There are so many reasons to not want to learn spirituality from random people or from books with unknown sources, some of them are quite obvious and others are only known if you go deeper into thought about the concept. In almost every circumstance this is a bad practice because traditional religions are structured in such a way where the learning is meant to be done from an elder. There is a distinction though, you don’t just learn from any elder, you learn from your elder. The issues with learning from anyone is that there are lineages and they may not all work the same way or have the same practices, traditional religions come with cultures and communities and learning from anybody breaks away from community, and there are protocols that should be followed to avoid unnecessary problems both personally and spiritually. There is also something to be said about being self-taught and how destructive the ideology really is to traditional religions as well as how common it is.

Lineages are an integral part of traditional religions, without them you have nothing. Every living person has a lineage and traditional religions like Palo Mayombe do too. These lineages impart history, culture and beliefs. This is to say there are many different lineages and they are specific, having elders for each one. When you have an elder they will teach you from the perspective of their lineage. Learning from anybody teaches you history, culture and beliefs from other lineages and not necessarily your own. This is a problem because you end up having to unlearn everything to relearn from your specific lineage. To keep these things from the wrong lineage is to erase your own. Because moving forward everyone you teach, you will teach about another lineage when teaching your own but your own will not be represented.

Furthermore, the community aspect of traditional religions suffers when people learn from anyone versus learning from their elder. Community is not built and maintained by disregarding the ones meant to be your community leaders in favor of strangers. First of all, this can create problems among the community because outside influences can come in and start planting the seed of discord. Telling people this one or that one said this or did that, creating major problems within the community and tearing it apart from the inside. Even worse is the fact that strangers can make up anything and spread it, and people paying attention and learning from strangers will pick up on it. This prompts them to ask their elders about it and when their elder says they don’t know what they are talking about (because this is made up) it plants the seed in the mind that their elders are lesser than the strangers, causing them to seek out the strangers and being put into situations where they get taken advantage of. This is an extremely common issue that happens within traditional religions and can cause major problems.

Speaking of causing major problems, protocols are not optional and taking them as such is a recipe for disaster. Every traditional religion has protocols in place to preserve the traditional practice, history and culture. These elements are critical to traditional religions. When you practice traditional religions, the protocol is to learn from your elders, not from others. Even further, your elders are the ones that teach you the protocols and they are not the same from one lineage to another let alone one traditional religion to another. This is to say that even the things that are okay or not are established by your elders and learning from others will have you out here thinking that what you are doing is fine when in actuality it is not. How can you know what you don’t know? How can you know you are messing up without knowing what messing up looks like? You need your elders to show you what messing up looks like.

The flip side of learning from elders, your own or not, is being self-taught and/or self-initiated. This has been an ideology on the rise for a while and there have been many people who have gone down this path and encouraged the masses to go down this path. It is important to note that the earliest known reference of self-taught religion is in the Abrahamic religions. From there we moved towards Allan Kardec Spiritism. This is to say that the ideology of being self-taught comes from Abrahamic religion as far records can tell and was almost exclusive to European spiritualists. In African traditional religions, this would not fly. It directly contradicts the concept of community, culture and even history. This is because when you are self-taught you are really just relying on yourself and resources available to you, which creates a hyper individual practice where there is no accountability. You learn what you want to learn, you determine what is and is not valid, you determine what is and is not ancestral and can or cannot consult with the ancestors. In most cases, the self-taught people learn from books that can be written by anyone with no verifiable experience themselves. This is still fine because what you do with your life and your spirituality is your business but then they teach others that they no longer have a need for protocols. Protocols just hinder your growth, etc. This is particularly destructive because it teaches people to walk away from traditional religions, they are no longer necessary or worse, it teaches people that they can practice traditional religions however they want setting them up for failure. There has even been a more recent trend in which self-taught people have been appropriating from traditional religions to fill in the gaps of what they claim to practice because they do not have knowledge of the religions they claim to practice. This too can lead to erasure of traditions by way of having the masses believe something came from something else and the original source never being credited so it disappears into the darkness. Then the ones taught that self-taught ideology is valid proceed the cycle of teaching others the same thing which furthers the erasure and divide between people and traditional religions.

In summary, learning from your elders specifically is critical. While some may tell you that learning from any resource is valid, it is absolutely not. Learning from any resource is dangerous to your spiritual progress, erases traditional religion, history and culture. Self-teaching and Self-initiating are not valid ideologies that lead to successful community building and have roots in appropriated religions. Every person on the search for their traditional religion or their specific elder should really ask themselves if they agree with the teachings, morality and personality of these elders to avoid future conflict. People being told by others to just grab books and teach themselves should really evaluate the advice they are being given and consider how picking up that book and practicing what the book says negatively impacts them versus what their grandparents actually practiced that wasn’t written about in any book. People that already have elders shouldn’t be looking at other elders and what they teach unless they are already planning on walking away from those elders. This is all to say, your elders are critical to your development. Either you are practicing these traditional religions right or you are practicing them wrong. In learning from anywhere, you are practicing them wrong. In self-teaching and self-initiating you are practicing them wrong.