Magic 101: Disclosure

Ambition is not your friend, as much as anything, because knowledge isn’t your friend. An ambitious person, in vodou, is someone with a death wish. For the most part, the way knowledge is treated outside vodou is considered in vodou to be frequently fatal, if not just harmful.

An ignorant person is free to act ignorantly, or not act at all because they simply don’t know any better. Consequences are lighter for them. They cannot be expected to act in alignment or compliance with knowledge they don’t have.

In vodou, knowledge is obligation. To be a magician in vodou is to be tightly bound by obligation. Every bit of the knowledge you have, you will pay for: you will pay for the getting of that knowledge, and you will pay for having that knowledge by being obligated to use it. You are also obligated, to avoid the consequences of misusing that knowledge, to also develop the necessary wisdom which will allow you to know when to act or apply that knowledge, which is a part of getting that knowledge but also the ongoing cost of having it.

All of this is to say that to know is expensive. It’s so expensive that a priest or spiritual worker will pay with the rest of their lives for having it, in every and any way the spirit deems fit for the upkeep of that knowledge. This is also why, if you’re familiar with the culture, to be told you will initiate into the priesthood is cause for most people to run.

I ran. Physically. I didn’t want any part of this responsibility.

I didn’t get far. If the spirit wants you, you won’t get far.

Many of these entries are by request of the spirit, and represent knowledge that can be shared. As much as anything else, they are harm reduction in an environment full of people pumping out “the real secrets of vodou” in the form of ideas, rituals, and magical fragments dangerously stripped of culture or fundamentally inaccurate. The knowledge being shared here is a series of warnings, cautions, cultural ideas, and reminders that you are not individually competent to negotiate these spaces, that being in these places has a cost, and that the knowledge is not without cultural context.

If they have seemed satisfying or complete to you, I assure you, you’re missing quite a bit. I’m here to say that whatever knowledge you might get from your “secrets of vodou” books or articles is false, and if it is true, you will pay for it.