Magic 501: A Question of Motivation
I like to ask priests and spiritual workers a leading question when we talk about the lwa: why do you suppose a cosmic power lets you make requests or order them around?
The answers are often a summary of how they understand the divine. They tend to fall into two categories: either they think of themselves as being so special (gifted, powerful, etc) that they would naturally have the capacity to command spirits; or they think of that capacity to be a function of a sort of contractual relationship the divine has given them.
When I hear the first answer, I usually don’t bother to respond further. Charitably, it might be the case that they are trying to fake confidence until they make it. Not charitably, it might be the case that they’re delusional. Ego is driving, they are not. Either way, I’ll leave them alone. We are, none of us, powerful enough to be ordering cosmic powers around.
When I hear the second answer, I have more to say. I tend to joke about malicious compliance and ask them if their lwa are maliciously complying, but I end up asking the next question: what motivates the divine to allow these relationships?
For myself, I can answer fairly simply: there’s only a few scenarios in which something vastly more powerful gives something vastly less powerful the capacity to issue orders, and all of them involve training. A parent trains a child by letting them make choices. A boss trains a subordinate for authority by delegating it to them in smaller, specific scenarios. A master trains an apprentice by giving them projects of increasing complexity, eventually letting them take over parts of their business.
I suppose either could involve malice, but it’s not the most common motivation for that sort of thing. The most common motivation is more positive. That training happens over lives and lives and lives, and the person becomes not just better at a skill, but a more complete, more whole, more fulfilled person, which rules out something as minor as the desire to see a business succeed. The business can be successful without the person being better at, for instance, love and relationships. This leaves a single motivation: much more akin to a parent training a child.
It leaves love.
Neither answer considers divine love as a motivation for the lwa’s relationship to us seriously. If we are, right now, cosmic powers who need no training, there’s no particular need of the kind of love in evidence through the course of our lives—hell, there’s no need for lives in the first place. We’re just born with all the things and no one needs to help our understanding (or, for that matter, in any crisis in our lives which presumably as cosmic powers we are choosing to experience.) I’m not going to talk to that person in part because they exist in a universe where love is superfluous. There’s only power and themselves.
The second answer involves a universe in which love might exist, but it’s limited. It’s far less effective than punishment or negative consequences, less trustworthy than contractual obligation, and rare enough to be negligible when you start considering relationships.
To the person answering that the lwa obey us because of contractual relationships, I have a final question: what do you think motivates a lwa to enter a contract with you? What incentive does a cosmic power have to enter a contract with something that is not a cosmic power?
What do you have to offer?
I don’t say that to downplay or devalue priests and spiritual workers, but to remind people that if the relationship is contractual, it is deeply one-sided. There are not that many things which would incentivize such a one-sided relationship.
As for myself, I view the willingness of the lwa to let us be bosses or make requests as an expression of divine love, the love which seeks to train us in everything we do until we reach a point where we can understand it.
I like that experience of the relationship we have with the lwa a whole lot better. It is, at least in this point of my understanding, a better explanation for the fact that we are here to learn.
