From time immemorial, human beings have sought pristine natural spaces as places to seek or encounter something beyond the mundane realities that shape daily life.In the forest regions of the world, the forest is often perceived as the abode of supernatural wonder into which people go to be initiated into spiritual mysteries, awakening them to the hidden metaphysical meaning of life.
The Oshun Forest in Oshogbo, Nigeria has been interpreted by the Austrian/Nigerian artist and philosopher Susanne Wenger, for whom the forest has become a spiritual home, in terms that develop into an expansive metaphysical vision the general understanding of forests as demonstrating sacred spaces.
Living in Oshogbo since 1950, she has come to understand the forest as embodying the spiritual beings who animate the world as understood in the Orisha tradition developed by the Yoruba of South-West Nigeria, where Oshogbo is located. Within this vision, the devotee who explores this forest make contact with the spiritual beings who constitute the metaphysical dynamism and spiritual essences of the world. The spiritual forces embodied by the forest represent a microcosm of the macrocosmic structure of the universe.
Wenger’s conception of the forest as a template of the metaphysical structure and dynamism of the cosmos could be understood as a development of Classical Yoruba thought as described by Irele, in its conceiving of the forest as constituting a theatre of experience within which the adventures of the hunter are evocative of the challenges faced by the human being in navigating the symbiotic formation of spiritual and material existence that constitutes life on earth.
The complexity of the forest’s ecosystem is constituted not only by the interrelationships of the flora and fauna that compose and inhabit it but also by the reflection of that physical complexity in a network of relationships between the material and spiritual aspects of its elemental and animal life. This interrelational network makes the forest into an example of one way of interpreting Aquinas’s conception of connaturality in terms of a symbiotic conception of reality, within which the material, the psychological and the spiritual are mutually constitutive of the nature of being.
