Magic 501: Humility

I am enjoying responding to the entries in Vodou Worldwide, of which this is another, on the topic of how a priest understands individuality in vodou.

One of the most powerful tools available to a vodou priest or spiritual worker is humility. This does not mean to be lesser, it means to accurately understand yourself and your place in the world around you. To understand yourself, as the entry suggests, within a framework of ritual obligations, within a framework of jurisdictions, with a framework of responsibility and condition. Priests are not understood, in vodou, as exceptional individuals whose consequence free choices are our right as leaders. Our choices echo through the lives of the people we care for. No fault is private, nor is any consequence punitive. All consequences are intended to correct the ruptures our choices may have made in the lives of the people we care for.

In other words, if there’s anything a vodou priest or spiritual worker is, it’s accountable. Our intentions are meaningless. Our actions are significantly not meaningless and come from what we do not understand about humility. All the consequences we earn come to correct our misunderstandings.

It is humility that helps us resist some of the nastier traps in the astral or spiritual world. The same emotional manipulation which characterizes the relationship demons (or, if you like, negatively aligned or lesser spirits) try to maintain with priests or spiritual workers tends to start in whatever misunderstandings that person might have about their identity, their relationship to their obligations, their relationship to their community, etc. Where we understand our individual experience to be more important than consequence, we become easily manipulated. It’s easy to introduce all sorts of ideas or convictions, emotions, and ideals which slowly corrupt and distort the priest’s understanding and actions. Despite being priests or spiritual workers, we are never the main character. The priest or spiritual worker has the capacity to be a priest or spiritual worker precisely because they live in a web of spiritual law, obligation, jurisdiction—within bounds. Where there are no bounds, there is no freedom.

You cannot move in a formless void.

Demons will argue for your selfishness, for reasons why you should move outside jurisdictional lines, why promises should not be honored, why you should only consider yourself. They will bring (false and sometimes true) news of betrayal, will question your service, and try to incite whatever emotions which will distract you from fulfilling your responsibilities, justifying it and laying the emotional framework to reward it. Despair. Depression. Malice. But also pleasure. Enjoyment. Distraction.

Understand, if you are intended to be a magician (a priest, a magical worker) in vodou, what will save you the most when you must deal with entities and people who offer you an opportunity to be distorted is your humility. It is your knowledge of those bounds and your willingness to stay within them. Those bounds free you, not just from distraction and taking on what you cannot sustain, but also from the consequences of breaking your obligations.

Sometimes, all you have is doing whatever the spirit has asked you to do despite the wall of noise, distraction, and distortion which oppositional forces (or demons) will throw at you. And, no matter what it seems like, it is obedience to your laws which saves you. That obedience comes from humility.

I will also tell you this: if you understand what it is to love as a priest or spiritual worker, you will also know why humility saves us from many of the attempts to corrupt us. It is love—not the pale shadow society refers to—that enforces the bonds which humility helps us understand. For that reason, humility is very much about love. The love of the divine is, after all, why we’re here.

As always, remember this sort of thing is easier with a teacher.