Magic 501: Time and Baron
I’ve discussed this before in the culture series—insert your ‘island time’ joke here about the willingness of people from the Caribbean to honor the arbitrary nature of schedules. I can sum that up by saying that schedules are in fact quite arbitrary, and philosophically, once you understand they are arbitrary, you have less interest in entertaining them. This is not, however, a magical view of time. It’s just a practical one.
When we speak of time outside jokes about the schedule, we speak of the forces of entropy: of the change in various things as they slowly fall apart. If I were a physicist, I would say the change toward a state of organization, which the most decayed form of the thing we’re looking at. In vodou, when we speak of time, we’re speaking of the domain of one of the Barons, the various leaders of the Guede, or the spirits responsible for the dynamics of death.
The Barons are not considered particularly easy to work with. Of all the various dynamics involved with death, they manage the underlying dynamics: in this case, the engine of entropic change (time). The Barons are titanic forces, not inherently friendly nor necessarily inclined to kindness to any particular incarnation or the consciousness that incarnation is functioning from. They might entertain a human magician but it will be on their terms and, depending on the relationship they have with that human magician, fiddly or tricky as fuck—they might just give that magician some authority or access to the dynamics of their domain, but on the terms that inattention to detail or sloppiness can harm that magician badly.
The relationship between a lwa and a person is, after all, a teaching or training relationship.
A domain is, fundamentally, the ‘playground’ for that lwa. It does not bind them. They are entirely the ‘master’ or ‘owner’ of that dynamic and, because of the interrelated nature of the domains of the lwa, they tend to have a lot of room to play in the domains of other lwa. This is, of course, permission or authority based, but where they accomplish the goals they have been given to accomplish, that permission or authority is easily granted. The lwa work together easily where they’re accomplishing the divine’s will.
All of this is to say that the Barons, along with the rest of the lwa, are not bound by time. Instead of time being an inescapable force that moves everything toward entropy, it is the playground for a Baron and a place where the lwa can enter, do what they need to do, and leave. We are, as incarnations, bound by time. The lwa are not, and you can see it at work in a variety of ways if you are a priest or spiritual worker in vodou. The ‘soul’ is not bound by time, either—the parts which persist between incarnations.
To have a Baron in your court is to have a relationship with some of the fundamental forces of the universe. We tend to underestimate the Barons, or to underestimate their domains because the idea of those forces as domains is incomprehensible to us. To think of time itself as a playground, or to view it as something that is able to be manipulated or even set aside is more than a consciousness can typically swallow.
