Magic 301: Jurisdiction and Domain
There’s a lot of ways to deal with colonialism, and the ATRs (African Traditional Religions) are probably practicing most of them in one way or another.
In vodou, power and authority resists being captured and suborned by being secretive and by being distributed in limited, explicit jurisdictions and domains. If you’re coming out of a worldview colored by one of the religions of the book (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) or a nation with colonial aspirations, this is going to seem really bizarre. The idea that you can have a religion whose ability to discuss truth, the will of the divine, and what it takes to interact with the divine (or the divine’s emissaries) is not universal can be hard to understand. Religions almost exclusively make universal claims, and on occasion you will hear a universal claim from a vodou priest because there are some fundamental shared beliefs in vodou, but even that should be understood to be an expression of jurisdiction and domain.
Or to put it another way, the claims of a priest or spiritual worker are an expression of the power associated with their role which has a time, a place, and a topic which is appropriate.
The actions of a priest or spiritual worker have those same attributes. When we are working in our jurisdiction or domain, we have enormous leeway and spiritual resources are made available to us through our connection to our lwa and the divine. We can even work outside our specialty if necessary, for the particular situation or person and the jurisdiction or domain we serve.
This was done, specifically, because of the way colonialism responded to the authority that vodou and other ATRs wielded in the populations of people kidnapped and enslaved by colonial authority. Colonial authority viewed the ATRs as a way to organize people for revolution, in addition to being heretical, and punished participation in the ATRs with torture and/or death. For vodou in particular, being a vodouizan during this period meant being in small, relatively isolated groups under the constant threat of punishment. It made no sense to have one priest speak for everyone, nor could a single priest do so. Communication between groups was highly dangerous, and while it did happen, there was no free exchange of beliefs and information.
Currently, colonial regimes attempt to enlist and suborn the ATRs by chronicling their practices, promising legitimacy if ATR practitioners let them have their knowledge, beliefs, ideals, and practices. They’ll ‘let’ our priests into hospitals to minister to the sick if we give them our religion, or let us have an official icon on the grave of soldiers who were vodouizan, or let our priests compete with Christianity for official funding. They’ll let us be a religion if we let them turn possession into a psychological and medical event, a malfunction that must be treated with medication and therapy.
We resist by refusing to share that information—colonial regimes will never give legitimacy to a religion which will always limit their influence. They will only make it a tool of the state, enlisting vodou in maintaining colonialism.
Jurisdiction or domain refers to a number of things here, not just the bounded authority of a priest or spiritual worker. It also refers to what the divine has set a lwa to do: romantic love; the heat and press of war; what it is to be a mother; what it is to be a woman and a revolutionary. Authority is always bound to some specific concern, even for the lwa. Within their domain or jurisdiction, they are immensely powerful. Outside it, they can still be effective, but it is frequently mediated by or aided by the lwa whose domain they are attempting to operate inside.
Vodou itself has a jurisdiction or domain. Not everyone is intended to be a vodouizan—vodou explicitly applies only to vodouizan or people intended to be vodouizan.
Magic is similarly an application of jurisdiction or domain to the circumstance, though a circumstance tends to involve multiple concerns, making the approach of a priest or spiritual worker important. A priest or spiritual worker can approach a circumstance in a variety of ways, contacting whatever lwa they feel would best resolve the situation and that they have good working relationships with. We tend to specialize for that reason, following both the lwa we work with and the sorts of situations they are most able to impact.
Vodou doesn’t make that many universal claims. On purpose.
