The Man who Thought He Was European
This essay is an exploration of political and cultural identity. This exploration is centred on an investigation of the modes of integration of a particular person, the writer, into the political and cultural heritage represented principally by Europe, but also understood, in its wider sense, as that of the West. The West is understood here as consisting in Europe and North America.
The exploration of identity is dramatized in the particular form assumed by the essay through which it is conducted. The essay departs from the conventional format of the scholarly essay in employing different modes of indentation for the main text and the refrain that operates as a counterpoint to the text. It therefore tries to harmonise both the conventional essay form and an adaptation of an element in poetic form-the refrain.
This exploration in expressive forms is directed at two correlative purposes. The first purpose relates directly to the direction of meaning the essay moves towards-the exploration of what it means to be European. The disjunction in graphological formation between the main body of the text and the refrain is evocative of the disjunction between the subject’s conception of his own identity in relation to Europe and the political understanding of that identity.
This graphological disjunction, in turn, in the weaving of the questions that constitute the refrain in and out of the main body of the text, dramatizes the fact that the questions that constitute the refrain and inspire the main text are still in process of exploration. The dance/journey of exploration that the text represents continues after the text is concluded.
This exploratory form represents a questioning of an aspect of the cultural heritage represented by Europe. That aspect relates to the norms of scholarship, particularly to the format for scholarly writing. Within the hegemony represented by European-Western conceptions of scholarship, the conventional essay format is the standard form of scholarly expression in all disciplines. Why must this be so? Does the form of the work constitute part of the essence of scholarship? To a degree. The use of a uniform form ensures uniformity and thereby conduces to the universality of knowledge that is central to the Western conception of scholarship, as it originated in Europe. It also implies that the criterion of the development of knowledge principally as a form of reasoning which can be followed by anyone, anywhere, can also be realized.
These goals are laudable. I acknowledge that, even though I am suspicious of the wholesale insistence on universal conceptions of the character of scholarly knowledge and procedure. I think that insistence on an unproblematic universality does bracket out areas of thought that do not operate within the criteria thus defined, and which need to be assessed in terms of their validity for scholarly exploration and presentation. A purpose of this work is to challenge the assumptions that underlie aspects of Western constructions of scholarship. This is done through the format of the essay and the questions addressed in its content.
Must scholarly writing operate in the conventional essay format for a reasoned exposition or argument to be developed with the necessary rigour? I don’t think so. Other formats could be just as effective and have been successfully used by scholars even in the Western tradition. Examples of these are Plato’s dialogue’s which include his Parable of the Cave, Galileo’s Dialogue between Two World Systems, Wittgenstein’s aphoristic philophical writing, Rorty’s integration of science fiction narrative into his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Melissa Raphael’s summation with a parabolic narrative in her work on the female face of God in Auschwitz.
This paper was written for the Hermes 2006 conference. My proposal was accepted for the conference but I could not attend. It replaces the paper that would have been written if I had been able to attend the conference. This paper is a reflection on that inability to attend the conference in terms of the implications of the circumstances surrounding that non-attendance for questions of cultural and political identity.
My inability to attend the conference emerged from the mistake I made in thinking I was European. I had been beguiled by my integration into European society, my admiration of the seamless movement of Europeans between European borders into thinking that such seamless crossing applied to me too.
I had rested content with my inclusion in the programme for the conference and had got myself mentally ready for the trip to Belgium but forgot that I would need a visa. After being reminded about that necessity and I called the automated line of the Belgian Embassy in London to apply for a visa the earliest appointment I could be given was a month after the date of the conference I wanted to attend.
But really, am I or am I not European?
Is the question of whether or not I am a European determined solely by the political definition of my identity as a foreign student-that group who pay very high fees but have few privileges compared to their native counterparts-the enviable Home Students-or by my cultural affiliations? By the fact that English is my first language? That I am more fluent in English than I am in any other language? That I was trained in the study of English Literature and the history of English from the earliest period to the present? That I have significant knowledge of English and European history and some acquaintance with the classics of European literature and thought? That I can appreciate and identify with some of Europe’s dominant social values while being healthily critical of them?
What does it mean to be European?
Is Europe primarily a geographical entity? A political or economic one? A social network or a cultural entity? Or are all of these of equal value, and can such value can be measured?
How does one belong to or with Europe in any of these senses?
Can Europe exist outside its geographical boundaries?
Maybe it exists as a set of ideas, of values and attitudes? May it be a state of mind? A scholar responded to questions about the North African theologian St. Augustine of Hippo, who, writing in what later became North Africa, became the most influential Western Christian thinker of his time, and one of the most influential after that, in fields from sociology to autobiography, by asserting that what is most important about a person is not their race or their geographical provenance, but their culture. On those grounds, Augustine was practically a Roman citizen and a part of the culture represented by the Church in the sweep of empire it shared with Rome.
How true is this?
May we not speak of the transmutations of cultures as they migrate across space and perhaps time, and even across embodiments in human beings and human institutions, so that the Christianity of Palestine, even in its self conscious theological development by Paul, is different from that of Augustine and his fellow North Africans, Origen, Athanasius, Cyprian of Carthage, and different from the Christianity of Spain and the achievement of St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Francis Xavier? Why did Christian monasticism begin in Egypt with St. Anthony of Egypt? Perhaps questions of physical geography may provide a clue in terms of the inspiration of the desert to a contemplative life, thereby suggesting the role of natural forms in their interaction with human consciousness in the transmutation of culture.
The transformation of the language and world views of former empires through the alembic of the formerly colonised has created cultural achievements that the natives of the source of empire could not have developed since they did not belong to those alternative worlds. So, perhaps, the idea, perhaps even the being of Europe, is undergoing a shift, a shift embodied in countless examples of cultural transformation manifested in the embodiment of each human who exemplifies this transformation, in each cultural expression that dramatizes it.
Is Europe, then, a mobile identity? Transformatory, fluid, volatile, shifting in time and in space?
Perhaps it is. Without the presence in Nigeria of Europe, in the form of English formal education, of a European way of life and of the books written by or published by Europeans that shaped my personality, I and many other Nigerians would not be who we have become. These books were overwhelmingly present over books from other part of the world, apart from the United States, which is culturally a development from Europe, on account of the neo-colonial control of access to the Nigerian economy.
I would not have been able to understand even the endogenous elements of my own native cultures as much as I have been able to do, limited as that is, without the inspiration of such books. Living in Nigeria, I was like a person living in Europe, perceiving the elements of my native culture with my corporeal sight, as a European might do in museums or books, but not perceiving them with my cognitive sight. They meant nothing except that they were the vestiges of a way of life different from ours, ours being we who spoke and wrote in English, had access to the modern, civilised knowledge represented by rational thought, and by the higher religions which operated in terms of lofty ideas and the most refined of symbols. Religions where animal sacrifice was not practiced as in endogenous African religions, where there were no rumours of human sacrifice as held for Bini religion in Benin where I grew up.
Europe was both the source of my alienation from the native genius of that culture and the subsequent source of my access to it. This is a paradoxical juxtaposition made possible by my reading of Europeans like the English Hermeticist Dion Fortune who concluded that Europe had developed through a number of overlapping identities, successively realized but coexistent in space. She worked towards a recovery of the endogenous European religious genius which had been suppressed by Christianity . Fortune makes little or no reference to Africa, except allusively as part of a group of primitive peoples contrasted with Western civilization, but her ideas have proved invaluable for me as they have enabled me to look at African systems of thought with the empathic and yet critical mind with which her ideas frame her exploration of pre-Christian European thought . Her ideas led me to an appreciation of multiple African identities, those shaped by Europe and those that were not. Successively realized, but consistent in space. Ironically, to reach that Africa that was not shaped by Europe I had to pass through Europe. So the Africa I have come to in that search is unavoidably shaped by Europe. It can not come to me as a pristine reconstruction, sans European influence. It exists to a large extent as an interpretive vision, a constructed schema significantly influenced by Europe.
Can we escape Europe?
I doubt it. The human race at the beginning of the twenty-first century could be seen to be in the position of the Psalmist who cries out about their inability to escape from their creator, regardless of where they hide, in deep space or in the depths of the sea, because European influence has shaped the world decisively in the last few centuries. Not only through colonization, but through the assertion of a conception of human good, manifest in the conquest of nature, the marshalling of natural resources, the development and application of scientific and technological innovation and the construction of social systems. So much so that the rest of the world regards aspects of the model of human good either first developed in Europe, or developed to a high state in Europe, to be ideal, and strives after it, as a norm of what is known as development.
This brings me to my effort to assimilate and employ Europe as a means of going beyond Europe as it is conventionally understood.
Under the inspiration of the marginalised knowledge systems represented by the ideas of Dion Fortune, I have been exploring endogenous conceptions of being in Yoruba and Bini systems of thought. I am exploring a conception of forms of mind that emerges from the correlations between the ideas of the English occultist and these endogenous African systems. Some of the questions that emerge from these notions gravitate around such queries as “May consciousness be understood to include not only mammalian forms but non-mammalian such as vegetative and other elemental forms, such as natural bodies of water? May it also go beyond the conventional understanding of group psychology and demonstrate the capacity of groups to generate mental forms that transcend space and time?”
These ideas emerge from Western occultism but demonstrate significant resonance with endogenous ideas in Yoruba and Bini systems of thought, resonances I would not have discerned without the study of Western occultism which led me to the study of the African systems in the first place. Controversial European ideas, marginalized within Europe itself, have enabled me, an African to understand better my own African heritage, which I had been estranged from by the colonial encounter with Europe.
These convergences between European and African knowledge systems have enabled me to enter into the understanding of marginalised knowledge systems. These systems are marginalised both in Africa and within the global economy of knowledge.. I am in the process of interpreting the convergence between the African and Western expressions of these systems in relation to cognitive procedures in the dominant Western cognitive models. In doing this, I am again operating within the framework of the agenda developed by the English occultist, Fortune. She emphasises the need to interpret such marginalised and recovered forms in relation to contemporary forms of knowledge so as to demonstrate their contemporary significance.`
The research Fortune’s work has inspired into a marginalised African episteme has led me to Europe, specifically to England, the birthplace and source of her ideas. This movement in space enables me to engage at first hand with the natural phenomena and movements of thought that inspired her thinking. This direct engagement facilitates the correlation of my experience of these natural and cultural phenomena with their counterparts in Nigeria which I have studied under her inspiration.
These movements within and through space and time suggest the image of a spiral. In continuing my research in England, the source of the ideas that inspired me in Nigeria, I have come to a place a part of whose mental world I shared while in Nigeria. In doing this, however, I have also brought with me what I have learnt about Nigeria with the help of that mental world.
How does the spiral motion represented by the correlation of diverse cognitive worlds relate to the question of rethinking Europe, in relation to the global frameworks within Europe is currently being reconstructed?
This question could be understood through the lens of the poetry of T.S. Eliot, an Anglo-American poet whose work is often concerned with questions of ancestry, both genealogical and cultural. The spiral motion of my quest recalls Eliot’s closing lines in Little Gidding, the conclusion of a poetic sequence, which, like this essay, explores issues of the quest for identity in relation to questions of belonging in a spiritual and geographical sense:
What we call the beginning is often the end/
And to make an end is to make a beginning/
The end is where we start from/
…
We shall not cease from exploration/
And the end of all our exploring/
Will be to arrive where we started/
And know the place for the first time .
This spiral motion of quest understood in both a mental and a physical sense, as described in this essay I relation to the Europe-Africa dialectic, leads to the idea that there are different Europes. These represent interpretive and/or material constructions of Europe. They demonstrate an implicit or explicit relationship to other forms of knowledge in relation to or outside the ambience of Europe. Europe can be understood,then, as both a geographical and a political characterization as well as a form of knowledge or an agglomeration of forms of knowledge that purport to present what Europe is or stands for. These forms of knowledge that represent Europe may emerge from Europe while others may originate from outside it, being embodiments of the views of non-Europeans who identify with Europe.These patterns of Europisation, a neologism indicating forms of thinking about Europe, demonstrate various forms of relationship within themselves and with forms of thought that have no direct relationship with Europe. The various forms of intra-European thought include the Europe of the occultists, the Europe of mainstream academia, the Europe of what is accepted as the general character of reality by the generality of the European citizenry , and the Europe that exists in flux between all these. The latter Europe is represented, paradoxically, by Isaac Newton, a founding father of the scientific and technological reworking of the universe that is one of Europe’s defining contributions to civilisation. Newton’s researches into the marginalised episteme represented by the occult discipline of alchemy is described as fundamental to his discoveries in physics, yet the motivation, the raison de etre, the values, that informed his correlation of the unlikely cognitive forms of alchemy and modern physics do not seem to have survived as an active influence on subsequent scientific research in the scientific heritage he represents.
From the convergence of the various Europes I have encountered, and the various forms of Africa which have influenced me, I am constructing a contemplative and intellectual exploration of the ground of being. The philosophical framing of the notion of a ground of being represents an interrogative strategy I have gained from my encounter with European and Asian thought. The concept exists in endogenous African systems but my formative encounters with the concept as an abstract philosophical subject that can be addressed in relation to various provinces of enquiry have been in relation to European and Asian thought. My enquiries into the ground of being represent an effort to answer the question as to whether the ground of being can be understood as related to a non-physical centre. The effort to answer this question emerges in various cultural traditions of enquiry into the fundamental ground of existence.
This enquiry operates at two levels. One of these is the level of the physical organisation of the cosmos. The other is the level of nonmaterial principles of meaning, causation and purpose.
In the transposition of ideas from marginalized epistemologies to mainstream disciplines, I am integrating in my work the various identities of Europe and Africa that inspire me. My goal is to harmonise these cognitive worlds, enabling them to speak to each other in languages that empower them to enrich each other, instead of operating in the epistemic compartments in which they work at present. To achieve this, I aspire to transpose the language and styles of thought of the marginalised systems into those of the mainstream traditions, without impairing the integrity of each of these ordinarily contrastive modes of thought. The most significant challenge seems to emerge here.
My research has been inspired and initiated by my efforts to apply the ideas of the English occultist to Bini and Yoruba systems of thought, not in a purely intellectual manner, but in an experiential way. It is the unusual experiences I have had in relation to these efforts that has led to my effort to explore their significance in relation to similar experiences and ideas in other parts of the world as well as to examine as broad a range as possible of the significance of these marginalised modes of knowledge.
But, how do I explain in a PhD dissertation that my work has been inspired by my practise of Hermetic magic and Yoruba and Bini nature spirituality? How do I integrate into such a work my efforts at nature mysticism, embodying such unusual practices, in the modern academic context, of efforts to engage in dialogue with trees? How may I advance my conviction that through such arcane practices-gradually becoming more and more visible in the West through growth of neo-Paganism-I thereby developed unusual modes of responding to nature? These modes of relating to nature are close to William Blake’s conception of visionary sight in which he saw “through his eyes and not with them” . This suggestion of a mode of penetrating into an essential, supra-biological identity is different from the more common aestheticised notion of relating with nature where the focus is on external beauty of natural forms. The former focuses on a sense of distinctive identity, related to the physical form but not limited to it.
How do I relate to my research the sense of numinous presence which I have encountered a number of times in nature? Similar claims have been made by the Romantics and Symbolists, but could Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth or Baudelaire have made their perceptions part of a PhD dissertation?
How may I also relate to my research my experiences of nonmaterial presence in relation to my practice of Western hermetic magic in my study of Yoruba cosmology? An experience and practice that has borne concrete results in my research in graduate work in England , results that have been positively accredited with good grades, that basic benchmark of academic achievement, without the examiners knowing how I arrived at some of the ideas that would have looked so logical on paper but which were not always inspired through procedures that relied on logic?
Western scholarship is centred on the study of the subject as Other, in which affective distance is maintained between the subject and the researcher. It has de-emphasized the possibility of the subject of research being the researcher themselves. This research paradigm might have emerged on account of the need to preserve the central value of objectivity that is facilitated by critical distance. This value is central to the scholarly tradition that has been made dominant by the West. But does an unbending insistence on the affective divorce of the researcher from their subject matter not constitute a fiction of a sort?
In the degree to which I have been inspired by the ideas of Europeans, I am a part of Europe. To the degree that I integrate various possibilities from different continents in a quest that has taken me from Africa to Europe, I testify to the possibilities of integrating various possibilities in relation to Europe.
The aspect of European thought that has initiated my quest embodies the efforts of Europeans to rediscover endogenous European religious and philosophical identity as it existed before its suppression by the imperialistic efforts of the church, the successor to the Roman Empire, an initiative similar to the effort currently being undertaken by Africans in the aftermath of Western colonialism and its Christian appendage. This convergence embodies the Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako’s argument that Africa and Europe are united by the urgency to develop a shared quest to understand and adapt to modern needs the aboriginal world views that were suppressed in both continents by the advent of Christianity . To the degree that this strand of thought represents only a fraction, and in the case of Hermeneutic thought, a marginalised fraction, of European thought, my research bears witness to the contrastive influences of multiple possibilities represented by Europe.
The exploration of identity is dramatized in the particular form assumed by the essay through which it is conducted. The essay departs from the conventional format of the scholarly essay in employing different modes of indentation for the main text and the refrain that operates as a counterpoint to the text. It therefore tries to harmonise both the conventional essay form and an adaptation of an element in poetic form-the refrain.
This exploration in expressive forms is directed at two correlative purposes. The first purpose relates directly to the direction of meaning the essay moves towards-the exploration of what it means to be European. The disjunction in graphological formation between the main body of the text and the refrain is evocative of the disjunction between the subject’s conception of his own identity in relation to Europe and the political understanding of that identity.
This graphological disjunction, in turn, in the weaving of the questions that constitute the refrain in and out of the main body of the text, dramatizes the fact that the questions that constitute the refrain and inspire the main text are still in process of exploration. The dance/journey of exploration that the text represents continues after the text is concluded.
This exploratory form represents a questioning of an aspect of the cultural heritage represented by Europe. That aspect relates to the norms of scholarship, particularly to the format for scholarly writing. Within the hegemony represented by European-Western conceptions of scholarship, the conventional essay format is the standard form of scholarly expression in all disciplines. Why must this be so? Does the form of the work constitute part of the essence of scholarship? To a degree. The use of a uniform form ensures uniformity and thereby conduces to the universality of knowledge that is central to the Western conception of scholarship, as it originated in Europe. It also implies that the criterion of the development of knowledge principally as a form of reasoning which can be followed by anyone, anywhere, can also be realized.
These goals are laudable. I acknowledge that, even though I am suspicious of the wholesale insistence on universal conceptions of the character of scholarly knowledge and procedure. I think that insistence on an unproblematic universality does bracket out areas of thought that do not operate within the criteria thus defined, and which need to be assessed in terms of their validity for scholarly exploration and presentation. A purpose of this work is to challenge the assumptions that underlie aspects of Western constructions of scholarship. This is done through the format of the essay and the questions addressed in its content.
Must scholarly writing operate in the conventional essay format for a reasoned exposition or argument to be developed with the necessary rigour? I don’t think so. Other formats could be just as effective and have been successfully used by scholars even in the Western tradition. Examples of these are Plato’s dialogue’s which include his Parable of the Cave, Galileo’s Dialogue between Two World Systems, Wittgenstein’s aphoristic philophical writing, Rorty’s integration of science fiction narrative into his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Melissa Raphael’s summation with a parabolic narrative in her work on the female face of God in Auschwitz.
This paper was written for the Hermes 2006 conference. My proposal was accepted for the conference but I could not attend. It replaces the paper that would have been written if I had been able to attend the conference. This paper is a reflection on that inability to attend the conference in terms of the implications of the circumstances surrounding that non-attendance for questions of cultural and political identity.
My inability to attend the conference emerged from the mistake I made in thinking I was European. I had been beguiled by my integration into European society, my admiration of the seamless movement of Europeans between European borders into thinking that such seamless crossing applied to me too.
I had rested content with my inclusion in the programme for the conference and had got myself mentally ready for the trip to Belgium but forgot that I would need a visa. After being reminded about that necessity and I called the automated line of the Belgian Embassy in London to apply for a visa the earliest appointment I could be given was a month after the date of the conference I wanted to attend.
But really, am I or am I not European?
Is the question of whether or not I am a European determined solely by the political definition of my identity as a foreign student-that group who pay very high fees but have few privileges compared to their native counterparts-the enviable Home Students-or by my cultural affiliations? By the fact that English is my first language? That I am more fluent in English than I am in any other language? That I was trained in the study of English Literature and the history of English from the earliest period to the present? That I have significant knowledge of English and European history and some acquaintance with the classics of European literature and thought? That I can appreciate and identify with some of Europe’s dominant social values while being healthily critical of them?
What does it mean to be European?
Is Europe primarily a geographical entity? A political or economic one? A social network or a cultural entity? Or are all of these of equal value, and can such value can be measured?
How does one belong to or with Europe in any of these senses?
Can Europe exist outside its geographical boundaries?
Maybe it exists as a set of ideas, of values and attitudes? May it be a state of mind? A scholar responded to questions about the North African theologian St. Augustine of Hippo, who, writing in what later became North Africa, became the most influential Western Christian thinker of his time, and one of the most influential after that, in fields from sociology to autobiography, by asserting that what is most important about a person is not their race or their geographical provenance, but their culture. On those grounds, Augustine was practically a Roman citizen and a part of the culture represented by the Church in the sweep of empire it shared with Rome.
How true is this?
May we not speak of the transmutations of cultures as they migrate across space and perhaps time, and even across embodiments in human beings and human institutions, so that the Christianity of Palestine, even in its self conscious theological development by Paul, is different from that of Augustine and his fellow North Africans, Origen, Athanasius, Cyprian of Carthage, and different from the Christianity of Spain and the achievement of St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Francis Xavier? Why did Christian monasticism begin in Egypt with St. Anthony of Egypt? Perhaps questions of physical geography may provide a clue in terms of the inspiration of the desert to a contemplative life, thereby suggesting the role of natural forms in their interaction with human consciousness in the transmutation of culture.
The transformation of the language and world views of former empires through the alembic of the formerly colonised has created cultural achievements that the natives of the source of empire could not have developed since they did not belong to those alternative worlds. So, perhaps, the idea, perhaps even the being of Europe, is undergoing a shift, a shift embodied in countless examples of cultural transformation manifested in the embodiment of each human who exemplifies this transformation, in each cultural expression that dramatizes it.
Is Europe, then, a mobile identity? Transformatory, fluid, volatile, shifting in time and in space?
Perhaps it is. Without the presence in Nigeria of Europe, in the form of English formal education, of a European way of life and of the books written by or published by Europeans that shaped my personality, I and many other Nigerians would not be who we have become. These books were overwhelmingly present over books from other part of the world, apart from the United States, which is culturally a development from Europe, on account of the neo-colonial control of access to the Nigerian economy.
I would not have been able to understand even the endogenous elements of my own native cultures as much as I have been able to do, limited as that is, without the inspiration of such books. Living in Nigeria, I was like a person living in Europe, perceiving the elements of my native culture with my corporeal sight, as a European might do in museums or books, but not perceiving them with my cognitive sight. They meant nothing except that they were the vestiges of a way of life different from ours, ours being we who spoke and wrote in English, had access to the modern, civilised knowledge represented by rational thought, and by the higher religions which operated in terms of lofty ideas and the most refined of symbols. Religions where animal sacrifice was not practiced as in endogenous African religions, where there were no rumours of human sacrifice as held for Bini religion in Benin where I grew up.
Europe was both the source of my alienation from the native genius of that culture and the subsequent source of my access to it. This is a paradoxical juxtaposition made possible by my reading of Europeans like the English Hermeticist Dion Fortune who concluded that Europe had developed through a number of overlapping identities, successively realized but coexistent in space. She worked towards a recovery of the endogenous European religious genius which had been suppressed by Christianity . Fortune makes little or no reference to Africa, except allusively as part of a group of primitive peoples contrasted with Western civilization, but her ideas have proved invaluable for me as they have enabled me to look at African systems of thought with the empathic and yet critical mind with which her ideas frame her exploration of pre-Christian European thought . Her ideas led me to an appreciation of multiple African identities, those shaped by Europe and those that were not. Successively realized, but consistent in space. Ironically, to reach that Africa that was not shaped by Europe I had to pass through Europe. So the Africa I have come to in that search is unavoidably shaped by Europe. It can not come to me as a pristine reconstruction, sans European influence. It exists to a large extent as an interpretive vision, a constructed schema significantly influenced by Europe.
Can we escape Europe?
I doubt it. The human race at the beginning of the twenty-first century could be seen to be in the position of the Psalmist who cries out about their inability to escape from their creator, regardless of where they hide, in deep space or in the depths of the sea, because European influence has shaped the world decisively in the last few centuries. Not only through colonization, but through the assertion of a conception of human good, manifest in the conquest of nature, the marshalling of natural resources, the development and application of scientific and technological innovation and the construction of social systems. So much so that the rest of the world regards aspects of the model of human good either first developed in Europe, or developed to a high state in Europe, to be ideal, and strives after it, as a norm of what is known as development.
This brings me to my effort to assimilate and employ Europe as a means of going beyond Europe as it is conventionally understood.
Under the inspiration of the marginalised knowledge systems represented by the ideas of Dion Fortune, I have been exploring endogenous conceptions of being in Yoruba and Bini systems of thought. I am exploring a conception of forms of mind that emerges from the correlations between the ideas of the English occultist and these endogenous African systems. Some of the questions that emerge from these notions gravitate around such queries as “May consciousness be understood to include not only mammalian forms but non-mammalian such as vegetative and other elemental forms, such as natural bodies of water? May it also go beyond the conventional understanding of group psychology and demonstrate the capacity of groups to generate mental forms that transcend space and time?”
These ideas emerge from Western occultism but demonstrate significant resonance with endogenous ideas in Yoruba and Bini systems of thought, resonances I would not have discerned without the study of Western occultism which led me to the study of the African systems in the first place. Controversial European ideas, marginalized within Europe itself, have enabled me, an African to understand better my own African heritage, which I had been estranged from by the colonial encounter with Europe.
These convergences between European and African knowledge systems have enabled me to enter into the understanding of marginalised knowledge systems. These systems are marginalised both in Africa and within the global economy of knowledge.. I am in the process of interpreting the convergence between the African and Western expressions of these systems in relation to cognitive procedures in the dominant Western cognitive models. In doing this, I am again operating within the framework of the agenda developed by the English occultist, Fortune. She emphasises the need to interpret such marginalised and recovered forms in relation to contemporary forms of knowledge so as to demonstrate their contemporary significance.`
The research Fortune’s work has inspired into a marginalised African episteme has led me to Europe, specifically to England, the birthplace and source of her ideas. This movement in space enables me to engage at first hand with the natural phenomena and movements of thought that inspired her thinking. This direct engagement facilitates the correlation of my experience of these natural and cultural phenomena with their counterparts in Nigeria which I have studied under her inspiration.
These movements within and through space and time suggest the image of a spiral. In continuing my research in England, the source of the ideas that inspired me in Nigeria, I have come to a place a part of whose mental world I shared while in Nigeria. In doing this, however, I have also brought with me what I have learnt about Nigeria with the help of that mental world.
How does the spiral motion represented by the correlation of diverse cognitive worlds relate to the question of rethinking Europe, in relation to the global frameworks within Europe is currently being reconstructed?
This question could be understood through the lens of the poetry of T.S. Eliot, an Anglo-American poet whose work is often concerned with questions of ancestry, both genealogical and cultural. The spiral motion of my quest recalls Eliot’s closing lines in Little Gidding, the conclusion of a poetic sequence, which, like this essay, explores issues of the quest for identity in relation to questions of belonging in a spiritual and geographical sense:
What we call the beginning is often the end/
And to make an end is to make a beginning/
The end is where we start from/
…
We shall not cease from exploration/
And the end of all our exploring/
Will be to arrive where we started/
And know the place for the first time .
This spiral motion of quest understood in both a mental and a physical sense, as described in this essay I relation to the Europe-Africa dialectic, leads to the idea that there are different Europes. These represent interpretive and/or material constructions of Europe. They demonstrate an implicit or explicit relationship to other forms of knowledge in relation to or outside the ambience of Europe. Europe can be understood,then, as both a geographical and a political characterization as well as a form of knowledge or an agglomeration of forms of knowledge that purport to present what Europe is or stands for. These forms of knowledge that represent Europe may emerge from Europe while others may originate from outside it, being embodiments of the views of non-Europeans who identify with Europe.These patterns of Europisation, a neologism indicating forms of thinking about Europe, demonstrate various forms of relationship within themselves and with forms of thought that have no direct relationship with Europe. The various forms of intra-European thought include the Europe of the occultists, the Europe of mainstream academia, the Europe of what is accepted as the general character of reality by the generality of the European citizenry , and the Europe that exists in flux between all these. The latter Europe is represented, paradoxically, by Isaac Newton, a founding father of the scientific and technological reworking of the universe that is one of Europe’s defining contributions to civilisation. Newton’s researches into the marginalised episteme represented by the occult discipline of alchemy is described as fundamental to his discoveries in physics, yet the motivation, the raison de etre, the values, that informed his correlation of the unlikely cognitive forms of alchemy and modern physics do not seem to have survived as an active influence on subsequent scientific research in the scientific heritage he represents.
From the convergence of the various Europes I have encountered, and the various forms of Africa which have influenced me, I am constructing a contemplative and intellectual exploration of the ground of being. The philosophical framing of the notion of a ground of being represents an interrogative strategy I have gained from my encounter with European and Asian thought. The concept exists in endogenous African systems but my formative encounters with the concept as an abstract philosophical subject that can be addressed in relation to various provinces of enquiry have been in relation to European and Asian thought. My enquiries into the ground of being represent an effort to answer the question as to whether the ground of being can be understood as related to a non-physical centre. The effort to answer this question emerges in various cultural traditions of enquiry into the fundamental ground of existence.
This enquiry operates at two levels. One of these is the level of the physical organisation of the cosmos. The other is the level of nonmaterial principles of meaning, causation and purpose.
In the transposition of ideas from marginalized epistemologies to mainstream disciplines, I am integrating in my work the various identities of Europe and Africa that inspire me. My goal is to harmonise these cognitive worlds, enabling them to speak to each other in languages that empower them to enrich each other, instead of operating in the epistemic compartments in which they work at present. To achieve this, I aspire to transpose the language and styles of thought of the marginalised systems into those of the mainstream traditions, without impairing the integrity of each of these ordinarily contrastive modes of thought. The most significant challenge seems to emerge here.
My research has been inspired and initiated by my efforts to apply the ideas of the English occultist to Bini and Yoruba systems of thought, not in a purely intellectual manner, but in an experiential way. It is the unusual experiences I have had in relation to these efforts that has led to my effort to explore their significance in relation to similar experiences and ideas in other parts of the world as well as to examine as broad a range as possible of the significance of these marginalised modes of knowledge.
But, how do I explain in a PhD dissertation that my work has been inspired by my practise of Hermetic magic and Yoruba and Bini nature spirituality? How do I integrate into such a work my efforts at nature mysticism, embodying such unusual practices, in the modern academic context, of efforts to engage in dialogue with trees? How may I advance my conviction that through such arcane practices-gradually becoming more and more visible in the West through growth of neo-Paganism-I thereby developed unusual modes of responding to nature? These modes of relating to nature are close to William Blake’s conception of visionary sight in which he saw “through his eyes and not with them” . This suggestion of a mode of penetrating into an essential, supra-biological identity is different from the more common aestheticised notion of relating with nature where the focus is on external beauty of natural forms. The former focuses on a sense of distinctive identity, related to the physical form but not limited to it.
How do I relate to my research the sense of numinous presence which I have encountered a number of times in nature? Similar claims have been made by the Romantics and Symbolists, but could Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth or Baudelaire have made their perceptions part of a PhD dissertation?
How may I also relate to my research my experiences of nonmaterial presence in relation to my practice of Western hermetic magic in my study of Yoruba cosmology? An experience and practice that has borne concrete results in my research in graduate work in England , results that have been positively accredited with good grades, that basic benchmark of academic achievement, without the examiners knowing how I arrived at some of the ideas that would have looked so logical on paper but which were not always inspired through procedures that relied on logic?
Western scholarship is centred on the study of the subject as Other, in which affective distance is maintained between the subject and the researcher. It has de-emphasized the possibility of the subject of research being the researcher themselves. This research paradigm might have emerged on account of the need to preserve the central value of objectivity that is facilitated by critical distance. This value is central to the scholarly tradition that has been made dominant by the West. But does an unbending insistence on the affective divorce of the researcher from their subject matter not constitute a fiction of a sort?
In the degree to which I have been inspired by the ideas of Europeans, I am a part of Europe. To the degree that I integrate various possibilities from different continents in a quest that has taken me from Africa to Europe, I testify to the possibilities of integrating various possibilities in relation to Europe.
The aspect of European thought that has initiated my quest embodies the efforts of Europeans to rediscover endogenous European religious and philosophical identity as it existed before its suppression by the imperialistic efforts of the church, the successor to the Roman Empire, an initiative similar to the effort currently being undertaken by Africans in the aftermath of Western colonialism and its Christian appendage. This convergence embodies the Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako’s argument that Africa and Europe are united by the urgency to develop a shared quest to understand and adapt to modern needs the aboriginal world views that were suppressed in both continents by the advent of Christianity . To the degree that this strand of thought represents only a fraction, and in the case of Hermeneutic thought, a marginalised fraction, of European thought, my research bears witness to the contrastive influences of multiple possibilities represented by Europe.
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