Magic 101: Force and Word
A reminder: magic is not intended to be practiced alone. You cannot DIY magic, and you will need a teacher or someone to bail you out. You will inevitably need to be bailed out. The spiritual world is intolerant of ignorance and the consequences of ignorance can cause serious harm.
We say, in vodou, that personal work is important. We mean that work on your character, on who you are, is an essential part of vodou. Healing, elevation, growth, all of these are work on who you are. The will to do the work associated with healing, elevation, and growth is a demonstration of personal maturity or the willingness to have personal maturity. These things are inherently rewarding, but have profound magical implications.
The contracts between spirits and humans are not exactly the same as a contract in the legal system, but there are a few similarities which are vital to magic. One of the similarities comes in the fact that a contract is about trust. A contract in the legal system is a matter of trusting that system and the parties in the contract to have negotiated in good faith. We trust the legal system to enforce the contract, the other party to have been (at least mostly) telling us the truth. If they haven’t been truthful, we trust that the legal system will void the contract and our obligations.
In magic, there is no third party enforcement of the contract. A contract between you and the spirit is enforced by you and the spirit. You can both call on help, but ultimately the contract is your responsibility to enact, enforce, or honor. A spirit who enters a contract with you will fulfill their part of the contract, though you have no guarantee that they will do so the way you thought they should, and they absolutely will get payment and enforce penalties against you if you violate the agreement.
Spirits observe you, your character, and your actions. What they observe will impact how they choose to enforce, enact, and act on contracts. There are some spirits that simply will not bother with you if they do not observe you to be trustworthy—these are the spirits that, trust me, you’d rather be dealing with. Some spirits will choose to interpret things differently in order to teach a lesson, some are merely more straightforward in their interpretation than others, and yet more will accept a contract with you easily but not tell you about the side effects of the contract unless you think to ask just the right questions.
Your word is binding, whether you meant it or not and whether you want it to be or not.
The problem, for aspiring magicians, is not whether or not your word is worth anything, because the spirits will ensure that lying to them has consequences. The problem is the sort of spirits your character will allow you to communicate with.
In that sense, work on your character is self-preservation for magicians. The better your character and word are, the more likely you are to be able to talk to something which is not malicious.
