Magic 601: Acceleration and the Path
‘Road’ comes up a lot in vodou and not just as a metaphor. It can refer to the path of someone’s life over the course of lives, the path that every one and everything takes, and a lwa. The word ‘road’ can also refer to the sum of actions and events in those paths: the choices taken.
It is important to know, up front, that all roads are infinite and all roads end in oneness with deity. No matter what seeming dead-ends or backtracks, everything that exists will be a part of deity and everything that can know will know itself to be a part of deity by the end of that road. No matter what you do with magic, you cannot prevent that. You cannot even really delay it. You can only accelerate the conditions for a lesson, which is itself acceleration along the path. Lessons are the removal of things that slow progress.
This is one of the reasons I tend to resist the characterization of magic as ‘good’ or ‘evil.’ Even magic whose explicit purpose is to destroy someone’s life can only cause a lesson to surface more quickly—if the person is lucky, that lesson is about the influence of the ego and mind on the spirit. Vodou views adversity as a necessary tool for advancement, as well, so the division between ‘white’ and ‘black’ or ‘good’ and ‘evil’ magic is especially specious. There is nothing that can be done to deny that reunion with deity, and attempts to delay the reunion only accelerates it in a different way.
No one knows every twist and turn of the path for any spirit but deity. As a reminder, people are spirits. Lwa will know something of that path, especially those lwa associated with the path, but the entire path is generally a mystery.
This allows priests and spiritual workers a bit of room to work. If what we did works, it was in alignment with a necessary lesson no matter what it looks like. If what we did does not work, the lwa and deity are saying “not yet.” This does not remove the necessity for appropriate action, because we can accelerate lessons in our own lives by making inappropriate choices, but it does remove the kind of moral urgency that people tend to approach the discussion with. Priests and spiritual workers do their best and everyone gets a lesson along the way.
Lesser spirits and people tend to see only what is immediately in front of them: literally only whatever choice is closest to them and not its potential outcome. They also typically don’t see all the choices available to them, only the ones they have enough experience to recognize. Sometimes, the magic needed is to help them recognize other available choices.
One of the most common things people ask priests and spiritual workers for involves making options easier: opening their road to an opportunity and/or closing a road for themselves or someone else. They also ask for good luck, which can be understood as increasing their general chance of positive opportunity for a time. Keep in mind that positive or negative here is in perception. Asking magic to be done, for instance, to force a relationship with someone is only positive from the point of view of the person who asked for the magic. From a longer point of view, it’s a lesson on the topic of love and things that masquerade as love (like possession.)
These kinds of works are completely compatible with vodou’s view on the road: it’s all lessons on the way to the divine and magic is fundamentally a tool for accelerating the progression of lessons. The specific actions a priest or spiritual worker has to take to accelerate those lessons depends on what jurisdictions they have access to, what lwa they work with, what they have permission to do, and their discernment or the lessons they have learned. It also depends on how far into the path they can see, and priests or spiritual workers will have specific specialties or things they see more easily or readily.
Part of the process of maturing as a priest or spiritual worker is recognizing the things you see most easily.
