After initiation your intuition is undoubtedly enhanced and refined. You will hear the spirits and they may even tell you when people are lying to you or if you need to avoid something potentially harmful. The loa/spirits will give you revelations so you may avoid pain and suffering and open doors for you. They will also show you things in your dreams; sometimes teachings, sometimes answers to your personal matters. In addition to seemingly psychic awareness, a magician/houngan/mambo has the ability to heal people with headaches, backaches, stomach problems, health issues, anxiety, stress, psychic attack, drug addiction, and pretty much any other human ailment. This is done by the use of magic and quite often holistic procedures are revealed to us by the loa/spirits.

Head Spirit: The first spirit that is called when being initiated will claim the lead as your head spirit and if he is not the right one later on you may have problems, (just like putting the wrong engine in a car! or to better put tuning the car with the wrong engine specification!) The very first and most important element you need to find out before you proceed to initiation is who your head spirit is, many people wind up having a bad experiences after initiation when they receive the wrong spirit, practitioners try to determine the head spirit by divination, your head spirit is written inside your hands and finding a hougan (voodoo priest) that knows how to read hands is the only true way of determining your head spirit! Unfortunately many hougans have lost the art of reading hands and the ones that can do so are hard to find! In general unless you are gay or lesbian, if you are male your head spirit will be a male, and if you are female your head spirit will be a female!

Your head spirit comes from your family lineage, usually several generations before you were born someone in your family used to worship some kind of deity, and weather or not they converted in Catholicism, and sometimes even choose to ignore the deity that their gran parents used to worship, those spirits are still hanging around waiting in the back ground for someone to bring them back to life, Haitian voodoo deals primarily with Spirits from Africa, and although most of them will gladly adopt you, the original spirit from your ancestor may not be always keen about your choice!

Indeed people think that initiation with original voodoo spirits from Africa is the proper thing to do, the art of communicating with spirits does not only exist in Africa or Haiti, the Egyptians practiced it, the Greek had the oracles in Delphi, the Mayans had their own gods and so did the shamans and many other ancient civilizations, you don't need to go far to witness possession many Episcopalian churches during their services get possessed and they speak in tongues, many white magician have labeled the practice as channeling, the list of spirits you can get initiated with is endless! The Haitians call it voodoo, the Jewish people call it Kabala the Indians shamanism, but it all boils down to possession!

When you are initiated your head spirit and other spirits of your ancestors are called into possessing your body, they are fed and communicate with the hougan what they expect from you, that is what happens when you go to the process of initiation! So if the hougan is not used to deal with other deities beside Haitian Loas you may run into problems and instead of finding a solution to your problems you may wind up having more than you bargain for!

And last: I do not recommend marrying any spirits or tattooing yourself with the sign or verver of any of them!