Is It Possible to Become an Iyami Aje

a Form of Witchcraft from Nigeria's Yorubaland?

Teresa Washington, Mercedes Morgana Reyes

and the

Development of Spiritual Traditions

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

1
 Abstract

An examination of the facts and implications of claims of plagiarism and self

misrepresentation for financial ends directed against Mercedes Morgana
Reyes in connection with Yoruba Iyami Aje (Our Mothers Arcane)
spirituality, the central, if not the only classical Yoruba spirituality centred on
human women.

This analysis is carried out in relation to a perspective on spirituality

demonstrating a particular epistemology-method of knowing, and
metaphysics-conceptions of the nature of existence.

These investigative frames are developed in the context of the urgent need to
develop the body of ideas on the feminine represented by Iyami Aje lore in a
manner that foregrounds its glorious potential, freeing it from the
encrustation of confusing ideas, contradictions that have long defined this
cultural form of strategic ethnic, national, continental and global significance.

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 Cover Image

Evocation of female spiritual power in an edan ogboni, a symbolic and

spiritual vessel of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order, from Babatunde
Lawal’s “Ayagbo Ayato: New Perspectives on Edan Ogboni.”

The figure dramatizes the projection of feminine power through paradox

central to classical Yoruba conceptions of the feminine. She holds her breasts
in a maternal gesture even as her rich beard portrays her as demonstrating
qualities that exist outside the range of nature conventionally understood, the
latter as represented by the maternal identity suggested by her breast holding
gesture.

The entire figure is framed by crescents evoking the relationship between

lunar cycles and female biological rhythms, and thus reminiscent of the
rhythms of terrestrial life in its embedding within cosmic dynamism.

This image is reinforced by the circles of transformative dynamism, like the

funnel of a whirlpool, as described of this symbolism by Lawal, that surmount
the crescents evoking increase of life force.

The significance of the crescents is amplified by their consonance with other

crescents on the forehead of the figure, pointing to their signifying values as
embedded in the self of the kind of personage evoked by this work.

A powerful image of arcane force, crystallizing the eldritch personalities

represented by the conception of Awon Iya Wa Aje.

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Contents

The Question 6

My Response 6

Constructing a Spiritual System 7

Paradoxical Conceptions in Aje Lore 7

Narratives and Symbolism in Accounts of the Origin of Aje : Osun,

Odu and Esu 7

Osun: Erotic Force, Oracular Wisdom and Power 7

Odu and the Cosmic Calabash 7

Aje as Cosmological Travellers 8

Esu and Transformative Mediation 9

Awon Iya Wa Aje as Creative and Destructive Foundational Maternalities of

the Social Order 10

Image and Text : Mercedes Morgana Reyes at her Iyami Aje Initiation
11

Awon Iya Wa Aje and the Pervasive Occult Identity of the Feminine in Classical
Yoruba Thought 14

Contemporary Aje Activism 15

Contradictions in Mercedes Morgana Reyes' Aje Advocacy 16

Fiction and Fact in the Construction of Spiritual Mythologies 16

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Image and Text : Mercedes Morgana Reyes at her Iyami Aje Initiation
18

Suggestions for Moving Forward in Mercedes Morgana Reyes' Awon Iya Wa

Aje Advocacy 21

Apology 21

Constructing an Iyami Aje System through an Aesthetic Intelligence 21

Integrating Various Competencies 24

Cultivating Iyami Aje Spirituality as an Innate Human Inheritance

Emblematized by Feminine Biology and Psyche 25

Cultivating Ethics in Iyami Aje Spirituality 24

Economics of Spirituality 26

Image and Text: Crystal Concentric Circles Formation from a Mercedes

Morgana Reyes Facebook Page and a Picture of Her at Her Iyami Aje Initiation
27

Existing in Fact vs Existing Only in Terms of Faith 28

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The Question

Did Mercedes Morgana Reyes plagiarize Teresa Washington's books Our

Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts:Manifestations of Aje in Africana
Literature and The Architects of Existence: Aje in Yoruba Cosmology, Ontology
and Orature, derived from Washington's PhD thesis on Yoruba beliefs in
Iyami Aje, a term which may be translated as "Our Mothers Arcane," "Our
Mothers Sorcerous" or "Our Mothers, the Witches", as Washington alleges in
"A Day for the Owner: Exposing the Cyber Life and Crimes of Mercedes
Morgana Cordova Bonilla Reyes"?

Is Washington accurate in declaring that Reyes has been giving self

constructed Iyami Aje initiations, on the basis of a fraudulent link with actual
physical Iyami Aje from Yorubaland, allegations reinforced by a report from a
collective of "Ogboni Iledi, Ifa Orisa community elders, women , Iyami and
aje," central Yoruba religious institutions, describing Reyes as collecting large
amounts for such initiations and detailing, with visual evidence, what they
describe as her methods of winning the confidence of her victims, and after
the initiations, abandoning them without any further training or guidance?

As a passionate supporter of Reyes over the years, as a respecter of the

quality of work represented by Washington's books, as a person committed to
the development of Iyami Aje spirituality in particular and to the development
of African witchcraft spiritualities as well as to the cultivation of African
spiritualities and philosophies in general, as demonstrated by my publications
on various platforms and the Facebook groups on these subjects I have
founded and run, I am hereby making a public statement of my observations
and conclusions on this controversy.

My Response

I have told Reyes in a private conversation that I am convinced that

Washington's accusations are factual but that factuality does not invalidate
Reyes'achievement.

Reyes' responses to my direct enquiry from her as to the allegations

reinforces my position, in my view.

Why so?

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Constructing a Spiritual System

To the best of my informally acquired knowledge from living in Yorubaland

and interacting with others who have lived there or who live there, and in the
light of the literature on the subject, I dont think Iyami Aje initiation exists in
Yorubaland, if it exists at all, in the manner presented by Reyes and which I
deeply admire for its creativity.

In fact, the existence of the Iyami Aje, though paradoxically subsuming both
creatively profound and misogynistic ideas on womanhood in classical Yoruba
thought, is defined more by unsubstantiated belief than by verifiability, and to
a significant degree, is shaped by superstition.

It is different, in terms of visibility, from the development of modern

witchcraft in the West, as initiated by Gerald Gardner, as a publicly visible,
ideologically precise though imaginatively powerful body of ideas and
practices, whose practitioners and history are well known, the latter being
the direction in which Rees is admirably taking Iyami Aje belief.

Paradoxical Conceptions in Aje Lore

Narrations and Symbolism in Accounts of the Origin of Aje : Osun,

Odu and Esu

Osun: Erotic Force, Oracular Wisdom and Power

Aje are understood, as presented by Rowland Abiodun in "Woman in Yoruba

Religious Images" and in Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in
African Art, as projecting a primordial identity emerging at the beginning of
time, demonstrated by the goddess Osun, mistress of erotic force and arcane,
oracular wisdom and power, an identity expressing a force enabled by
Olodumare, the creator of the universe.

Odu and the Cosmic Calabash

Along with the correlation of the erotic and the arcane, of erotic force and
oracular wisdom and power in Osun, another characterization of aje
integrating strategic classical Yoruba conceptions of the feminine in relation

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to spiritual potency is represented by an account of the origin of aje narrated
by Babatunde Lawal in The Gelede Spectacle.

In this context, the primordial aje is Odu, a woman whose spiritual force,
gifted her by Olodumare, is represented by a calabash within which is placed
a bird. The bird is describable, in this context, as evoking the capacity to
navigate and shape reality through an inclusive knowledge of the various
dimensions of existence, ascending above the limitations of materiality as
suggested by the power of birds to partly negate gravity through flight, a
power the aje are understood to demonstrate through motion in spirit outside
their bodies.

The closed calabash in classical Yoruba thought represents cosmological

totality, the two halves of this calabash evoking the coinherence of sky and
earth, of spirit and matter, of orun, the world of ultimate origins where
Olodumare is centred and the material universe, as described by Lawal in
"Ejiwapo: The Significance of Twoness in Yoruba Art and Culture."

Aje as Cosmological Travellers

The aje, as these ideas may be filtered through the correlative image of the
Tibetan Buddhist dakini, the traveller in metaphysical and physical space, as
described, among other sources, in Joan Campbell's Traveller in Space: In
Search of Female Identity in Tibetan Buddhism and Western esoteric thinker
Dion Fortune's conception of the cosmological agents she names the Lords of
Mind in The Cosmic Doctrine, may thus be understood as migrants through the
various dimensions of the cosmological network represented by the cosmic
calabash, adjusting the relationships between its various constituents through
a knowledge of points of intersection between forms of being within the web
that unifies them all.

In the consummating initiation into becoming a babalawo, an adept in the

esoteric knowledge of the oracular, magical and herbalogical system known
as Ifa which aspires to encapsulate the totality of possibility through its
symbols, the initiate "looks into the pot of Odu", as depicted by Wande
Abimbola in An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus, the initiate thus developing
intimacy of insight into Odu, Odu being foundational to Ifa as the feminine
principle complementing Orunmila, its masculine expression.

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This conjunction of cosmological foundation and mysterious power is central
to classical Yoruba conceptions of the feminine. The identity represented by
these characterizations is often described as inherent, actualised or latent, in
every woman, underlying the body politic in a feminine/masculine synthesis
constituting the social order.

Esu and Transformative Mediation

In another aje origin story provided in Lawal's Gelede, the power of the aje is
given to them by Esu, unique embodiment of ase ( Bolaji Idowu, Olodumare:
God in Yoruba Belief) the cosmic force issuing from Olodumare, enabling
individual performative capacity in all forms of existence, engendering being
and becoming, existence and change, stability and transformation ( Henry
John Drewal, Rowland Abiodun, John Pemberton III, Helen Wardwell, Yoruba
:Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought), mediator between modes of being,
represented by humans, deities and nature ( Bolaji Idowu, Olodumare: God in
Yoruba Belief, Awo Falokun Fatumnbi, "Esu: Ifa and the Spirit of the Divine
Messenger") between states of being ("Esu:God of Fate" in Wande
Abimbola, Sixteen Great Poems of Ifa, Jack Mapanaje and Landeg White, Oral
Poetry in Africa, Abiola Irele, "The African Scholar", Oluwatoyin Vincent
Adepoju, "Abiola Irele at the Intersection of Disciplines") between modes of
knowledge, demonstrated by conjunctions between conventional
understanding and oracular wisdom ( Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying
Monkey) and between existence and its apprehension in self consciousness
(Juan Elbein and Deoscoredes Dos Santos, "Esu Bara : Principle of
Individual Life in the Nago System" ).

The relationship between this deity of connections and transformations and

aje resonates with the transformative capacities ascribed to the aje,
transformations involving knowledge and skill through which reality may be
reconfigured for creation or destruction through a power inhering in the self.

This interiority is cognate with the dynamic ubiquity as well as individualized

interiority of Esu , as described by Toyin Falola of Esu as "a constant
traveller", "with the enormous capacity to know the truth and reveal it",
"ubiquitous and invisible, so much so that his 'temple' can also be within the
individual self"( "Esu : The God Without Boundaries" in Esu: Yoruba God,
Power and Imaginative Frontiers, ed. Toyin Falola ) and by Juan Elbein and
Deoscoredes Dos Santos, "If someone did not have his Esu in his body, he

9
could not exist, he would not know that he is alive;therefore everybody must
have his individual Esu" ( "Esu Bara : Principle of Individual Life in the Nago
System", quoted by by Ayodele Ogundipe in "Retention and Survival of
Yoruba Traditional Religion in the Diaspora: Esu in Brazil and Benin
Republic" ).

This relationship between Esu and aje is crystallized in the image of the
crossroads, a point of intersection of possibilities, of varied dimensions, thus
a privileged location of Esu as embodiment and enabler of those dynamic
possibilities. As representing the point of intersection of spirit and matter, the
crossroads are also strategic for invocation of aje.

These three origin stories invite further correlation, amplifying the

implications of their unified theme. Such integration would be an exercise in
mythic engineering of the kind often critical for building spiritual and
philosophical systems through distilling and adapting the implications of
diverse but conjunctive narratives and expressions, thereby generating an
idea, image or process synergising its constitutive forms.

The triad of Osun, Odu and Esu, the rhythmic beauty of that verbal sequence
contributing to the compelling force of its symbolic values, could be deployed
in invoking powers within the outer and inner cosmos, the universe external
to the self and the universe constituted by the self, in the development of the
aspirant to aje.

Awon Iya Wa Aje as Creative and Destructive Foundational Maternalities

of the Social Order

The feminine character of aje is described as Awon Iya Wa, "Our Mothers" or
"Awon Iyami", "My Mothers". "Awon Iya Wa" and "Awon Iyami", however,
integrate a referent that is not stated but is clearly understood in terms of its
allusions in the Yoruba context as not referring to mothers in the
conventional, biological sense, but in the spiritual sense, and not only to
nurturing mothers as ordinarily perceived, a maternal orientation also carried
over into the spiritual activity of the aje, but also to mothers whose potency is
often defined in terms of the ability and the orientation to kill and revel in
blood and in feasting on human entrails.

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11
 Image on Preceding Page

Mercedes Morgana Reyes at her Iyami Aje Initiation

"Red is the colour of blood, the palpitation of which, from heart to veins,
keeps us alive.

So, the High Priestess is dressed in red.

The High Priestess holds a wooden staff, evoking the power within her,
the power in nature channeled through herself.

The High Priestess is plump, suggesting the fecundity of being.

She wears a black headwrap dotted with white spots, the blackness
suggesting the depths of the mysteries she embodies, the white spots
evoking islands of awareness of the all pervasive mystery, islands that
constitute spots of human understanding within this immensity.

The headwrap is shaped in terms of a pyramidal structure, evocative of

the elevation and fullness of a crown.

The coruscation of energy, invisible but palpable, intangible but sentient,

that emerges from the energizing encounter with Iyami sheaths the head
with a crown of power.

That crown of power is suggested by the shape of the headwrap of the

High Priestess.

She holds a candle of illumination of the darkness of being, even though

she welcomes the comforting depth of that darkness, for the darkness is
Iyami.
The inscrutable being manifesting as darkness, for when light is too
bright, the eyes are blinded.

Those who know, know.

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She is covered with symbolic inscriptions showing she has gone to meet
Them and returned and is now a walker between both worlds.

The ring of red dots round her eyes shows her eyes have been bathed with
the life flow of Iyami, here suggested by the red colour of blood.

Her eyes have been opened to see front and back, left and right, at once,
into the intersections of dimensions, while still effectively navigating
physical space.

The black crescent on her forehead evokes the rhythms of the moon in
relation to women's monthly cycles and this lunar/biological rhythm as
one expression of rhythms of cosmic power expressed at all levels of
being.

The three black lines on either cheek are evocative of the life cycle of a
human being from birth, to middle age and old age, the life cycle at which
Iyami stand at each point as ultimate enablers of birth and the final
transition in each person's lifetime.

The black line from her lip to her chin is the sign of silence.

A person who has been inside the womb of the cosmos, that womb that is
Iyami, does not speak lightly, if at all, of this awesome mystery.

She is standing in a vegetative space, suggesting the life force rippling

through nature that is the lifeblood of Iyami, the energy that feeds all
existence.

The cosmic identity of the High Priestess is Yewajobi Mother of all the
Orisa and all living things, the Great Mother who make things happen,
enabling all possibility, adapting her description by her acolyte, Mercedes
Morgana Reyes.

We salute Our Mothers Enigmatic, of whom more is unknown than is

known."
From my "The Iyami Tarot Part 2 : The High Priestess", 2014.

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The biological and spiritual procreativity represented by Awon Iya Wa is
described as underlying the body politic. At the same time, however, they are
depicted as prone to irrational destructiveness and as rapaciously
bloodthirsty, and so must be appeased to bestow on humanity their
benevolence while concealing their devastating natures, this being the
dominant understanding of aje in Yorubaland, as Lawal points out in Gelede,
aje being perceived as either good or evil.

Is there likely to be anyone coming forward to describe themself as belonging

to such a group of people, venerated and dreaded, both human and inhuman?

Not likely.

Awon Iya Wa Aje and the Pervasive Occult Identity of the Feminine in
Classical Yoruba Thought

Iyami Aje spirituality, however, is the best known and perhaps the only
human female centred form of classical Yoruba spirituality.

It is allied with such non-human divine figures as Osun and Iya Nla, Ile, Earth
as mother of all, but is understood as ultimately defined by its latent or
actualized presence in every woman. Its occult hiddenness and transformative
potentiality is like a tiger crouched in a cave, to adapt an image of concealed,
alert strength from classical Chinese aesthetics inspired by Taoism as
depicted in Mai-mai Sze's The Way of Chinese Painting: Its Ideas and Technique.

Like Ulli Bier's depiction, in The Return of the Gods :The Sacred Art of
Susanne Wenger, of Osun as both "the velvet skinned concubine and the
ancient woman steeped in magic," the Chinese motif conjoins the
distinctive potencies of youth and age in the attractions of pine trees in their
"sinuosity, sturdiness and venerable age" [evocative of ] people of high
principles whose manner reveals an inner power[ resembling] young dragons
coiled in deep gorges; they have an attractive and graceful air, yet one
trembles to approach them, awed by the hidden power ready to spring forth."

This concretisation of ideas of human potential in relation to "the stillness

before the manifestation of spiritual power," is resonant with the conflation of
occult force and the evocation of secrets distilled in the self through decades
as the individual progresses through time, an image concentrated in the

14
persona of the old woman, an iconic motif in Iyami Aje lore as in Western
witchcraft, in the latter's transformations across the centuries.

This power, in the Iyami Mi Aje context, as described by Rowland Abiodun in

"Woman in Yoruba Religious Images", is emblematised by the concealed but
erotically potent force of the clitoris, small but erogenously powerful, "the
king in the world", as Loland Matory in Sex and the Empire that is No More:
Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion, depicts a
characterization of this organ in classical Yoruba culture, doubly concealed by
its minisculity and by its hiddenness within the interiority that is the “dark,
small orifice… concealed in pubic hair”, concealments evoking the feminine
capacity for interiority of power, all the more potent for being hidden within
a contemplative inwardness, as depicted by Henry John Drewal in "Art and
the Perception of Women in Yoruba Culture."

Being so egalitarian in scope, defining the feminine in terms of a power both

divine and primordial, ascending beyond human limitations yet grounded in
human identity, dramatizing the biological and spiritual procreativity intimate
to womanhood, why must aje also be depicted in terms of an irrational and
bloodthirsty character as enshrined in Ifa and Gelede, two central
institutions of classical Yoruba spirituality, while Ogboni, another strategic
Yoruba institution, may be described as unique among these three canonical
systems in valorising feminine spirituality without demonizing it, as the
others do?

Contemporary Aje Activism

The work of Teresa Washington, Mercedes Morgana Reyes and Ayele Kumari,
the latter another activist in relation to this spirituality, may be seen as
responses to this question.

I understand Washington as interpreting Iyami Aje beliefs as demonstrations

of female power, while integrating the descriptions of them as radically
destructive into an understanding of a form of justice which they dispense
through such dreadful methods.

Reyes and Kumari reject the descriptions of the aje in terms of a pervasive
destructive character, describing this negative characterization as patriarchal
impositions on a female centred spirituality.

15
These three women are American, not Nigerian, suggesting to me that, though
these ideas come from Nigeria, these women's level of advocacy on this
subject is not likely to be pursued by Nigerian women, on account of the
fearsome character of Iyami Aje beliefs, the permeation of Nigerian society by
Christian denigration of and Islamic distancing from classical African
spiritualities as well as the low level of identification of and particularly belief
in and practice of classical African spiritualities by the Nigerian Western
educated middle classes- the social class to which the three Americans belong
in their own societies- an alienation in the Nigerian context created by
colonialism in harmony with Christianity, and the value of classical African
spiritualities to African-Americans as a form of ideational oxygenation in
their struggle for identity grounded in racially centred history and culture and
to Latino-Americans as passed down across centuries of relationships with
Africans in the Americas.

Nigerian women have also studied Iyami Aje but I am not aware of activism
among them along the lines developed by Washington's scholarship, Reyes'
fraternal and ritual constructs and Kumari's ideational creations.

Contradictions in Mercedes Morgana Reyes' Aje Advocacy

The level of detail provided by Washington in her allegations convinced me of

her case. The Facebook sites Washington describes Reyes as plagiarizing her
work on have been taken down, Reyes, in my conversation with her citing
instructions by the Mothers, Iyami Mi Aje, to take them down, a claim I don't
find convincing.

Reyes also claims that she was actually taught to do Iyami Aje initiations by a
Nigerian who has passed away relatively recently. I wonder how realistic that
claim is.

Fiction and Fact in the Construction of Spiritual Mythologies

As I have told Reyes, she might have been doing the right thing in the wrong
way, constructing a genuine Iyami Aje spirituality without acknowledging her
sources and claiming a non-existent physical link with actual Iyami.

I explained that a lot of spirituality and religion grounds its legitimacy in

fiction, at times deliberately concocted, at other times the lines between

16
deliberate concoction and pious faith being difficult to discern, although the
numinous core, the means of access to spiritual vitality provided by the
system, often operating through the faith galvanized by those fictions, is very
real.

Examples are the Biblical Hebrew claim of being chosen by God above all
other peoples and granted land belonging to others as their Promised Land
and the description of Jesus as God incarnate on Earth through impregnation
of his mother by God himself, bypassing the human husband of Mary, Jesus'
mother.

Coming down the centuries to modern esoteric and religious systems, this
strategy is also represented by a version of the history of the Ancient Mystical
Order of the Rosy Cross, a prominent Rosicrucian order, a central ideological
strain in Western esotericism, that the school is the contemporary expression
of the line of physical continuity of a school began by Egyptian pharaoh
Akhnaton, emerging into the modern limelight under the leadership of a US
man, Harvey Spencer Lewis.

Even bolder in terms of such accounts of ancient genealogies culminating in

the modern US is Eckankar's claim to be the latest expression of the oldest
spiritual school in existence, established since or even before the beginning of
time, and its leader the most exalted spiritual personage in the various
dimensions that constitute the cosmos, this leadership passing through
several great religious figures in various religions dispersed across time and
space to issue in the US man who was the leader in its current revelation to
the public for the first time, Paul Twitchell, a mantle passed on to his
successors, US men.

I understand all these narratives as being fictions, as demonstrated by their

contradictions. These fictions are useful, however, as means of inspiring
believers, of galvanizing faith and focusing the imagination, bringing within
the frame of readily apprehended ideas and images the otherwise amorphous
world of spiritual aspiration, reaching towards something transcending
human existence but imbuing that terrestrial existence with meaning,
permeating individual and global history with ultimate value.

What effective genealogies may one construct in building a spirituality from

such a mysterious matrix of ideas as those defining Iyami Aje?

17
18
 Image on Preceding Page

Mercedes Morgana Reyes at her Iyami Aje Initiation

The initiate, Mercedes Morgana Reyes, bearing on her forehead the

crescent moon of cosmological nexus, of lunar rhythms in concert with
female biological cycles.

Her eyes are ringed by circles symbolic of revelatory vision, wearing a

headdress evocative of the coruscation of dark energies as Those who
are invoked intersect with biological form and mental dynamism at
the crown of her head.

She is tying a red wrapper suggestive of the intimate link between the
force of Iyami Aje, the Mothers Enigmatic, and the life flows of human
embodiment.

Her wrapper tied in the way it is tied in the place where the devotion
to Iyami Aje comes from, Nigeria's Yorubaland.

She is carrying a sculpture in which a group of women hold up a form

evocative of the sphericality of a pregnant woman's stomach and thus
of the ultimate source of life known to humanity, the womb, the
biological form and creative possibilities of the womb suggestive of
the metaphysical womb space from which the initiate is reborn into
the arcane sisterhood of Iyami Aje, biological power giving birth to
spiritual power at the point of the opening of the portal between orun,
the world of ultimate origins, and aye,the physical world, as the
matriarch, the embodiment of all mothers, past, present and future,
representative of Iyami, Our Mothers, the embodiment of the
existence of mothers as channels for the capacity to shape existence,
looks on..

19
That is a way of describing Mercedes Morgana Reyes’
interpretation of this ancient and paradoxical complex of ideas,
making it humane, logical and oriented in terms of fundamental
parameters of meaning that may be readily assimilated by anyone,
even within the context of her description of these forms of being
as cloaked in the mystery of the ultimate finalities beyond
perception, at the sources of life and death, their vitality pulsing in
the fire of blood, their depth ululating in the darkness of earth and
the eloquent silence of the unknown beyond terrestrial being, yet
resonating as unspoken voices vibrating from the beyond, forms
and expressions both transcendent of time and space and
yet whispering soundlessly but compellingly in every moment. to
those who are sensitive to them.

Mercedes Morgana Reyes and the Womb of Witchcraft VII :

Initiation into Aje Constellation in the Forest of Being and
Becoming, 2014.

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Suggestions for Moving Forward in Mercedes Morgana Reyes' Awon Iya
Wa Aje Advocacy

Apology

I hereby suggest to Reyes that if she plagiarized Washington she should

tender a public apology. If she claimed a link to physical Iyami Aje that was
concocted she should also apologize for that.

Constructing an Iyami Aje System through an Aesthetic Intelligence

What of value is Reyes offering besides quotations that might not be hers and
claims of physical Iyami Aje connections that might not exist and questionable
links to spiritually existing Iyami Aje?

She demonstrates a very powerful ritual consciousness, a profound sensitivity

to the use of images, digital and physical, in evoking a sense of the arcane, of
numinous possibilities, projecting a sense of supernatural mystery and occult
power.

Her presentations of Iyami Aje visualizations in terms of Yoruba Gelede art

dedicated to Iyami are further empowered by a constellation of images drawn
from various contexts, from pictures of mysterious figures, as in a cloaked
figure walking solemnly into a forest, her back to us as she glides in flowing
red, to depictions of amazing crystal installations, exquisite ritual
constructions in which the eye is inspired to experience the ability of human
creativity to evoke the sublime and the numinous, to magnificent nature
images, evoking a balance between light and darkness, such as a flame
glowing solemnly from a votive bowl within the archaic presence of the
darkness of a tree's hollow.

The eloquent silence of those images brings alive what is beyond full human
comprehension. Often unmediated by any words, they give themselves up to
naked intimacy of interaction with the self.

These images are complemented by her superb pictures of herself

undergoing her Iyami Aje initiation, employing symbolism that captures very
powerfully central ideas of this spirituality.

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The qualities demonstrated by this imagistic system are the nucleus, in my
view, of what Reyes needs in developing an Iyami Aje spirituality.

Various spiritualities, on different continents, declare that the creative power

that enables the shaping of spiritual reality is pervasive throughout the
universe and can be harnessed by human beings, an idea described by John
Mbiti in African Religions and Philosophy as unifying classical African
cosmologies.

A variant of that idea is Jesus' declaration in the Biblical Book of John that
"the spirit bloweth where it listeth and none knows whence it cometh and
whither it goeth". Hinduism refers to a similar force as Shakti.

"By names and images are all powers awakened and reawakened," declares
Israel Regardie's edited The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites
&Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, in a summation
covering the use of visuality and language in spirituality. The Golden Dawn
itself unifies an imagistic and verbal universe drawn from ancient Egyptian,
Jewish Kabbalistic, Christian, and other spiritualities in creating the most
influential text in modern Western esotericism.

Reyes is very skilled in the deployment of images, visualizing creative power

through aesthetic forms. This description of her activity adapts Abiodun on
this strategy in Yoruba ritual contexts, in his essays “Verbalizing and
Visualizing Creative Power through Art”, “Understanding Yoruba Art and
Aesthetics: The Concept of Ase” and in Yoruba Art and Language, exploring
how correlative visual and verbal dynamics are employed in activating,
shaping and directing ase, the Yoruba variant of the cosmic force enabling
existence and change.

Such creative dynamism may be demonstrated in expanding cognitive

capacities, opening the mind to dimensions beyond the conventionally
accessible. The conjunction of carefully chosen and aesthetically crafted
images and words is a central method in fulfilling this goal in spiritual systems
and in a good number of philosophical structures.

My experience with Reye’s Facebook images dramatizes Abiodun’s account in

“Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics”, of how “physical materials,
metaphysical concepts, and art blend to form the energy or life force

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activating and directing… artistic processes and experiences. ... triggering an
emotional response … even when this may not be fully and immediately
comprehended,” an effect all the more powerful for the inchoate force glowing
at its centre.

One of the world's greatest rituals, compact yet cosmologically expansive, the
Hindu Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram, is a meditation on a single image, the Sri
Yantra, which encapsulates the dynamic structure of the cosmos in terms of a
harmony of interlocking triangles within a sequence of concentric circles.

One of the richest of cosmological symbols is the human body, as realized by

the use of the body as a map of the cosmos in Yoga, the Jewish origin Kabbala
and the Sri Yantra.

The entire visible universe, even the most commonplace of visible things, has
been the subject of the most expansive symbolism. One of the most
imagistically rich and yet powerfully associative images is that of the tree,
which recurs in cosmologies across continents, with the most concretely
realised yet imagistically luxuriant symbol of the cosmos as a tree known to
me being Yggdrassil, the Norse cosmic tree, the branches of which are the
various regions of the cosmos, at the bottom of which is Mimer, the well of
wisdom around or near which are positioned the three Norns, aged women
who weave the threads of human life between past, present and future.

A frog jumping into the water of a pond, as depicted by the Japanese poet
Matsuo Basho inspired by Zen Buddhism, a person walking with an animal
on a journey, as pictured in the Zen Buddhist ox-herding parable, the expanse
of the sky as depicted in Tibetan Buddhism, as in the particularly splendid
account of this image in Judith Simmer-Brown's Dakini's Warm Breath: The
Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism, puddles of water on a road mirroring
the image of the sky, as described by Christian theologian Karl Rahner in Belief
Today, the view of the sea as seen as one bends to wash one's hands in a bowl
of water in the garden designer Sen Rikyū's garden at Sakai, as described at
the Encyclopedia Britannica article on Japanese gardening, the moment
between one breath and the next, as engaged with in the Hindu Vijnana
Bhairava Tantra, the silence between the utterance of one speech sound and
another, as depicted by Hindu thinker Abhinavagupta, the empty space at the
centre of a bicycle wheel, the relationship between the emptiness of a room
and its walls, as responded to in Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu's Tao te Ching,

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emptiness in various concrete and abstract forms and the seemingly banal
idea of nothingness, as recurring in various thought systems, religious and
scientific, from Africa to Asia to Europe, as in the religious examples discussed
in Bettina Baumer and John Dupuche's edited Void and Fullness in the
Buddhist, Hindu and Christian Traditions, the scientific analyses by Tian Yu Cao
in "Ontology and Scientific Explanation" and in Frank Close's Nothing: A Very
Short Introduction, all these are cosmological symbols, encapsulations of
cosmos in their respective spiritual,philosophical and scientific systems,
suggesting the associative possibilities of practically anything that people can
readily identify with, everyday images being the most gripping of such
possibilities.

With such an understanding in mind, developing a spiritual, and a kind of

philosophical initiatory and training system is not difficult, simply
painstaking. One approach is to find images and ideas that are likely to elicit
deep responses from the aspirant and develop these in terms of a sequence
of meditations, invocations and ideas about how to live.

I understand the majestic and delicately beautiful images of Reyes' earlier

announced forthcoming Aje Oracle as moving in such a direction.

Integrating Various Competencies

Does one need to be a literary genius to develop inspiring words and

expressions for use in a spiritual or philosophical system? No. All one needs is
sensitivity to one's own inspiration, cultivating it through reflection,
contemplation and possibly ritual practice, perhaps through fruitful
interaction with others, and a painstaking effort to keep working at sharing
that inspiration. The more one tries to express oneself, the better one gets,
particularly if one cultivates a habit of reading good writing and engaging with
powerful visual and other expressions, particularly the kinds that inspire one.

One approach to the work involved in building a spiritual system is that such
effort is meant to make it relatively easy to internalize the system through
regular practice, like learning to ride a bicycle.

Washington's screenshots of the alleged plagiarisms on Reyes' Facebook

pages demonstrate the enhancing of the communicative value of the verbal
text with matching images chosen from various online sources. The ethical

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thing to do is to clearly acknowledge the sources of the verbal text, and ideally,
of the images.

The scholarship demonstrated by Washington's work represents a particular

kind of skill, painstakingly cultivated. Searching for and selecting appropriate
images to evoke the ideas of the arcane and the numinous, the sacred and the
otherworldly, matching these with relevant verbal text, Washington's forte, is
another skill set. Being able to develop a practical teaching and initiatory
system through such a combination represents again another skill set. Being
able to bring these diverse but complementary competencies together,
drawing from various sources which one acknowledges in respect for the
commitment, skill and accomplishment of the creators of those sources, would
be a great achievement.
The key is building on one's primary competencies, complementing it with the
skills of others, reaching into the inspirational core that brought one to the
particular spiritual path in the first place, a nucleus one can project to others
in whatever way one knows how, as someone put it about the magnetic power
of spiritual accomplishment, striving to light a fire to which people would be
drawn to warm themselves.

Cultivating Iyami Aje Spirituality as an Innate Human Inheritance

Emblematized by Feminine Biology and Psyche

After all, as stated by thinker Akin Solanke in a personal communication, may

that not be seen as what the aje concept is about in the first place? A metaphor
for an ancient idea, pervasive across cultures, of the human being as an
embodiment of hidden powers, a cauldron of infinite cognitive depth, a well
waiting to be plumbed, a flame ultimately unbound by the frameworks
shaping the limitations of body and mind, able to soar like a bird, to navigate
the complex of past, present and future without constriction by the linear flow
of time, consorting with the symphony of consciousnesses that animate the
web of being, animate, inanimate, human, non-human, animal, spirit, plants,
rocks, the elements and more, penetrating into the majestic ultimacy, the
space of infinite rooms where the cosmos is subsumed and transcended in the
embrace of an infinite intelligence, the magical and the mystical converging in
the conglomeration of visions of human possibility?

The inspiration that brings you to a spiritual path, is that not the seed
representative of your own inheritance of the Iyami Aje principle, the

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maternality of cosmos giving birth to a seed within one at the intersection of
individual potential and cosmic possibility, a maternality imaged in terms of the
primary maternal paradigm available to humanity, the human woman, her
ability to bring forth life being the primary image of the human capacity to give
birth to new things at various levels of being?

Allow the aje in you to communicate with you. Let her voice whisper to you in
intimations of glorious potential. Cultivate her intimacy through silence. Let the
capacity for inward privacy, the cultivation of power through concealing the self
as in a space where it gathers power free from the endless currents of human
activity, be your way of life. Alone, listen to her. When with others, be attentive
to her.

Seek places that inspire you and in solitude, go to those places in imagination.
Visualize them. Even better if they are natural spaces or natural or human made
sacred spaces. Allow their power to call you.

The ability to navigate dimensions with the help of inspirational spaces is part of
the skill of aje.

Suggestions to cultivate one's identity as Iyami Aje may be thus be framed as

in the preceding italicized lines addressing an aspirant to aje.

Cultivating Ethics in Iyami Aje Spirituality

In these explorations, you are likely to meet various opportunities. For good or
evil. The divine and the demonic.

The injunction of the Galilean is most vital in such situations "What shall it profit
a person if they gain the whole world, and lose their own soul?," the
exhortations to the initiate into aje may further suggest.

Economics of Spirituality

Should initiations be charged for? At what point, in relation to different

contexts, do prices for spiritual initiation and training go from the reasonable
to the exorbitant?

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Crystal Concentric Circles Formation from a
Mercedes Morgana Reyes Facebook Page and
a Picture of Her at Her Iyami Aje Initiation

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 Existing in Fact vs Existing Only in Terms of Faith

Do Iyami really exist? Do deities of any kind really exist? Does God or the
variants of that idea across religions really exist apart from people's faith?

These questions about the reality of spiritual beings cannot be definitively

answered by any one person for everybody. What is understood by religious
people as evidence for the validity of their faith is often not admissible for
believers in other faiths and certainly not for those outside any faith
affiliation.

The best the human race is often able to do, like the Buddhist image of the
finger pointing to the moon, is create structures-ideas, images, practices- for
relating with what the creators of those structures believe exists beyond the
world as readily known.

One of such systems is the Iyami Aje spirituality being constructed by

Mercedes Morgana Reyes.

[ Humanity's] best artifice to snare and hold the grandeur of divinity

always crumbles in [ one's ] hands, and the more ardently [one]
strives the more paltry and incongruous the result. So it were better
he did not try at all; far better to ritualise that incongruity and by
invoking the mystery of metaphor to hint at the most unattainable
glory by its very opposite, the most mundane starkness- a mere
stream, a tree, a stone, a mound of earth, a little clay bowl,
containing fingers of chalk.

Thus it came about that the indescribable Pillar of Water [ in which

Idemili, daughter of the Almighty, came to Earth] fusing earth to
heaven at the navel of the black lake became in numberless shrine-
houses across the country, a dry stick rising erect from the bare,
earth floor.

Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah.

I can describe myself as experiencing an initiation into depths of creativity in

relation to the world as seen though the universe constructed by Reyes' image

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selection and organization in her Facebook pages, leading me to compose two
cycles of poetry taking that orientation further, , "Mercedes Morgana Bonilla
and the Womb of Witchcraft" and the "Iyami Tarot."

I look forward to seeing her inspiring Facebook accounts reopened, with any
references from other sources duly acknowledged, clearly demonstrating any
experimental methods she is employing in giving flesh to enigmatic spiritual
ideas.

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