Elders are pillars of traditions, they embody the principles and are custodians of wisdom and history of traditions. They are undeniably a necessary and critical part of these traditions. Tradition without history is not tradition, it is simply something that will be. See, every living thing must have origins; plants have roots and people have ancestry. In order for someone to fully benefit from spirituality they need to have roots and ancestry. The combination of the two gives you spiritual connections that are beyond what the normal person experiences in their lifetime. Every living person has ancestors because they were born from other living people that were born from other living people. The idea of ancestry is that while an umbilical cord is physically cut at birth, the blood connection is never cut and neither is the emotional connection. The ancestors are people that have passed from being physically living beings to energy that is living within and around us. Plants have roots that act as veins and interconnect them directly to the earth and all energies on it. It is simple to see that ancestors are just one of two legs that we must have to stand on and roots is the other. An Elder is specifically equipped to be able to manage these connections and make them for others via their wisdom and permissions.

The fallacy of being self-taught has taken a deep root within the spiritual community. People are taking spiritual concepts from wherever they want and applying them to themselves and to make it worse, teaching others this is a valid option for themselves. Lets all say this together: Appropriation is not okay. In fact, appropriation is a very disgusting act in and of itself that has been used as a tool to erase traditions, cultures and identities. When you teach yourself spirituality, you leave the door open for your imagination to roam and there is nobody but you that can correct it. There will be no correction because you are the problem and the check of the problem. The most similar thing outside of spirituality to visualize this is the police’s “we have investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing” approach. What wisdom can self-taught practitioners from the outside really hold? They ultimately hold wisdom that was published, therefore it is not wisdom but knowledge. Anyone else can read the books they read, take them at face value and learn what they know, then they too can make the claim to know something. The issue is traditions tend to keep spiritual wisdom secret because they have been appropriated and persecuted. In taking the teachings of traditions and applying them without following the correct protocols, you are the same as all the others. You are the problem, not the solution or even the savior. With that aside, you are also depriving yourself of true wisdom that is handed down over the course of many generations and relying only on the information you gather from this current generation (you). As I mentioned earlier, it only gets worse when you start telling others this is a valid practice because you are now claiming all these spiritual concepts you dont fully understand and deceiving others into believing that they dont need traditions or Elders, leading them away from what they possibly truly need, in the pursuit of your own selfish gains. This is why we see so many people using these buzzwords and nobody truly understands what they even mean anymore. This is where we see these bogus concepts like “I was born knowing everything and just have to remember it by going within instead of without.” You cannot remember something from a closed tradition you were never initiated to. If you assert that you can, it is essentially the same as Colonizers and Conquistadors asserting that they too can remember a tradition they were never part of because they said so.

Elders truly embody the principles of traditions. They show you how the cultural principles and practices should be via their actions and mannerisms. These things cannot be learned from a book. You have to see them and understand them from observing them and asking questions. As well as from being explained why this is that way. These little details that arent written anywhere make the difference between an okay practitioner and a great practitioner. See all spirituality has a mechanic behind it, these mechanics are navigated in a personal way which creates culture and identity. Yes there are many traditions and they all move energies and even deal with spirits but they dont do it like this one because we are unique. Without the culture and identity of a tradition, attempting to practice its concepts is really just pretending to be part of that tradition. The culture and identity is a huge part of the traditions themselves. One cannot simply skip this step or replace it with “birth right.” It has to be learned, one must follow the protocols. An Elder will be able to teach you these protocols and even save you from the known issues they encountered so that you dont have to encounter them yourself. The mechanics of each tradition also come with their own unique set of principles in the form of rules and regulations. Even Palo Mayombe, which some would have you believe is a lawless tradition, has rules that everyone lives by. These rules can vary a little from one house to another but are generally the same across the board. An Elder shows you via example how to live by these principles.

Elders are the custodians of wisdom and history of the traditions. An Elder without wisdom is not an Elder and tradition without history is not tradition. Every good Elder had to earn that title of Elder, had to learn from their Elder who learned from their Elder etc. A good Elder inspires trust because they know what they are doing and carry with them the wisdom from several generations of Elders. In short, we carry more than a single lifetime of wisdom in traditions. We carry the wisdom of an entire lineage, accumulated over the years and passed down. This concentrates the wisdom within the tradition and keeps it alive as well as makes all practices have roots. In traditions everything must have roots, without that you might as well be cosplaying Harry Potter and friends. The wisdom is absolutely critical and necessary and will not be found in books online or from other outside sources. It has to be acquired specifically from your Elder, from your lineage, from your tradition. There can even be a lineage issue where you are from one lineage and learning from another which is not your own and this would create a bastardization of wisdom and conflict of teachings. In essence, youre erasing your lineage and replacing it with another while calling it your own. Its not good enough to learn from a real source, its necessary to learn from your source, your Elder. All else is unacceptable and quite frankly disrespectful to yourself, you ancestors, your lineage, your Elder and any other persons you may be learning from. Now moving on to history, your Elder is the living embodiment and appointed custodian of the history of the lineage he/she represents. If you truly believe in that lineage and trust the judgement of those spirits, surely you will trust their judgement to appoint their custodian. The history of the tradition is something that is vital to the culture and practice. It is in large part the “why” behind many of the things we do and seeing as how history has been commonly rewritten to fit other people’s narratives, it is critical to learn the history of your lineage as it may not be what is made public or mainstream. These secret histories are only found within the lineages that carry them and the representation of these lineages are Elders. There is no other place to find these histories and again learning any history does no justice to your lineage. It has to be the history of your lineage.