Vodou Culture 101: Death
In the US majority culture, death is an inhuman villain. A thief of life, an enemy who will eventually destroy you. Death is to be feared, and any effect of aging is to be avoided as long as possible. Death is when you go to judgement, when you go to the good or bad afterlife or, if you’re an atheist, you cease to be. Life is something stolen from death one moment at a time, because death is a final end and you will never be alive again.
If you think about it, this explains a lot of advertising and cultural anxieties in the US majority culture.
Vodou has a personified death. Actually, it has several for aspects of death, dying, and the state of the body and soul in death. Death can be solemn or, in the case of Guede, hilarious and crude. Death visits spiritual parties to give advice, heal people, clear them of their negative states, or make people laugh. His or her (because death is sometimes female) advice is often prudent, fixes a multitude of problems, and often makes everyone laugh. In vodou, we live with the dead, who vastly outnumber the living and are pretty much everywhere. Death’s personal permission has to be sought to cause certain kinds of magical mischief, and death is a protector of pregnant women and children, since the role of death is to open the gate to life.
Vodou’s death has, for lack of a better way to put it, a far more personable face. Papa Guede will laugh, dance, smoke, drink, playfully hump people, and generally act like the life of the party, often reminding people explicitly that their time in this life is short and that we should not take anything too seriously. He reminds us to have fun, that being alive is a gift to be savored and experienced.
This is in part because we’ll be back—death is not an end of everything, it’s place where we go to rest and learn between incarnations into life. You don’t disappear or cease to be when your body dies. You just go somewhere else for awhile. Sometimes you linger here, around people.
This is also because we have eternity to come back and learn all there is to learn, and we often learn by experiencing things. Death prompts us to go out and do something with our time in life, to make ourselves available to learn lessons and inch forward in our elevation.
In vodou, death is not your enemy. Death is a friend who comes to remind you to enjoy what you have and reminds you that whatever messes you make in this life, everything but what you learned will be left behind.
So fuck it up. Just learn something in the process.
