The relationship between the self and the creation of textual forms in exploring the significance of the flow of experience in relation to the past and the future from a vantage point in the present emerges in Ifa from the role, in the divinatory process, of the ontological category of the human self, represented by the cardinal term of traditional Yoruba thought known as Ori18. The Ori can be described as the existential drive that animates each individual’s existence. This term literally means the “head”, but, through what could be understood as a metonymic process, it symbolises, through the cognitive nucleus of the human form in the head, the supra-physical cognitive centre that guides the individual’s existence.

Ifa divination describes Ori as fundamental to the divinatory process. It states that the client’s Ori determines the pattern assumed by the divinatory instruments when they are cast during a divinatory session on account of the pre-eminence of the Ori in all contexts relating to the individual. Abimbola’s account of this conception suggests that the Ori of the client achieves this shaping influence through a collaborative process in relation to the Odu, the organisational categories of the system, which are symbolised by the total possibilities of patterns that can be assumed by the divinatory instruments. These configurations also represent the frameworks of organisation of the textual corpus of the Ifa system.

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18 Bolaji Idowu, Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief (London : Longman, 1962) and Wande Abimbola, An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus (Ibadan:OxfordUP,1976) represent very lucid expositions of this concept but Adegboyega Orangun, Destiny:The Unmanifested Being (Ibadan: African Odyssey Publishers,1988) explores its complexities in detail.