1. Statement of Purpose

This essay explores the question of the sources of religious ideas in relation to the interpretation of landscape by two religious visionaries. These figures are Susan Wenger and Katherine Maltwood. Wenger has developed the Oshun Forest in Nigeria while Maltwood has focused on the town and surrounding landscape of Glastonbury in England.1

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1 The key sources for the work of these religious visionaries are: Ulli Beier, The Return of the Gods:The Sacred Art of Susan Wenger, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,1975; Rolf Brockmann and Gerd Hotter, Adunni:A Portrait of Susanne Wenger,Munchen;Trickster Verag,1994;Susanne Wenger, The Sacred Groves of Osogbo,; Susanne Wenger, The Timeless Mind of the Sacred and Its Manifestation in a Yoruba Town,; Susanne Wenger and Gert Chesi, A Life with the Gods in their Yoruba Homeland, Brixentaller Strasse: Perlinger Verlag,1983; Katherine Maltwood,A Guide to Glastonbury’s Temple of the Stars, Cambridge: James Clarke,1982; Mary Caine, ‘The Glastonbury Zodiac’ Gandalf’s Garden, no. 4, 1969;Mary Caine, The Glastonbury Giants, Kingston -Upon -Thames,1978;Mary Caine,n.d.A Map of the Glastonbury Zodiac: Arthur’s Original Round Table. N.p. This essay contributes to knowledge about the work of these figures as well as to the understanding the manner in which human beings create metaphysical orientations for themselves in relation to the interpretation and reconfiguration of space. The work fill the lacuna in current literature about the work of Susan Wenger who has devoted her life to the reinterpretation of traditional Yoruba metaphysics through philosophical and artistic expression with particular reference to its demonstration in the traditional conception of the Oshun forest. Wenger’s work, being that of an Austrian working in Africa and transmuting traditional African artistic forms and their metaphysical correlates, has been tacitly perceived as existing in a limbo in which the tradition to which she belongs as well as her geographical and cultural roots are most problematic. Her work, therefore, is not explored with any depth in texts on traditional or on modern African art and neither is it adequately represented in literature on Austrian or German art. The groundbreaking works of Abiodun,the Drewals and Pemberton(such as Drewal, 1980,1994) on traditional Yoruba art hardly make any reference to her.The absence of a discussion of her work in the major survey of the development of contemporary African art, Clementine Delis (Ed.)Seven Stories: About Modern Art in Africa(Paris: Flammarian, 1996) represents the pervasive absence of critical literature about her work in scholarship on this field. The few book length studies of her work do not engage it within a theoretical matrix. Her art and thought receives their most consistent representation in her own books, in magazines, newspapers and nonacademic internet sites which do not explore in detail the complexity and profundity of her artistic enterpriseThis essay also explores Maltwood’s work on Glastonbury in relation to the imaginative processes involved in this work and the theoretical implications of those processes. Her work has not been studied in detail so far in relation to the creative exercise of the imagination, rather it has been explored fundamentally in terms of its empirical validity. Nigel Pennick, The Ancient Science of Geomancy: Man in Harmony with the Earth (London; Thames and Hudson, 1979)which he describes as the human science of placing human actives and habitats in to a relationship with the visible and invisible world around us, edges towards a sensitivity to the artistic dimension of her work when he observes that it represents the correlation of the forms of landscape with the artificial forms of human consciousness but he does not develop this insight.Adrian Ivakhiv, Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona (Bloomington:Indiana UP,2001)examines the phenomenological dimension of her work but does not demonstrate a sensitivity to the artistic essence implicit in the phenomenological framework of her activity.