origins

☆☆☆Understanding the African Philosophical Concept Behind the “Diagram of the Law of Opposites – Yosef A.A. ben-Jochannan with Evelyn Walker, Dorothy Lee Cobb, and Calvin Birdsong☆☆☆ Josef ben-Jochannan (1918-2015) was a master teacher with a forceful command of ancient and contemporary history. He used wit, humor, and common sense to accent history and expose historical distortions. Dr. Ben taught on the faculty of colleges and universities in the United States and abroad. He was a Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Languages, Al Azhar University (Arab Republic of Egypt), and for many years served as Adjunct Professor of History and Egyptology at Cornell University’s Africana Studies and Research Center. Published while teaching at the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University, this work showcases Dr. Ben as a mentor, and gives readers a sample of his interactive teaching style. He combines in this book a dynamic lecture on the Diagram of the Law of Opposites, along with essays contributed by his graduate students on aspects of the same topic. This collaboration between student and teacher distinguishes this volume from the many other books by this noted activist-historian.1975*, 2005. 66 pp. illus. “Before dealing with man’s ideas on Immortality, it is necessary to say that the elements: Air, Fire, Water, and Earth and the four qualities: Hot, Dry, Wet, and Cold, I took to mean the projection outwards of the phallic principles or man and woman. The universe mirrored man or earth and the generative principles were the same for the universe as they were for man.” “In seeking explanations for the “How” of his existence man became cognizant of the generative powers of the moon (female) and the sun (male). Man can be seen as being evolutionary, not in the Darwinian conception of man’s descent from primates but rather evolutionary in the various stages of phases which he passes through not only biologically but spiritually; this spirituality ending in the path to the Ultimate Cognition; man deified or man projected outside himself into the universe as God. The rising and setting of the sun, the different phases of the moon, the seasons which created a death/life condition during the winter upon vegetation and spring and summer which saw a bursting forth of new life, were the means by which man was aided in his attempt to answer the “How” of himself. The answers to the “How” appeared to be stated in the Law of Opposites which is the name of the matrix presented by professor Yosef ben-Jochannan; a matrix itself being equivalent to the female or mother within which something originates or take form. Man determined that it was the conjunction of the female and male principles that produced life.” ~ Dorothy Lee Cobb