Magic 501: A Lwa and A Priest
…walk into a bar.
The bartender says, “long time no see, Ogou.”
The priest says, “Wait a minute, I’m here with Bossou.”
A man at the bar turns around, looks the spirit up and down, and says, “That’s not a lwa.” To the priest, he says, “You’re not a real priest. I know Agawou and that’s not Agawou.”
The relationship between a priest and their lwa is deeply intimate. It is personalized, close, and involves a shared energy which allows the lwa to work through the priest and the priest to have their lwa’s aid learning lessons and helping their children. By necessity, the lwa show up a little different for everyone, reflecting the shared energy and entanglement the person has with the lwa. One person’s Bossou might show up saying “mean” things to others, another shows up as an African king. One person’s Freda shows up as a weeping, soft-voiced woman, another shows up with a firm voice and an air of command.
The problem with this is that a priest can forget that their relationship with the lwa is intimate. People who are not priests and do not have an intimate relationship with their lwa will tend to credit their priests’ relationship and its particularities with the lwa to that lwa as well, and people who do have an intimate relationship with their lwa will make the same mistake as the priest. What this means is that there are a lot of people trying to figure out who has the ‘real’ relationship running around using their priest’s personal criteria or criteria from their relationship on everyone else.
It’s an easy mistake to make, in part because the lwa touch us so intimately that it’s hard not to see them the way we see them. It’s also an easy mistake to make because a great deal of existing as a vodouizan involves carefully selecting who is safe to be a vodouizan around and because consciousness inherently wants to judge.
This is another case where the consciousness’ tendencies do not help, and where ego can very easily step in. The question might seem innocuous—is this person really experiencing a lwa? Should I listen to them or take their advice?
But it quickly becomes other things, especially in online spaces. It quickly becomes a judgement about who is a real priest, whose house is a real vodou house, and how someone can ‘win’ and prove their lwa are more real, their house is better, their priest has a bigger dick, etc. For priests, this becomes gossip about each other’s houses or speculation about each other’s initiations. People who are not priests will happily help this happen, reporting on this or that priest for ‘safety’ reasons or asking priests to remark on each other or criticize each other. If the priest does criticize or comment, they will spread this widely, especially to the person criticized.
This sort of thing in priests is poisonous both inside their communities and between communities. It also demonstrates a problem in the priest’s understanding.
One of the disciplines that can be useful to a priest here is being clear of the individual nature of our relationships with the lwa. We say, as a short hand, “my Freda,” “my Ogou.” What we mean, when we remember the nature of the relationship, is the expression of the spirit in us, the sliver of divinity with which we can interact. Not the entirety of that spirit, nor the entirety of their domain, the sliver that is ours to work with. Inside our houses, if we have a house, that is the Ogou people deal with, or the Freda they deal with. Ideally, there are multiple horses of the same spirit in a house so that the spirits demonstrate the variety and complexity of their expression across horses. Each Ogou is Ogou when he is Ogou, whether loudly dressing someone down or sitting having a conversation with one of his children.
There is typically something of possessiveness in the way we speak of the spirit, which reflects how we understand intimacy. If we find intimacy difficult, or if we are afraid of loss, we tend to be more possessive in the way we speak of our spirits. There will always be an acknowledgement of the personal nature, but there is a difference between that acknowledgement and the attempt to assert that our intimacy is the only real intimacy which tends to show up here in the explicit inability to allow the spirits’ complexity to have different expressions.
As always, ego is quick to take advantage of problems in understanding—it’s not uncommon for the same sort of judgement against different expressions of vodou to happen between houses where one house is Asogwe and another is Makout, or where houses have different geographical roots/bitasyon, or between houses primarily in Haiti and those primarily in other places. Online, this will get inflated into ‘wars’ fairly quickly by the same nosy people trying to get priests to criticize each other, with the explicit rationale that the criticizer is preventing people from being taken advantage of, or “calling out” the immoral/non-Ginen people, etc.
It is trouble-making, frequently in service to ego: that is, in service to confusion, alienation, disunity, distraction from doing one’s own personal spiritual work, etc.
It is worth repeating the motto on the Haitian flag: in union is force.
Part of that union is recognizing that the spirit comes to do work in as many forms as it needs to, that the lwa have no problem policing their own, and that the domain of priests is limited to their houses and not generalized over all of vodou.
If I had to give advice, I would say let Ogou be Ogou for you, and let the Ogou of your brother and sisters be the Ogou of your brothers and sisters. The spirit is always at work, whether it looks like your vodou or not.
