In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Wole Soyinka The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy The persistent search for the meaning of tragedy, for a re-definition in terms of cultural or private experience is, at the least, man’s recognition of certain areas of depthexperience which are not satisfactorily explained by general aesthetic theories; and, of all the subjective unease that is aroused by man’s creative insights, that wrench within the human psyche which we vaguely define as “tragedy” is the most insistent voice that bids us return to our own sources. There, illusively, hovers the key to the human paradox, to man’s experience of being and non-being, his dubiousness as essence and matter, intimations of transience and eternity, and the harrowing drives between uniqueness and Oneness. Our course to the heart of the Yoruba Mysteries leads by its own ironic truths through the light of Nietzsche1 and the Phrygian deity; but there are the inevitable, key departures. “Blessed Greeks!” sings our mad votary in his recessional rapture, “how great must be your Dionysos, if the Delic god thinks such enchantments necessary to cure you of your Dithyrambic madness.” Such is Apollo’s resemblance to the serene art of Obatala2 the pure unsullied one, to the “essence” idiom of his rituals, that it is tempting to place him at the end of a creative axis with Ogun,3 in a parallel evolutionary relationship to Nietzsche’s Dionysos–Apollo brotherhood. But Obatala the sculptural god is not the artist of Apollonian illusion but of inner essence. The idealist bronze and terra-cotta of Ife which may tempt the comparison implicit in “Apollonian ” died at some now forgotten period, evidence only of the universal surface culture of courts and never again resurrected. It is alien to the Obatala spirit of Yoruba From Myth, Literature, and the African World by Wole Soyinka. Copyright © 1976 by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. “essential” art. Obatala finds expression, not in Nietzsche’s Apollonian “mirror of enchantment ” but as a statement of world resolution. The mutual tempering of illusion and will, necessary to an understanding of the Hellenic spirit, may mislead us, when we are faced with Yoruba art, for much of it has a similarity in its aesthetic serenity to the plastic arts of the Hellenic. Yoruba traditional art is not ideational however, but “essential.” It is not the idea (in religious arts) that is transmitted into wood or interpreted in music or movement, but a quintessence of inner being, a symbolic interaction of the many aspects of revelations (within a universal context) with their moral apprehension. Ogun, for his part, is best understood in Hellenic values as a totality of the Dionysian , Apollonian and Promethean virtues. Nor is that all. Transcending, even today, the distorted myths of his terrorist reputation, traditional poetry records him as “protector of orphans,”, “roof over the homeless,” “terrible guardian of the sacred oath”; Ogun stands for a transcendental, humane but rigidly restorative justice. (Unlike Sango, who is primarily retributive.) The first artist and technician of the forge, he evokes like Nietzsche’s Apollonian spirit, a “massive impact of image, concept, ethical doctrine and sympathy.” Obatala is the placid essence of creation; Ogun the creative urge and instinct, the essence of creativity. Rich-laden is his home, yet decked in palm fronds He ventures forth, refuge of the down-trodden, To rescue slaves he unleashed the judgment of war Because of the blind, plunged into forests Of curative herbs, Bountiful One Who stands bulwark to offsprings of the dead of heaven Salutations, O lone being, who swims in rivers of blood. Such virtues place Ogun apart from the distorted dances to which Nietzsche’s Dionysiac frenzy led him in his search for a selective “Aryan” soul, yet do not detract from Ogun’s revolutionary grandeur. Ironically, it is the depth-illumination of Nietzsche ’s intuition into basic universal impulses which negates his race exclusivist conclusions on the nature of art and tragedy. In our journey to the heart of Yoruba tragic art which indeed belongs in the Mysteries of Ogun and the choric ecstasy of revelers, we do not find that the Yoruba, as the Greek did, “built for his chorus the scaffolding of a fictive chthonic realm and placed thereon fictive nature spirits . . .” on which foundation, claims Nietzsche, Greek tragedy developed: in short, the principle of illusion . Yoruba tragedy plunges straight into the “chthonic realm,” the seething...

Share