| Subject: |
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Not so fast: Reading the bones is not something you can choose to master, let alone to master overni |
| Name: |
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Wim van Binsbergen |
| Date Posted: |
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Apr 4, 05 - 5:44 AM |
| Email: |
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binsbergen@ascleiden.nl |
| Website: |
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http://www.shikanda.net |
| Message: |
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dear eric
thank you for your mail, which speaks of a genuine desire that i can fully understand, having it had myself in the late 1980s, before i had the opportunity of learning to throw the bones under capable african masters.
you are fortunate that i made a very full description of the experience, in the form of a large number of articles that are (nearly) all available on the internet. you will be directed to these articles if you click the 'Southern African sangoma: background and personal consultation' link on the opening page of my website www.shikanda.net. if you study these texts (nearly all in english, too) very carefully, you cannot miss the message, which is 60% of what i could teach in this matter. the rest you will have to pick up by yourself, by experience and learning from your obvious errors. there is no objection whatsoever to cast the bones for financial gain. you will see that one of my long articles on the topic is is entitled 'we are in this for the money'.
two major snags:
1. you need a material set of bones. you cannot just take anything. normally you obtain good bones from your master. i could help you out but you must be prepared for considerable expense.
2. the most important point, and i think it renders your whole project invalid the way you have conceived it so far: if casting bones for reliable and valid information about past, present and future would be just a mechanical routine, using facilities every human being has by birth, everyone would be doing it, and the world would be a more transparent and less confusing and less conflictive place. in southern africa, there are some uninitiated or semi-initiated people who cast bones and believe (i think spuriously) that they get true information, but the vast majority of diviners using bones have gone not only through a long technical apprenticeship but also and especially through a spiritual initiation, in the course of which they are confirmed in a special, unique status in this sense that their ancestors have specifically empowered them to be diviners, on the basis of an exceptionally close association with these ancestors: ancestral election, ancestral possession, ancestral emergence, ancestral reincarnation -- whatever name you put to it. that initiation also imposes important obligations and idem limitations upon the novice, needed to put her or his powers to a morally and socially constructive application (abstinence from financial gain is not one of these conditions). if someone apprentices herself or himself to a master in order to learn to read the bones, the apprenticeship is really a preparation for such ancestral initiation, and the rest, the technique, is a by-product of the spiritual process, extending over several years. invariably, substantial prestations especially of a monetary kind (but also menial services, for instance: cleaning the yard, washing clothes, running errands) pass from apprentice to master, in the course of that process. in exchange the master guides the novice's spiritual process, establishes and monitors the contact with the ancestors, etc.
there is no way in which this can be done by proxy, through e-mail. i know that in the southeastern USA, west african ifa diviners are active (often via cuba), and they do take on apprentices, often charging enormous fees, and staging initiation rites that sometimes lack spiritual depth and integrity. this is the nearest to Denver, Col. Ifa is very much like sangoma divination, as I have argued in detail in several of my articles. And although a return air ticket from Denver to Holland is much cheaper than to commit yourself as an apprentice to my Ifa colleagues active in the southern USA, I cannot take you on as an apprentice. i have a big family and several very demanding jobs, in other words have little time to teach you, and i can certainly not offer you a crash course: you would still need a year or longer, of regular (say, weekly) exposure to my guidance, and you would have to pay both tuition fees, and the costs of rituals, liquor for libations, animals for sacrifice etc.
most important hurdle to take: one does not just appropritate or invent an ancestral election, it is the ancestors who elect one and they make this very clear, normally through dreams and through a puzzling and devastating affliction that cannot be cured by cosmopolitan biomedical medicine. you give no signs of such election, as yet.
please consider this answer carefully, and weigh your options accordingly. one of my technical, epistemological articles will convince you that there is genuine knowledge in the bones, and most of my articles contain the message that bones casting is a valuable part of mankind's heritage that needs to be preserved and handed down to subsequent generations. so i am not against your desire, but how can you make it come true?
may the ancestors' blessings be with you in this life and the next
wim van binsbergen |
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