A Note Before We Begin

I originally wrote this piece for my master’s program under the title “The Forest as Psychic Terrain: A Comparative Analysis of Jungian and Afro-Caribbean Approaches to Forest Consciousness,” and I’ve adapted it for this blog post. This work felt like it needed to breathe beyond the academic setting—to reach those of you drawn to African Traditional Religions, Indigenous wisdom, or the deeper questions about how we know what we know. At the end, I’ve provided extensive references so you can continue your own research.

I’ve transformed it from its more academic framework, and after working on this for quite a while, I think this is as far as I’ll take it.

What follows is both rigorous and intimate, scholarly and sacred.

A word about lineage: In some of my traditions, we don’t speak openly about our godparents. There’s wisdom in silence, in protecting what’s sacred from casual consumption. In others, naming your lineage establishes credibility and honors the elders who’ve invested in your formation.

I walk a careful line here.

What I’ll share is this: I’ve been blessed with godparents in three main ATRs who are not just practitioners but masters—healers, curanderos, workers of both medicine and mystery. Some hold PhDs alongside their ritual knowledge. All have decades of serious practice behind them. Their reputations in their communities are formidable.

I could name-drop to impress you. I won’t.

Why? Because I learned early that invoking your godparents’ credentials can become a shield against doing your own work—a way of claiming authority you haven’t yet earned through your own blood, sweat, and discipline. My elders don’t tolerate that. They don’t allow misconduct, disrespect, or spiritual laziness. They demand that you exhaust your own internal resources before coming to them with questions. They require genuine commitment, not mere posturing (meaning its not just an act).

So I’ve learned to sit with my confusion longer. To research deeper. To try, fail, and try again before seeking their counsel. Only when I’ve truly hit a wall—when my own knowing runs dry—do I approach them.

This discipline has shaped everything that follows.

I mention my lineage not to elevate myself but to acknowledge: I’m speaking from within living traditions, under the guidance of elders who hold me accountable. I’m an eternal student, not a master. What I offer here is my best understanding, shaped by study, practice, and the occasional hard correction from those who know far more than I do.

If you’re drawn to these traditions—or any other serious spiritual practice—please: find proper initiation, seek authentic teachers, commit to the long apprenticeship. Don’t mistake reading for knowing. Don’t confuse intellectual understanding with embodied practice.

The ancestors are watching. The spirits have expectations. And the forest—whether you approach it as symbol or as living sacred territory—will test your sincerity.

With that foundation laid, let’s begin.

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Introduction: Two Ways of Seeing the Same Woods

Imagine standing at the edge of a forest at twilight. What do you see?

A Western psychologist trained in Jungian depth psychology might observe the darkening trees and recognize the threshold of the unconscious mind—a symbolic landscape where your shadow self awaits integration, where archetypal figures emerge from the collective psyche to guide your individuation. The forest becomes a mirror reflecting your inner multiplicity, your fragmented self seeking wholeness through psychological work.

A Palero—a practitioner of Palo Monte—sees something entirely different in those same trees. They perceive a living spiritual territory inhabited by autonomous entities: nfumbes (spirits of the deceased), forces of nature, ancestral presences that possess their own agency, their own demands, their own wisdom. The forest is not a symbol of something else. It is the thing itself—sacred, conscious, relational, and utterly real.

Both are looking at the same forest. Both are correct within their frameworks. And therein lies one of the most profound challenges facing modern spirituality, psychology, and ecology: How do we honor multiple ways of knowing without reducing one to the other? How do we resist the colonial impulse to translate everything into Western psychological language, while still engaging in meaningful dialogue across traditions?

This exploration invites you into what I call polyontological literacy—the capacity to navigate different frameworks of reality without insisting that only one can be true. It’s an intellectual stance, yes, but more importantly, it’s a practice of humility. A recognition that our way of knowing is not the only way. That reality might be far stranger, far more multiple, than any single system can contain.

What follows is a journey through Jungian depth psychology and three powerful Afro-Caribbean traditions: Palo Monte, Vodou, and Ifá. Along the way, we’ll encounter the uncompromising teachings of practitioners like Tata José, whose words cut through spiritual romanticism to remind us that this work demands discipline, respect, and integrity—not just intellectual curiosity or exotic experience-collecting.

This isn’t armchair philosophy. These traditions have been preserved at tremendous cost—through slavery, colonization, persecution, and the risk of death. The elders who maintained them did so because they knew something essential about reality, healing, and human transformation. Something that the modern world desperately needs but often approaches with casual entitlement.

My invitation to you is this: Read with your whole self—intellect, yes, but also intuition, body, spirit. Let yourself be challenged. Notice where you want to reduce unfamiliar ideas to comfortable categories. Notice where you feel defensive, where you feel called, where you feel lost.

The forest—whether as psychological symbol or living spiritual territory—meets you exactly where you are. But it also invites you further than you intended to go.

Let’s begin.

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Part One: The Psychological Forest—Jung’s Map of Inner Wilderness

When Forests Speak the Language of Dreams

Carl Jung understood something essential: forests have always been humanity’s first temple, our original classroom for encountering the unknown. In European fairy tales—those ancient psychological maps passed down through generations—forests appear again and again as liminal spaces where transformation becomes possible.

Jung called this transformation individuation: the process of integrating unconscious contents to achieve psychological wholeness. He observed that dreams emerge from “a spirit of nature” akin to “the fables of the primeval forest,” suggesting that forest imagery represents humanity’s original symbolic habitat for engaging with what lies beneath conscious awareness.

But let’s be clear about what Jung was proposing. In analytical psychology, the forest functions primarily as symbolic terrain. The witch in the woods, the wise old woman by the tree, the beast lurking in shadows—these are not independent entities but projections of internal psychic contents. They are aspects of yourself that you’ve disowned, repressed, or not yet integrated into consciousness.

The Architecture of the Multiple Self

Jung recognized what spiritual traditions have always known: you are not one thing. You are many.

His psychological model maps this multiplicity with precision.

• The Ego represents your conscious identity, the “I” you think you are.
• The Shadow encompasses everything you’ve rejected about yourself, pushed into darkness.
• The Anima/Animus embodies the contrasexual archetypes representing qualities you need to integrate.
• The Self serves as the supreme organizing principle, what Jung called “the inner empirical deity.”
• The Personal Unconscious holds your individual repressed material,
• while the Collective Unconscious contains the vast reservoir of archetypal patterns shared by all humanity.

When you enter the forest in a fairy tale, you’re entering this landscape of multiplicity. Each figure you encounter represents an aspect of your psyche demanding recognition.

Vasalisa the Wise: A Tale of Two Forests

Consider the Russian tale of Vasalisa the Wise—a story that perfectly illustrates how the same narrative can be read through multiple lenses without diminishing either interpretation.

Sent into the dark forest by her cruel stepfamily to fetch fire from the witch Baba Yaga, Vasalisa must undergo a series of trials. She has only a magical doll—given by her dying mother—to guide her. The doll represents what Jung called the transcendent function: a mediating symbol that bridges conscious and unconscious realms, offering guidance when rational thinking fails.

Baba Yaga’s hut, standing on chicken legs in the forest’s heart, embodies what Jungian analysts call the Initiation Guide—the harsh but ultimately transformative figure who tests the seeker through impossible tasks. She is simultaneously threatening and life-giving. She could devour Vasalisa—and indeed, a kind of ego-death is precisely what must happen for psychological rebirth to occur.

But let me pause here and speak from personal experience.

I love Baba Yaga. I’ve had my own encounters with her that go far beyond what Jung’s framework can contain. She’s taught me things that transcend archetypal theory entirely and have everything to do with direct spiritual relationship. She’s shown me her sharp humor, her fierce protection of those she chooses, her absolute refusal to coddle or comfort. She is far more complex, more alive, more utterly herself than any psychological category can hold.

And here’s the thing—this is precisely what this whole exploration is about: I can honor Baba Yaga as a literal spiritual presence in my life AND simultaneously recognize how her image functions symbolically within Jungian psychology. Both are true. Both are useful. Neither cancels out the other.

When I work with clients using fairy tales, I might use Jungian language about initiation archetypes—and that analysis is valid and helpful for understanding certain psychological dynamics. But when I’m in ritual space, when I’m seeking her guidance directly, when I feel her presence shift the energy in a room? That’s a different kind of knowing entirely. She’s nobody’s metaphor in those moments. She does what she wants, when she wants, and you either get on board or get out of her way.

If you’ve encountered Baba Yaga yourself—whether through dreamwork, meditation, shamanic journey, or direct spiritual practice—you know exactly what I mean. There’s a quality to that encounter that cannot be reduced to “Oh, that’s just your psyche processing shadow material.” Sometimes it is that. And sometimes it’s her, showing up because she has something to teach you or a job for you to do.

This is why we can see Baba Yaga not only as a gatekeeper or threshold guardian, but also as the Terrible Mother, perhaps as a Shadow Integration Figure, as a Helper, or as a Wise Crone/Dark Mother spirit. She contains multitudes, and which face she shows depends on what you need—and what you can handle.

For the purposes of this section, I’m focusing on the symbolic lens—how Jungian analysts understand Baba Yaga as representing the initiatory ordeal within the psyche. But please know: there’s so much more to her than this framework allows. The symbolic interpretation is one doorway into understanding her significance. It’s not the only door, and it’s certainly not the deepest one.

With that understanding, let’s return to Vasalisa’s story through the Jungian lens.

The fire Vasalisa ultimately earns symbolizes what Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls “psychic fire”—the intuition and discerning consciousness gained through successfully navigating unconscious contents. This fire burns away illusions while illuminating authentic selfhood. Vasalisa doesn’t just survive her encounter with Baba Yaga; she’s transformed by it. She returns with the ability to see clearly, to trust her inner knowing, to distinguish truth from deception.

In Jungian terms, she has successfully passed through the initiatory ordeal. She’s faced the threshold guardian and emerged whole, carrying its wisdom without being consumed by it. The cruel stepfamily—representing false consciousness, internalized oppression, the voices that tell you you’re not enough—cannot survive this psychic fire. When Vasalisa returns home with the flame, it burns them to ash.

This is individuation in action: the process of becoming who you truly are by confronting what terrifies you, integrating what you’ve rejected, and emerging with hard-won wisdom.

The Deeper Question: Symbol or Spirit?

From the Jungian perspective, this entire journey happens within the landscape of the psyche. The forest is your unconscious. Baba Yaga is an autonomous complex—a psychological structure with its own energy and personality. The trials are internal psychological processes. The fire is symbolic of consciousness itself.

But what if it’s not only symbolic in the reductive sense? What if Baba Yaga—like all archetypal figures—exists as what Jung called an autonomous primordial energy, something that predates individual consciousness and operates independently of any single person’s psychology?

This is where Jung’s framework becomes more complex than many realize. He didn’t see archetypes as mere psychological constructs we create. He saw them as pre-existing patterns—energies imprinted in what he called the collective unconscious, possibly even encoded at biological levels. They exist whether we acknowledge them or not. They have their own agency, their own intelligence.

So when someone encounters Baba Yaga, they might be engaging with her as an internal psychological structure, yes—but that structure itself is plugged into something larger, something transpersonal. Jung would say the archetype exists objectively in the collective unconscious, while our personal experience of it is subjective. The archetype doesn’t need you to exist, but you need it to access certain kinds of knowing.

The real question isn’t “Is it psychological or spiritual?” but rather: What is the relationship between autonomous archetypal energies and the spirits, entities, and intelligences recognized in traditional spiritual cosmologies? Are they the same thing described in different languages? Are they overlapping realities? Or are there forces in the world that exist entirely outside the archetypal framework Jung described?

The distinction I’m making isn’t between “psychological” and “spiritual”—as if one is more real than the other. It’s between symbolic/intrapsychic (where Baba Yaga functions as a representation of internal psychological structures) and literal/relational (where Baba Yaga exists as an autonomous entity with her own agency, regardless of whether humans think about her).

A psychological experience can be deeply spiritual. Working with archetypes can be sacred work. But there’s a difference between saying “Baba Yaga represents the initiatory ordeal within my own psyche that I need to navigate” and saying “Baba Yaga is a spirit who exists independently, has her own preferences and personality, and whom I’m in relationship with.”

Both can be true. Both are true, depending on the ontological framework and the specific encounter. The question isn’t which is more valid, but rather: Are we willing to hold space for the possibility that reality operates on multiple levels simultaneously?

This is the question that drives this entire exploration. And it’s the question we’ll hold as we move from European fairy tale psychology into Afro-Caribbean spiritual cosmologies, where forests are not metaphors but literal sacred territories inhabited by autonomous beings.

The Clinical Application: Forests in the Consulting Room

Contemporary Jungian analysts document how forest imagery emerges spontaneously during psychological transitions. Clients report dreams of being lost in woods, encountering strange figures, finding unexpected clearings. Through active imagination exercises, they dialogue with these forest presences, gradually recognizing them as projected aspects of personality requiring integration.

The therapeutic goal remains consistent: expand individual consciousness by integrating unconscious material. The forest serves as a container for human projection rather than a conscious ecosystem with independent agency.

This approach proves remarkably effective for psychological healing and self-understanding. It offers sophisticated tools for working with inner multiplicity, shadow material, and archetypal patterns. But it maintains a fundamental subject-object division, treating forests as symbolic representations rather than living spiritual territories.

And this is where the story splits into two paths.

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Part Two: The Spiritual Forest—Afro-Caribbean Theology of Living Landscapes

When Forests Are Not Metaphors

Now we enter a different ontological territory entirely.

In Palo Monte, Vodou, and Ifá—three powerful Afro-Caribbean traditions with roots in Central and West African cosmologies—forests are not symbols. They are literally inhabited spiritual territories where practitioners interact with autonomous entities possessing their own intelligence, agency, and demands.

This is not primitive animism requiring psychological interpretation. These are sophisticated theological systems with internal coherence, practical efficacy, and theoretical rigor rivaling any Western psychology.

The difference is ontological, not developmental. These traditions operate from fundamentally different assumptions about the nature of reality, consciousness, and transformation.

Palo Monte: The Forest as Resistance and Refuge

Lydia Cabrera’s landmark ethnography El Monte (1954) documents Palo Monte’s relationship with forest consciousness. Rooted in Central African (particularly Congo) traditions and developed in Cuba during slavery, Palo Monte treats forests as populated with spiritual entities requiring negotiation, offering wisdom, and sometimes resisting human demands.

Central to practice is the nganga—an iron cauldron containing spiritually charged materials (earth, sticks, bones, sometimes human remains, metals, stones) that house spirits for healing, divination, and protection. The nganga is understood as a miniature forest, a concentrated spiritual ecosystem.

But more than that, as anthropologist Stephan Palmié notes, the nganga functions as an analogue of maroon settlements—those communities of escaped enslaved people who found refuge in forests beyond colonial control. The practice situates forest consciousness in historical resistance rather than timeless archetype. It carries the memory of those who fled to the woods seeking freedom, who learned to work with forest spirits for survival and power.

The invocation of nfumbes (spirits of the deceased) operates as spiritual technology for processing collective trauma and channeling ancestral wisdom. These are not psychological complexes requiring integration. They are autonomous spiritual entities with whom practitioners negotiate ongoing relationships through offerings, respect, and ritual protocol.

Cabrera records a cosmological view that frames earthly life as spiritual exile: infants were mourned as entering suffering, while the dead were celebrated as liberated to return to their true home. Transformation is thus collective ancestral work embedded in history and continuity, not isolated psychological growth.

Vodou: Sacred Architecture and Embodied Possession

Haitian Vodou extends forest consciousness through sacred groves and ritual architecture designed for direct engagement with the Lwa—intermediary spirits who govern different aspects of existence and who inhabit natural environments.

The poteau-mitan, the central post of the temple, serves as a conduit for divine presence, embodying forest consciousness within ritual space. Where Jungian forests symbolize archetypal encounters, the poteau-mitan channels ongoing forces that require offerings, songs, and maintenance.

Sacred trees (arbres-reposoirs) serve as permanent sanctuaries for specific Lwa. These are not temporary symbolic portals but actual dwellings where spirits reside, rest, and can be approached with petitions.

The most dramatic difference from psychological approaches appears in possession states. During ceremony, practitioners may be “mounted” by Lwa—their ordinary consciousness completely displaced as the spirit takes control of their body. This is not symbolic integration. The Lwa displays distinct personality, voice, movement patterns, preferences, and knowledge. They perform healing, divination, counsel, and spiritual work through the possessed medium’s body.

Ethnographic accounts document instances where single individuals mount multiple Lwa sequentially within ceremonial contexts, each displaying completely different characteristics. Post-possession memory varies—some practitioners recall nothing, others have partial awareness—but the experience is understood as literal temporary displacement of personal consciousness by autonomous spiritual presence.

Milo Rigaud characterized Lwa as electromagnetic entities inhabiting ritual and natural spaces. This language anticipates contemporary discussions of forest intelligence networks and mycorrhizal communication systems, suggesting Indigenous knowledge encoded different truths about ecological interconnection.

Ifá: Cosmic Intelligence and Sacred Botany

Ifá, rooted in Yoruba cosmology, preserves vast systematic knowledge through the 256 odù—sacred signs revealed through divination that contain histories, prohibitions, prescriptions, and cosmic principles.

Each odù prescribes specific forest rituals and restrictions, affirming forests as differentiated spiritual territories with distinct protocols. This is not general nature worship but precise spiritual law governing how humans should relate to specific landscapes, plants, and entities.

Ifá maintains sacred botany where plants embody orisha energies (divine forces governing aspects of existence) with precise ecological and ritual requirements. A plant is not merely a symbol of healing—it literally contains spiritual power that must be approached with proper protocol, harvest timing, and preparation.

Orí—the inner head or personal destiny—links individual life to cosmic design. Forest rituals mediate alignment between personal orí and larger spiritual forces. Divination reveals which forest offerings, plant remedies, or spiritual work will harmonize a person’s path with cosmic order.

Anthropologist William Bascom’s extensive documentation of Ifá divination (1951, 1969) demonstrates theoretical sophistication rivaling European psychology while grounded in entirely different premises about consciousness, causation, and transformation.

Anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s research on Amazonian forests as semiotic networks of plants, animals, fungi, and humans communicating through signs (2013) echoes what Ifá has preserved for centuries: forests are active intelligences participating in knowledge transmission, not inert backdrops for human projection.

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Part Three: The Discipline of Real Initiation—Tata José Montoya’s Uncompromising Teaching

 

When Respect Is Non-Negotiable: Understanding the Full Weight of Spiritual Commitment

Tata José Montoya’s teachings bring us back to earth with startling directness. While many approach these traditions with romantic notions or casual curiosity, he reminds us that real initiation involves binding vows, serious responsibilities, and consequences for failure.

His words may feel harsh to Western sensibilities accustomed to spiritual buffets where you sample what feels good and leave the rest. But there’s profound wisdom in his uncompromising stance. Sometimes, I am also in disbelief of how harsh and direct he can be.

Tata José teaches that initiation isn’t just about receiving spiritual empowerment—it’s also about receiving healing on all levels, not just spiritual. When you choose a shaman, a Tata, a Babalawo, or a Mambo as your godparent, you’re not just signing up for ceremonies and secrets. You’re entering a healing relationship that will fundamentally transform you. You’re saying: “I trust you to see my wounds, to hold me accountable, to guide me through the spiritual surgery required for my evolution.”

This is especially crucial to understand if you’re engaging in long-term healing work with a spiritual practitioner. Often, the healing and the initiation are not separate processes. Your godparent isn’t just teaching you rituals—they’re actively working on your spiritual body, clearing ancestral patterns, adjusting your energetic alignment, interceding with spirits on your behalf. This work doesn’t stop when the ceremony ends. It’s ongoing, intimate, and requires your full participation.

Once you choose initiation, that vow is binding. No one forces it—but once you say yes, you’re agreeing to live by the rules of that path. This isn’t about control or authoritarianism. It’s about recognizing that spiritual work operates according to laws as real as gravity. You can’t partially commit to these traditions any more than you can partially jump off a cliff.

Think of it this way: if you went to a surgeon for a life-saving operation, you wouldn’t walk out halfway through because you got uncomfortable or had other plans. Yet people approach spiritual healing with exactly that casualness—starting deep work and then disappearing when it gets difficult, or when the godparent requires something that challenges their lifestyle.

The bond between godparent and godchild is like a chain. While I don’t fully embrace the idea that this bond automatically breaks through disobedience, as Tata José teaches, deep disrespect clearly affects spiritual connection and protection. These relationships aren’t therapy contracts you can terminate at will. They’re spiritual kinship ties involving mutual obligation.

Your godparent has made commitments to the spirits regarding you. They’ve vouched for you. They’ve opened spiritual doors and created pathways of protection. When you fail to honor your end of the relationship—whether through disrespect, abandonment of practice, or refusal to do the work—you’re disrupting actual spiritual mechanisms that were put in place for your healing and protection.

Starting and not completing initiation leaves a person spiritually unbalanced. This path isn’t a game you play when convenient. Half-initiation creates spiritual vulnerability, like opening a door you can’t close. It requires integrity, not convenience.

I’ve seen this repeatedly in healing contexts: someone comes desperately seeking help, undergoes initial cleansings and preparations, receives significant relief—and then disappears the moment they feel better, unwilling to complete the process. What they don’t realize is that spiritual healing works in layers. The surface symptoms may improve quickly, but the root causes require sustained work. Stopping midway often means the original problem returns, sometimes worse than before, because you’ve stirred things up without completing the transformation.

Tata José speaks about priorities and sacrifice—putting spiritual work above comfort or luxury. In traditions born from slavery and resistance, where practitioners risked death to preserve sacred knowledge, this makes perfect sense. The spirits don’t care about your busy schedule or your financial goals. They care whether you’re serious.

When you’re in active healing with a spiritual elder, this becomes very practical. They might tell you to make certain offerings, observe specific restrictions, or show up for ceremonies at particular times. But here’s something crucial that many miss: ideally, your elder shouldn’t have to tell you to give gratitude. You should notice how your life has improved and offer to thank the spirits yourself by asking your elders how you can properly honor them—whether that’s putting up a service full of different foods and drinks for the spirits and community, or giving drums to the spirits through your elder’s spiritual house.

If your elder has to remind you to show gratitude, that reveals something about your relationship with the spirits. This gratitude isn’t for your elder or their temple—though they facilitate it. This gratitude comes back to you as blessings from the spirits. The worst things we can do in these traditions are to be selfish, ungrateful, and disrespectful. These aren’t arbitrary social niceties. They’re precise spiritual prescriptions tailored to your healing process. Skipping them because they’re inconvenient undermines the entire treatment.

A Tata won’t tolerate disobedience or disrespect. The focus is sincerity and discipline, not money. When someone disrespects the house or fails their duties, consequences are clear and immediate. This isn’t punitive cruelty—it’s maintaining the integrity of a system that depends on proper relationship.

Here’s what Westerners often miss: your godparent’s authority isn’t personal ego. When they correct you, set boundaries, or enforce consequences, they’re protecting the spiritual ecosystem that makes healing possible. They’re maintaining the conditions under which the spirits can work effectively. They’re ensuring that the medicine they’re giving you actually works.

If you choose to work with a healer or enter initiation, you’re choosing to trust their diagnosis and follow their prescription—even when you don’t fully understand it, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when your rational mind protests. This doesn’t mean blind obedience to abuse (discernment is always necessary). But it does mean recognizing that you came to them precisely because your own understanding was insufficient to heal yourself.

The healing relationship requires surrender without loss of self. You maintain your dignity, your discernment, your capacity to say “this doesn’t feel right.” But you also acknowledge that transformation requires following guidance that takes you beyond your comfort zone, that challenges your habits and assumptions, that demands more than you initially wanted to give.

This is the paradox of spiritual healing in traditional contexts: you must be both vulnerable and strong, both obedient and discerning, both committed and clear-boundaried. It’s not easy. It’s not supposed to be.

But for those willing to engage with proper seriousness, the healing that becomes possible goes far deeper than any Western therapy could touch. It’s not just your mind being healed—it’s your spirit, your ancestral line, your relationship with forces larger than yourself. When I saw for myself how my soul was wounded, I cried. I saw the wounds and knew I had been carrying this open wound in my energy field for thousands of years, if not longer.

When you choose your shaman, you’re choosing your healing. Make that choice with eyes wide open, ready for the full commitment it requires.

The Humility to Learn

What I’ve learned from my elders—and also from observing Tata José’s teachings, as well as many others, even from a distance, since he’s not my godfather—is that humility matters more than being right. These traditions survived because practitioners valued lineage, respected elders, and understood that some knowledge can’t be gained through books or intellectual analysis alone.

There’s a particular kind of Western arrogance that wants to pick apart these traditions, psychologize them, modernize them, make them more palatable. But that impulse often reveals our discomfort with genuine authority, with binding commitment, with the possibility that spirits might actually have their own requirements regardless of our preferences.

Honoring our elders—whether in Ifá, Palo Monte, Vodou, Indigenous Healing Traditions or any tradition—means sometimes listening even when we don’t fully understand, trusting that wisdom has been preserved for good reason, and recognizing our own limitations.

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Part Four: Polyontological Literacy—Holding Multiple Truths

The Capacity to Navigate Different Realities

So how do we reconcile these radically different approaches to forest consciousness?

The answer isn’t synthesis. It’s not about creating some hybrid system that dilutes both. It’s about developing what I call polyontological literacy—the capacity to navigate multiple ontological systems without reducing one to the other or insisting on universal truth claims.

This requires both intellectual flexibility and methodological rigor.

When analyzing Jungian approaches, we employ psychological terminology: projection, individuation, archetypal integration. We recognize this framework’s assumptions about consciousness and symbolic meaning.

When examining Palo Monte, Vodou, and Ifá practices, we shift to theological language that recognizes autonomous spiritual entities, possession states, and energetic signatures as literal phenomena rather than metaphorical constructs.

This methodological alternation prevents imposing one framework’s assumptions onto another while preserving analytical clarity.

Addressing the Objections

“Doesn’t accepting multiple ontologies lead to relativism where anything goes?”

No. This framework doesn’t suggest all truth claims are equal. It recognizes that different ontological systems operate under distinct assumptions about reality, each with internal coherence and pragmatic efficacy within its cultural context.

Just as quantum mechanics and general relativity offer incompatible yet useful descriptions of physical reality at different scales, symbolic and literal approaches to forest consciousness may serve complementary functions without requiring universal reconciliation.

“How can someone simultaneously hold that forest spirits are psychological projections AND autonomous entities?”

This apparent paradox dissolves when we recognize that different contexts call for different interpretative frameworks.

A therapist might work with forest imagery as symbolic material in clinical practice. The same person might engage forest spirits as literal presences during ceremony—each approach serving distinct purposes without contradiction.

The key is context-appropriate engagement rather than forcing one framework to explain all experiences.

Complementary Pathways to Transformation

Both traditions address multiplicity within the person. Jung integrates shadow and anima/animus projections encountered in forest imagery, recognizing the psyche as composed of multiple complexes and archetypal forces. Vodou operates with a framework that reveals a person has seven parts (including the gros bon ange and ti bon ange), each requiring attention and balance in relationship with the Lwa. Palo Monte works with the understanding that individuals contain multiple spiritual components that must be aligned with ancestral forces (nfumbe) and the Mpungu. Ifá balances the ori (inner consciousness, comprising ori inu and ori ode) with guidance from multiple Orishas, as taught by Babalawo Dr. Luciano Pulido, recognizing that spiritual health requires harmony among these dimensions.

Both recognize forests as transformative sites. Jungian fairy tales map psychological processes through symbolic forest journeys. Vodou engages the sacred forest (Gran Bwa and others) where Lwa manifest and ceremonies unfold. Palo Monte engages historical resistance and ancestral wisdom through literal forest spirits (nfumbe and Mpungu dwelling in la manigua). Ifá honors the forest as dwelling place of Orishas like Osanyin (lord of herbs and forest medicine) and site of initiation rites.

Both understand that ordinary consciousness must be suspended for transformation. Jungian fairy tales accomplish this through narrative imagination and active engagement with symbolic imagery. Vodou utilizes direct spiritual possession (monte) where Lwa ride practitioners. Palo Monte enters trance states (rayamiento, trabajos) to commune with spirits of the dead and nature. Ifá employs divination, trance, and ritual to receive direct communication from Orishas and access ori inu (inner consciousness).

The convergence is real. But so are the differences. And both matter.

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Part Five: Toward Decolonial Ecopsychology—Honoring Indigenous Wisdom

Beyond Metaphor to Genuine Relationship

Theodore Roszak, a founder of ecopsychology, called for reconnecting human and environmental intelligence. He spoke of “ecological unconscious”—an innate bond between psyche and nature that modern civilization has severed.

But here’s where Western psychology often stumbles. It wants to interpret Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean traditions as metaphorical, as “early” versions of insights that modern psychology has now refined. This is colonialism in intellectual clothing.

What if these traditions aren’t metaphors for psychological truths but accurate descriptions of spiritual realities that Western psychology simply doesn’t recognize?

What if the Palero who works with forest spirits, the Vodouisant who is mounted by Lwa during ceremony, the Babalawo who consults the odù for guidance—what if they’re engaging actual ecological intelligence networks rather than projecting psychological contents?

This question demands we move beyond privileging Western epistemology as the only valid framework for truth.

The Practical Path Forward

Genuine ecological reconnection may require both approaches.

Symbolic work (Jungian) for dissolving ego boundaries, cultivating non-rational perception, preparing consciousness for mystery. Literal spiritual technologies (Afro-Caribbean) for establishing reciprocal relationships with environmental intelligences through offering, ritual, and respectful protocol.

Neither approach alone satisfies the depth of transformation required by contemporary ecological crises.

We need the psychological tools Jung offers for working with shadow material, archetypal patterns, and individuation. These practices help Western people begin softening the rigid subject-object divisions that fuel environmental destruction.

But we also need what Afro-Caribbean traditions have preserved: actual protocols for engaging forests as conscious ecosystems, for entering reciprocal relationship with more-than-human intelligences, for recognizing that nature is not resource or symbol but kin.

Decolonizing Psychology

This polyontological approach contributes to decolonizing psychology by recognizing Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean wisdom traditions as sophisticated theoretical systems rather than primitive beliefs requiring psychological interpretation, challenging Western academic tendencies to reduce spiritual practices to psychological metaphors, honoring cultural sovereignty over knowledge systems and recognizing that some wisdom cannot and should not be translated into Western frameworks, acknowledging historical violence that attempted to erase these traditions and the resistance that preserved them, and supporting lineage-based transmission rather than appropriative borrowing that strips practices from their cultural context.

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Conclusion: Walking Both Paths Without Losing Your Way

Stand again at that forest edge at twilight.

You can enter as a seeker of psychological integration, recognizing the trees as mirrors of your unconscious, the shadows as projections of your disowned self, the journey as symbolic individuation.

You can enter as a spiritual practitioner, approaching with offerings and respect, seeking relationship with autonomous entities, understanding the forest as literal sacred territory requiring proper protocol.

You can—with discipline, humility, and guidance—learn to navigate both.

But here’s what Tata José’s teachings remind us: you cannot do this casually. You cannot pick and choose based on convenience. You cannot demand that spirits accommodate your schedule or that psychological work provide easy comfort.

Real transformation—whether psychological or spiritual—requires commitment that persists through difficulty, respect for lineages that preserved this wisdom, discipline that prioritizes spiritual work over personal preference, humility to recognize your limitations and honor those with deeper knowledge, and integrity to complete what you begin rather than abandoning the path when challenged.

The Call to Depth

We live in a time of profound ecological crisis, where Western civilization’s divorce from nature threatens all life. We also live in a time of psychological fragmentation, where people desperately seek wholeness while remaining trapped in consumer identities.

The forest—both as psychological symbol and as living spiritual territory—offers pathways to healing. But only if we approach with genuine respect, only if we’re willing to be transformed rather than merely informed, only if we recognize that some doors, once opened, cannot be casually closed.

Jung offers us maps for navigating inner wilderness. Palo Monte, Vodou, and Ifá offer us protocols for engaging outer wilderness as sacred, conscious, relational territory. Teachers like Tata José remind us that real spiritual work demands everything, not just our curiosity.

The forest is waiting. Are you ready to enter? How will you enter? What—or who—is calling you?

Reflection Questions for Your Journey

Before stepping forward, sit with these questions:

1. When I encounter teachings that challenge my assumptions, do I rush to reduce them to familiar categories, or can I sit with the discomfort of genuinely different worldviews?
2. Am I seeking spiritual practice as consumer experience, or am I prepared for binding commitment with real consequences?
3. Can I honor both psychological and spiritual approaches without privileging my cultural framework as the ultimate arbiter of truth?
4. What forest—literal or symbolic—am I being called to enter? What preparation does that require?
5. Am I willing to complete what I begin, even when it becomes difficult? Or do I abandon paths when they demand more than I expected?
6. How do I balance intellectual understanding with embodied practice, thinking with doing, analysis with surrender?
7. What would it mean to approach the natural world not as resource or symbol, but as kin—as conscious, demanding relationship?

The answers don’t come quickly. They emerge through practice, through mistakes, through guidance from elders, through actual engagement with forests both inner and outer.

But the questions themselves—if we hold them honestly—begin the transformation.

May you walk with wisdom. May you listen to the elders. May you recognize when the forest calls your name—and may you answer with the full depth of commitment it deserves.

In Sacred Service,

Victoria