Magic 201: Confusion and Doubt

One of the best tools to discourage someone working on a spiritual lesson is doubt and or confusion—a lack of clarity, another layer of delusion or interpretation between the individual and reality. Because of their nature, spiritual entities can easily suggest or inspire emotion, and many times serve as opposition to lessons a priest or spiritual worker is intended to work on.

We do not, in vodou, consider opposition a bad thing. We consider opposition an opportunity: to learn persistence and endurance; to learn to evade or sidestep; to learn the ability to test your convictions; etc. Vodou is a warrior’s tradition. We fight.

Doubt and confusion are not inherently unnatural or inherently the effect of opposition. Like many emotions or states of being, they will occur regardless of interference. The difference lies in what is being doubted or found confusing, and when doubt and confusion come up. When those two states interfere with the ability to hear, understand, and act on the directions the spirits give, they can absolutely be assumed to be oppositional. They are being used as tools, to prevent obedience to the spirit and to delay personal growth.

Doubt and confusion are among the most insidious of the tools available to spiritual entities because they can be introduced in a very mild form and slowly made more intense. What starts with a slight misremembering of something a spirit said can become a corrosive set of questions about one’s ability to hear and, finally, the spirits’ willingness to love and provide guidance to a vodouizan. One of the reasons we are told to write down exactly what we were told by a spirit is so that we have a reference that does not depend on later interpretations in memory.

One of the reasons that obedience becomes vital to the life of a vodouizan is exactly because of the use of confusion and doubt as tools by negative entities. The instructions a spirit gives someone will often be met with panic, confusion, and doubt specifically to delay the action the spirit is calling for. Vodouizans who are not intended to deal directly with the spiritual world do not have the opportunity to build a direct resistance to those tools. Obedience is a discipline they can master which will allow them to get the benefit of those spiritual instructions despite interference. Unlike obedience, the attempt to summon confidence to combat doubt or confusion does not tend to help.

Priests and spiritual workers will wrestle with confusion and doubt, and the spiritual entities using them, more directly. Obedience does not become less important, it is coupled to a responsibility to wrestle. Their capacities make them more attractive to those entities, making them more likely to experience confusion and doubt as tools. Confidence does not necessarily help here, either. Every priest or spiritual worker will find their own discipline for this wrestling.

A teacher helps. Humility also helps.