at least speak in analogical terms, of ideas

as suggesting a sense of individuality, of purpose and incipient direction, even if we only use

these conceptions in metaphorical and analogical terms. The development of knowledge often

consists in the possibilities of renewed understanding opened by creating novel juxtapositions

between phenomena and ideas.

J.K.Rowling describes the idea for her famous Harry Potter series of books as emerging almost

fully formed in her mind on a train journey as she looked out from the train window 4. Karen

Armstrong describes her biographical itinerary as motivated principally by her profound desire to

find God, in which goal she failed until years after she had left the convent, she started writing

about religion as a freelance scholar. She then describes how she gradually, in spite of herself,

cultivated scholarship as an ecstatic discipline, in which the inspiring power of the ideas she was

exploring seemed to transport her beyond the material confines of her existence5. Einstein

describes the sudden emergence in his mind of what he calls the happiest thought of my life.

McEvoy quotes Einstein as narrating this experience in a manner that evokes the concerns we

emphasize here:

Sitting in a chair in the Patent Office at Berne(1907),a sudden thought

occurred to me. If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight. I

was startled and this simple thought made a strong impression on me. It

4Sean Smith,J. K. Rowling: A Biography(London: Michael O' Mara Books,1999 ).5 Armstrong, Karen, The Spiral Staircase (London: Harper, 2004).

5


6/37

impelled me towards a theory of gravitation. It was the happiest thought of

my life.

Having responded to the exhilaration stimulated by this sudden inspiration, he continues to

analyse its cognitive implications in terms of the ideational structures of the discipline in which

he is trained, physics:

I realized that for an observer falling freely from the roof of a house there exists-at

least in his immediate surroundings-no gravitational field. If the one who is falling drops

other bodies (e.g. Galileos cannon balls),then these remain relative to him in a state of

rest or of uniform motion independent of their particular chemical or physical nature.(Of

course, we are going to ignore the effect of air resistance.)

The observer therefore has the right to interpret his state as at rest or in uniform motion

McEvoy describes Einstein as working under the impetus of this moment of unanticipated

inspiration for eight years. He again quotes the great scientists description of his quest in terms

that provoke correlation with the model of ideas as cocreative with the psyche of the creative

individual in terms of both particular instances of inspiration as well as in their capacity to shape

the biographical progression of the individual:

Einstein presented [the final form of the theory he developed from this

inspirational insight ]his general relativity law of curved space and warped

time to the Prussian Academy on 25 November 1915.

Then he sat down and wrote a letter to a close friend, the Dutch physicist Paul

Ehrenfest:

I was beside myself with ecstasy for days. Imagine my joy that the new law of

curvature obeys the principle of relativity and predicts the correct perihelion

motion of Mercury.

. the years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels but cannot

express-the intense desire and the alterations of confidence and misgiving until

6


7/37

one breaks through to clarity and understanding-are only known to him who

has experienced them himself6.

It is true that these creative minds had for a long time before these inspiring experiences,

been deeply involved in those pursuits within the framework of which they experienced

these inspirational encounters. It is true that these creative minds had for a long time

before these inspiring experiences, been deeply involved in those pursuits within the

framework of which they experienced these inspirational encounters. The mind could be

seen to operate as a matrix within and through which novel ideational configurations

emerge. What are the forms and levels of agency involved in this process? Clearly, a

form of subconscious mentation is at work, in which ideas are digested and synthesized

at various levels of integration and abstraction, from which superordinate plane, through

a dialogue between the ratiocinative and intuitive faculties, they develop the explanatory

adequacy relevant to theory, or the explicatory possibilities that enables the development

of a work of art from an imagistic, affective or emotional nucleus.7

Correlative Images and their Associated Ideational Values

6 J.P.McEvoy and Oscar Zarate,Introducing Stephen Hawking(Cambridge: Grange, 1999). p.32;p.37.7 Having articulated the conception of subconscious mentation, in relation to anexplicatory dialogue between the ratiocinative and intuitive faculties as one explanation

of creative processes, we observe that certain examples of the creative experience would

not seem to be completetely explicable by this and other conventional interpretations.

What could be the source for the sudden emergence in the mind of J.K.Rowling of the

image of Harry Potter, when she had not even been contemplating a story idea related to

that image at any point in time? Is her general preoccupation with writing sufficientexplanation? Perhaps the mind, at times, digests and resynthesises the general

predispositions of the individual and represents them in completely unrecognisable

forms, at a level of transposition similar to the extreme departure of dream imagery from

the conscious mental content of the mind. Having noted this possibility, how may we

account for certain experiences which eventuate in the production of discourse, but which

suggest a sense of personhood which it would be a challenge to account for through

conceptions of subconscious, semiconscious or conscious mental working?

7


8/37

These conceptualisations could be seen as foregrounded through the convergence between ideas

and their associated imagistic expressions, realised in the points of contact between the thought of

the two imaginative workers, Wenger and Maltwood, and the interpretive strategies related to the

literary and divinatory forms to which their work is intimately linked.

These images and their complementary ideational values could be understood as subsumed in

related representations that correlate the conception of fecundative potential associated with the

feminine, with images of concavity and enclosed circular form, realised by the image of a bowl or

a pot. These images could be seen as inspired by the capacity to generate life in terms of

replicative but original forms, demonstrated by the containment and nurturing of life, within the

space represented by the womb8.

These images and their associated ideational values which correlate the work of the imaginative

artists and the discursive worlds to which their work is related, are represented by the calabash of

Odu in Ifa, most intimately linked with Wengers inspiration, by the cup of the Grail in Arthurian

literature, a central motif in Maltwoods work, and, pre-eminently, by Wengers image of the

relationship between abstract and concrete form in the image of a pot as realised through her

representation of the deity, Iya Mopo, whom she depicts as crystallising the creative possibilities

embodied by the feminine. The imagistic and philosophical implications of Wengers image of

the traditional Yoruba Orisa or deity Iya Mopo, as both pot and potter, crystallises and mediates

8The relationship between this model and creative processes is centred in the similarity novelhuman creations demonstrate with the emergence of biological life, in the sense that new

biological life is replicative of genetic predispositions that establish particular physical and

psychological forms, particularly as these are expressive of the genetic pool from which that new

life has emerged. That new life, however, remains individual, and, to a degree, unique. It is

expressive of hitherto unrealised potentiality, as represented by the fact, for one, of theuniqueness of every human fingerprint. Along similar lines, creative expressions represent

configurations of ideas and possibilities, the constituents of which are extant within the range of

experiences, from the imagistic, to the ideational and the affective, undergone by the person who

develops them, yet, their creative nucleus resides in the emergence of a novel realisation of the

possibilities of synergy between these existent elements.

8


9/37

the conception of cocreativity between creative inspiration and inspired individual we develop

here. As pot, she is created, as potter, she creates9. She symbolizes the artist as embodying what

they create as well as the process through which this creation comes into being. This symbolism

emerges in this image in terms of the interrelationship of spatial and concrete form, embodied

by the mutually constitutive character of the inner form of a pot represented by the space inside it,

and the outer form, embodied by its external, concrete form. These spatial and formal

relationships are depicted as suggestive of the inter-ontological character of the creative mind and

the subjects to which it addresses itself, as represented by both the primary referent and the ideas

and forms which these inspire10.

B. The Brain as Spatial Arena of Creative Dance

All these forms, evocative as they are of the nuturant and transformative capacities of the womb

in its transmutation of seminal creative potential into the actuality embodied in the human form,

could be seen as ultimately subsumed in the image represented by the concavity of the brain,

9 This image is developed in Rolf Bruckman and Gerd Hotter Adunni: Portrait of Susanne

Wenger(Munchen:Trickster Verag,1994)p.53 and in Susanne Wengerand Gert Chesi,Alife with the

Gods in their Yoruba Homeland (BrixentallerStrasse:Perlinger Verlag,1983),p.140.10 Ranjana Thapalyals description, in a personal communication, of her experience in the process ofmaking pottery as a contemplative exercise, which one might interpret in relation to the concrete

dimensions of the process, as one in which the mind seems to achieve an imaginative identification with the

nexus represented by the imagistic form that emerges as the work progresses, as mediated through thetactile realizations communicated by the contact between the form of the pot and the potters hand, could

be seen as clarifying as well as reinforcing the expressive and associational significance of Wengers

potter image. Wengers choice of this image could be understood as an expression of her creative

reinterpretation of traditional Yoruba conceptions within the framework constituted by her cosmopolitan

imagination. In experimenting with the tradition, she could be said to demonstrate her assertion that the

tradition is in need of reinterpretation within novel configurations, so as to demonstrate its perennialsignificance in relation to the transformations of cultural forms across time within the Yoruba milieu, as

well as the universal validity of the Yoruba tradition across time and space. In adapting the image of IyaMopo within the matrix of philosophical questions which she correlates with the Chinese philosophy of

Taoism, in relation to which she develops the relationship between space and constituent form as a central

motif, she reaches out across time and space to interpret within culturally expansive configurations, the

Yoruba tradition which represents for her a central inspirational matrix. She reinforces the tradition by

highlighting its associative and ideational potential, in forms that draw from its traditional ideational and

iconographic character, but enlarges these through images and ideas drawn from various cultures.

9


10/37

within which space the transformative dance between the mind and the ideas it relates itself to in

the creative enterprise is staged.

Our development of this conception of creativity, therefore, operates in terms of the motif, the

organizing idea and its imagistic realization, of the relationship between inner space and outer

form, suggested by the images that emerge from the central discourses we explore. These images

are represented by the pot that suggests both the being as well as the creation of Iya Mopo, by

the bowl where Odu resides, which symbolises the transformative possibilities of the Ifa system

as a process of textual realisations grounded in a spiritual formation11, the Grail as expressive of

various transformations across time and space, of conceptions of the convergence of the

transcendent and the concrete12, and the human brain as a space bounded by a concrete shell

11The Ifa tradition describes Odu,the wife of Ifa,as residing in a pot,the opening of which represents aculminating point of the initiates arduous and lengthy training as described in Wande Abimbolas,Ifa

Divination Poetry(New York:Nok,1977).Odu is also the name of the organisational categories of the Ifa

corpus. In relation to the fact that the Odu as the organisational structures of the corpus are organised in a

descending series of multiplicity which has its primal root in 16 basic units, which are expanded through aseries of permutations into its full range of 256 geomantic signs, we may observe that this transformative

process could be likened to a generative procedure, which itself recalls the notion of similarity and novelty

in the development of new forms which we have described as central to the creative process. This

conception of correlative similarity and novelty could itself be associated with the notion of feminine

biological creativity evoked by the associations between the concavity of the pot within which the feminine

persona of Odu, Ifas wife, resides, and the womb. Gleasons development of similar associations in her

efforts to demonstrate fundamental symbolic forms of the Ifa system in A Recitation of Ifa, Oracle of theYoruba (New York: Grossman, 1973) in terms that develop the symbolic significance of the pot ofOdu as

expressive of a fecundative matrix amplifies the ideational resonance of these ideas, particularly in relation

to the convergence they realise with Wengers conception of Iya Mopo, through whom she develops herpotter symbolism as evocative of the creative capacities of women, both within the exobiological activities

represented by the arts as human inventions, as in pottery, but, also, as she puts it, in relation to the erotic

vocations of conception and childbirth.These conceptions could be seen as gaining in resonance in relationto similar patterns of association in the Chinese discourses represented by the oracle of theI Chingand the

philosophical classic, the Tao te Ching, which employ the conception of the feminine, as in the Tao te

Chings realization of images that link generation and concave form, as representative of transformativeprocesses, understood in term of relationships between human and cosmic becoming. In the words of the

Tao te Ching, trans.D.C.Lau(Hong Kong:Chinese University Press,1982),p.17,geographical and biological

imagery coalesce to evoke a sense of generative activity at the level of the cosmos: The spirit of the valley

never dies/This is called the mysterious female/The gateway of the mysterious female/Is called the root ofheaven and earth/Dimly visible, it seems as if it were there,/Yet use will never drain it.

12 John Mathews,in The Grail: Quest for Eternal Life (London:Thames and Hudson,1981),describes the

Grail, in its twin realizations as imaginative object and subject of discourse, as emblematic of

transformative possibilties,as represented by its traditional depiction as a vessel that acts as a catalyst for

mytical transformation,as well as by the permutations realised through the developments in its

10


11/37


12/37

This conception of interpretive processes implies a vitalistic ontology in which active agency is

perceived as inclusive of non-organic, non-mammalian forms, and a participatory epistemology,

in which cognition consists in a mutuality of relationship between the knower and the known.

This foregrounds illuminating possibilities of enquiry in relation to the accounts of the creative

processes that inspired the interventions in the Oshun Forest by Susan Wenger in Nigeria and by

Katherine Maltwood in the Glastonbury landscape in England.14

American framework, his purpose being to establish points of artistic and cognitive continuity

between African and African-American culture across the rigours of the Middle Passage.

14The philosopher of religion, Rudolf Otto, in The Idea of the Holy: an Inquiry into the NonRational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, tr. John Harvey (London:

Oxford UP,1958), the spatial phenomenologists, Adrian Ivakiv, in Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims

and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona (Indiana UP, 2001) and Christopher Tilley in The

Phenomenology of Landscape ( Oxford: Berg,1994),the philosophers of landscape Paul Deveroux, in

The Sacred Place: The Ancient Origin of Holy and Mystical Sites (London:Cassell,2000), and Niggel

Pennick, in The Ancient Science of Geomancy: Man in Harmony with the Earth (London: Thames and

Hudson,1979),the philosopher of divination, Geoffrey Cornelius, in The Moment ofAstrology:

Origins in Divination (Bournemouth: The Wessex Astrologer,2003), and the fantasy writer Marion

Zimmer Bradley, in The Heritage of Hastur( New York: Daw Books,2002), a central aspect of whichcentres on relationships between human consciousness and sacred objects, could be said to develop

explorations which foreground the mutuality of subject and object within an existential and

phenomenological matrix, and with Bradley, a deeply probing animistic sensitivity, in a manner that

bodies forth ideas similar to those on creativity that we develop more explicitly in this work than has

been advanced by any of these writers.

12


13/37

THE OSHUN FOREST: COMPLEMENTARY SPACES CREATED BY

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN FOREST AND SCULPTURAL FORMS15

15This map from Ulli Beiers The Return of the Gods: the Sacred ArtofSusanne Wenger(London :Cambridge University Press, 1975) suggests how Wenger and her collaborators have tried to achieve,

in the symbiosis of formal relations shared by the forest and the sculptures, through the manner in

which they are sited within the natural space, a conception of spatial and sculptural relationships that

is illuminated through its parallels with Phyllida Barlows evocative description of a central interest

of her work current research focuses on sculpture, its processes of production and how and where

it is located. Space is as much a material as the sculpture itself and a sculpture is as much an

intervention as it is an object.www.ucl/slade/staff1.html.13/11/04.

13


14/37

This conception of interpretive processes implies a vitalistic ontology in which active agency is

perceived as inclusive of non-organic, non-mammalian forms, and a participatory epistemology,

in which cognition consists in a mutuality of relationship between the knower and the known.

This foregrounds illuminating possibilities of enquiry in relation to the accounts of the creative

processes that inspired the interventions in the Oshun Forest by Susan Wenger in Nigeria and by

Katherine Maltwood in the Glastonbury landscape in England.16

Creative Dynamics in the Artistic Processes of Wenger and Maltwood

The conception of cocreative agency is particularly appropriate for understanding the imaginative

processes that emerge through the manner in which Wenger and Maltwood develop their

responses to the landscapes they develop. With reference to the manner in which they both work,

their methods suggest a mode of working in which there emerges an interactive transaction

between intersubjective realities, subjective realities and the forms of the physical world. Wenger

describes her creative processes as inspired by her responses to the landscapes on which she

works. She depicts herself as acclimatising herself to the physical space through sleeping at the

place as well as meditating there. Through these processes of tactile and mental engagement,

ideas begin to form in her head as to the sculptures she eventually erects on those sites with the

aid of her assistants. At the same time, however, her sculptures are expressions of her own

16The philosopher of religion, Rudolf Otto, in The Idea of the Holy: an Inquiry into the NonRational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, tr. John Harvey (London:

Oxford UP,1958), the spatial phenomenologist, Adrian Ivakiv, in Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims

and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona (Indiana UP, 2001) and Christopher Tilley in The

Phenomenology of Landscape ( Oxford: Berg,1994),the philosophers of landscape Paul Deveroux, in

The Sacred Place: The Ancient Origin of Holy and Mystical Sites (London:Cassell,2000), and Niggel

Pennick, in The Ancient Science of Geomancy: Man in Harmony with the Earth (London: Thames and

Hudson,1979),the philosopher of divination, Geoffrey Cornelius, in The Moment ofAstrology:

Origins in Divination (Bournemouth: The Wessex Astrologer,2003), and the fantasy writer Marion

Zimmer Bradley, in The Heritage of Hastur( New York: Daw Books,2002), a central aspect of whichcentres on relationships between human consciousness and sacred objects, could be said to develop

explorations which foreground the mutuality of subject and object within an existential and

phenomenological matrix, and with Bradley, a deeply probing animistic sensitivity, in a manner that

bodies forth ideas similar to those on creativity that we develop more explicitly in this work than has

been advanced by any of these writers.

14


15/37

conceptions of the mythic forms traditional to the cosmology of the Yoruba, where the Oshun

Forest, where Wenger works, is to be found. Her sculptures, therefore, represent expressions of

Wengers own encounters with the landscape, as mediated and transmuted through her creative

assimilation of the cosmology traditional to the physical locations where she works. In her work,

therefore, we observe a synergistic relationship between the physical forms represented by the

landscape constituted by the Oshun Forest, the mental world constituted by her own ideas, which

continue to grow as an Austrian intellectual and artist, well grounded in processes and ideas

related to comparative spirituality and art,and the conceptions she has assimilated through her

interactions with the cosmology of the traditional Yoruba as mediated through her relationships

with the people she interacts with in the more than forty years she has spent as Osogbo.1718

17She describes and reflects on her creative processes in detail in Ulli Beier,The Return of the Gods: the Sacred ArtofSusanne Wenger(London: Cambridge University Press, 1975).The affective and visceral dimension of this process issuggested by the evocation of the transmutation of myth into sculptural form through the interpretation of the

numinousity of the forest in through the forms related to myth, as in the sculptural representation of the Yoruba orisha,Ela(Fig.16.) depicted in Jide Osikomaiya Susanne Wenger:A Potent Priestess Who Rebuilds Profane Shrinesin

Heritage:TheAfrican Quaterly of Arts and Letters(1982),p.59.The sense of the Other that characterizes the encounter

with the numinous,realised, in this case through the remoteness from the human world and yet elevation of spiritinspired by the atmosphere of the forest , could be seen as transmuted into a figure, that in the massiveness of its formand anguished upward thrust of its shape against the backdrop of the sky, its suggestive expanse accentuated by the

disruptive presence of the figures frenzied hands, evokes the paradoxical conflation of heightened sensitivity to thelimitations of self and, yet, of elevation of being, that is characteristic of the numinous encounter as described by Otto

and in relation to the Sublime, by Kant. The sense of mystery associated with Ela in terms of the paradoxicalconjoining of the proximity and otherness of the divine, reverberates in the earthiness of creative power evoked by the

erect penis and the large and powerful feet(not shown here)and the sense of anguish or/and frenzied supplicationsuggested by the manner in which the entire figure strains towards the sky, in a movement centred in the hands that

seem to either implore or agonise, suggestive, from one perspective, of an anguished effort to negotiate between cosmicrealms of meaning, hoped for but unrealised, evoked by the impersonal expanse of the sky, and unyielding terrestrial

realities, projected by the earth on which the figure is inescapably rooted by the massive feet. Correlative images recur,in relation to this work, of the human cry for the restoration of a violated sense of justice, in the midst of human madeor natural catastrophe, as realized, for example, in the statement by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams,on the tsunami that destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives on the day after Christmas 2004, "How can you believe in

a God who permits suffering on this scale?.The traditional answers will get us only so far.http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/050102.html. 01/03/05, or the Jewish narrative, whichdramatises bewilderment at the presence of stark and colossal human evil in a world supposedly directed by anomnipotent and omniscient God, by depicting God as discovered by a rabbi in a corner of a synagogue, crying in

frustration at the intransigence of the human race, in George Steiner, The Death ofTragedy (London : Faber and Faber,

1990),or Soyinkas portrayal, in A Dance in the Forests(Oxford U.P, 1963), of a God figure as wrestling with theclash within himself, of the contradictory impulses of hope and a sense of futility, as he struggles to express throughhis mode of participation in the universe he created, his sense of his own purpose within the cosmic framework,

limited as he is by his implication in a universe in which human free will is a constitutive datum to act is to be guiltyof contradiction, but to remain altogether unfelt is to make my long rumoured ineffectuality complete.18

15
http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/050102.htmlhttp://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/050102.html


16/37

THE OSHUN FOREST: THE TORTOISE GATE19

19The ecstatically curved shape of the tortoise gate entrance to the Oshun shrine complex from Susanne Wenger and

Gert Chesi,ALife with the Gods in their Yoruba HomelandBrixentallerStrasse:Perlinger Verlag,1983).Evocations of

the paradoxical conjoining of solidity and spatial elevation unite in the creation of aerodynamic form out of cementand mud, framing the entry into the density of the forest beyond, to suggest what Beier,in Return of the Gods describes

as the transmutation of the sense of weightiness of shell and slowness of pace evoked by the figure of the tortoise,evocative of the heaviness, the weight of the world, the ridged carapace of the tortoise here transformed intoswirling lines that combine both the unyielding ridges in their design, formal density in the medium employed, as well,

paradoxically, as the sense of unimpeded movement rising to a climax in the apex of the sculpture in the head of the

tortoise, which rises into the sky, supported by, and projected through, but beyond the density of form represented byits body. it suggests a transmutation by the inspiration that emanates from the numinous aura of the forest, as one

penetrates into its chambers, experiencing a progressive distancing from the fetters of cognitive limitation thatcharacterise human existence in its accustomed element among fellow ignorant and harassed humans, into the

confrontation with those verities evoked by Toynbee in speaking of the need to undertake a periodic withdrawal fromthe business and pleasure of the moment in order to rediscover the fundamentals of existence so that, as Thoreau put it,in relation to his retreat at Walden pond, not to approach death realising that one has not truly lived.

16


17/37

Maltwoods work could also be seen as expressive of a similar interaction

between individual subjectivity, physical forms, space and intersubjective

worlds. This interactive process emerges from her interpretation of the landscape

of Glastonbury in terms of astrological and Arthurian motifs. . She does not

create sculptures, as Wenger does, but she also develops forms that she

interprets as representing mythic values realised through the landscape and as

actualised in terms of figures expressive of astrological forms20. The fact that the

interpretation of these figures requires an ingenious visual transmutation of

landscape formations, expressive of a generosity of imagination, implies that her

interpretations are fundamentally imaginative. At the same time, however, once

the imaginative and therefore, heuristic character of her figural interpretation of

landscape is established, the ingenuity of her interpretations becomes evident.

One is invited to contemplate and speculate upon the human minds integration

of the physical universe to its own perceptual capacities and dispositions. Again,

processes of interaction between physical forms, intersubjective and subjective

realities are foregrounded. These emerge from the questions inspired by

Maltwoods interpretations of landscape and the process through which she

arrives at these interpretations. She describes herself as tracing the route of King

Arthurs knights in their quest for the Grail as they traverse the Glastonbury

countryside. She then observed that these routes, when correlated on a map,

delineate, through the configurations of landscape, the signs of the Zodiac.

20 Maltwood describes the processes through which she arrives at these conceptions and analyses some of

the implications of her discovery in Katherine Maltwood,A Guide toGlastonburys Temple of the Stars

(Cambridge: James Clarke ,1964).

17


18/37

THE OSUN FOREST:THE FIGURE OF ELA21

21 Please see note 12.

18


19/37

19


20/37

Interestingly, in relation to questions of imaginative perception and interpretation, some of the

Zodiacal signs to which she attributes the landscape formations do not correspond to the

conventional Zodiacal images but to images which may be related, through association, with the

signs to which they are depicted as related in Maltwoods pictographic scheme22.

She has developed different conceptions of the origin and significance of these images.The

questions raised by these conceptions are highlighted by the fact that other Zodiacs have been

discovered in other parts of England, through processes different from those that that led to

Maltwoods serendipitous discovery. That implies, therefore, that the tracing of the routes of the

Arthurian knights that led to Maltwoods discovery represents only one approach through which

this discovery could have emerged.23

22 See notes 17 and 20 on the images representative of the sings of Aquarius and of Gemini.23The discovery of these other Zodiacs are described and some of their implications analysed by NiggelPennick, in The Ancient Science of Geomancy: Man in Harmony with the Earth (London: Thames and

Hudson,1979).Geoffrey Cornelius The Moment ofAstrology: Origins in Divination (Bournemouth: The

Wessex Astrologer,2003), draws on these and other examples of divinatory thought to develop his

conception of the essentially imaginative but no less valid significance of these and similar discoveries.

20


21/37

THE GLASTONBURY LANDSCAPE: ASTROLOGICAL VISUALISATIONS24

24 The mythic cartography of Glastonbury developed by Maltwood in terms of the configurations created byrelationships between natural and humanly constructed formations are visualized as creating astrological configurationsas depicted in Janet and Colin Bord, Mysterious Britain(Herts:Paladin,1972)p.222-3.The mind is invited to play with

landscape patterns in a manner that reveals unexpected visual harmonies and their complementary mythic values.The sense of creative play as realised through unexpected possibilities of visualization and of conceptualisation is

underscored by the fact that some of the correlations suggested between astrological images and landscape are realisethrough visual patterns different from traditional astrological images. This recreation of traditional imagery which has

to take place if the land zodiac motif is to demonstrate the necessary integrity of imagistic form may suggest that theessence of the exercise might not consist so much in an objective relationship between the astrological imagery and theforms of landscape but is expressive of the susceptibility of particular landscapes to inspiring the mental dilation thatemerges in the expansion the possibilities of conventional perception, both visual and cognitive, expressed in the

perception of imagistic patterns as formed by landscapes. Thus, the sign of Aquarius is formed not by the traditionalimage of the water bearer but by a shape, the flowing forms of which are suggestive of a phoenix, evocative of theregeneration of spirit associated with the sign of Aquarius, and Taurus, by the traditional image of the bull, the horn ofwhich can be seen to jut out forward from a bull shaped head. These forms are understood not simply as static shapes,

but as dramatising a scenario, a narrative that suggests correlations between the underlying and overarching meaningsof Arthurian narrative and imagery and those of the Zodiac.

21


22/37

Questions that Emerge in Relation to the Hermeneutics of Landscape

In speaking of the hermeneutics of landscape we draw inspiration from Heideggers conception

of hermeneutics as a discipline which explores the principles that guide the interpretation of

phenomena, a central aspect of these phenomena being the manner in which the construction of

the human self, in relation to the concrete existence of human beings as- embodied creatures

whose being is fundamentally influenced by their encapsulation in space and time and the manner

in which the investigation of human being, in relation to this framework, could illuminate the

character of being in general25.

Along these lines, in which human response to phenomena is perceived as pointing to an

understanding capable of illuminating the character, not only of human being, but of being in

general, we foreground the questions provoked by the work of Wenger and Maltwood in terms of

its relevance for an understanding of the human relationship with spatial forms, as sources for

provoking questions, and possibly, inspiring understanding not only about human being and its

relationship with other aspects of the universe, with a focus of cognitive functioning in relation to

the development of ideas and the relationship of this to questions of levels of agency in human

relationship with ideas in general and with spatial forms and the ideas this inspires.

Certain questions emerge in relation to our correlation of these interpretations of, and

interventions, in, landscape. Why have these particular landscapes attracted such consistent

veneration across the centuries? Do they demonstrate any qualities inherent to themselves or are

people responding to the pull of ideas and attitudes accumulated over the centuries by other

people, a kind of response to the magnetism generated by other peoples perceptions? Or is it a

combination of both, in which the endogenous, numinous qualities of landscape are perceived at a

point in time and this perception is replicated on account of the consistent attention drawn to

25 These conceptions are developed in his Being and Time, trans. JohnMacquarrie &Edward Robinson

(Oxford : Blackwell, 1962).

22


23/37

these places and confirmed and reaffirmed by independent encounters with these landscapes?

What about the figural forms created in association with these landscapes as expressions of the

mythic values they are perceived as embodying? To what degree are these values as well as their

associated figures dependent on the mythic conceptualizations and images that observers bring

with them to their encounters with these landscapes? Could other observers respond with other

conceptualizations, other images and figures that are in consonance with their own

Weltansschaung, to their own conceptions and imagistic worlds?

When one relates these questions, emerging as they do from the interventions of Wenger and

Maltwood in the landscapes of the Oshun Forest and Glastonbury, respectively, to other examples

in different parts of the world, in which particular landscapes continue to exercise an enduring

fascination across the centuries, even when the contemporary audience have no access to the

world views that inspired the earlier responses to these landscapes, these questions assume a

shaper urgency and their relevance to the human effort to interpret the cosmos is thrown into

sharper relief and focus26.

Metaphorical Modelling of Creative Processes

The various approaches possible to the questions we pose here can be represented by the

epistemic implications of metaphors of the creative process that emblematize various conceptions

of creativity in terms of the ideational significance of imagistic forms. These metaphors and their

associated ideational values include Classical conceptions of creativity which depict the human

mind as reflective of nature, whether understood in transcendental or in concrete terms, Romantic

formulations, as developed by Coleridge, of the mind as a lamp that illuminates the subject,

26Avebury and Glastonbury in England represent key examples of landscapes that continue to inspirepeople,but in relation to which the contemporary audience have no access to the world views that

embodied and inspired the responses to these geographical forms developed in those eras when these

landscapes received their characteristic formation by humans.

23


24/37

thereby evoking the latters latent possibilities, Poststructuralist ideas, which understand the

relationship between the mind and the subject it addresses, as well as the ideas it develops about

this subject, in terms of a circle of interactivity or of paradox, and what we describe as a

divinatory conception, in which the mind and its subject and the conceptions this inspires, are

understood as mutually constitutive agents in the creative process, symbolized by Wenger in

terms of the interrelationship of spatial and concrete form embodied by the mutually constitutive

character of the inner form of a pot represented by the space inside it, and the outer form,

embodied by its external, concrete form. These interrelationships are depicted as suggestive of

the inter-ontological character of the creative mind and the subjects to which it addresses itself, as

represented by both the primary referent and the ideas and forms which these inspire.27.

27 MH Abrams The Mirror and the Lamp:Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London:Oxford UP1971), examines in detail the development and epistemic implications of the Classical and

Romantic/ Coleridgean positions, while Hans George Gadamers conception of interpretation in termsof a hermeneutic circle in Truth and Method (London: Sheed and Ward, 1979), represents the

understanding of interpretation as a revisionary, incremental dialectic, and Jacques Derridas

deployment of the image of the circle in Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human

Sciences in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends ed. David Richter (New

York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), embodies the understanding of interpretation in terms of paradoxes

that evoke both the limitations that constitute the interpretive parameters of forms as well as the

ultimate impossibility of delimiting the interpretive possibilities of a referent.

24


25/37

THE GLASTONBURY LANDSCAPE: ASTROLOGICAL VISUALISATIONS:

AQUARIUS28

28The sense of a spiral flow suggested by the twisting formation of this stretch of landscape pictured in Janet and Colin

Bord, Mysterious Britain(Herts:Paladin,1972)p.224, evokes the sense of movement associated by Maltwood with theregenerative spiritual change associated with Aquarius and with the death and rebirth associations aligned with the

figure of the phoenix image and idea are correlated in terms of levels of ideational and imagistic association eventhough this requires a deviation from traditional astrological symbolism of Aquarius as a figure pouring out water froma jug, representative of rejuvenation that emerges from the life giving liquid.

25


26/37

The Creative Persona as a Convergence of Shaped and Shaping

The conceptions we are developing about the cocreative relationship between ideas and those

who develop and apply them can be visualised in terms of Wengers characterisation of the

Yoruba Orisa or deity Iya Mopo, who, according to Wenger, is both pot and potter. As pot

she is created, as potter,she creates. She could be understood as the form that is shaped around

empty space as well as the empty space that the form embodies. In Wengers words, the

representation of the visual and philosophical significance realised through the shaping of form

out of pre-existent space.

The dialectical relationship between the form and the space it encloses, and which is as vital to its

constitution as the concrete material out of which the pot is constructed, crystallises our ideas

about the cocreative relationship between ideas and those who develop and apply them. This

relationship emerges from the paradoxical significance of the significance of space within the

constitution of the pot. Space is empty, yet, on account of its emptiness it can help to give shape

to form. Its emptiness is therefore potent. Without the emptiness that is partially constitutive of

the form, around which the concreteness of the form is shaped, the pot would not achieve its

aesthetic and functional realization as a pot29.

Between the seeming inertness of the space within the pot, a space that constitutes the functional

centre of the pot, and the concrete form through which that space is defined, there exists an

interactive, reciprocal and dialectical relationship. In a similar but more dynamic sense, ideas, as

the essence of imaginative activity, are abstractions, empty of concrete form and yet, they

29This interpretation of her ideas, and, possibly, the ideational matrix that informed Wengers

development of these conceptions, as suggested by her allusions to his works in Susanne Wengerand

Gert Chesi, A Life with the Gods in their Yoruba Homeland (Brixentaller Strasse:Perlinger

Verlag,1983) and in Rolf Bruckman and Gerd Hotter, Adunni:A Portrait of Susanne Wenger

(Munchen:Trickster Verag,1994), is informed byLao Tzus exploration of the paradoxical but fruitful

relationship between emptiness of form and functional value in the Tao te Ching, trans. D.C. Law

(Penguin: Harmondsworth,1963).

26


27/37

constitute the centre, the space of inspirational potentiality, capable of motivating the creative

person as they will his or her audience when they have been realised through the agency of the

artists chosen medium. Though empty of concrete form, they represent the nucleus, the ground,

in terms of which, and in relation to, and through which, form is structured.

The interpretation we develop in this work of the role of the Odu in the process of Ifa divination

implies an epistemology in which the Odu constitute forms of knowledge, as that concept is

developed by Hirst to represent the categories through which knowledge is developed and

organised, and which we expand to integrate a conception in which these forms demonstrate an

inner dynamism and motive force, and, are, thereby, capable of inspiring a synergistic

relationship with human consciousness.30 This conception facilitates an understanding of the

paradoxical relationship between creative ideas and the mind that conceives them, in which ideas

could be developed through a range of processes, where a dialectical relationship often develops

between the ideas that are conceived by the mind or emerge in consciousness, not all of which

emerge under the complete control of the individual who is developing them, and the volitional

30Paul Hirst, Knowledge and the Curriculum (London: Routledge,1974).His ideas seem to be an

adaptation of Platos theory of forms in terms of a visceral relationship between the mind and the

categories through which knowledge has been organised in Western culture. He interprets these

categories as fundamental organizing matrices of the mind, within a context determined fundamentally

by Western epistemology in its dominant post-Enlightenment form. He does not seem to be sensitive

to the relativity of his assessment of the significance of these forms for an interpretation of mental

formation in relation to a global comparative study of educational practices across time.

27


28/37

THE GLASTONBURY LANDSCAPE: ASTROLOGICAL VISUALISATIONS:

GEMINI31

31The sign of Gemini visualised in terms of the image of the giant of the Orion nebula from Niggel Pennick, The

Ancient Science of Geomancy: Man in Harmony with the Earth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979). I am not

informed about ideational and imagistic correlations between ideas associated with Gemini and the image of and

legends associated with the giant as in the other anomalous image correlation of the phoenix with the sign of Aquarius.These discrepancies could be seen not so much as an effort to force landscape formations into astrological images andthose associated with the constellations but an understanding of these style of perception as one that deploys/is inspired

by landscape, in a manner that suggests the imaginative encounter with the landscape becomes catalytic for the mindsown fertilisations, inspiring points of contact between its own content and the possibilities of interpretation

represented by special forms. This interpretation provokes certain questions relevant to the perceptual processesinvolved. These include the questions as to what degree one needs to have certain images in ones visual vocabulary in

order to recognise or construe similar shapes in landscape? To what degree are these recognitions of the impersonalityof space assuming forms that accord with human image making? The epistemic reach of these questions is expanded

when we ask to what degree are the signs of the Zodiac cultural constructs and to what degree do they reproduce

(which they do not do) the patterns formed by the stellar constellations?

28


29/37

29


30/37

capabilities and initiatives of the creative mind. In fact, a central aspect of creativity consists in

the freedom the mind demonstrates in generating ideas through a process that is outside the

complete control of the conscious mind, an independence that enables its efforts to transcend the

limitations of the conscious mind.

The poets Rilke, Rimbaud and Milton, among others, testify to experiences in which the

development of creative ideas is understood more as a gift, as a transaction with autonomous or

semiautonomous entities than as the emergence of fully conscious and completely deliberate

creations of the individual mind. Rimbaud pictures his creative processes from the perspective of

a participant observer I am present the birth of my thought, I look and I listen while Milton and

Dante depict their inspiration in terms of a divine afflatus. Hearkening back to classical ideas of

divine inspiration by the Muses and Apollo as well as to the Christian world view of their own

times, to inspiration by the Holy Spirit of God, Milton sums up this conception emphatically in

stating that the great poem he projected, eventually emerging as Paradise Lost, could not be

brought into being through the invocation of Dame Memory and Her Siren Daughters but by

devout prayer to that Spirit who enlightens whom he pleases and in the opening invocation of

Paradise Lost, Milton calls to the Spirit, who from the beginning was present [and who]dove-

like, sat brooding upon the vast abyss and made it pregnant an allusion to the account of creation

in the book of Genesis in which creation opens with the spirit of God brooding over the

primordial, unshaped form that constituted the building blocks of primal existence. Dante

continually invokes the Muses, and eventually, in the climax of his epic in Paradiso, he calls upon

Apollo in this crowning test, let me be the conduit that thy power runs through and in the last

canto calls on God to refresh in his memory

30


31/37

THE GLASTONBURY LANDSCAPE: THE TOR AND THE

TOWER AS NUMINOUS SPACE32

32The changing face of the Tor and its crowning tower, at different times of day, from SallyGriffin, Sacred

Journeys(London:Kylie Cathie,2000)pp.136-7, suggest those visual and atmospheric qualities, suggestive of a sense of

concealed and yet evocative meanings, that enable it to compel a continual fascination., qualities that may be better

appreciated when juxtaposed with Hardys great picture of Egdon Heath: The place became full of a watchful intentness

now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listenEvery night its Titanicform seemed to await something it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries.. To recline on a stump of thorn

in the central valley of Egdon, between afternoon and night, as now, where the eye could reach nothing of the world outside

the summits and shoulders of heathland which filled the whole circumference of its glance, and to know that everything

around and underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on

change, and harassed by the irrepressible New. The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot

claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a

day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.

http://www.mastertexts.com/index.php?PageName=ChapterDetails&TitleID=757&VolumeNo=1&ChapterNo=1 8/01/04 The Return

of the Nativeby Thomas Hardy.

31
http://www.mastertexts.com/index.php?PageName=ChapterDetails&TitleID=757&VolumeNo=1&ChapterNo=1http://www.mastertexts.com/index.php?PageName=ChapterDetails&TitleID=757&VolumeNo=1&ChapterNo=1


32/37

the recollection of his encounter with the transcendent realm he has visited. Rilke is described as

depicting his Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus interms of Waiting, working and hoping, for

the miracle of Duino[where the elegies were dictated to him by his Muse ]to recur.33

Conclusion

Just as the spacewithin the pot is central to the character of the pot, suggesting, thereby, a mode

of being, an ontology, in which the constitution of space is both dynamic as well as inert, active

as well as passive, evoking ideas that relate to the conceptions pf cocreative agency we are

developing. The question of relationships between formal and spatial elements as suggestive of

relationships between ideas and the creative individual is suggested by the question of which is

primary in time and value, the hole or the pot that the hole encloses? Would the space enclosed

by the pot not exist if it had not been delineated and therefore defined from impersonal space by

the shaping effect of the concrete from of the pot? Without the configuring effect of the pots

concrete form, would the space the pot encloses not exist? What happens to that space when the

pot is broken and its constitutive concrete structure deconstructed?

In relation to the conception we develop here about ideas as cocreatrive with consciousness,

symbolised by the conception of space as both dynamic and inert, passive as well as active, the

space constituted by the Oshun Forest and the Glastonbury landscape seem to work upon the

sensibilities of the imaginative workers we are studying as well as represent the phenomena on

which they work. While we make an effort to indicate a definitive conception of relationships

between ideas and mind, we note, however, that such a definitive conception is to some degree

heuristic, because we are attempting to peer into regions of mental working that defy definitive

33 Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works, trans. Paul Schmidt ( London : Harper & Row,

1976);Rilke,Rainer Marie ,in Encyclopaedia Britannica,1971);John Milton,Paradise Lost (New

York : Doubleday, 1974); Dante Aligieri, The Divine Comedy( London : Penguin, 1962).

32


33/37

categorisation and analysis. In the light of the provisional character of our conclusion here, we

are compelled to acknowledge not only the persistence of the paradox embodied by the question

of the temporal and functional priority of the pot and the hole it encloses, but to assert that that

paradox is relevant primarily as a means of stimulating thought through the sensitivity to

mysteries of cognition and of being that it dramatises, rather than as a puzzle the challenge of

which is to be negated by the provision of a definitive response.

33


34/37

REFERENCES

1. Ulli Beier,The Return of the Gods: the Sacred ArtofSusanne Wenger(London : Cambridge

University Press, 1975).

2. Susanne Wenger and Gert Chesi, A Life with the Gods in their Yoruba Homeland

(BrixentallerStrasse:Perlinger Verlag,1983)

3. Susanne Wenger, The Timeless Mind of the Sacred : itsNew Manifestation in the Osun

Groves (Ibadan : Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 1977).

4. Rolf Bruckman and Gerd Hotter,Adunni:A Portrait of Susanne Wenger(Munchen:Trickster

Verag,1994).

5. Katherine Matwood, A Guide to Glastonburys Temple of the Stars (Cambridge: James

Clarke, 1964).

6. Mary Caine; The Glastonbury Zodiac: Key to the Mysteries of Britain (Grael

Communications,1978).

7. Paul Hirst,Knowledge and the Curriculum(London: Routledge,1974).

8. Vincent van Gogh, The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh: With Reproductions of All

the Drawings in the Correspondence (London: Thames and Hudson,1959).

9. Sean Smith,J. K. Rowling A Biography(London:Michael O'Mara Books,1999).

10. Armstrong, Karen, The Spiral Staircase (London: Harper, 2004).

34


35/37

11. J.P.McEvoy and Oscar Zarate,Introducing Stephen Hawking(Cambridge:Grange,1999).

12. Wande Abimbola,An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus (Ibadan:OxfordUP,1976).

13. Wande Abimbola,Ifa Divination Poetry (New York : NOK :1977).

14. Angulu Onwuejeogwu,Afa Symbolism andPhenomenology in Nri Kingdom and Hegemony:

An African Philosophy of SocialAction(Benin:Ethiope,1997).

15. Henry Luis Gates Jrs, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary

Criticism(Oxford: Oxford UP,1988),

16. Rudolf Otto,The Idea of the Holy: an Inquiry into the NonRational Factor in the Idea of

the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, tr. John Harvey (London: Oxford UP,1958).

17. Adrian Ivakiv,Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrimsand Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona

(Indiana UP, 2001)

18. Christopher Tilley,ThePhenomenology of Landscape ( Oxford: Berg,1994).

19. Paul Deveroux, in The Sacred Place: The Ancient Origin of Holy and Mystical Sites

(London:Cassell,2000).

20. Jide Osikomaiya, Susanne Wenger:A Potent Priestess Who Rebuilds Profane Shrinesin

Heritage:The African Qauaterly of Arts and Letters(1982).

21. http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/050102.html . 01/03/05.

22. George Steiner,The Death ofTragedy (London : Faber and Faber, 1990).

23. Wole Soyinka,A Dance in the Forests(Oxford U.P, 1963).

35
http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/050102.htmlhttp://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/050102.htmlhttp://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/050102.html


36/37

24.Niggel Pennick, The Ancient Science of Geomancy: Man in Harmony with the Earth

(London: Thames and Hudson,1979).

25. Geoffrey Cornelius, The Moment ofAstrology: Origins in Divination (Bournemouth: The

Wessex Astrologer,2003).

26. Janet and Colin Bord,Mysterious Britain(Herts:Paladin,1972).

27. Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Heritage of Hastur( New York: Daw Books,2002).

28. Phylida Barlow,www.ucl/slade/staff1.html.13/11/04.

29. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (ed)Stephen Fender. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1997).

30.Niggel Pennick, in The Ancient Science of Geomancy: Man in Harmony with the Earth

(London: Thames and Hudson,1979).

31. Geoffrey Cornelius, The Moment ofAstrology: Origins in Divination (Bournemouth: The

Wessex Astrologer,2003).

32. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. JohnMacquarrie and Edward Robinson(Oxford :

Blackwell, 1962).

33. MH Abrams The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition

(London: Oxford UP1971).

34. Hans George Gadamer,Truth and Method ( London : Sheed and Ward, 1979).

36


37/37

35. Jacques Derrida,Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences in The

Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends ed. David Richter (New York:

St. Martin's Press, 1997).

36. Lao Tzu,Tao te Ching, trans.D.C.Lau(Hong Kong:Chinese University Press,1982).

37. John Mathews,The Grail: Quest for Eternal Life (London:Thames and Hudson,1981).

38. SallyGriffin,Sacred Journeys(London:Kylie Cathie,2000).

39. http://www.mastertexts.com/index.php?PageName=ChapterDetails&TitleID=757&Volume

No=1&ChapterNo=1 8/01/04 The Return of the Nativeby Thomas Hardy.

40. Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works, trans. Paul Schmidt ( London : Harper & Row, 1976).

41. Rilke,Rainer Marie ,in Encyclopaedia Britannica ,1971).

42. John Milton,Paradise Lost(New York : Doubleday, 1974).

43. Dante Aligieri, The Divine Comedy( London : Penguin, 1962).
http://www.mastertexts.com/index.php?PageName=ChapterDetails&TitleID=757&VolumeNo=1&ChapterNo=1http://www.mastertexts.com/index.php?PageName=ChapterDetails&TitleID=757&VolumeNo=1&ChapterNo=1http://www.mastertexts.com/index.php?PageName=ChapterDetails&TitleID=757&VolumeNo=1&ChapterNo=1http://www.mastertexts.com/index.php?PageName=ChapterDetails&TitleID=757&VolumeNo=1&ChapterNo=1http://www.mastertexts.com/index.php?PageName=ChapterDetails&TitleID=757&VolumeNo=1&ChapterNo=1

which comes first,the hole or the pot?: conceptions of cocreativity between idea and mind in the...

Documents