We might have over dramatised our case particularly with reference to Gates’s work, which represents a landmark in the field of African studies, and of Longe’s, which correlates the ancient system of Ifa with one of the most contemporary and widespread of human technologies, but we hope to demonstrate that what Wenger describes as the demonstration of the universal significance of traditional African systems of thought can be realized in ways that go significantly beyond our current understanding of the cognitive and cultural range of these systems.

We have chosen the study of the Ifa system in exploring the question of the transcultural significance of traditional African systems of thought on account of its multidisciplinary, ideational and artistic range. It integrates mathematical and artistic methods of organisation and communication. It embodies what is likely to be the largest corpus of literary expressions integrated within one framework of discourse. These literary forms operate as a means of communicating ideas that relate to a broad gamut of observation and experience, from human history to flora and fauna.

The sculptural forms that are employed in the creation of the implements of the system represent one of the finest examples of traditional Yoruba art and embody a central source for traditional Yoruba aesthetic principles as well as of imaginative expressions of traditional Yoruba thought. These aspects of the system, however, represent the crystallization of a central spiritual impulse which is expressed in the fact that the system is fundamentally a school of spiritual discipline which is principally manifest, among other expressive forms, as a divinatory system.

We choose to study van Gogh in relation to the Ifa system on account of the precise but highly suggestive correlations we observe between the Ifa system, autobiographical theory, and the manifestation of the autobiographical impulse in van Gogh’s letters and self portraits, as well as the points of convergence between these links with a broad range of disciplines, such as psychology, myth, anthropology and aesthetics.