Letisa: I am developing an argument on a number of fronts. I am working in relation to ideas of embodiment in relation to knowing as well as ideas about how Western thought has developed from the military culture of ancient Rome.
Toyin: Does is this notion of embodiment in relation to cognitive process gain from a specifically female inspirational base?
Letisa: I’m still working on that but my argument is for the notion that the act of knowing proceeds along a number of correlative lines, which include the sensory and the mental, that, in fact, the mind could be understood as located all over the body not only in the head since our sensory apparatus operates all over our bodies and are simply routed to their centres in the head.
Toyin: That makes sense. How do you intend to develop that into a cognitive procedure?
Letisa: That’s the challenge. The central challenge I face here is that the inspirational spring of my ideas derives from the fact that a lot of my ideas emerge from non-ratiocinative sources, of which the forms of bodily knowing are central.
Toyin: Could you please go to the point you were making about the military origin of modern Western discursive forms?
Letisa: I was refrying to its argumentative structure. Why must a question be examined, a point established, through the marshalling up of squads of points in favour of that point, arrayed in opposition to contrastive ideas? Why must the development of ideas and the examination of issues always resemble a conflict between combatants, the opposing side being the ideas not certified by the writer and the other side represented by the ideas they credit. Or even if this position does not emerge from the beginning, it emerges as the text progresses, so that there always exists or is developed a structure of opposition, between two groups of ideas.
Toyin: But is that not to be taken for granted ih the development of a perspective on a topic? Does one not need to examine contrastive ideas and arrive at those that are more valid? All ideas can not be equally valid.
Letisa: Noted. But I am not pleading for an uncritical embrace of all ideas available in relation to a question. All I am suggesting d that I seem to observe in the fundamental structure of investigation in scholarship the notion of a Manichean/oppositional duality, in which either/or propositions determine the structure of thought.
Toyin: You think such dualities are inadequate for knowledge?
Letisa: Yes. Because reality is often multiplex, kaleidoscopic, even fragmentary. To what degree can we isolate one phenomenon from another? Don’t many phenomena, particularly those relating to issues of value, infiltrate each other? I find myself using a military metaphor here, but I think you get my point.
Toyin: Can you suggest a style of investigation that would take advantage of the interdependence you are describing?
Letisa: I am still developing it. I am thinking of something like a navigational form of thought, where the purpose is to navigate our way in relation to as broad a range as possible of the possibilities of perception in relation to a subject. I am thinking of
Toyin: I seem to recall descriptions of essays by the French writer Michel de Montainge along those lines.
Letisa: Perhaps. But such styles of thought have not gained centrality in Western academe. The ethos of the warrior, who is certainly marshalling opposing forces against each other and of the hunter who operates in terms of an adversarial relationship with the Other represented by the animals he preys on, dominates scholarship, where this is conducted in terms of opposition between ideas and discourse is more often than not argumentative, with the qualities of mental combat embodying martial values.
Toyin: Intriguing. How do you arrive at conclusions? Do you stumble upon them or do you defer them endlessly?
Letisa: I know you are making fun of me but even those suggestions might not be as ridiculous as they sound.
Toyin: So, do we swim forever in a soup of inconclusion or do we arrive at any shore as we navigate the possibilities of an ideas or subject?
Letisa: Certainly. To postulate a permanent nondecision, nonjudgement would be irresponsible. That would be an excess of relativistic thinking. I am suggesting, as I still develop these ideas, a movement towards resolution with a tacit understanding that every resolution demonstrates some degree of the provisional and the specificity with which we circumscribe perspectives facilitates a bracketing out of ancillary but relevant aspects of those perspectives which we have relegated either to the background or to non-existence in our cognitive worlds.
Toyin: This reminds of a way you described this idea the other day-as a style of thinking the mobility of which dramatises a deferral of judgement in the name of a cognitive “synaesthesia” that enables/facilitates a perception of the subject matter from a variety of perspectives, even contradictory perspectives….
Letisa: Yes…leading to the possibility of convergence, or, even if not of convergence, of mutual tension, in which the absence of an ultimate coherence is itself an understanding that suggests possibilities of holding possibilities, understandings in a creative tension….
Toyin: You think, then, that such a tentative style of interpreting phenomena might be more in harmony with the paradoxical realities of existence than the notion of certainty, of linear coherence, even of dialectical balance that is /currently privileged in conceptions of the effort to arrive at meaning….
Letisa: My thinking is moving in that direction.
Toyin: You would seem, then, to be thinking in terms of an understanding of the search for knowledge more in terms of a quest for meaning, for structures, patterns, processes of understanding through which can be enriched, even if the ultimate truth value of the understanding arrived at, of the processes developed, may not be fully ascertained, are understood as to a degree, in flux
Letisa: But then, this does not imply, however, an absolute relativity. Absolute relativity, endless cognitive flux, could be more productive of a destructive anarchy, a breakdown in standpoints of collective responsibility than a liberating prospect
Toyin: How do you hope to escape from an absolute relativistic position?
Letisa: By treating conclusions, where necessary, as tentative in the ongoing project represented by the exploration realized through cognitive navigation. The sensitivity to the plural possibilities inherent a phenomenon or an issue or idea highlights the tension between the quest to know, to push back and even reshape boundaries that necessarily characterise a rethinking of our cognitive horizon, our epistemic envelopes, in contrast to the need to conserve, consolidate and apply what we gain in the process in contrast with, in tension with the renewed impetus to continue that quest, which continues beyond the bounds of what we can perceive at any point in time, as Dion Fortune puts it, may even take us out of space and time, “beyond the skyline, where the strange roads go down”.
Toyin: You mention Fortune. That is intriguing. How does she come here and how did you start on the development of these ideas?
Letisa: It began in relation to my experience of ways of knowing that could not be accounted for by prevailing paradigms. And by my efforts as a woman, to find new ways of thinking that would transcend or even avoid the limitations of the patriarchal thinking that I have often come across. Feminist thinkers often recognise such patriarchal thinking but do not often realise its origin in martial structures and even use the same critical tools while debunking its fruits. I want to go to the very source, to the very girders that hold it up, to the underlying skeleton, as it were, of this style of thinking.
Toyin: Please elaborate.
Letisa: I realised that I could know things through my skin, and not simply by touch. I could intuit people’s mental sates without talking to them. How could I explore such forms of knowledge without descending to superstitious thinking and demands for acceptance for my claims without empirical proof? I realised that the key would be to examine the question of ways of knowing and develop an approach from that point that would be inclusive of my own experience.
Toyin: And your encounter with patriarchal thinking?
Letisa: I kept coming up against both circumscriptions of reality that were demeaning of both women and the men and women who perpetuated them as well as accounts of alternative styles of thinking.
Toyin: Amazing how our experiences correlate. I was also challenged by my experience of unusual ways of knowing. That is what has led me into investigating traditional Yoruba and Benin thought for both explanatory models and ways opf developing this cognitive mode further.
Letisa: Could you explain?
Toyin: Under the influence of the English Hermetic thinker and occultist Dion Fortune explored the notion that there exist various forms of mind and not resent the individual mind. One could speak of the combined influence generated by the mental orientation of a group over along period of time. One could also speak of the mind of nature. She claimed that both conceptions of mind are vital to a recovery of the vitality of religious cultures where these have been disrupted, distorted or even erased by persecution, as in the case of pre-Christian thought in Britain. I realised the parallel with Africa which has suffered similar efforts at re-inscription by Christianity and I went to wok to apply these ideas to the Ifa divinatory system developed by the Yoruba of Nigeria and to nature spirituality in Benin, in relation to similar practices in other parts of Nigeria.
Letisa: Then what happened?
Toyin: My experiences raised questions of interfaces between forms of being, between human consciousness and the ideas with which human beings work, between human beings and natural forms.
Letisa: What were these experiences?
Toyin: Experiences that suggested a participation in the community constituted by the Ifa tradition understood as uncircumscribed by space or perhaps time, the manifestation of a sense of presence that began to emerge when I thought about my plans of developing Ifa in terms of a system of literary criticism, the sudden emergence of an insight into the possibility of realizing this that emerged when I was working on an entirely different subject- South Afro can anti-apartheid poetry, and the persistence of such experiences in relation to my efforts in developing the cognitive potential of the system in terns that could be appreciated in relation to contemporary thought.
Letisa: What did all these suggest to you?
Toyin: I began to ask myself what the sources of my inspirations were. Did it justify Fortune’s notion that groups constituted a group mind, the energies of which could be reached by others outside the group? Or my Ifa teacher’s idea that the Ifa system was empowered by the Odu, which are both categories of organisation similar to chapters of a text, in this case an oral text, as well as sentient entities and that their nature as nonhuman forms which the human being could reach implied that they are adaptable to various cultural and linguistic backgrounds?
Letisa: Where does the nature spirituality stuff come in?
Toyin: That was particularly striking and relates again to the question of cultural appropriation by people who are not, racially or by previous empathic affiliation, part of that culture. I spent time exploring Fortune’s ideas about the mind of nature by contemplating trees, spending time in contemplative silence in woodland and forest.
Letisa: Did that have any effect on you?
Toyin: Yes. Gradually, I began to observe a difference between various kinds of tees that was not reducible to a purely material difference, to differences in purely material biology.
Letisa: Non-material biology then?
Toyin: Perhaps one can put it that way. I began to observe that the sacred trees in Benin City where I lived, the trees used for ritual, seemed to have an aura, an immaterial field around them which I also saw on some trees in the woodland and forest. Most of them were either trees accorded special status in the traditional religion even though they were not actively used in religious or other similar purposes and others which might not have been seen as having any religious value but still demonstrated that sense of an unusual aura. What I found particularly striking was that my intuitive vision was confirmed by people in the localities where I sighted these trees. I could literally tell a tree that had a sacred function in a locality simply by looking at it. I did not have to have been thee before or known anything about the specific tree or of its species. I could tell that identity by observing what seemed to me like an aura around it.
Letisa: So, it would seem, then, that you shared an intersubjective space with the people who identified those tress as sacred, even though you did not have access to their cultural constructions
Toyin: That suggested to me that those cultural constructions were the development of biological properties in both the human being and nature.
Letisa: Meaning?
Toyin: That these trees and groves could be understood as possessing a quality that I could perceive on account of a sensitivity cultivated through contemplating such trees and others different from them repeatedly so that a sense of difference between them was gradually established for me.
Letisa: But, could you really say that you hardly had access to their cultural constructions? Had you not read books about similar aspects of African culture and read accounts of similar conceptions from other cultures?
Toyin : That’s true. I had read about African cultures along those lines. But I had not thought about my reading in Romantic and Symbolist thought along those lines.
Letisa: You could speak of sharing in a culture that was realized in particular cultural developments, in various geographical, spatial frameworks but a similarity of culture, nevertheless.
Toyin: Hmm…questions about cross-cultural transmission again emerge here. Following this trend of thought to its logical conclusion would imply that one could gain access to significant identification with a culture, through observing parallels between the target culture and other cultures and trying to embody what one has learnt in one’s own life.
Letisa: I would think so.
Toyin: Fortune makes a similar point about lighting your own dormant fire with fire from someone else’s hearth. Could biology be understood to play any role here, then? My notion that I was developing an latent capacity for sensitivity to biological properties of nature?
Letisa: I doubt if nature and culture, biology and human interpretations are so distinct. To what degree can we speak of the discontinuities between them? Perhaps we could speak of cultural propensities facilitating the sensitivity to biologically endogenous qualities? But how does this relate to Ifa, to interpretations of the female body in relation to witchcraft, which was what we started our discussion with?
Toyin: This zone of communication between different modes of being is understood in Yoruba and Bini traditions as the prerogative of Ifa and of witches. Ebohon, a Bini priest, describes some trees as witches, his ideas being expressive of a culture where humans are understood to be able to cultivate the ability to communicate with plants. The Ifa system is organised in terms of possibilities of dialogue between different modes of being and Ifa’s younger brother, as he is called, Osanying, the Orisha of herbalogy, since Ifa priests are also at times herbalists, represents the world of human relationship with plants. The sense of encounters with non-embodied presences, related to my studies of Ifa where I adapted techniques derived from Western hermetic ceremonial magic, Eastern and western meditation techniques and the related exporiences of inspiration also suggest correlations with ideas of transmission of ideas in terms of encounters, however these are understood, between various forms of being, whatever the ontological status we ascribe to the mythic forms with which I tried to relate and to the sense of non-embodied presence often associated with my experience of ifa.
Letisa: So it would seem, then, that we are both intrigued by experiences of and ideas relating to forms of knowing that are not ratiocinative and are not rational in the conventional sense.
Toyin: And which relate to relationships between embodiment in relation to knowledge and reflection in relation to knowing
Letisa: And to questions of the interface between the cultural and biological along these lines
Toyin: Interesting that we have both come upon the image of the witch in relation to such ideas.
Letisa: The witch as an embodiment of the reviling of women in pre-Renaissance Europe and of valorisation of the feminine in modern Western feminist spirituality.
Toyin: In Yoruba thought as the nexus for positive and negative conceptions of the feminine
Letisa: And in both cultures, the witch as embodying conceptions of physicality and its powers, whether negative, as in pre-modern Western conceptions or positive as in modern understandings, or both, as in traditional Yoruba thought.
Toyin: Does is this notion of embodiment in relation to cognitive process gain from a specifically female inspirational base?
Letisa: I’m still working on that but my argument is for the notion that the act of knowing proceeds along a number of correlative lines, which include the sensory and the mental, that, in fact, the mind could be understood as located all over the body not only in the head since our sensory apparatus operates all over our bodies and are simply routed to their centres in the head.
Toyin: That makes sense. How do you intend to develop that into a cognitive procedure?
Letisa: That’s the challenge. The central challenge I face here is that the inspirational spring of my ideas derives from the fact that a lot of my ideas emerge from non-ratiocinative sources, of which the forms of bodily knowing are central.
Toyin: Could you please go to the point you were making about the military origin of modern Western discursive forms?
Letisa: I was refrying to its argumentative structure. Why must a question be examined, a point established, through the marshalling up of squads of points in favour of that point, arrayed in opposition to contrastive ideas? Why must the development of ideas and the examination of issues always resemble a conflict between combatants, the opposing side being the ideas not certified by the writer and the other side represented by the ideas they credit. Or even if this position does not emerge from the beginning, it emerges as the text progresses, so that there always exists or is developed a structure of opposition, between two groups of ideas.
Toyin: But is that not to be taken for granted ih the development of a perspective on a topic? Does one not need to examine contrastive ideas and arrive at those that are more valid? All ideas can not be equally valid.
Letisa: Noted. But I am not pleading for an uncritical embrace of all ideas available in relation to a question. All I am suggesting d that I seem to observe in the fundamental structure of investigation in scholarship the notion of a Manichean/oppositional duality, in which either/or propositions determine the structure of thought.
Toyin: You think such dualities are inadequate for knowledge?
Letisa: Yes. Because reality is often multiplex, kaleidoscopic, even fragmentary. To what degree can we isolate one phenomenon from another? Don’t many phenomena, particularly those relating to issues of value, infiltrate each other? I find myself using a military metaphor here, but I think you get my point.
Toyin: Can you suggest a style of investigation that would take advantage of the interdependence you are describing?
Letisa: I am still developing it. I am thinking of something like a navigational form of thought, where the purpose is to navigate our way in relation to as broad a range as possible of the possibilities of perception in relation to a subject. I am thinking of
Toyin: I seem to recall descriptions of essays by the French writer Michel de Montainge along those lines.
Letisa: Perhaps. But such styles of thought have not gained centrality in Western academe. The ethos of the warrior, who is certainly marshalling opposing forces against each other and of the hunter who operates in terms of an adversarial relationship with the Other represented by the animals he preys on, dominates scholarship, where this is conducted in terms of opposition between ideas and discourse is more often than not argumentative, with the qualities of mental combat embodying martial values.
Toyin: Intriguing. How do you arrive at conclusions? Do you stumble upon them or do you defer them endlessly?
Letisa: I know you are making fun of me but even those suggestions might not be as ridiculous as they sound.
Toyin: So, do we swim forever in a soup of inconclusion or do we arrive at any shore as we navigate the possibilities of an ideas or subject?
Letisa: Certainly. To postulate a permanent nondecision, nonjudgement would be irresponsible. That would be an excess of relativistic thinking. I am suggesting, as I still develop these ideas, a movement towards resolution with a tacit understanding that every resolution demonstrates some degree of the provisional and the specificity with which we circumscribe perspectives facilitates a bracketing out of ancillary but relevant aspects of those perspectives which we have relegated either to the background or to non-existence in our cognitive worlds.
Toyin: This reminds of a way you described this idea the other day-as a style of thinking the mobility of which dramatises a deferral of judgement in the name of a cognitive “synaesthesia” that enables/facilitates a perception of the subject matter from a variety of perspectives, even contradictory perspectives….
Letisa: Yes…leading to the possibility of convergence, or, even if not of convergence, of mutual tension, in which the absence of an ultimate coherence is itself an understanding that suggests possibilities of holding possibilities, understandings in a creative tension….
Toyin: You think, then, that such a tentative style of interpreting phenomena might be more in harmony with the paradoxical realities of existence than the notion of certainty, of linear coherence, even of dialectical balance that is /currently privileged in conceptions of the effort to arrive at meaning….
Letisa: My thinking is moving in that direction.
Toyin: You would seem, then, to be thinking in terms of an understanding of the search for knowledge more in terms of a quest for meaning, for structures, patterns, processes of understanding through which can be enriched, even if the ultimate truth value of the understanding arrived at, of the processes developed, may not be fully ascertained, are understood as to a degree, in flux
Letisa: But then, this does not imply, however, an absolute relativity. Absolute relativity, endless cognitive flux, could be more productive of a destructive anarchy, a breakdown in standpoints of collective responsibility than a liberating prospect
Toyin: How do you hope to escape from an absolute relativistic position?
Letisa: By treating conclusions, where necessary, as tentative in the ongoing project represented by the exploration realized through cognitive navigation. The sensitivity to the plural possibilities inherent a phenomenon or an issue or idea highlights the tension between the quest to know, to push back and even reshape boundaries that necessarily characterise a rethinking of our cognitive horizon, our epistemic envelopes, in contrast to the need to conserve, consolidate and apply what we gain in the process in contrast with, in tension with the renewed impetus to continue that quest, which continues beyond the bounds of what we can perceive at any point in time, as Dion Fortune puts it, may even take us out of space and time, “beyond the skyline, where the strange roads go down”.
Toyin: You mention Fortune. That is intriguing. How does she come here and how did you start on the development of these ideas?
Letisa: It began in relation to my experience of ways of knowing that could not be accounted for by prevailing paradigms. And by my efforts as a woman, to find new ways of thinking that would transcend or even avoid the limitations of the patriarchal thinking that I have often come across. Feminist thinkers often recognise such patriarchal thinking but do not often realise its origin in martial structures and even use the same critical tools while debunking its fruits. I want to go to the very source, to the very girders that hold it up, to the underlying skeleton, as it were, of this style of thinking.
Toyin: Please elaborate.
Letisa: I realised that I could know things through my skin, and not simply by touch. I could intuit people’s mental sates without talking to them. How could I explore such forms of knowledge without descending to superstitious thinking and demands for acceptance for my claims without empirical proof? I realised that the key would be to examine the question of ways of knowing and develop an approach from that point that would be inclusive of my own experience.
Toyin: And your encounter with patriarchal thinking?
Letisa: I kept coming up against both circumscriptions of reality that were demeaning of both women and the men and women who perpetuated them as well as accounts of alternative styles of thinking.
Toyin: Amazing how our experiences correlate. I was also challenged by my experience of unusual ways of knowing. That is what has led me into investigating traditional Yoruba and Benin thought for both explanatory models and ways opf developing this cognitive mode further.
Letisa: Could you explain?
Toyin: Under the influence of the English Hermetic thinker and occultist Dion Fortune explored the notion that there exist various forms of mind and not resent the individual mind. One could speak of the combined influence generated by the mental orientation of a group over along period of time. One could also speak of the mind of nature. She claimed that both conceptions of mind are vital to a recovery of the vitality of religious cultures where these have been disrupted, distorted or even erased by persecution, as in the case of pre-Christian thought in Britain. I realised the parallel with Africa which has suffered similar efforts at re-inscription by Christianity and I went to wok to apply these ideas to the Ifa divinatory system developed by the Yoruba of Nigeria and to nature spirituality in Benin, in relation to similar practices in other parts of Nigeria.
Letisa: Then what happened?
Toyin: My experiences raised questions of interfaces between forms of being, between human consciousness and the ideas with which human beings work, between human beings and natural forms.
Letisa: What were these experiences?
Toyin: Experiences that suggested a participation in the community constituted by the Ifa tradition understood as uncircumscribed by space or perhaps time, the manifestation of a sense of presence that began to emerge when I thought about my plans of developing Ifa in terms of a system of literary criticism, the sudden emergence of an insight into the possibility of realizing this that emerged when I was working on an entirely different subject- South Afro can anti-apartheid poetry, and the persistence of such experiences in relation to my efforts in developing the cognitive potential of the system in terns that could be appreciated in relation to contemporary thought.
Letisa: What did all these suggest to you?
Toyin: I began to ask myself what the sources of my inspirations were. Did it justify Fortune’s notion that groups constituted a group mind, the energies of which could be reached by others outside the group? Or my Ifa teacher’s idea that the Ifa system was empowered by the Odu, which are both categories of organisation similar to chapters of a text, in this case an oral text, as well as sentient entities and that their nature as nonhuman forms which the human being could reach implied that they are adaptable to various cultural and linguistic backgrounds?
Letisa: Where does the nature spirituality stuff come in?
Toyin: That was particularly striking and relates again to the question of cultural appropriation by people who are not, racially or by previous empathic affiliation, part of that culture. I spent time exploring Fortune’s ideas about the mind of nature by contemplating trees, spending time in contemplative silence in woodland and forest.
Letisa: Did that have any effect on you?
Toyin: Yes. Gradually, I began to observe a difference between various kinds of tees that was not reducible to a purely material difference, to differences in purely material biology.
Letisa: Non-material biology then?
Toyin: Perhaps one can put it that way. I began to observe that the sacred trees in Benin City where I lived, the trees used for ritual, seemed to have an aura, an immaterial field around them which I also saw on some trees in the woodland and forest. Most of them were either trees accorded special status in the traditional religion even though they were not actively used in religious or other similar purposes and others which might not have been seen as having any religious value but still demonstrated that sense of an unusual aura. What I found particularly striking was that my intuitive vision was confirmed by people in the localities where I sighted these trees. I could literally tell a tree that had a sacred function in a locality simply by looking at it. I did not have to have been thee before or known anything about the specific tree or of its species. I could tell that identity by observing what seemed to me like an aura around it.
Letisa: So, it would seem, then, that you shared an intersubjective space with the people who identified those tress as sacred, even though you did not have access to their cultural constructions
Toyin: That suggested to me that those cultural constructions were the development of biological properties in both the human being and nature.
Letisa: Meaning?
Toyin: That these trees and groves could be understood as possessing a quality that I could perceive on account of a sensitivity cultivated through contemplating such trees and others different from them repeatedly so that a sense of difference between them was gradually established for me.
Letisa: But, could you really say that you hardly had access to their cultural constructions? Had you not read books about similar aspects of African culture and read accounts of similar conceptions from other cultures?
Toyin : That’s true. I had read about African cultures along those lines. But I had not thought about my reading in Romantic and Symbolist thought along those lines.
Letisa: You could speak of sharing in a culture that was realized in particular cultural developments, in various geographical, spatial frameworks but a similarity of culture, nevertheless.
Toyin: Hmm…questions about cross-cultural transmission again emerge here. Following this trend of thought to its logical conclusion would imply that one could gain access to significant identification with a culture, through observing parallels between the target culture and other cultures and trying to embody what one has learnt in one’s own life.
Letisa: I would think so.
Toyin: Fortune makes a similar point about lighting your own dormant fire with fire from someone else’s hearth. Could biology be understood to play any role here, then? My notion that I was developing an latent capacity for sensitivity to biological properties of nature?
Letisa: I doubt if nature and culture, biology and human interpretations are so distinct. To what degree can we speak of the discontinuities between them? Perhaps we could speak of cultural propensities facilitating the sensitivity to biologically endogenous qualities? But how does this relate to Ifa, to interpretations of the female body in relation to witchcraft, which was what we started our discussion with?
Toyin: This zone of communication between different modes of being is understood in Yoruba and Bini traditions as the prerogative of Ifa and of witches. Ebohon, a Bini priest, describes some trees as witches, his ideas being expressive of a culture where humans are understood to be able to cultivate the ability to communicate with plants. The Ifa system is organised in terms of possibilities of dialogue between different modes of being and Ifa’s younger brother, as he is called, Osanying, the Orisha of herbalogy, since Ifa priests are also at times herbalists, represents the world of human relationship with plants. The sense of encounters with non-embodied presences, related to my studies of Ifa where I adapted techniques derived from Western hermetic ceremonial magic, Eastern and western meditation techniques and the related exporiences of inspiration also suggest correlations with ideas of transmission of ideas in terms of encounters, however these are understood, between various forms of being, whatever the ontological status we ascribe to the mythic forms with which I tried to relate and to the sense of non-embodied presence often associated with my experience of ifa.
Letisa: So it would seem, then, that we are both intrigued by experiences of and ideas relating to forms of knowing that are not ratiocinative and are not rational in the conventional sense.
Toyin: And which relate to relationships between embodiment in relation to knowledge and reflection in relation to knowing
Letisa: And to questions of the interface between the cultural and biological along these lines
Toyin: Interesting that we have both come upon the image of the witch in relation to such ideas.
Letisa: The witch as an embodiment of the reviling of women in pre-Renaissance Europe and of valorisation of the feminine in modern Western feminist spirituality.
Toyin: In Yoruba thought as the nexus for positive and negative conceptions of the feminine
Letisa: And in both cultures, the witch as embodying conceptions of physicality and its powers, whether negative, as in pre-modern Western conceptions or positive as in modern understandings, or both, as in traditional Yoruba thought.
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