Magic 201: Crazy and Compliance
No one involved in spiritual work is going to win “sanest person you know,” if it was a prize—generally speaking, we’re all at least three cans short of a six pack. Half sane, at best. Calling us crazy is easy.
There is an entire stage early in learning to be a priest or spiritual worker where you wonder. Delivering a message you can’t prove the truth of, only feel, to someone you don’t know like that. Waking in the middle of the night to a presence trying to speak to you. Hearing something in your mind and realizing it doesn’t belong to you. Feeling things you cannot explain in any way that sounds remotely normal. Going places you’ve never been before because the spirit insists.
I had to go pick up a whole goat head once, early in the process of getting where I am now. I laughed myself sick the whole way home, the head on the passenger seat as I blared music and swerved through end of day traffic. If I’d had sunglasses, I’d have put them on the head and put a cigarette in his mouth. I can only conjecture what my neighbors thought when I used a hammer to smash open that skull—with a light hammer for hanging prints, that’s not a quick process.
There is no part of magic that looks sane to an observer.
Comparison, before you learn what it actually is, can really be hurtful. We look at the world around us, compare it to ourselves and what we’re up to, and it scares the shit out of us. We conjure the memory of our parents, our friends, the people of our churches, our coworkers, the whole world in our heads watching us, judging us. We wonder what kind of person we’re becoming. We wonder if we’ll even be able to understand ourselves and act reasonably. We might wonder if we’re going to be involuntarily committed to a hospital, if the people around us will recognize something in us that must be contained.
For a priest or spiritual worker, this is one of the first hurtles we have to get over. There’s a number of ways to get over that hurtle, including just doing whatever it is anyway and noticing that the sky did not fall on our heads. My long suffering neighbors did not call the cops despite the sustained banging. Anyone who saw me swerving through traffic with a goat head in the passenger’s seat probably had other things to worry about and did not call the police. The Indian butcher who sold me the head might have had some doubts about what I was up to, but he sold it to me anyway. And here I am, un-medicated and not in the custody of the state.
Obedience is a popular tool, but it also helps if you know what’s happening when you conjure up the memory of the people around you and their judgement.
One of the first lessons a society teaches is compliance. There’s nothing wrong with compliance by itself. It can be useful and societies depend on compliance. The problem starts in that compliance comes tangled with guilt and the idea that noncompliance is evil, wrong, and should be punished. Every person whose imaginary presence we conjure is someone who we feel tangled with, someone whom we have given the permission to run our lives. The funny part is that they aren’t there, and our memories aren’t really conjuring them anyway. That’s not your mom, your dad, your coworkers, your partner, your grandmother, etc.
That is ego. Not your ego, because ain’t nobody got a personal connection to ego. Ego.
We comply for many reasons, but mainly for fear. Fear of the kind of consequences listed above: the bad opinion of others, the loss of social standing or job, incarceration. Ego flourishes in fear. The problem is not feeling fear—fear is just going to happen sometimes—it is a matter of imbalance, delusion, and disproportionality. It is the idea that noncompliance deserves and will always cause punishment. It is the idea that we must punish ourselves to prevent the world from punishing us because we were noncompliant.
This will handicap a priest or spiritual worker, preventing them from the work the spirits ask them to do and making them act not from the authority and decisiveness of their role, but from a cringing servitude that prevents their work from being effective.
A priest or spiritual worker is, first and foremost in vodou, a warrior. Even someone who only does healing is a warrior, in vodou. We fight anything and everything that prevents a work from being done, whether it’s ego or something within us, or any external factor. This is not an optional fight and like any fight, it helps if you understand your enemy. It’s not entirely yourself you fight when you start worrying about crazy and compliance.
Balance means moving between compliance and noncompliance, between crazy (as others might see it) and not crazy as a situation demands. Maturity means getting comfortable doing it.
