I was Jean’s fourth foreign initiate but the only one who was able to stay and work with him for an extended period of time. Over the course of my time with Jean, he taught me fragments of his spiritual truths. He taught me how to construct shrines; how to recognize and invoke each of Fá’s 256 binary signs that embodied Fá’s corpus; and how to perform divination for myself and others. Even so, there were certainly ceremonies and magical recipes that Jean held from me just as there were things that he taught me freely. One evening over hot tea, Jean admitted to me that there were things—special medicines and charms—that he would teach his children only. It was clear that some barriers could only be overcome by kinship. “Some things are only for my sons,” he noted. I agreed with—and even appreciated—his sentiment.
After spending just a few months in Fátòmɛ̀, Jean formally accepted me as his apprentice. Within a few days of working with Jean, he took the Fá I received earlier from Émile and converted my Fá from the Fon system to the Nàgó system.12 Doubtless, local practitioners benefit economically as the clients always pay the priest performing the conversion for his time and expertise. However, having participated in both systems, I understood such a process is required for reasons that extend beyond economics. The Nàgó ceremonies take more time, require more sacrifices, and are more involved. It is easy to see why some local people might feel that the Nàgó system is a more potent manifestation of Fá; even as an outsider I caught myself—perhaps stereotypically—favoring the complexities found in Nàgó Fá.
After working with Jean for only a couple of weeks, it became clear to me that becoming a Fá diviner, over being a devotee of any of the other spirit groups that are worshiped by Fon and Yorùbá peoples, would bring advantages. As Jean taught me, Fá diviners tend to have a broad general knowledge of all the spirits, so they can adequately advise their clients of necessary ceremonies and even perform basic sacrifices and offerings to a wide array of spirits on their behalf. In addition, their roles as Fá diviners often facilitate relationships with many different priests, temples, and practitioners—most of which were made available to me, thanks to Jean.
Jean and I began working together only two days after he agreed to serve as my mentor. “I want you here ready to work at 8 a.m.,” he said. “We have a lot to go over while you are here.” Over the next couple of days I reviewed a faded photocopy of La Géomancie à l’ancienne Côte des Esclaves by Bernard Maupoil (1943), which I had borrowed from a local Vodún practitioner just a few weeks earlier. I thumbed through Maupoil’s formative work on Fá divination and used other locally published sources to test my ability to recognize perfectly the 256 different patterns (Fon, dù/ Yr., odù) of Fá that are elegantly interpreted when a diviner, seated on a straw mat, casts a “divining chain” (Fon, akplɛ̀/ Yr., ò̩pè̩lè̩) onto the floor. The complexity of the 256 signs of Fá left me overwhelmed even before my apprenticeship began—but my anxiety also added to my excitement.
On the day we were to begin working, I arrived at Jean’s home eagerly, fifteen minutes early. I was ready to begin, but Jean had other plans. He left me to sit on a low cement wall where I waited for him for nearly three hours. I quickly learned that my training would be on his terms. I was always expected to be punctual, and he never was; his position as teacher and elder, and mine as student and child, was always clear. As the people in Fátomɛ̀ became my close friends, I learned to appreciate the time I spent in the village waiting for Jean to decide to include me in his day. Once I released my contemporary U.S. expectations of what an education should be—or how time should function—I realized the time I spent waiting in the village, seemingly far removed from lessons in divination, was just as important to my training as was learning how to pray, move, and act as a diviner would—a lesson I suspect Jean knew all along. During these times I learned about the prevalence of witchcraft, and I watched children pretend to perform divination with small seeds that they found on the ground. Eventually, I came to appreciate these moments as important backdrops to my formal lessons in divination.
Seeking Divine Power
Secrecy has contributed to, and even encouraged, Vodún’s global expansion. More and more, foreign spiritual seekers are becoming initiated and participating in the country’s growing Vodún tourism industry. As these numbers grow, an increasing number of Béninois Vodún practitioners, faced with the promise of economic success and international networks, have begun to reveal and market Vodún’s secrecy. In Chapter 1, “Touring the Forbidden,” I examine the politics of spiritual tourism in Bénin by showing how and why foreign spiritual seekers negotiate access to Vodún. By interacting with two British tourists, Michelle and Christine, who disappointedly felt little resistance when visiting a “Voodoo village”; with Luiz, a Brazilian man, who did all he could, and failed, to learn how to construct one of Vodún’s more sought-after and dangerous shrines; and with Marcella, an African American woman who was determined to disrupt Vodún’s long-standing rules and become initiated into a men’s-only spirit cult, I document the religious secrecy and the resistance one faces as one attempts to observe or experience Vodún’s secret objects, and also how religious experiences are authenticated for foreign spiritual seekers.
Many tourists come to Bénin hoping to participate in Vodún by observing rituals or purchasing religious objects. There are, however, those select few tourists who come to Bénin for the sole purpose of initiation. In Chapter 2, “Receiving the Forest,” I turn my attention to the initiations of both Béninois and foreign spiritual seekers. In this chapter, I begin to show why foreign involvement in Vodún should not be simply dismissed as a form of cultural appropriation or neocolonialism. Through ritual, Béninois merge both foreign and Béninois initiates with the forest and install spirits (vodún) in the bodies of both white and black spiritual seekers. Challenging colonial structures of power, the ritual provides Béninois with a meaningful space to, in effect, turn the tables on long-established structures of power by ritually colonizing the bodies of foreign spiritual seekers with African spirits and occult forces. Through this experience, foreigners are validated as Vodún practitioners as their bodies are imbued with what I call an “occult ontology,” or those hidden ways in which one’s being is transformed through mobile ritual secrets and religious commodities. Throughout the chapter, I draw on my initiation as well as the initiation of Jean’s son, Auguste, into the cult of Fá, the oracular spirit of knowledge. Through this process, as initiates move slowly and deliberately through an object’s or place’s social aura of secrecy, they become inoculated ritually to the social dangers and risks that come with being exposed to a ritual secret too soon. By slowly taking the secret into one’s body, even if unintentionally, and inscribing one’s successful encounter with a ritual secret onto one’s body by shaving one’s head, undergoing ritual baths, and by wearing special beads, one’s body undergoes ontological changes as it is transformed into a secret itself that can then be marketed within the emerging Vodún global marketplace. In this way, I join other anthropologists in arguing that it is the process of secrecy—and not necessarily the secret itself—that holds social importance. While secrecy is often thought of as a restrictive social force by which access to information is controlled, by focusing on what Johnson called “secretism,” I begin to lay out my argument: that it is paradoxically through secrecy that Vodún has become global.
After someone is successfully initiated, he or she often begins collecting objects from Vodún’s rich material repertoire. In Chapter 3, “Secrecy, Objects, and Expanding Markets,” I delve more deeply into the secret international Vodún market in which religious art, artifacts, and ritual paraphernalia are all sold to interested agents—including spiritual tourists trying to practice Vodún authentically in their home countries. I examine the importance of emerging technologies, especially Facebook, in the spreading of this market, and how local Béninois and Nigerian entrepreneurs have begun to profit from Vodún’s increased transnational efficacy. Examining this emerging market