Magic 401: I Don’t Know

There is a subtle trap in leadership and any position where you feel as if you are an ‘example’ for others: the idea that you should have the answers. I was once told, and I find it to be very true, that in vodou your elders are the people who have been able to take and act on the most correction. Every time the spirit corrects us and we are able to learn and change (and grow and heal), we avoid the dynamics of this trap. Every time we do not learn, we fall into that trap.

This is often misunderstood by people observing vodou priests and elders—a child wants adults to be perfect, demands that moral authority relies on an inhuman (and hypocritical) perfection. Children try to punish their adults for anything else, trying to withhold support, love and affection, or obedience, and try to manipulate their elders in retaliation for what they perceive to be a lack of moral authority but what is actually just the attempt of the child to control the elder. Children do not want to grow, change, or heal, and will use anything they can to avoid doing so. Trying to make their elders doubt, question, and falter is a fairly successful strategy for doing so.

Children are often hypocrites, demanding of others what they cannot do themselves and know that no one else can do either. Children do not know how else to be. Pretending to be perfect is just as hypocritical as demanding perfection, and no child is truly prepared for the authority and control of others that they seek. Negative entities often use the same pattern to try and control priests and elders.

There is no authority in the control of others.

Priests and elders who have fallen into that trap are often forced to do several things. They are forced to claim even coincidence or any success as intentional. They are forced to constantly gaslight and reinterpret, demanding changes in the memory and consciousness of their children with the authority of their position. They are forced to curate their appearance, how they are seen and perceived, what the community thinks of them, to constantly perform against the expectations of others for fear of anyone finding out that they didn’t know and aren’t perfect.

They end up behaving the same way their children are behaving. The same hypocrisy, both child and elder upholding their sides of an impossible relationship that is an attempt to delay healing, change, and elevation.

One of the cures for this lies in the frequent, public use of the phrase “I don’t know.” It is the refusal to let the child’s understanding and grudging unwillingness to change dictate the terms of your relationship. A priest or elder might, on occasion, have to adapt their behavior for the child to meet them where the child’s understanding begins, but there’s a difference between some adaptation and letting the child run the relationship. Adaptation can change. The child is never, ever going to allow fundamental change, nor do they typically recognize it.

The difference lies in humility. If an elder and/or priest is being honest with themselves, which requires humility, they both give up the need to have moral authority and must recognize that they are, no matter how powerful, not in a position to have all the answers. The public declaration that you do not know is, in many ways, a relief. It is the beginning of acknowledging the dynamics that might let a child (or negative entity) control you and refusing them.

It is also a public affirmation that you are honest, if you mean it. Honesty and humility are the entrance costs to elevation (and healing).