Magic 101: Loyalty
Loyalty tests are a losing prospect. By the time you are in a position to feel the need to ask, other things have gone seriously wrong in a society that a loyalty test won’t fix.
One of the more uncomfortable aspects of dealing with the lwa is that they know if you ain’t shit—if you don’t keep your word, if you only obey out of fear, if you crack easily under pressure. This is another curable condition of the soul in vodou, if painful to cure. The lwa will, as the opportunity comes up, put you in situations where you can see for yourself what sort of person you are. They know, but you will need to confront it to more fully understand yourself and engage healing, learning, and/or elevation.
Vodou allows vows, promises, contracts, and formal agreements in part as an opportunity for you to see what sort of person you are. Every vow or promise you make has consequences. Consequences they might impose are your training wheels, your explicit reminder of what could happen to you if you break your word. There are other consequences, however, to breaking your word or to being disloyal. If you keep your word because you gave your word, because that is a part of your nature, you have affirmed something about yourself. Likewise, if you don’t, you have affirmed something.
To break your word is to betray yourself, and you will also hold yourself accountable (and miserable.) You will not trust yourself. You will know what you are worth.
It takes a lot of work to convince someone who knows they ain’t shit that they could be worth something. It can be done, but it’s a lot of work.
Loyalty is much the same way. No vow, no promise, no test insures loyalty, and in fact those are so often broken that they’re as much a reminder of how ineffective outside punishments are to ensuring loyalty. There will always be consequences, and to some degree that is one of the jobs of a godparent: applying boot to ass to help people understand that actions have consequences.
The coin of loyalty has always been something a lot more difficult to earn: love. In any form, no matter how shallow, love will have some ability to inspire loyalty. Even mixed with other, more dysfunctional dynamics, love can inspire some loyalty. That loyalty will be easy to break or betray, but it will at least influence behavior.
If the person is capable of real (deep, emotionally mature) love, that is when they are capable of durable loyalty.
The lwa and godparents frequently work with much less material than that.
