Magic 601: Obtuse and Mystical

Vodou is fundamentally an oral tradition. We tell stories, and the people telling and listening matter. We are inconsistently consistent, have no orthodoxy nor central governing body, and personal experiences with the divine are what drives the religion.

Vodou is also secretive by design and it doesn’t take much history to figure out why.

I was asked to write this series by one of my lwa. It has lead to some very interesting experiences and conclusions, reflecting the consciousness wrecking nature of those experiences. In the process, I have had some worries about writing the series. Vodou is, fundamentally, at odds with civic authority. Vodun might not be, given its history in various regional and tribal governments, but vodou is.

One of the primary strategies vodou uses to not end up trapped by civic collusion is secrecy—makes sense, because every vodou house is its own vodou path. Civic collusion will result in a single path being picked as ‘real.’ Where civics picks your religious path, it ends up enforcing that pick the way Christianity got enforced on enslaved Africans, to make sure everyone behaves themselves. Civics has the job of making sure societies run well, and it almost always ends up trying to make people be uniform as a result. There’s not that much general agreement in the faith, though there are commonalities in practice. Anything widely spread as ‘real vodou’ will be used to discriminate against every other vodou, and used by a culture that needs to codify everything to try and codify and make non-oral a religion that has to be oral.

In other words, the more we talk about vodou, the more we contribute to its potential death at the hands of the cultures we’re in. Sociologists perpetually sniff around the edges of vodou societies (and other initiatory traditions) for all the ‘right’ reasons, which always include trying to pin it down and make vodou acceptable to other cultures. Many things get lost in the process of translation between the stories we tell and the academic and civic criteria used to judge the ‘real’ thing. Some of those things will be lost because they are not acceptable to the society in which vodou is being practiced.

I should know. That was one of the sciences I went to grad school for, a lifetime ago.

This has all given me a bit of anxiety, to be real. In writing about these things, do I contribute to their capture? Do I contribute to them being watered down by cultures that are actively hostile to the kinds of experiences and viewpoint which are what it means to be a vodouizan?

I both love and hate the way the lwa give us things to do and just wait for us to figure things out. At least it didn’t take years this time (progress!)

I am reminded, ironically enough, of reading the Bible in my childhood. Any time I tried to exchange notes with the people around me, I quickly noticed that it was almost like we were reading two separate books: what I was seeing in the book and what any other person I tried to talk saw were completely different. Our interpretations of the same text had nothing in common, and everything I read in the Bible and elsewhere kept leading me toward a very different set of conclusions.

Call it interpretation or experience differences. Call it spiritual inspiration. It doesn’t matter.

Talking to someone I will be initiating, he referred to reading these entries as being like reading thieves’ cant: complete nonsense, right up until he runs into something that he needed to see. The analogy is that unless or until you have the ‘key’ for interpretation, what is written looks like something else or nothing at all.

On reflection, I am happy to be writing nonsense right up until you see something you need to see. I am happy to let the spirit provide interpretation of my nonsense to anyone who particularly needs it, and to be pointless for everyone else to read. The spirit has been running this show a lot longer than I’ve been around, and comparatively, culture (even colonial culture) is ephemeral as smoke. Vodou changes. Any version that civic authority can get its hands on will always end up being false, and vodou has been practiced before under conditions where civic authority attempts to suppress it.

I will continue to be obtuse and mystical, continue to fail this or that person’s orthodoxy tests for the ‘real vodou.’ What I have is here if it’s for you.