The grandmother walks into the room and the granddaughter — three years old — looks past the grandmother's shoulder and says hello to grandpa, who has been dead for eleven years. The mother knows what just happened. The child has not yet been told that the dead are not visible to most people. The child sees grandpa standing slightly behind grandma the way he used to stand. By age six the child will have learned not to mention it. By age ten the child will mostly have stopped seeing.
In the Akan account, the child has not developed a special ability. The child has simply not yet had the spiritual sense beaten out of her by a culture that does not have language for what she is doing. The Akan tradition counts seven spiritual senses, parallel to the seven physical senses, and the framework says everyone has all seven — they atrophy when the surrounding culture treats them as non-existent.1
The Akan tradition counts seven physical senses (the standard five plus the sense of balance and the sense of time) and a corresponding seven spiritual senses, one per physical sense:
The last two — clairtempian and clairequilibrant — are Odwirafo's specific coinages for senses that exist in the Akan tradition but were not previously given systematic English-language names. Clairvoyance, clairaudience, and clairsentience are widely-used Spiritualist-tradition terms. Clairalience and clairgustance are less common but in use. The seven-sense framework integrates all of these under one taxonomy.
The Akan account places spirit-communication on a spectrum from non-ritual to ritual. The seven spiritual senses are non-ritual means — they operate spontaneously when a spirit enters the space, without requiring any specific ritual setup. A person walking down the street who catches a sudden smell of their dead grandmother's perfume is using clairalience without intending to. A person who feels suddenly dizzy at a specific location is using clairequilibrant without ritual setup.
Ritual means of spirit-communication — meditation (Suhumesum), divination (Adisa), libation (Akwambo), and the other Akan ritual practices — are the structured techniques that heighten the spiritual senses, focus them on specific intentions, and produce more reliable spirit-communication than the spontaneous-sense operation alone. The Akan ritual practice does not create the senses. The senses are always there. The ritual practice trains and intensifies them.3
This is why the Akan account treats spirit-perception as normal. Everyone has the senses. Most contemporary Westerners have had the senses atrophy through disuse and through cultural messages that the senses are not real perceptions. The Akan ritual practice is partly a re-training of senses that the practitioner had as a young child and then was taught to ignore.
This page connects to multiple Akan-tradition vault destinations:
Take a person who consistently smells specific scents that no one else in the room is smelling. The scents are not random — each one corresponds to a specific deceased relative or recurring spirit. Grandmother smells like a particular perfume. Uncle smells like cigarette smoke. A negative spirit that occasionally comes through smells like rotting fruit.
In a contemporary Western framework, the person would either dismiss the experience (olfactory hallucination, nothing to worry about) or pathologize it (possible temporal-lobe abnormality, see a neurologist). In the Akan framework, the person has well-developed clairalience. The clairalience is doing exactly what the spiritual sense is supposed to do — identifying which spirit is in the space.
The Akan response would be: pay attention to which spirits show up when, learn to distinguish helpful presences from negative ones, develop ritual practice that allows for explicit communication with the helpful presences and protective practice against the negative ones. The clairalience is a gift — a sensory channel that most people have lost. It is not a problem to be solved; it is a capacity to be developed.
The contemporary clinical context for this would obviously require careful handling — actual neurological abnormalities and trauma-related hyperarousal can produce similar phenomena and require clinical assessment. The categorical anti-clinical framing in the source is quarantined per Odwirafo Source Tensions Category 6. The Akan framing of spiritual-sense capacity as developable gift is preserved as practitioner-tradition account, with the obvious caveat that any disabling or distressing experience deserves both ritual-tradition and clinical attention.
Friday evening, 6:47. You walk into a room you have not been in before. You stop just inside the doorway. You spend ninety seconds before you do anything else.
You ask each of the seven senses what it perceives, in order. Physical sight: what do I see? Physical hearing: what do I hear? Physical touch: what do I feel? Physical smell: what do I smell? Physical taste: anything? Physical balance: am I steady? Physical time: am I tracking normally?
Then you ask the spiritual versions. Clairvoyance: do I see anything not physically present? Clairaudience: do I hear anything not physically present? Clairsentience: is there a presence I can feel that is not embodied? Clairalience: any scent that does not belong to the room? Clairgustance: any taste in my mouth that arrived with arrival? Clairtempian: is my time-tracking normal or distorted? Clairequilibrant: am I balanced or off?
You answer honestly. You write down anything that comes up, even if it feels imagined. The exercise is not about producing perceptions; it is about checking whether perceptions are arriving and being ignored. Most of the time the answer is nothing unusual. Occasionally the answer is something specific. The discipline of checking is the practice.
The framework fails in two predictable ways. First failure: over-attribution — treating every unusual sensory experience as a spiritual-sense perception when the more likely explanation is mundane (a real smell from outside, a real sound from a nearby room, an actual neurological event). Discerning genuine spiritual-sense perception from mundane sensory phenomena is a skill the framework does not automatically grant; ritual training is supposed to develop the discernment, but practitioners new to the framework can over-attribute.
Second failure: atrophy normalization — assuming that since most adults do not have active spiritual senses, the senses must not be real. This is the cultural default in much of the contemporary West. The Akan account would say the senses are real; their inactivity in most adults is the result of cultural suppression, not evidence of non-existence. The diagnostic sign of the second failure is a person who dismisses spontaneous spiritual-sense experiences in themselves and others without considering that the senses might be reporting on something the framework recognizes.
The five basic clair-senses (clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, clairalience, clairgustance) are widely documented in spiritualist-tradition literature and in cross-cultural shamanic and indigenous traditions. The systematic Akan integration of all seven (adding clairtempian and clairequilibrant for time and balance senses) is Odwirafo's specific coinage but is consistent with broader cross-traditional patterns. The categorical claim that all humans have these senses and that they atrophy through cultural suppression is the Akan position; whether this is empirically testable is an open question.
Open question: contemporary parapsychology research on extrasensory perception (Bem, Radin, others) has produced contested results with weak-to-moderate effect sizes in some replications and null results in others. Whether the methodology of parapsychology research is appropriate for what the Akan framework calls spiritual-sense perception, or whether the framework calls for a different methodology, is a research question.
The Akan seven-sense framework converges with spiritualist-tradition Western frameworks (Spiritualism, Theosophy) on the existence and broad classification of clair-senses, and with cross-cultural shamanic traditions on the developability of these senses through ritual training. It diverges from mainstream contemporary Western psychology and neuroscience, which generally treats reports of clair-sense experiences as either pathology or imagination. The convergence-among-non-Western-traditions versus divergence-from-mainstream-Western-science is itself an interesting comparative-religion data point.
Psychology: Altered States and Perception — Contemporary psychology of altered states (psychedelic research, meditation neuroscience, dream research) increasingly documents perceptual experiences that fall outside the standard waking-state model. The Akan seven-sense framework offers a tradition-grounded taxonomy for some of what altered-state research is encountering. The insight: the contemporary scientific reckoning with non-ordinary states is currently building taxonomies in the absence of much of the inherited tradition-knowledge from cultures that have systematically classified these phenomena for centuries. Cross-pollination between altered-state research and the inherited frameworks would substantially extend the taxonomic apparatus.
Eastern Spirituality: Siddhis and Perceptual Powers — The Vedic siddhi framework similarly catalogs non-ordinary perceptual capacities that develop through yogic practice (the eight siddhis: anima, mahima, garima, laghima, prapti, prakamya, ishitva, vashitva). The structural parallel: a tradition that takes seriously the developability of non-ordinary perception will tend to produce a systematic taxonomy of the kinds of non-ordinary perception that can develop. The Akan seven-sense framework and the Vedic siddhi framework are independent answers to the same question, with different specific contents reflecting different lineage emphases.
Anthropology: Shamanic Perception Cross-Cultural — Cross-cultural anthropology of shamanism documents that traditional shamanic practitioners across geographically and linguistically unrelated cultures consistently report and operationalize non-ordinary perceptual capacities that map roughly onto the seven Akan spiritual senses: seeing spirits, hearing spirit-voices, feeling presence-changes, smelling spirit-arrivals, sensing time-distortions, sensing balance-disturbances. The cross-cultural consistency is high enough that contemporary anthropology has had to develop taxonomic vocabulary to handle the reports (Eliade's Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy is the canonical reference). The Akan seven-sense framework is one specific tradition's systematic naming of capacities that cross-cultural shamanic ethnography independently documents across hundreds of geographically distant cultures. The insight neither alone produces: when traditions across continents independently arrive at the same catalog of non-ordinary perceptual capacities, the convergence is itself evidence that the capacities are real cognitive-perceptual features of human beings under specific training conditions, not culturally-specific superstitious constructions. The implication: the contemporary scientific reckoning with non-ordinary perception would benefit substantively from systematic engagement with the inherited taxonomies that cultures like the Akan have refined over centuries — these are not folk-beliefs to be explained away, they are tradition-grounded data about human perceptual capacity that contemporary research is independently rediscovering.
The Sharpest Implication. If the Akan account is even approximately right — if everyone has seven spiritual senses that have atrophied in most adults through cultural suppression — then the contemporary materialist default is itself a learned perceptual filter, not a baseline. The cultural shift from a world in which most people had access to spirit-sense to a world in which most people do not is a narrowing of perception, not a correction of error. Take this seriously and the contemporary disbelief in spirit-perception starts to look less like enlightenment and more like collective sensory atrophy.
Generative Questions.