The narratives that emerge in response to the query of the client of Ifa as well as the narratives constructed by the autobiographer can both be understood as narratological devices, stories with a pattern, that are being interpreted by those to whom those patterns have an intimate value. In the case of the divinatory process the interpreting agents are the client and the diviner, in the creation of autobiography, the writer.

The divinatory process as well as the process of autobiographical creation, consist in a process in which the significance of the aspects of the subject’s life which are being explored, are examined in terms of their relationship to their roots in the subject’s past and the development of these into the future, as understood from the vantage point of the present. Wordsworth’s evocative image representing the perception of self through the refractive mirror of memory, emblematizes this convergence between past, present and future in relation to the shifting perspectives of the self that experiences them.