IGBO GEOMETRY AND THE METAPHYSICS OF NUMBERS - Onyeji Nnaji

Copied from the book Cosmic Chain by Onyeji Nnaji.

Dan Brown made a shocking revelation when he said that the easiest way to understand the underlying meaning in the writings of ancient scholars is by untying their mystic codes. Interpreting the mystic symbols of some ancient cults and the revelation of their mystic emblems made him one remarkable mystic scholar known in recent time. The reason why many Igbo values are misinterpreted and their mystic emblems misrepresented is because researchers find them relatively difficult to decode them comprehensively. 

Igbo ancestors who used the language in it's original forms understood these valuey with less puzzl because they belonged to the generation where everything was mystic; the language itself notwithstanding. For the language was the container and dispenser of these codes. Afa was the language of the beginning. It was the genesis of the human tongues. Almost entirely codified; Afa is the language of the gods. This remains the sole reason why expressions in the Igbo language is not ordinarily realized without the inclusiveness of proverbs and wise saying.

Igbo Language is composed of nature components. The makeups of the language are those things found around the human environment; both as perceivable entities and as concepts realized as ideas. That is why, dominant in the Igbo language are terms associated with humans, gods, trees, air, water, the atmosphere, spirits and other forms of nature. 

The Igbo believe that all these nature components speak and communicate in their own different ways. For so reasoned, it becomes imperative that anybody seeking an interpretation into the Igbo world, according to Chinua Achebe, will have to gain greater understanding of the Igbo folklore, proverbs, proper name, rituals and festivals. These avenues serve as the media for the exploration and transmission of the encoded tongues. Another area to be given adequate attention is the Igbo Geometries; for the values that informed the potency of the Igbo world views are symbolically represented in their iconic forms through the Geometries.

Igbo geometry is the artistic representation of scholarship formally initiated as the iconic standard for the exhibition and preservation of the Igbo taughts. Fundamentally, these symbolic representations of values began with the Ichi scarification. In the later days of the Igbo historic society, the symbols became formally acculturated into the conversational process that communicated vividly what the Igbo believe, stand for and what the Igbo represent. But because the scripting of these symbolic terms was the reserve of the Igbo scribes, the knowledge of the symbols became relatively restrictive; especially in the post flood period when the knowledge of these Geometries gained the attention of certain societal groups who masterminded their usage and their accompanied interpretations. 

As a child, we made serious exhibitions of these symbols, marking out their different shapes; but our exhibitions of the shapes were devoid of the required interpretations that would make our use of them in communication astute. For this reason, we lacked totally the underlying relevance of the values they represented. This same situation applies to the very many Igbo children who were not schooled towards their interpretations even hitherto.

The geometry of the Igbo scholarship ranges from single representation codes to the more complex types. The base point of their interpretations are numbers. For their figurative representations fully encode virtually all that is knowledgeable about the Igbo race. Igbo numerical symbols range from one to twenty-four. One, two, three, four, five, seven and eight are figures codified to depict the axioms of the Igbo historical tradition. Axionomical because they form the Igbo cosmological principles. The rest are for extended metaphysical depictions of cults whose interpretations rest in the hands of higher acultic realms in the Igbo society. In this discourse, we are particularly concerned with the seven figures stated above as embodying the tenets held universally as the Igbo Metaphysical view points.