C. Points of Convergence between the Hermeneutic Processes Involved in Ifa Divination and the Interpretation of Self and Individual History Constituted by Autobiography and the Self Portrait

a. Consciousness, Temporality and Textual Formations

The hermeneutic process constituted by Ifa divination demonstrates significant correlations with the interpretation of meaning manifest in the creation of autobiographies and self-portraits.

These points of convergence consist in the interpretation, in terms of textual forms, of the flow of experience in relation to the past and the future from a vantage point in the present. These textual forms constitute interpretive centres in relation to either specific situations, or in relation to the development of a broader span in the development of the subject’s life.

The deployment of textual forms as interpretive centres emerges from the fact that the process of Ifa divination consists in a procedure, in which, in response to the client’s query, the diviner casts his divination instruments and interprets for the client the significance of the configuration realised by the instruments. This significance is depicted in terms of poetic or prose narratives, and, at times, through lyric poetry, from one or more of the Odu, the organisational categories of the Ifa corpus, which are represented by the patterns formed by the configuration the divinatory instruments assume as they are cast.

The literary expressions that emerge in response to the casting of the divinatory instruments are supposed to embody a response, in symbolic terms, to the client’s query. The symbolic character of this relationship has to be interpreted by both the diviner and the client. This interpretation of the significance of situations in terms of symbolic narratives and imagistic patterns demonstrates a similarity to Nabokov’s conception of autobiography as best understood as created and read as an effort to crystallize, in the form of images, convergences of meaning, in which the thematic significance that emerges from the contemplation of the flow of experience is crystallized in terms of points of illumination.