Magic 501: The Implications of Balance
Balance is a difficult topic in vodou and in magic. Like many things, part of the problem involves consciousness.
We aspire to balance because it offers us the greatest freedom of movement, the greatest number of alternatives or directions we can go. We aspire to balance because it offers us the least possibility of negative consequences. We aspire to balance because it is often the state in which we are best at recognizing the situation around us—if you are able to stay balanced, you have understood the situation well enough to avoid various traps, problems, and ways we can be distracted from acting in a situation.
Balance is a demonstration of wisdom, in vodou. It is also a demonstration of appropriate maturity, and one the lwa respond to well. A balanced response, even one which is ‘messy’ (loud, difficult, negative in effect), demonstrates the attempt to understand consequences and the situation, as opposed to making a mess out of ignorance or an unwillingness to try. The lwa are likely to respond poorly to imbalance. It can be an aggravating factor in negative consequences, and will always be a potential site for lessons on the topic of balance.
Balance is a demonstration of what knowledge is currently contained in the entire soul of the person, as demonstrated in the consciousness. The consciousness’ job is to make decisions, which it does with a combination of the contents of the rest of the soul, a variety of spiritual influences, and whatever else happens to be in that consciousness at the time. Memory is questionably useful in this process, though it does get invoked in the process of trying to discern a pattern.
More importantly, balance is a demonstration of the ability of the rest of the soul to intervene in consciousness. By itself, consciousness is not inclined to balance. It is most useful as an inflection point, a place where decisions are made. The consciousness has some use in the kinds of weighing and judgements which it does best, but the ability to divide things up does not necessarily mean that they are evenly or well divided. The rest of the soul will always be a factor in the decisions that consciousness makes, but it takes a considerable amount of spiritual development for the rest of the soul to actively intervene in those decisions.
Once enough development has been reached, that interference goes from a vague tendency to an active but inexplicable conviction about what should be done. The consciousness has neither a way to trace that conviction nor a way to justify it, which can be distressing to the consciousness, to which explanations and justifications are essential.
You might be distressed about it, but you just know.
That conviction does not necessarily start out as an accurate understanding of balance, but the more spiritual development you have, the more likely it is to be accurate. It is never 100% accurate, but it will be more accurate than not.
Magically, we strive for balance because things that are imbalanced tend to be fragile. Without balance, they will tend to swing from one extreme to the other, both lacking any sort of longevity. Any result achieved by imbalance will feed its opposite result, just making the inevitable opposite faster to appear.
We also strive for balance because our lwa are, fundamentally, the laws of their domains. They are who adjudicates balance where the magic touches their domains. If, for instance, you do a love working which is imbalanced, you also feed hate. You are also likely to, if you aren’t working with her directly, create an energetic dynamic which Freda will regulate. She may choose to regulate that dynamic by killing the work, by boosting something else, or by facilitating a consequence for the involved people. If Freda permits that imbalance, it is likely in the service of a lesson on the topic of romantic love, which is itself a larger, domain-spanning balance.
Workings without the appropriate permissions, workings that are imbalanced, workings that are not appropriately paid—all of these are opportunities for lessons on balance (among others) to be applied to the witch. It can also sour the relationship the witch has with their lwa. Persistent imbalance is, among other things, a demonstration of ingratitude and entitlement. The lwa are likely to withdraw their company while a witch demonstrates that they do not understand the value of that company.
Where the witch is imbalanced, their work will contain ‘holes’ that reflect that imbalance: things that did not occur to them as factors in the situation; ideas they can’t think of from where they are; alternatives they can’t see; etc. Those holes make for a much easier way for other witches to interfere in and cancel their workings. A very imbalanced witch is going to have a lot more workings that do not work the way they want the workings to work, and will have few if any defenses against certain kinds of workings against them.
Imbalance is magically dangerous. It’s also sometimes physically dangerous for the same reason.
