There is so much depth to secrets and mysteries hidden from the plain eye in the world of the living. The living only have to live and they complicate even that. Its no surprise that divination and readings are such a staple in most African Traditional Religions. These ceremonies in and of themselves are life altering by way of the insight they offer us but they can also offer the information on things we can or should do in order to progress spiritually and physically too. This article is not one to convince people that they need these services, its one to enlighten on the dangers of these services. There are so many dangers associated with these services that the general public is not aware of. The first danger is addiction. People that lean towards surrendering and having others make every decision for them tend to get addicted to these services and seek to be told what to do for every single decision in their life. There is also the dangers revolving around the person performing the services and their qualifications and teachings. Then we have the danger revolving around the timing of the services and finally, the danger of intermingling energies.

First, let us address the elephant in the room, while some people believe a divination and a reading to be two different things, most elders in Palo Mayombe, Lucumi and Ifa use the terms interchangeably. This is to say that readings are divination and divination is a reading. For the purpose of simplicity, we will stick with the terminology of reading. With that out of the way, we need to stress the danger of addiction. This danger is a very real one for some and really non-existent for others. This depends on each person’s general disposition to becoming dependent on readings and the elders performing these readings. What we are referring to is that some people are overwhelmed by having too many choices or may have a more submissive disposition or maybe have some other emotional reason to surrender entirely and become entirely dependent on readings in order to function in their day-to-day lives. This surrender can be dangerous to a persons progress and growth because they have surrendered their free will and ability to ration in favor of just following instructions. There is nothing wrong with following instructions but there is something wrong in surrendering your free will. This leads to a negative scenario in which someone can be stuck so far in their submission as to where they are unable to even decide what to eat for dinner without a reading or the spirits telling them. In some traditions this can be especially dangerous because the spirits can be offended by this behavior as they are not a parlor trick to be summoned for such a mundane thing. This can also be especially dangerous because a bad elder or someone misrepresenting themselves as an elder can take advantage of a person and they would be stuck in a vicious cycle of submission. These situations can be caused by the lack of an elder performing these readings or an elder that is irresponsible performing these readings. A responsible and concerned elder will definitely see the patterns in these behaviors and correct this behavior before it consumes a person entirely.

Speaking of responsible elders, there is a great deal of danger surrounding the who performs your readings. In a lot of cases people will present themselves as readers but not have the qualifications or wisdom to do readings on themselves, let alone others. Readings are complicated and can tamper with a person’s spiritual alignment. In most traditional religions and more specifically in Palo Mayombe, having the ability to do readings on anyone is a very special thing because of the dangers of giving the wrong messages or seeing something drastically wrong but not knowing how to correct it. In some cases, people will not even have the correct ceremonies to do the reading at all and they are just picking up publicly available books that claim to teach someone how to do readings and doing readings on others. This is a wildly dangerous scenario because not only does the person not know how to address anything major but they don’t even have the correct authority to perform the reading at all. This can lead to major problems in the life of the person or people receiving these readings that could require extensive ceremonial work to even correct. That isn’t even counting the amount of things the person or people in question will have to unlearn to then learn correctly or the possibility for them to lose hope in the traditional religions they were meant to practice, forcing them elsewhere and permanently damaging their spiritual progress.

There is also something to be said about the danger revolving around timing. When a person receives a reading, they are receiving a snapshot of what is to come, general guidance to leading a better life and even things they can do to improve their spiritual progress and physical life. The issue is that when you overlap readings you are in essence disregarding the last one for the new one. This doesn’t seem like such an issue at a glance but it is a major one. Say you have a reading done and everything was smooth and there were great things mentioned and then afterwards you went and got a reading from someone else who is not really good at doing readings. Lets say that second reading is really bad. Your reading that set you up for success was just voided for one that set you up for failure. This is such an important thing to keep in mind. To add more complexity to the subject, not all readings have the same timelines. Some readings can extend outward of 21 days, others 28 days so on and so forward based specifically on different traditions. So you can have a perfectly beautiful 21 days planned out by a Palo Mayombe reading and trade that in for 28 days of pain from an Ifa reading.

Finally, there is an exchange of energy when readings take place. People use this terminology to explain and justify their needs for compensation all the time but do not seem to understand or explain that this is a big danger to all involved in the process of doing a reading. During the reading the two or more people involved have their energy linked in order to discern, divine and interpret the messages. The person performing the reading as stated above may not be well suited or properly authorized and having their energy come in contact with the energy of the person being read could have disastrous consequences. This is a door that works both ways as well. The person receiving the reading can be “loaded” which means they can have a lot of negative energies on them and the person doing the reading has to know how to navigate such a situation should it occur. Failure to resolve this issue in a timely manner can result in a reading that is inaccurate, possibly dangerous, leads the person receiving the reading astray and can even cause the person performing the reading to have consequences for taking in all this negative energy and leaving it unresolved.

In summary, there are so many complexities and dangers when it comes to divination and readings. Everyone should be extremely mindful about who they allow to read them and when. To receive a reading is not a cute little parlor trick and its not something everyone can or should provide. A divination or reading is something special that is meant to guide and provide us with insight that could create forward progress both in our physical and spiritual lives but only when done right, by the right person. When people get these from anywhere they are liable to do more harm than good.

Divination is the connection we share with spiritual beings, our connection to them should be pure and consistent.