Black Spiritualists have lost the plot.

Okay, let’s be honest. I have been a quiet onlooker online for millennia, but I’ve always wanted to discuss something fairly pressing with y’all.

Walk with me.

Many forums showcasing spiritual and religious traditions created and maintained by the Black/African Diaspora have been perverted with a painfully ironic spirit of exploitation. A spirit born well before 2025, but we will get to that.

And I have noticed, over a reasonably prolific time on the internet and within this previously niche community, that the consequences that follow a career of seemingly untouchable hubris have always been extreme. Why? Find out on today’s episode of “Checks the ass can’t cash”.

But first, let me explain:

To preface - this post is not about black spiritualists or black-owned spiritual shops as a whole. This concerns the growing phenomena I and others have seen in recent years.

I am referencing the businesses that sell exorbitantly priced candles, oils, beads, spells, a hope, and a dream at prohibitive costs to the ordinary person with monthly responsibilities, kids, or relentless earthly foils. Those folks that answer earnest requests for knowledge in their comment sections with non sequitur advertisements of products and “iykyk” or desperate pleas for help with “nothing in life is free!” I mean the businesses that posture their chosen path of ATR/ADTR as uniquely better than the next. (Sidebar: It makes me chuckle to think the ancestors are continuing the diaspora war on the other side. I mean, they could be, who knows, but they put that shit to the side when work needs to be done. I know that.) And lastly, folks who harness legitimate abilities to exploit and harm others.

These brands are taking pages out of the classic televangelist playbook:

• My Deities are better and more powerful than any other.

• My ancestors/entities/spirit will hurt you if you even so much as piss me off.

• I have the key to save you from everything, including yourself because you don’t know what I know, nor will I teach you.

• I will perform acts of miracle in your life for a cost no less than a house down payment. Broke folks need not inquire.

This concern is typically written off by statements such as “Well, spiritualists deserve to be paid for their labor,” and I would agree at face value. Absolutely everyone should be given adequate compensation for the work that they do. Hell, I’ve met people who have taboos against working for free for a good reason. But I think these discussions have been halted at face value too often, which allows abusers of the black spiritual sphere to abuse them further because, in most situations, pushing back against that perfectly legitimate qualifier sounds absurd. But I am an absurdist, and it needs to be discussed. So, get comfortable because this is a long one, and let us press forward.

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