The first time I sat in front of a Babaláwo for a divination, in the spring of 2018, I did not know I was beginning anything. I had gone because a friend had recommended it after a particularly difficult year — a divorce, a job loss in the same six-month window, the kind of compound difficulty that leaves you willing to try things you would not normally try. I expected, vaguely, what most Americans expect from a “reading” — a dramatic stranger who would tell me dramatic things about my future. What I got instead was an elderly West African gentleman in a clean white shirt who asked me practical questions, listened carefully to the answers, cast the *ọ̀pẹ̀lẹ̀* twice with great economy, and then spent forty minutes describing my situation back to me with such precision that I left the room shaken.
I am writing this seven years later, having been initiated as a Babaláwo myself in October 2023, in a lineage that runs through my own teacher in Houston back to his teachers in Òṣogbo and through them into the unbroken line of Yorùbá Babaláwos that the tradition has carried forward for at least a thousand years. The journey from that first divination to the initiation was the central transformation of my adult life. This essay is a brief account of what it actually involved, written for any reader who is at the early stage of their own seeking and might want to know what the road looks like from the other end.
## The Years of Learning
The first thing I want to say, very plainly, is that the road took seven years and I am still on it. Initiation is not the end of training; it is the beginning of a different phase of training. The Yorùbá tradition is, in the most concrete sense, infinite — the corpus of *ẹsẹ* alone runs to roughly one hundred thousand verses, and the Babaláwo who claims to know the whole corpus is either a liar or a saint, and probably the former. The work of the lifetime, after initiation, is to deepen knowledge of the verses, to refine practice with clients, to study under more teachers, and to slowly and patiently become competent in something that one will never be finished with.
In the seven years between that first divination and my initiation, I did three things. I met regularly with my teacher, first in once-a-month sessions that gradually became once-a-week. I read everything in English I could find that was serious — Wándé Abímbọ́lá’s books in particular, but also Sophie Olúwọlé and Henry Drewal and the older work of Bólájí Ìdòwú. And I joined the Òrìṣà Spiritual Assembly chapter in Houston when it was founded in 2019, which gave me — for the first time — a community of people on the same road.
The community part turned out to matter as much as the study. I had assumed, in the early years, that what I needed was knowledge — that if I read enough and studied enough I would understand enough. What I came to understand only by spending time around other Olórìṣà was that the tradition is communal in a way that is not optional. The Babaláwo does not do his work alone. He does it as a member of a network of priests who consult each other, correct each other, share verses with each other, and hold each other accountable. Initiation is, among other things, a formal joining of that network.
## What Initiation Actually Is
I will not describe the details of my initiation, both because they are protected and because they are not the kind of thing that gives the right impression when written down. I will say what is appropriate to say.
The initiation took seven days of preparation and three days of ceremony itself. Before the preparation began, I had been involved in increasingly serious ritual work for over a year, including a sequence of preliminary consecrations and the formal acceptance of my candidacy by my teacher in consultation with two other senior Babaláwos. The decision to initiate me was not mine alone; it was made by the teachers, in response to a long process of evaluation that I was only partly aware was happening at the time.
The seven days of preparation involved fasting, seclusion, and a sequence of teachings and ritual sequences that brought me to the threshold of the initiation proper. The three days of ceremony itself were attended by my teacher, three other Babaláwos who had been part of the evaluation process, and a small group of senior community members. At the end of the third day, I was a Babaláwo — which is to say, I had received the consecrations and the authorisations that allow me to perform divination and prescribe *ẹbọ* on behalf of others.
What I want to convey to the reader who is in the early stage of their own seeking is that this was the most serious thing I have ever done. It was not a workshop. It was not a certification. It was the formal acceptance of a set of obligations that will shape the rest of my life, and the formal entry into a network of relationships that I now experience as the central community of my adulthood.
## Practical Counsel
For the reader at the beginning: the most useful thing I can say is *find a teacher*. Books are necessary; books are not sufficient. The Yorùbá tradition is transmitted person-to-person, and the relationship between teacher and student is the central institution of the transmission. If you are in a city with an Òrìṣà Spiritual Assembly chapter, attend the chapter; the chapter is the most reliable route to introductions to senior practitioners. If you are not in such a city, the Assembly office can help you identify the nearest practitioners and the nearest annual gatherings where you can meet them.
Do not rush. The road is long because the road has to be long. I am grateful, looking back, for every one of the seven years between my first divination and my initiation. The years were not delay. The years were the road.
And do the morning practice. The piece elsewhere in this issue on morning devotion describes what I have been doing every day, with some variation, for the better part of seven years. The practice is what makes the rest possible.
The road continues. I am still walking it. I am very glad I started.