Magic 501: Building Trust in a Vodou Society

The consciousness of anyone in a vodou society cannot be trusted to notice positive change—depending on where they are in the process of healing, they may be a direct witness to a positivity they cannot see. They can watch other people experience growth and healing, and even experience that growth and healing themselves, but still be unable to retain that experience when they attempt to understand how things are going.

This creates a problem for the priests and/or head priest of a society: the consciousness will always try to establish itself as the rightful and only real judge of what’s going on, will almost always overestimate the negative, and will actively interfere with healing, elevation, change. The consciousness will not just interfere, it does a neat trick where it reasons itself to be the primary entity making decisions, the only reasonable entity, and its conclusions the only sense or comfort in a situation that is always a dangerous mess without the consciousness. It will argue that there is a feedback loop of negativity that only it is capable of judging, and in doing so try to paralyze the person with doubt, fear, and feelings of futility or hopelessness.

The head priest’s job, in many ways, is to figure out how to bypass the consciousness, which is always the last thing to experience growth, elevation, and change in the soul of a vodouizan.

There’s a variety of ways to do this. Some priests opt to work people until they are too tired to listen to consciousness and can start to hear their priest. Some opt to put people in positions where their consciousness is impaired to help meaning be established or communicated. It’s better for the person to hear it from their own mouth, sometimes. Some work with the lwa to introduce change with spiritual force to other parts of the soul, knowing that the consciousness is last to get the effect of the change. Some introduce ideas to the consciousness, knowing that things do bubble back up from the consciousness to other parts of the soul.

Whatever tool gets the job done.

That trust is fundamentally established away from consciousness, though consciousness is impacted by trust. The lwa are intermediaries to those portions of the soul for priests, and far more skillful workers with the portions of the soul trust is established in. The priest must, in addition to working with their lwa on their children, demonstrate not to the consciousness (which often cannot recognize positive change), but to the rest of the souls of their children that they can reliably do what needs to be done for those children. That consistency is not observed often by their children’s consciousness, but is observed keenly by the lwa and the rest of their children’s souls.

From time to time, those children realize the trust exists—moments of clarity in the fog that so often preoccupies their consciousness.