Magic 401: Silence

This could just as easily be a 101 as a 601. It’s a pervasive theme in magic and the relationship between the priest or spiritual worker and the lwa.

I can only compare what the lwa do with us to parenting. There comes a stage in parenting where, in order to let the child begin to grapple with adulthood, you must withdraw. Withdrawing your presence (so that they notice you) forces the child to deal with not just the situation at hand, but the emotional and mental weight of independence. The cost of adulthood, spiritually speaking, is the weight of independence. It is the weight of consequence, the weight of self-reliance, the weight of wondering if you will choose right and of trusting yourself. People often find trusting themselves to be one of the most painful, if not the most painful, of those weights.

Direction, instruction, rules: all are an act of generosity, a kindness intended to help us choose what is appropriate and necessary. They contain the promise that whatever causes us pain today is able to be endured and resolved—after all, there’s no point in offering direction or instruction if there’s no resolution or path out of a situation. The lwa often offer us that advice and then withdraw, letting us grapple with the emotional weight and potential outcomes of our decisions so that we will increase our understanding of ourselves, the world around us, and our own endurance, leaving what amounts to the path out.

It’s not uncommon for the advice to seem contradictory, un-intuitive, or to otherwise violate what we think of as the way things work. This is because the trial at hand, or the silence at hand, involves a change of understanding. Hindsight, when the trial is over and the lesson is learned, makes the advice painfully clear.

Early in the process of being a priest or spiritual worker, that silence can be interpreted as a punishment. New priests or spiritual workers often wonder if they’ve made a mistake, if they have permanently alienated their lwa, if they just weren’t good enough.

We do this when we have no idea what divine love looks like, but to be clear, most of us aren’t super clear on what love looks like, divine or not. Guilt, we understand. Pain, we (sorta) understand. Fear, we understand. Love? Not at all.

A parent who trains their child for adulthood loves that child, and seeks to prepare them for a time when they must find themselves. In vodou, adulthood is not the years you’ve lived, it is the lessons you’ve mastered. Every time the lwa prompt their children to learn, give them instructions on how to succeed, and let them grapple with the situation, it is because they love them toward adulthood. It is because they want their children to rejoin the divine as adults, able to see the divine in themselves and experience that oneness.

You are not able to be one if you do not understand and cannot bear the weight of being one. Rebellion, anger, guilt, fear, shame: all these things are often a precursor to understanding and bearing that weight.

Silence is as much a magical tool as the instructions for a ritual, and often a more effective one.