Magic 601: The Ouroboros

The divine wastes nothing—we say this when we want to comfort, in the wake of a loss. It is true. Nothing is forgotten by the divine. Nothing is purposeless (sometimes the waste is the point.)

At the moment of loss, the thing which has existed is split into the parts which cannot be destroyed and those things which are subject to what you could think of as divine recycling: to be converted back into the energy which becomes something else. If the thing which has existed is physical, the parts which can be destroyed decay, being converted into physical energy.

In vodou, the body is part of the soul but it is not the only part which can be destroyed. There is an energetic component which belonged to the incarnation and, when the life is finished, must also be recycled into the energy which is used elsewhere.

I have mentioned that when we speak of evil, we often mean that which makes us uncomfortable. Little makes us more uncomfortable than the knowledge that we die and we are fractured, changing so completely that we cannot return to our previous state. And the things which split us, the agents of that change—whether the agent of our death or the spirits whose job it is to do that sort of recycling, are to us evil.

Evil or not, those spirits and the processes they regulate serve the divine.

The parts which can be destroyed are swallowed, digested back into light. The ouroboros is an ancient symbol for this process exactly: for the conversion of what must be destroyed back into energy, into a light from which everything is born. The process is unending, destruction feeding creation, evil feeding what we consider to be good.