Vodun. Timothy R. Landry
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CFA—much more than was customary. After the diviner said his opening prayers and lightly tossed his divining chain onto the ground in front of him, he began detailing Michelle’s future while also providing solutions to the employment problems she was experiencing.
After just a few moments into her consultation, the diviner told Michelle, “You must receive a cleansing ceremony to ensure your future success.” “You should also receive Fá and become an initiate,” the diviner continued. After these two spiritual prescriptions, I stopped listening, as my mind began to drift more than two years into the past when I had received my first divination from a priest who did not know me from the next foreign client he may have seen. “You should become a diviner and a priest of Tron,” the diviner had explained to me. At the time, I was unwilling to undergo the rituals—partly due to time and partly due to cost. But over the two years that had passed between my divination and Michelle’s, several diviners had insisted that I undergo certain rituals—rituals that would have cost me more than 3 million CFA—rituals that I almost always refused. Michelle and I were not unique. While tourists were not always told that they should become initiated, most tourists I encountered who sought a diviner’s guidance were told that they should undergo one ritual or another—all for large sums of money, and almost always for more money than local people would be expected to pay for the same spiritual intervention.
Diviners consistently serve as religious brokers—selling ceremonies or other spiritual services such as spiritual baths or charms (bǒ)—for local and foreign spiritual seekers alike. Divination is far more than having your future told and serves greater purposes than mere entertainment. For a diviner to be effective, he or she must provide his or her client with solutions to his or her challenges, or ways to reinforce and maintain blessings; telling clients that they are ill is of little use if the diviner cannot help them to heal. For Béninois, divination is about achieving well-being. Understanding the commitment not just to receiving divination but also to the treatment, many Béninois approach Fá (and other forms of divination) cautiously, as a trip to a diviner, much like a trip to the doctor, can cost them a great deal, once offerings and post-divinatory ceremonies and rituals are considered.
Although foreign spiritual seekers may be charged more for the same ceremony, Béninois certainly pay for the guidance, advice, and ceremonial intervention of ritual specialists. In fact, even among local people, a sliding scale of services exists—family members often enjoying ritual services at a greatly reduced rate, and middle- to upper-class Béninois pay a premium that approaches what tourists may pay.11 Remarkably, Western spiritual seekers, all of whom have spent a great deal of money to travel to West Africa to become initiated, often balk at the cost of ceremonies, arguing that “Africa is supposed to be cheap.”12
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