Essay: Jacob K. Olupona’s City of 201 Gods: Ilé-Ifè in Time, Space, and the Imagination

Jacob K. Olupona’s City of 201 Gods: Ilé-Ifè in Time, Space, and the Imagination is the book which has given me beyond imagination and an informative passage about the sacred cities in the world, other than knowing Jerusalem, Rome, and Mecca is the only sacred cities in the world. According to me, Olupona gives us a prevailing information about the sacred city of the Yoruba religion, Ilé-Ifè. This city has been comprehensively reviewed and learned by archaeologists and art historians. Ilé-Ifè should be studied further through religious aspect and should be considered among one of the sacred cities like Banaras, Medina, Tenochtitlán, and others as one of the great sacred cities of the world. Olupona discusses the cosmology, history, and ethnography of the sacred city, their associated sacraments and the lively nature of the bond concerning the Yoruba religion. Olupona’s philosophy and scheme methodology are manifold. He talks about outside world life of Ilé-Ifè with the art and archeology aspect. His approach is principally ethnographic. He believes in merging together conventional ethnographic research. Experiencing in person, he researched and analyzed the spiritual and cultural center of the Yoruba religion. He discusses the change in the city from great distinction to near demolition and then was known again as the city of gods.
Throughout, Olupona corroborates the indispensable linkages between religion, cosmology, migration, and kinship as espoused in the power of royal lineages, hegemonic state structure, gender, and the Yoruba sense of place, offering the fullest portrait to date of this sacred African city. Culturally and spiritually, African cosmologies are in search of better existence that is bringing entities and societies together. Everybody from all age should be thankful for the privilege of living and staying healthy and wealthy. Socialization processes, festivals, and ceremonies make the life of African culture. Individual and social satisfaction is informally associated with the ritual life of society.
However, according to my understanding, Eliade’s theory of “the sacred” offers a significant stand or periphery for my methodology to religious studies because it represents to appreciate of the distinctive appeal of religious experience. It is certainly important to my methodology to religion, people who tend to approach interacts in religious actions are assumed to go out of their limit to understand more in seeking and absorbing whatever they can with their limited means. The word sacred itself is very distinctive and unusual kind of individuals perception, as it conveys other secretive reality which cannot be assumed or simplified. With his perception of the sacred, Eliade is in a consciousness gesturing about things around him are believed to be actual and real. Deprived of believing to distinguish the foundation of the sacred, Eliade claims that, whatever the foundation is, it is distinctive, secretive and prevailing as the being experience related with it is also distinctive, secretive and prevailing. Moreover, Eliade thinks that people who are religious believe in distinct something of which we are unaware of, so insists that we make a research on that distinct something. Eliade’ approach has the perspective view of the likelihood of humanity’s objective, expressive or academic connection with unearthly strengths or individuals. Eliade’s philosophy, then, will establish one of the levels of my methodological approach. Other than that, having the sense of understanding from both Eliade’s and Olupona that myth is reality and place and space is associated with a historical and mythological experience of the divine. It gives the concept of the beliefs and philosophies concerning definitive actuality and the divine and supreme can develop liberally, inhibited by scientific reductionism.