Magic 401: Hieros Gamos
I’ve written elsewhere about spirit marriage in vodou—mentioning that it is a bit controversial in many temples. On forums, I’ve made a few jokes at the expense of people scandalized by it and by the open relationship of vodou to gender and embodiment. As a woman married to female spirits, I enjoy my jokes at people who are scandalized to find out the LGBTQ+ population has representation in vodou.
I would like enthusiastically say “yes, homo” here on behalf of my relationship with my wives.
As a priest, I enjoy reminding people that the soul includes the body in vodou, and as such the body and sexuality are not lesser or debased the way the religion of the books (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) would have it. Sexuality does not make you anything less in vodou, at least in my temple, and neither does a creative relationship to gender.
The idea of sacred marriage is old as civilization. The fact that vodou practices it is a reflection of its ancient roots in vodoun and the many mother religions of West and Central Africa which gave birth to vodou, as well as to the religions of the book. In many societies, sacred marriage was associated with harvest, fertility, and royalty/royal authority. In vodou, at least here in the US, spirit marriage is closer to the practice of plaçage, reflecting the influence of slavery and racism on the religion: a marriage honored via a contractual relationship between spirit and person. It is not strictly legal in the sense that one can employ lawyers, police, and judges to enforce the contract. The spiritual world enforces contracts much more efficiently.
Nothing holds up a mirror to your understanding of relationships like a spirit marriage, from the distantly civil marriage of convenience to something as torrid as any romance novel. I belong to the ‘torrid’ part of that spectrum, if it isn’t clear. There is no best marriage in the spectrum, your marriage reflects you: your understanding of love, what you want from the relationship, what you think is the right relationship. The spirit who marries you comes to you as you need them to, with whatever expectations you come to them with.
The decision of what is right here strongly reflects you. The spirit is extraordinarily flexible. If you need something barely friendly or something almost parental and completely non-sexual, they can do that. If you need something that better resembles porn, that is also a possibility. There is no divorce. The spirit does have needs and will express desires, but they understand that people are limited, fragile, and often deeply afraid. A marriage between a lwa and a human is not a marriage of equals.
This relationship can and does evolve over time. One of the fundamental parts of hieros gamos was a kind of spiritual union—in vodou, the spirit provides, inherently, some energy or sets of energy that the person does not have enough of. The marriage balances the person in some facet, providing greater wholeness. Vodou’s open relationship to gender is important here: no matter the gender of the body, the person will have energies which belong to facets of other genders. They will need energies which belong to other genders and not infrequently the energies of their own gender. The wholeness which that spirit brings to them frees them to seek healing, to seek lessons, to move more freely in their lives.
In that sense, there is always an element of divine mercy and generosity to the marriage. Spirit marriage is, no matter the lwa, fundamentally a healing relationship. The person can and usually will begin to more aggressively pursue lessons and the necessary healing, driven by the love and presence of that spirit. Our spirit spouses make us want to be better.
The body and sexuality is only exempt from this if you need it to be.
