Again, processes of interaction between physical forms, intersubjective and subjective realities are thrown into relief. These emerge from the questions inspired by Maltwood’s interpretations of landscape and the process through which she arrives at these interpretations. She describes herself as tracing the route of King Arthur’s knights in their quest fro the Grail as they traverse the Glastonbury countryside. She then observed that these routes, when correlated on a map, delineate, through the configurations of landscape, the signs of the Zodiac.

Interestingly, in relation to questions of imaginative perception and interpretation, some of the Zodiacal signs to which she attributes the landscape formations do not correspond to the conventional Zodiacal images but to images which may be related, through association, with the signs to which they are depicted as related in Maltwood’s pictographic scheme. She has developed different conceptions of the origin and significance of these images. She first described them as Later she .

The questions raised by these conceptions are highlighted by the fact that other Zodiacs have been “discovered” in other parts of England, through processes different from those that that led to Maltwood’s serendipitous discovery. That implies, therefore, that the tracing of the routes of the Arthurian knights that led to Maltwood’s discovery represents only one approach through which this “discovery” could have emerged.(SEE MANDALA AND LANDSCAPE-SOAS LIB.)

Maltwood’s work could also be seen as expressive of a similar interaction between individual subjectivity, physical forms,space and intersubjective worlds. This interactive process emerges from her interpretation of the landscape of Glastonbury and its surrounding landscape in terms of astrological and Arthurian motifs.

She does not create sculptures, as Wenger does, but she also develops forms that she interprets as representing mythic values realised through the landscape and as actualised in terms of figures expressive of astrological forms. The fact that the interpretation of these figures requires an ingenious interpretation of landscape formations as well as a generosity of imagination implies that her interpretations are fundamentally imaginative.

At the same time, however, once the imaginative and therefore, heuristic character of her figural interpretation of landscape is established, the ingenuity of her interpretations becomes evident. One is invited to contemplate and speculate upon the human mind’s integration of the physical universe to its own perceptual capacities and dispositions.

Chapter 2:
Theoretical framework and methodology
A. Exposition of theoretical framework
a. Creative Dynamics in the Artistic Processes of Wenger and Maltwood
The conception of cocreative agency is particularly appropriate for understanding the imaginative processes that emerge through the manner in which Wenger and Maltwood develop their responses to the landscapes they develop. With reference to the manner in which they both work, their methods suggest a mode of working in which there emerges an interactive proves between intersubjective realities, subjective reality and the forms of the physical world.

Wenger describes her creative processes as inspired by her responses to the landscapes on which she works. She describes herself as acclimatising herself to the physical space through sleeping at the place as well as meditating there. Through these processes of tactile and metal engagement, ideas begin to form in her head as to the sculptures she eventually erects on those sites with the aid of her assistants.

At the same time, however, her sculptures are expressions of her own conceptions of the mythic forms traditional to the cosmology of the Yoruba, where the Oshun Foest, where Wenger works, is to be found. Her sculptures, therefore, represent expressions of Wenger’s own encounters with the landscape, as mediated and transmuted through her own distinctive responses to the cosmology traditional to the physical locations where she works.

In her work, therefore, we observe a synergistic relationship between the physical forms represented by the landscape constituted by the Oshun Forest, the metal world constituted by her won ideas, which continue to grow as an Austrian intellectual and artist, well grounded in ideas related to comparative spirituality and art, and the ideas she has assimilated through her interactions with the cosmology of the traditional Yoruba as mediated through her relationships with the people she interacts with in the more than forty years she has spent as Osogbo.

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 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.

One effort that does examine Ifa in relation to a transcultural framework of knowledge is Longe’s Ifa Divination and Computer Science6, which demonstrates the relationship between the numerical ordering and permutations of the Ifa system and the mathematical framework of computer science. Most insightful and suggestive of further possibilities as this work is it may be said to lay the grounds for further questions. These questions include the possibility of going beyond the correlations the work develops to building investigations into the scope of the scientific or potentially scientific character of forms of knowledge within the Ifa system and related discourses in traditional Yoruba thought. We would need to investigate the possibility of developing a progression from this research that could yield new knowledge either through the application of principles of investigation similar to those employed by the creators of the Ifa system or through the application of the scientific or quasi-scientific forms of the system as it stands. This essay attempts to develop one such effort at creating knowledge that is based on Ifa but goes beyond its original formulation or its expression in related discourses.

A key effort at developing the explanatory capacities of the Ifa system in relation to a field of knowledge that goes beyond its original cultural matrix is Henry Louis Gate’s Jrs The Signifying Monkey4 in which he correlates the figure of the Orisa or deity Eshu from the Ifa system and that of the Signifying Monkey from African-American folklore as correlative metaphorical expressions of hermeneutic principles relevant to the interpretation of African-American literature.

While Gate’s impressive work does demonstrates not only the conceptual and cognitive significance of aspects of the Ifa system in terms of a modern idiom represented by contemporary principles of hermeneutics, and further demonstrates the expansiveness possible to the cultural range of the system by relating it to African-American literature, we may argue that his work, to some degree, still constitutes an exercise that needs to be built upon in order to demonstrate the universal cultural potential of such systems.

The kind of study we propose would develop this significance, not simply in terms of studies that operate purely within the endogenous cultural matrices of these systems, even when these efforts relate these to those creators of discourse who relate their work explicitly to these artistic and conceptual formations. The perspective we advocate would study these systems as conceptual structures which can exist on their own as free standing conceptual apparatus, as it were, and which can be deployed in the study of relevant phenomena, from any cultural, spatial or temporal milieu, whether African, Western or Asian, traditional or modern5.

B.Justification of Purpose
This work is inspired by the need to contribute to the development of the study of traditional African systems of thought beyond what this author identifies as the descriptive and analytical stages of scholarship. We do this through the erection and application of a theoretical framework that goes beyond the descriptive and analytical foci which currently dominates studies of traditional African thought.

Most studies of traditional African thought consist in descriptions and analysis of the ideational structures they demonstrate, as well as, in some cases, of an analysis of the relationship of these structures to the cognitive and social organisation of the societies to which they are endogenous.

Most of the studies make no effort to examine the significance of these systems to social formations and cultural productions that go beyond the host societies of these systems. The study of these systems of thought, however, has certainly gone beyond their classification as curiosities representing the infancy of the human race. Significant advances have been made in demonstrating their ideational sophistication and explanatory power, but these analytical advances are often limited to restricting these systems to tools of knowledge that can explain only those realities they were originally created to explicate or to which they have been explicitly related by modern forms of discourse2.

Examples of such intracultural study include interpreting Ifa, for example, as a means of elucidating critical principles embodied in Yoruba visual art or relating it to the work of the Yoruba writer Wole Soyinka, who makes the mythology of the system central to his work3.

One of the best examples is Rimbaud’s description of his creative processes in which he states “I am present at the birth of my thought. I look and I listen” or accounts of revelatory insights emerging, seemingly unbidden, through dreams, as the story of Kekule’s discovery of the structure of the benzene ring. Creative minds across disciplines concretize the idea we are developing about mutual engagement between ideas and those who develop them in various terms, some of which attribute sentience and volition, even if metaphorically, to the sources of their ideas as well as to the ideas themselves. The scientist Everet Just speaks of a central idea in his scientific work having “ridden” him for years. The conceptions of inspiration by the Muses developed by the Greeks and Romans, as well as Dante’s and Milton’s invocations to God represent the most definitive examples of this conception of inspiration in relation to ideas of cocreative agency.

With reference to those ideas we draw upon to explain the universe, are they not better understood, not as notions that are animated, given significance, purely by our own relationship with them or appropriation of them, but as possibilities of interpretation, of awareness, that to so some degree, affect our minds in ways that they do in spite of ourselves, that in fact, they do demonstrate some form of existence that removes them partially out of the pale of our own control, as demonstrating, therefore, some of those qualities that we associate with independent existence, and at a distant remove, with sentience, as the Ifa system attributes to the Odu?

The notion of interpretive possibilities, not as reified constructs or forms, which we appropriate at will, but as dynamic forms, which engage us to a similar degree to which we engage them, as partners in a creative dialogue, would seem to be a more appropriate interpretation of the creative processes through which Wenger and Maltwood and a significant number of other creative workers who have described their creative processes, than the conception of ideas and creative forms as passive constructs or possibilities, the deployment of which is purely under the control or agency of the creative individual. In fact, reports by creative individuals about the processes they undergo consistently suggest this sense of being engaged by as well as of engaging the creative forms they work with.

It is within the interactive locus constituted by the divinatory process through the collaborative relationship between the Odu and the Ori, in which the Ori expresses its will through the Odu, that we wish to explore the possibilities of employing the hermeneutic process of the Ifa system as an interpretive matrix for exploring the manner in which reality is constructed through the creation of maps, in a dialogical relationship between inner and outer world as actualized in an oscillation between individual subjectivities, intersubjective realities and the physical cosmos. The process of oscillating between a textual framework, as represented by the Odu and specific questions which constitutes the divinatory process, could be seen as representative of the processes through which reality is constituted through the oscillation between the physical cosmos, and intersubjective and subjective worlds.

This conception of the Odu as self-conscious entities that embody a sense of ultimate direction relates it to our study of the imaginative processes through which reality is constructed through the creation of maps that correlate inner and outer realities.

The system constituted by the Odu represent a means of mapping possibilities of existence, in terms of specific situations and interpretations of responses to these situations.

This process is developed through the creation of correlations between specific situations and the cosmology embodied by the system since each Odu is associated with a particular Orisa or divinity in the traditional Yoruba cosmos as well as by the fact that each divinatory session represents a means of relating terrestrial issues to sources of insight that emanate from the world of spirit, as constituted by the Ori of the client in its collaborative relationship with the Odu.

This collaborative relationship is manifest in the fact that, within the relationship between metaphysics, ontology and hermeneutics represented by the system, the Ori of the client influences the configuration realised by the divinatory instrument.

Since these configurations are the Odu or organizational categories of the system, the emergence of the patterns constituted by the Odu is manifest through the influence of the Ori. This occurs on account of the autonomy the system attributes to the individual’s Ori in relation to all affairs relating to the individual. The progression of the divinatory process, emerges, therefore, through a collaborative, dialectical process between the Ori and the Odu, in which, however, the Ori’s role is paramount. The Odu, therefore, expresses the will of the Ori.

In relation to their characterization in terms of chapters, that description, even though informative, does not represent adequately the multivalence of significance the conception of the Odu embodies in the ontological framework of the Ifa system. The Odu are understood not only as consisting of the graphic forms realised by lines organised in numerical formations, and of textual expressions, realizable through the resources provided to the essentially oral system of Ifa, by the graphic symbols of the written language.

They are also understood in terms that relate less to a conception of a text as an inert codification of expressions, than to what we might describe as dynamic content, dynamic in the sense that it is realizable in various ways by different audiences, as emphasised by reader response theory, but more to an understanding of texts that relates to Milton’s conception when he asserts that “A good book is the precious life blood of a master spirit, sealed and transmitted to a life beyond life” and van Gogh describes as a predominance of the “working of the soul, which is realized in its effects on its audience as “an awakening power”.

The Odu are depicted in terms that not only integrate the sense of endogenous dynamism, expressive of a motive fore emanating from an imaginative creator, a force described by Milton as “a precious life-blood”, by van Gogh as “the working of the soul” but goes beyond these to depict the Odu as sentient entities, each of which embodies its own centre of ultimate direction, known in traditional Yoruba ontology as Ori. The Ori represent the spiritual and cognitive centre of an entity, within which is embodied its complete potential for actualisation, in relation to the matrix of influences to which it relates. Its origin is described as preterrestial. In describing each of the Odu as embodying its own center of ultimate direction or Ori, the Odu are thereby perceived as self-conscious entities, each with own sense of mission, because the conception of the significance of the Ori suggests ideas of destiny as well as of mission.

The literary form of the system is realized from the fact that each of the two hundred and fifty six Odu represents the organizational centre for a corpus of texts, either lyrical or narrative, of an unknown number. Abimbola gives some insight into the character of the organisational structure represented by the Odu in describing them as chapters. That conception of the Odu in terms of the forms assumed by written texts demonstrates some validity on account of the fact that since the Odu operate as a means of organizing the literary texts that constitute the Ifa corpus in terms of distinctive but related units, they could be equated to chapters, particularly since the texts that constitute the entire corpus demonstrate fundamental similarities of form and content.

The continuity of content they demonstrate is similar to that of a collection of poetry by a single poet or to a work like the Koran, which is ahistorical, [IS THIS TRUE OF THE KORAN?]unlike the Bible which contains myth, in historical form, as well as narratives that could be described as efforts at representing historical narrative. The narratives and lyrics of the Ifa system are essentially ahistorical and mythic, although Abimbola has argued for their significance, as sources of history and the work of Alagoa and Dike could be relevant in exploring their historical significance. We would expect, however, that any historical value they may demonstrate have to be sifted through careful and discriminating scholarship.[SEE THE RELEVANT SOURCES,INCLUDING ABAIMBOLA ON THIS]

On account of the fact the order of the lines is inverted in the movement from the first to the second set of eight lines, we refer to the second set of eight lines as a mirror image. The conception of a mirror image does not imply a direct correlation but a correlation in difference, which emerges from the inversion of the positioning of the lines in the second set of eight lines. Proceeding from this structure constituted of a pairing of two sets of eight lines, which represent mirror images of each other, in inverted form, a further fourteen patterns are developed.

The first sixteen patterns thus developed are known as the major Odu or organisational categories of Ifa. From this major sixteen Odu or organisational categories, are developed a further two hundred and fifteen categories. The process through which these are developed consists in a process in which each member or set of the primary or major sixteen Odu is further developed into a another set of sixteen Odu which constitute its derivates, or Omo Odu (children of the Odu).

This process is carried out with each of the primary Odu so that a complete set of two hundred and fifty-six Odu, consisting of the primary sixteen and their derivatives, emerges.

This ordering and development of the Odu, organised in terms of graphic signs represented by patterns of lines organized in formations that demonstrate a numerical value, constitutes the mathematical structure of the Ifa system.[SEE IFA DIVINATION AND COMPUTER SCIENCE- LONGE’S INAUGURAL BOUGHT FROM UI.GET YOUR COPY FROM OHONBAMO.SEE IF YOU CAN GET IT THROUGH INTERLIBRARY LOAN]

The configurations are first expressed in terms of patterns of straight lines, which are inscribed by the diviner on the divining tray. These patterns correspond to numerical forms, since the total range of possible patterns is organized in terms of a development from a basic to more complex numerical units. The basic numerical unit in which these patterns of lines are organized is the number four which constitutes the basis for the total range of numerical ordering and numerical permutations the system embodies. This basic unit is doubled to realize the number eight.

This number constitutes the first full realization of an integral organizational unit, since the Odu or categories realized through the basic unit of four represents a template for the realisation of other possibilities, prototypes, as it were, the building blocks from which other possibilities could be developed. From this primary integral unity constituted by the first set of eight, known as the first Odu, or organisational category, emerges the next set of eight, which constitutes a mirror image of the first set of eight lines.[EXPLAIN THAT MIRROR IMAGE MEANS HERE;REVERSION BE SURE OF THUS CHARACTERISATION]

The Hermeneutic Process in Ifa Divination

The hermeneutic process in Ifa divination consists in an oscillation between specific questions and the exploratory matrix represented by the Odu or organisational categories of the system. The client expresses a question, either in silence to the instrument used for that purpose, so that the diviner does not hear it, as described by Abimbola, or as we have observed in our fieldwork in Benin, where the system has also been significantly developed, aloud to the diviner, who then casts the divinatory instruments, the diving chain or the sacred palm nuts, in response to the query. The configuration assumed by the divinatory instruments will constitute the response of the Ifa oracle to the client’s query. This response will be expressed in terms of texts, which correspond to these configurations.

A central question through which we develop the interpretive potential of the Ifa
system in relation to the epistemic focus of this essay is to explore the question of whether the oscillation between questions and their cosmographic organisation represented by the Odu can be adapted as a model for the understanding of the processes through which Wenger and Maltwood have created their cosmogeographic maps, as well as illuminate the processes through which human beings shape their reality through an interactive process that consists in an oscillation between the physical cosmos and intersubjective and objective realities.[SEE PEEK,DIVINATION SCHOLAR, ON THISIN HIS WORK ON DIVINATION,AND ANGELANAND GEOFFREY-PORACTISING ASTROLGERS AND DIVINATION SCHOLARS CURRETLY RUNNING A THRIVING COSMOLGY AND DIVINATION PROGRAM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF KENT]

In order to develop the interpretive possibilities of the system in relation to a model that facilitates a conceptualisation of the imaginative processes through which Wenger and Maltwood have developed their conceptions of the landscapes they work with, as well as the relationships of their activity to the imaginative activity of other creative workers, we need to provide an exposition of the hermeneutic processes through which the Ifa system operates.

This essay explores the possibility of using the process of mapping possibilities through a cosmological system, represented by Ifa, in the manner in which the divinatory process oscillates between specific questions and the metaphysical framework represented by the system in its patterned responses to specific situations and issues[RELATE TO TILLICH’S TECHNIQUE OF CORRELATION AND YOUR PRESENT IDEAS FOR USING THIS IN RELATION TO THE ELA WORK-SEE MODERN THELOGIANS.ED.FORD]

In this essay, we correlate the specific landscapes addressed by Wenger and Maltwood with the particular questions addressed at specific divinatory sessions and the explorations of these questions through reference to the interpretive matrix embodied by the cosmology expressed through the Odu, the organisational categories through which the Ifa system is organised.[SEE OHOMINA ON THE UNIVERSALITY OF IFA-SEE GREEN NOTEBOOK-COPY OUT HIS STATEMENTS WITH THAT OF THE HARVARD GRADUATE WHO WROTE ON RUNES: ON FORM FOLLOWING FUNCTION]

This essay examines the rationale for their interpretations, the processes through which these interpretations have been arrived at, as well as the significance of their efforts. In order to achieve these goals, we develop a theoretical framework that highlights the interaction between various cognitive domains through a system of mapping experiential and interpretive possibilities.

This framework is developed through an adaptation of the Ifa system of knowledge and divination developed by the Yoruba of Southern Nigeria.

This system consists in a dynamic grid of units organised in a mathematical and literary from through which a categorisation of a comprehensive range of possibilities of existence is realised. This organisational framework, known as the Odu, represents a template through which possibilities of interpretation of specific questions are actualised. It represents a dynamic matrix that represents the organisation of a cosmology and its application to the exploration of specific questions.

In embodying interpretations of a broad range of issues, it represents a means of categorising and, therefore, mapping possibilities of experience. In embodying the organisational framework representing a cosmology, it crystallises a mapping of relationships between physical and spiritual realities in terms of metaphysical principles. The system operates, therefore in terms of two aspects of mapping. It creates a map of possibilities of interpretation in relation to specific situations and it develops a framework that integrates all aspects of existence in terms of metaphysical principles.

Chapter 1:
A. Statement of purpose
This essay explores questions that emerge from the navigation of inner and outer worlds through the creation of maps. Inner worlds consist in the subjectivity in which the individual world consists while outer worlds are represented by the physical cosmos shared by all individuals. The work focuses on maps that demonstrate an aesthetic and spiritual significance, specifically, the conception of the convergence of cosmography and geography developed by Susanne Wenger at the Oshun Forest in Nigeria and by Karen Maltwood at Glastonbury and its surrounding landscape, in England.