KUNTUNKANTAN UNDERSTOOD AS A CONTEMPLATIVE COMPANION


Nana Atuan, an Adinkrahen, was in the habit of addressing Kuntunkantan the way one addresses a an interlocutor to whom was one was grateful for precious time given. At the conclusion of her contemplation of Kuntunkantan she would address the Adinkra symbol mentally, from one mind to another mind, as it were, and say “Thank You”. She saw the symbol as representing a confluence of possibilities, and that her addressing it as an entity that was relating with her enabled her to express her gratitude at participating in the liberation of mind, the freedom from immediate concerns, from the energy sapping creepers of the mind, enabling the ease of body she enjoyed through the contemplation of the profoundly evocative design.

She claimed that this act of articulated gratitude, of addressing the symbol as if it were living, led to a sense of personality emerging from the symbol, a welling forth of a presence in relation to it that suggested a sense of warmth, a sense of being enclosed within a protective embrace, the way in which the centre of Kuntunkantan is surrounded in a protective embrace by the surrounding circles, a sense of the nurturing togetherness of a family, a sense of being at home in the world, with the universe as a region uniquely suited to the presence of herself, Nana Atuan. With all its fears, troubles, dangers, anxieties, she was at home, she felt at home.

She expressed her experience in the following lines:

Where will I find wisdom?

Wisdom that will free me from the prison of my mind?

In the centre of Kuntunkantan

Mother

Who holds me to herself

The influence of Nana Atuan’s relationship with Kuntunkantan as Mother eventually inspired a correlation between Kuntunkantan and the Odu of the Ifa system of knowledge and divination that was developed by the Yoruba of Nigeria. The Odu, like Kuntunkantan, also embodies the sense of empty but potent space, of a matrix within and through which an understanding of the possibilities of the universe may be assembled and reassembled, of the symbol as evocative of having a life and personality of its own, of a means of integrating the cosmos of the human mind and the cosmos of the world outside the mind, but, which, to some degree, is perceived by the mind. But along with these associations, which bring the Odu into line with the fundamental conceptions of Kuntunkantan as they emerged in the fifteenth century, the Odu also embodies certain ideas that made it possible to develop Kuntunkantan in terms of an elaboration of new ideas from Ifa.

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