Closed PracticesWhat “closed” actually means — and it means four different things
An online shibboleth: shouted, sneered at, and almost never explained. It is not one thing. It is at least four distinct mechanisms with different logics, different histories and different levels of internal agreement — and underneath the argument there is a body count.
It is not telling you what you are allowed to practise.
It is not adjudicating the arguments. Several are live, in good faith, and being had by people with far more standing than this resource has.
It is doing three things: explaining what “closed” actually means, setting out why traditions close, and giving you enough to know whose argument you are stepping into before you step into it.
You should finish better equipped to decide for yourself — and better able to spot the people selling you something they have no right to sell.
How to read this page
Part I is the four meanings, why they exist, and a working map of what is actually restricted. Part II is the counter-arguments — which are real and several of which come from inside source communities — and then the harm, in both directions.
Four different things wearing one word
This distinction is the whole contribution of the page. Get it right and most of the confusion dissolves, because the four types have different logics and call for different responses.
Why traditions close — and the reason most people don't know
A reader who does not understand why will experience all of this as arbitrary gatekeeping. It usually isn't.
⚠ Survival
Many of these traditions are closed because they were criminalised. Secrecy is why they still exist.
1978. Within living memory. Native Americans did not have federally protected religious freedom until the year Grease was in cinemas.
And the honest caveat, because the page should not overstate its own best fact: AIRFA was largely a statement of policy with little enforcement behind it. Nothing in it compelled changes to state or federal law to accommodate specific practices — peyote and eagle feathers among them. Protection for peyote use by members of federally recognised tribes in bona fide ceremonies came later, through amendments in 1994.
Attested Vodou developed under slavery, among people forbidden to practise their religion, and was demonised for two centuries afterwards — partly to justify the occupation of Haiti.
When a practice survived by hiding, “we don't hand this to strangers” is not a fashion. It is the mechanism that kept it alive.
The other four reasons
- Safety. Some practices are genuinely dangerous without training. The sweat lodge deaths in §06 are the proof, not the metaphor.
- Integrity. The meaning is in the context. Remove the community, the language, the obligations and the ancestors, and what remains may look identical and do nothing — or do something else.
- Accountability. Initiation creates obligation — to elders, to a lineage, to a house. A practitioner who can be corrected is safer than one who cannot, and this is the thread running through the whole library: initiatory traditions have accountability structures. The free-floating online practitioner has none.
- Reciprocity. The community bears the costs of a tradition — the persecution, the maintenance, the labour of keeping it. Outsiders frequently take the benefits and the revenue.
The three things people conflate
Almost every argument about closed practice collapses because these get mixed together. Separate them and most of the heat goes out of it.
| Generally fine | Depends | Generally not | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Learning about itreading, studying, understanding, respecting | ✓ Nearly always | ||
| Practising itdoing the ritual, using the tools | ⚠ This is where the argument actually lives | ||
| Claiming authorityteaching, selling, initiating others, presenting as a lineage holder | ✗ Almost never, without the standing |
The third row is where the harm concentrates — and it is where nearly every scam in this library lives.
Read the first row again too. “Closed” does not mean “unknowable.” You may read about almost anything. Nobody is protecting these traditions from your curiosity.
A working map
Not a ruling — an orientation, so you know which conversation you are in.
Lucumí / Santería, Candomblé, Ifá · Haitian Vodou · Palo · specific Indigenous North American ceremonies (sweat lodge, Sun Dance, pipe, peyote and the NAC) · Aboriginal Australian sacred knowledge · Tibetan Buddhist tantric practice, which requires empowerment from a qualified teacher · traditional initiatory Wicca.
Hoodoo, conjure and rootwork — debated among Black practitioners, and do not let anybody tell you it is settled. · Smudging with white sage — burning herbs for purification is near-universal (frankincense, copal, juniper, benzoin); the specific ceremony and the specific plant are not, and there is a live conservation problem. · “Spirit animals,” totems and dreamcatchers — Indigenous terms and objects, routinely misused.
Tarot, astrology, numerology, Human Design — European and American, commercial, open by design · most European folk magic, which is under-transmitted rather than guarded · most Buddhist and Hindu practice, actively taught through proper channels · Reiki, most modern eclectic Paganism, most Western energy work.
The counter-arguments, which are real
A page that gives only one side is propaganda. These objections are serious, and several are made by people inside source communities.
- Traditions have always spread. Buddhism transformed moving to China. Christianity is not Judean. Cultural stasis is not a real thing, and no tradition is a museum.
- Some “closed” claims are made by people with no standing. There is a genuine cottage industry of outsiders policing on behalf of communities that did not appoint them — often loudly, often for status. This is real and it deserves naming.
- Descent-based restriction is philosophically uncomfortable, and the logic has a difficult history. Some practitioners within source communities say so themselves.
- Gatekeeping causes its own harm. It shuts people out of things that would have helped them, and it is wielded punitively by people with no more claim than the person they are attacking.
- The Hoodoo argument is not settled inside the Black community, and pretending it is settled — in either direction — misrepresents Black practitioners. Some hold it closed as the inheritance of an enslaved people; others hold it open. Both positions are held by people with far more right to hold them than this page has. Name the debate; don't pick.
- “Closed” does not mean “unknowable.” Read, study, respect, understand. The restriction is on practising and on claiming authority.
Practitioner And the school's own position, marked as opinion so you can weigh it as such. We think the third row of §03 is where the argument should concentrate, and that most of the online heat is spent on the second row instead. Somebody quietly lighting a candle for their own dead in a way they learned from a book is not the problem. Somebody selling initiations they do not hold is. That is a claim about where to aim, not a ruling about what anyone may do, and you are free to hold it differently.
⚠ Underneath the culture war there is a body count
This is why the page exists, and it is not rhetorical.
The same shape appears elsewhere. Ayahuasca retreats run by people claiming a lineage they do not hold have produced deaths, psychiatric casualties and documented sexual assaults. The protocols exist because the practices are dangerous. Strip the protocol, keep the danger.
⚠ The scam aimed straight at you
Attested On 10 June 1993, at Lakota Summit V — an international gathering of Lakota, Dakota and Nakota nations from the United States and Canada, with around five hundred representatives from as many as forty tribes and bands — a Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality was passed unanimously. Its principal authors were Wilmer “Stampede” Mesteth, an Oglala Lakota traditional spiritual leader and culture instructor at Oglala Lakota College, with Darrell Standing Elk and Phyllis Swift Hawk.
It names, among those it is aimed at, “wannabes”, hucksters, cultists, commercial profiteers and self-styled “New Age shamans” — and it names the New Age movement, the men's movement, neo-paganism and “shamanism” workshops directly.
Two details worth knowing, because they are usually left out. It also urges Lakota people to stop their own people from enabling the abuse — so it is not simply an outward-facing complaint. And it urges other Indian nations to issue their own statements, on the explicit ground that the Lakota are not the only people this is happening to.
Whatever you conclude about any of this, you should know that this document was written and signed by the people whose tradition it is.
⚠ Risk — and it runs in both directions
What a new seeker should actually ask
- Which type of “closed” is this? Initiatory, inherited, protocol-governed, or actually just open with a front door? They are not the same and the right response differs.
- Who is telling me it is closed — or that it isn't? Are they from the community? Do they have standing? This cuts both ways.
- Am I trying to learn about it, practise it, or teach it? Three completely different questions.
- What is my teacher's actual lineage, and can I check it? A real house answers. A fake one gets angry that you asked.
- Is anyone from the source community benefiting from what I am paying?
- ⚠ Is this physically dangerous, and does the person running it actually know what they are doing? Sweat lodges. Plant medicine. This question is not philosophical.
- If somebody tells me “there's no such thing as a closed practice” — what does that tell me about them?
Provenance
The suppression history Attested
Code of Indian Offenses, 1883 — “Rules Governing the Court of Indian Offenses,” issued 30 March 1883 under Commissioner Hiram Price, following Secretary of the Interior Henry M. Teller's instruction. Never enacted by Congress. Penalties included withholding treaty rations for up to thirty days, and imprisonment of medicine men for not less than ten days or until they renounced their beliefs. Enforcement eased after 1934; the Code was not formally displaced until 1978. American Indian Religious Freedom Act, Public Law 95-341, 92 Stat. 469, signed 11 August 1978, codified at 42 U.S.C. § 1996 — a policy statement with limited enforcement power; peyote protections for members of federally recognised tribes followed in 1994 amendments. Potlatch ban in Canada, 1885–1951.
The Lakota Declaration Attested
Passed unanimously at Lakota Summit V on 10 June 1993 — roughly 500 representatives from as many as 40 tribes and bands of the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota nations of the US and Canada. Principal authors: Wilmer “Stampede” Mesteth (Oglala Lakota), Darrell Standing Elk and Phyllis Swift Hawk. Reported by Valerie Taliman in The Circle, July 1993, and republished widely. The full text is freely available and short enough to read in ten minutes.
The Sedona deaths Attested
October 2009, near Sedona, Arizona. Kirby Brown (38) and James Shore (40) died at the scene; Liz Neuman (49) died after more than a week in a coma; eighteen hospitalised. Convicted June 2011 by a Yavapai County jury on three counts of negligent homicide, acquitted of manslaughter; sentenced to two years, released July 2013.
Standing Practitioner
Two things this page owes you plainly. The Indigenous sections need review by Indigenous scholars — this is written from outside, about people who have been written about from outside for four hundred years, and that is not a formality. The Hoodoo section needs review by Black practitioners and scholars on both sides of the openness argument — not one side, both. The position marked in §05 is the school's own opinion and carries no more weight than that.
✦ For practitioners
- Answer the lineage question gladly. Who initiated you, when, in what house, and who can confirm it. If you bristle at being asked, notice that.
- Never sell an initiation you cannot trace. And never let “certification” do the work of a word you have not earned.
- Say which type you are talking about. Half the arguments your students will have online are Type 4 being mistaken for Type 2, and you can defuse that in one sentence.
- Do not run anything physically dangerous you were not trained to run. Sweat lodges, extended fasts, plant medicine. The protocol is the safety system, and improvising it has killed people.
- If you teach borrowed material, route the money and the credit toward the source where you can, and say where it came from every time.
✦ For those guiding others
- Teach the four types before the arguments. Most of the distress in this territory is people arguing past each other about different mechanisms.
- Protect people from purity policing as well as from appropriation. Somebody being shamed by a self-appointed enforcer needs an ally, and the shaming is frequently done by people with no standing at all.
- Be careful with mixed-heritage students. They get it from both directions, and telling somebody they are not enough of something to honour their own grandmother is a real harm.
- Ask the safety question first when a student mentions ceremony. Before the ethics, before the history: who is running it, and what happens if somebody collapses?
- Point at the primary documents. The Lakota Declaration is short and it is theirs. Handing somebody the source is better than summarising it for them.
We are not vouching for these, only pointing at them.
- The Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality (1993). Freely available, ten minutes to read, and written by the people concerned rather than about them.
- The 1883 Code of Indian Offenses in its original text. Dry, administrative, and genuinely chilling.
- The American Indian Religious Freedom Act itself — short enough to read in full, including how little it actually compelled.
- Indigenous scholars writing about appropriation, rather than non-Indigenous writers summarising them. There are many, and they disagree with each other, which is the point.