Magic 401: Consciousness and Soul
Vodou takes a technician’s view of consciousness, because a surprising amount of the healing and magical work of vodou involves dealing the consciousness.
The cosmology of vodou has a many part soul, but I’m about to be talking about this in a way that echoes Western ideas about the soul. The division I’ll be talking about is between parts of the soul, and specifically between the parts of the soul which persist when there is no body, and the consciousness which makes decisions for the soul’s current incarnation.
When you are a magician (a priest or spiritual worker) in vodou, the consciousness might be what you’re interacting with when you talk to someone to do work, but it is not what’s motivating someone’s actions for the same reason that motivation and decision are not the same thing. The consciousness intentionally presents itself as being the most important thing to consider when you talk to someone, the decision-maker. This is because the consciousness is fundamentally concerned with controlling others. It has very little fundamental interest in any healing or elevation work except where doing so facilitates control. Consciousness facilitates control via several tools, the most prevalent of which is personality.
Think of it this way: if someone’s personality includes a short temper, they control their environment by demanding others avoid things which they might find angering, so that others can avoid experiencing that short temper. They know themselves to have a short temper, they inform others that they have a short temper, and in doing so ensure that they can ‘punish’ people for not taking the proper care to avoid that temper, which inevitably involves avoiding anything that distresses the person with the short temper.
Personality can do the same with other qualities, as well. Things which inspire pity or protectiveness, or things which inspire pleasure, etc.
This does not make the consciousness bad or evil, two terms which have no real place in vodou. It merely means that, fundamentally, the consciousness is in no position to make decisions about healing and elevation. We’ll talk to it and deal with it, since that’s how things get done in the physical world, but it’s not the only focus of spiritual work and will generally resist anything it thinks does not facilitate control.
Getting to the point where the consciousness gives up controlling strategies is a very late development in the elevation and growth of the soul, and comes after a LOT of personal work over the span of lives. If you are doing spiritual work in vodou, you will no doubt have already noticed that your clients are not asking about things that would help them, merely things that make them feel better, prosper them, or facilitate their control of their environment. In fact, clients not infrequently ask for things that are going to become a trial to them, but will initially make them feel good (that is, money, love, sexual attraction, domination of people in their lives, etc.)
Consciousness is, for that reason, rather “downstream” of a lot of other things in the soul: a person’s current knowledge, which is part of what we mean when we talk about consciousness, is the product of what they’ve already learned and experienced. The lessons you’ve already mastered over the course of lives are not stored in consciousness. The result of those lessons manifests in the consciousness, though those results may not present directly because the consciousness is extremely porous. Every damn thing influences consciousness, but not every damn thing that happens to it will reach the more persistent parts of the soul. The consciousness is usually not aware of the rest of the soul and what is contained in it without a lot of work over the course of lives.
All of this is to say that spiritual work for healing or elevation addresses the persistent parts of the soul as a primary factor, and the consciousness as something which is important, but not the central factor of importance that it would position itself as. The consciousness is just where you may see results. A magician in vodou will work with whatever’s in the consciousness, but for healing or elevation is going to try to work with the other parts of the soul, as well. If the work doesn’t concern healing or elevation, there’s no need to address anything persistent. Temporary changes to the physical body (e.g. physical healing or harm), current branch of their path (e.g. luck work, open or close roads work, etc), or consciousness are enough.
Working on the parts of the soul which are persistent requires a variety of permissions and is not engaged in lightly. Trying to do that work without permission is going to cause harm, most often to the magician, if they have the capacity to do that sort of work.
As always, these sorts of things require a teacher—if for no other reason than to help your consciousness get over the outrage of discovering that it isn’t the primary factor in how things are done.
