Dirty Hands
In the last week, I’ve run into this idea a few times: mambo or houngan makout (that is, those of us from non-asogwe lineages) are who can be asked to do the ‘dirty’ or ‘dark’ tasks that asogwe priests do not want to do. That dark or dirty work is typically justice work, or work designed to balance the scales in a situation. The stated reason, in all those cases, is that they don’t want to contaminate themselves, ritually, or that they believe that doing those tasks will make them unclean in a way that would impact their ability to do work with the spirits.
I am not an asogwe. For all I know, this is true for asogwe. My spirits have no such hangups with me.
What I do know is that this arrangement sounds familiar—in many Abrahamic religions (and in Hinduism), there’s a priestly caste which has to maintain a certain level of ritual purity. This impacts their ability to do a variety of daily tasks, but especially anything which might be classified in their system as evil or unclean. Because the work which is often labelled ‘dirty’ is also often fundamentally a part of living (like, for instance, taking out the trash) or fundamentally a part of what a priest does (like justice or magical work which is considered not nice), this creates the need for an underclass or ‘unclean’ caste to handle the ‘unclean’ tasks.
Ironically, the makout lineages are older than the asogwe lineages. The underclass came first, in time.
As a mambo of what they’re calling the ‘unclean’ class, I feel obliged to share a philosophical comment. For me, as the ‘dirty’ hands which do the work, I am not who suffers the consequences. It is the person who thought of the ‘unclean’ work, who paid for the ‘unclean’ work, whose motivations or desires or beliefs are the cause of the ‘unclean’ work, who takes the penalty (if there is one) to an action.
If the work in question is justice work, I petition the spirits to balance the scales, not to punish someone. The ideal outcome is that everyone learns something in a situation, not that one person suffers. Ideally, everyone has an opportunity for healing and elevation as an outcome of magical work. Sometimes this means that one party in the situation takes a greater penalty than others, and sometimes this means that the penalty is spread around because everyone in the situation was out of balance.
Magic is not much use as justice if it’s only punitive.
Of course, I don’t believe in a good and evil system, nor am I particularly concerned with the same kind of ideals of purity that an asogwe would be, but generally speaking I believe that if you were willing to pay for it, the consequences are on you. I will warn you going in that a justice or ‘dirty’ work (and how sad that justice is considered ‘dirty’!) may result in something happening that you don’t want or like, but I’m not worried about myself in that situation. It’s not justice for me.
There is one more point that I want to bring up, and this is from my own relationship with the spirits. The lwa are not who does the dirty work you don’t want to have to see, experience, or be associated with. Several times now, I’ve been in a situation to be an assistant at a consultation where someone is talking to the spirit in the body of another horse and wants what they think of as justice (that is, for someone else to suffer), but does not want to be associated with or have to watch or be a part of that work. They want to hand it off to a spirit so they don’t have to get their hands dirty.
This, I can promise you, if you’re a client: if you contact me looking for work against someone, you will not sit there with clean hands and a clean conscience, pretending you had nothing to do with it. You gonna get dirty as part of the cost.
I love my spirits far too much to let someone act as if they are the dirty hands which save someone from having to experience consequences.
