Magic 301: Justifications

The desire for social interaction is the bane of magical work, particularly where it concerns justification.

Nothing we do can be justified, often not even to our own societies or the priests and spiritual workers around us. Not only do our spirits have us working on different domains or jurisdictions, which can have incredibly different ways to react to a situation, but a society is often a ‘blended’ group, especially in the US. The background cultures of society members may make it difficult for priests or spiritual workers to understand each other, and where those background cultures cross racial boundaries, it can make justifications particularly difficult.

The US has tremendous unhealed (and festering) racial wounds.

Where it concerns being asked to explain by people outside priests or spiritual workers, there is nothing we can say that is satisfying and they do not find alarming. How does one explain to a random person nailing a cow tongue to a tree? There’s not much we can say. We just learn to be sneaky, when possible.

Being a priest or a magical worker does not mean you don’t want to talk to someone, have them approve of you or understand you. Sadly, being a priest or spiritual worker involves a frequent negative approval rating with your children and clients. Ain’t nobody happy sometimes, and mostly only a few people are happy.

This is definitely correlated to their ignorance of what you’re up to.

The culture series on this journal mentions secrets on and off: a truism in vodou is that we don’t talk about what we do. We might, as in this series, offer some basic concepts in magic or culture, or explain some specific facet of a ceremony or ritual. But we don’t tell people what we’re up to, and we never give that much in terms of detail. This is not for the hell of it, it is protective. We don’t try to make people responsible for what they can’t handle. There is also the problem that priests or spiritual workers can be competitive, and some of them are destructively competitive. They’ll ruin what you’re doing to ruin it, for bragging rights, over a perceived slight.

This should tell you what’s influencing them.

There is another problem with justification. It provides ego’s children, demons, fantastic cover for mischief. Priests and spiritual workers have to be incredibly careful with the desire to be known or approved of, precisely because it allows them to be influenced through their relationships with their children and the priests and spiritual workers whose opinion they care for. A priest or spiritual worker does not mean to choose (say) comfort for their children or clients, they just want to have a happy, nice relationship with their children or clients. That desire to have a happy, nice relationship begins to slowly atrophy the work the priest or spiritual worker needs to do for healing and elevation, removing the inherent challenge to the child or client’s understanding that the work requires.

This is one of the hardest lessons of being a priest or spiritual worker in vodou and it requires constant maintenance. We cannot afford to be likeable, to be approved of, to always maintain a ‘good’ reputation in our communities. We might need to know something of the disapproval and who is disapproving, but we cannot let ego’s children govern our relationship with our reputation.

Each priest or spiritual worker must work out their own way to wrestle with this, but justification is dangerous for us. It suggests that our real ‘boss’ is our community, which is an inversion of who is calling the shots.

That would be our lwa and bondye.