Magic 501: Patterns and Symptoms
Vodou is very much about healing, something many priests and spiritual workers are at pains to remind people of when they talk about what they do. I do not find healing to be all that dissimilar from war, but that might be my particular focus.
One of the most common reasons people contact priests and spiritual workers for healing are symptoms, which they identify as bad patterns. Drug or alcohol addiction, abusive relationships, self-sabotage—all the ways a person comforts themselves when something else is going wrong. The people that contact us are often engaged in a chaotic mess of patterns that result in the symptoms they’re complaining about. The same repeated abusive relationship, the same chase after euphoria or even just the comfort of having their pain dulled, etc. They notice the misery, some even notice the repetition in their actions, but that’s about all they notice.
If I were a psychologist or a (western) medical doctor, I’d send them to talk it out or prescribe them some sort of medication, hoping to either convince them to stop engaging in those behaviors or use chemistry to make their brain more amenable to different behaviors. The psychologist or doctor might say the cause was a brain malformation, or a parental relationship, or the inability to manufacture neurotransmitters in particular amounts. There’s nothing wrong with any of the treatments they might prescribe. Sometimes those treatments are necessary for any sort of healing to occur. However, they are explicitly treatments of the symptoms, not the causes.
A priest or spiritual worker has access to other tools. We ask what is attached to your life that results in those patterns. There is no blame in the statement—blame, like guilt, is a distraction from doing anything about your problems. We’re not particularly interested in making you feel better about the situation, nor in anything which might prolong your problem. What we’re interested in is if there is something motivating the symptoms.
Throughout this series, we’ve talked about various spiritual entities: on occasion that is exactly what is motivating the symptoms, either directly attached to the person or attached to someone in their life. Spiritual entities can overlap, forming a chaotic mass and working together to foster patterns and exacerbate symptoms; they can and will choose whatever will get them the control and diet of energy they desire.
Spiritual work allows a priest or spiritual worker to detach the entity or entities. We also work with people to help close the holes in their lives which the entity or entities have made. The presence of those entities is both caused by and causes vulnerability and weakness in the life of individuals, making them prone to relapse or attracting other entities. It is not enough for a priest or spiritual worker to remove the entity, we have to heal the person and strengthen them, which can be a process of years.
Healing has a lot in common with war. Those sorts of entities do not like to leave voluntarily.
