Ifa understands the client’s Ori as determining the Odu patterns assumed by the divinatory instruments when they are cast during a divinatory session, and therefore, of determining the texts that emerge in relation to the issue in question in the client’s life. In a similar sense, the autobiographer’s conception of the character of their self, as it exists in the present, having emerged through a development from the past, and as it could develop in future, is the locus around which the textual formulation represented by an autobiography is constructed.

In relation to this centring of autobiographical writing, and, necessarily, of its interpretation, in a conception of the development of the self which is the subject of the work, emerges the artist’s efforts to mediate between an exploration of the character of the self as a composition that emerges from the factors that have influenced it and as causative of those factors that constitute the character of the individual’s life. This tension between the self as caused and as causative represents a dialectical tension between independence of the self and its grounding within a complex of influencing factors that is central to the Ifa conception of the self in relation to the cosmos.