When I asked René why he was comfortable revealing secrets to foreign spiritual seekers like Christopher, he shrugged and replied, “He doesn’t live here. What is he going to do with what I teach him?” In this way, Béninois are able to redefine power as they initiate foreign spiritual seekers into systems that foreigners may not be fully equipped to understand. As a Béninois Vodún priestess one told me, “I can teach a white person how to be possessed by the spirits but it’ll never happen.”
In a similar way, Jung Ran Forte has argued, “Because of the substantial lack of knowledge, Westerner [initiates] are somehow less effective than Beninese ones…. Whites are not allowed to be possessed during public ceremonies, at least in Benin, when gods ‘mount’ human bodies, as during the confinement in the convent there is not apprenticeship of the modes of possession” (2010: 134). As both my and Forte’s Béninois informants reveal, there is a sense among some Béninois that foreign initiates may lack the social and embodied power to participate fully in particular rituals. For them, foreigners simply lack the habitus or embodied memory to undergo ritual events such as spirit possession.2 Regardless of these sentiments, or perhaps because of them, foreigners tend to focus less on effectively undergoing possession and more on successfully undergoing initiation. Before, during, and after initiation, foreign spiritual seekers commonly attempt to use their economic and racial power to coerce Béninois into revealing religious secrets. In Christopher’s case, he eventually offered René an extra 100 USD to “tell him the real secrets”—but was told unapologetically, “Christopher, you already know them all.”
While power, such as that exhibited by Christopher, often reveals itself as an oppressive and coercive force, in the case of Vodún’s global expansion, my research confirms Michel Foucault’s claim that power is also creative and productive. Béninois have creatively turned the tables on historic power relations, not just through their control of secrecy, but also through their willingness to charge foreign spiritual seekers large sums of money to learn secrets that even uninitiated Béninois typically already know. Because foreign spiritual seekers are not a part of the local community, where the “active milling, polishing, and promotion of the reputation of secrets” (P. Johnson 2002: 3), or what Paul Johnson called “secretism,” acquires its social meaning, it is often assumed that foreigners can do little social harm with the secrets they are given. Nevertheless, it does not take long for foreign initiates to realize that the promotion of secrecy and the subsequent community that secretism helps to create, both in Bénin and in their home countries, are important to their success as priests and to the validity of the ritual secrets and powers that are entrusted to them.
Christopher found himself in a conundrum. Despite his claims of being “scammed,” he could not disavow his initiator without discrediting his own status as an initiate, and he could not reveal the secret, regardless of how inconsequential he found it to be, without diminishing the economic and esoteric significance of the initiation he sought to provide to others in Vodún’s global religious market. Instead, all he could do was reemphasize the authority given to him by the initiation process to other foreign spiritual seekers, thereby inadvertently reifying the transnational social value of secrecy over the secret itself. Christopher discovered what his initiators already knew—secrecy establishes community.
As secrecy creates global Vodún communities, foreign initiates in particular speak about the value of West Africa as an important symbolic place in their religioscape (e.g., Appadurai 1996). Many foreign spiritual seekers, even after being initiated into Haitian Vodou or Cuban Lucumí, travel to Nigeria and Bénin for initiations, arguing that West Africa is where “real Voodoo,” “real secrets,” or “true spiritual power” is found. For these tourists, Bénin and Nigeria have become symbols that authenticate their practice and imbue their own positions as priests with social power and authority.3
Since the 1990s, in an effort to escape Nigeria’s perceived political instability and as a result of a strong marketing push by the Béninois government, an increasing number of spiritual tourists have begun traveling to Bénin for the same initiations, ceremonies, and spiritual powers they once traveled only to Nigeria to receive. Upon arriving in the Béninois side of Yorùbáland, spiritual tourists once again encounter the “Nigeria is more authentic” trope, but this time by Fon- and Yorùbá-speaking Béninois who themselves see Nigeria as the “origins” of many of the rituals, ceremonies, and cults in which spiritual tourists have become interested (e.g., Fá/Ifá, Egúngún, Orò). Indexing this perception among local Béninois, one Yorùbá man told me, “Nigeria is where the real power is. That is where all these spirits came from. That is where the real secrets live.”
Discussions of authenticity and power among Béninois practitioners often centered on acɛ̀, the Fon and Yorùbá concept of “divine power.” I would hear “Yorùbá oracles have more acɛ̀ than Fon oracles!” or “Fon magic has more acɛ̀ than Yorùbá magic!” Acɛ̀ (Yr. às̩e̩) has been explored by many scholars (mostly of Yorùbá speakers) who have described acɛ̀ in various ways. Às̩e̩ has been defined as “a supernatural force that can cause an action to occur” (Clarke 2004: 317); “the notion of power itself” (Barnes 2008: 181); “divine power” (Babatunde 1985: 98); “spiritual essence” (Drewal 1998: 18); and, perhaps most poetically, as “that divine essence in which physics, metaphysics and art blend to form the energy or life force activating and directing socio-political, religious and artistic processes and experiences” (Abiodun 1994: 319). Às̩e̩’s function is as dynamic and mysterious as its identity, described as a force that can be “impregnated” into or “absorbed” by objects (Doris 2011); às̩e̩ pertains to the identification, activation, and utilization of all innate energy, power, and natural laws believed to reside in all animals, plants, hills, rivers, natural phenomena, human beings, and òrìs̩à (Abiodun 1994: 310).
Às̩e̩’s usefulness is said to depend on “the verbalization, visualization and performance of attributive characters of those things or beings whose powers are being harnessed” (Abiodun 1994: 310). An important factor in initiations, divination sessions, prayer, ceremony, and even in the continuation of life, acɛ̀/às̩e̩ is a dynamic combination of the principles of both animism and animatism. All of the definitions given above are accurate—but, like the incomprehensible nature of acɛ̀/às̩e̩, all are insufficient. Thus I do not attempt to offer a definition as such of acɛ̀/às̩e̩, as that would be, by acɛ̀’s very nature, impossible. Instead, I hope to contribute to our ever-growing comprehension of acɛ̀/às̩e̩ by paying special attention to how acɛ̀/às̩e̩ affects the process of religious secrecy, and initiates’ understanding of their validity as priests, especially in the context of spiritual tourism.
In Bénin, acɛ̀ was described to me in two ways, and while using French, Fɔngbè, or Yorùbá. In one sense, acɛ̀ is perhaps best described as spiritual “power” (pouvoir). Here, Béninois would affirm that initiation, for example, imbues one with the “power” of the vodún, or that some Nàgó (Yorùbá) spirits have more power than Fon spirits, or that some spirits embody powers that are too intense for the uninitiated or the unprepared.4 Conversely, acɛ̀ was described to me as a way of understanding one’s spiritual “right” (droit) or “jurisdiction” (juridiction). In this sense, Fá diviners would argue that priests of other spirits, for example, do not have the right to read