Magic 401: Divine Nature

The history of vodou is long with people whose names are unknown, executed for being vodouizan, for their race, for their culture. It is long with the strategies, the adaptations, the tactics of a people who had to constantly change to survive, discarded when they no longer preserve the lives of the people vodou shepherds.

This is not an imagined past nor the delusion of persecution. Being a vodouizan can still get you lynched in Haiti, especially if your neighbors think you’re powerful. Vodou is still understood to be ‘black magic’ or ‘witchcraft’, and evil.

Our spirits are also the product of violent persecution and torture. Many of our Petro spirits and quite a few of our Guede were once people who were murdered by various colonial regimes or in some cases by their own terrified, panicking people. Vodou takes the idea of tests, trials, and life (or people) trying to kill you quite seriously and literally—-the psychological horror of it, the spiritual cost, and the physical toll. Vodou has been developed specifically in a crucible in which those were common, inevitable events.

You could expect rape, torture, and murder. Regularly.

Instead of declaring itself too good, peaceful, or refined to have to deal with these sorts of things, vodou gets dirty with the world around you. That, we inherit partially from our African mother religions: the idea that opposition and conflict are not a waste of time, but rather a venue for learning that life is faithful to present you. In fact, vodou contains the idea that these things refine you.

They are a furnace in which all that is not your divine nature is burned away.

When we say that vodou is a path to oneness with the divine, we do not mean a life of contemplation. We do not mean a life of isolation. We do not mean a life cloistered away from a world in which vodou is demonized. We mean that you will fight wherever you are. None of our lwa, not even the most refined, most sweet, most feminine or peace-loving lwa are unwilling to face conflict. They might seek peace in it, or might look for ways to make the situation less potentially violent, but this does not make them incapable of understanding that furnace. Many of them have been through it, and do not confuse a king for a weakling.

We mean that everything which prevents you from your divine nature will be burned away, and the spirits which accompany you will be there with you.

It’s just that there is nothing left on them to burn.