Magic 601: Trust and Vodou Societies
Societies are living things. They change over time, but also in response to the people of the society. The head priest is, in many ways, the heart of the society. The priests who are not the society’s head are essential organs in the society.
No vodou society is fully well—as healing places, they are by definition full of people in pain, sick, unhealed, and/or in crisis. This can and does include the priests of the society and the head of the society. Ideally, they are places where people are getting better, where the spirits visit and prescribe treatments that the society members take so that they will be healed.
The spirits give treatments with a degree of trust. While the lwa are very aware that people are immature, irresponsible, and easy to distract or divert, they trust that the structure of the society and the nature of lessons will contain enough enforcement to help people remember to do what they need to. The priests, particularly the head priest, are trusted to provide reminders, to coach society members through their lessons, and as necessary to provide consequences. Even when the lwa have not found this to exist in a society, they still extend trust to the priests, because what might not be done for everyone might be done by someone. If a priest who is intended to provide reminders to someone, does not, someone will, on occasion because the lwa involved borrowed that person’s tongue in their inattention.
By any means necessary. If a priest will not do as the lwa need them to, they will find someone and do it.
It is the head priest’s job to not just provide the energetic tone of the society, but also to set the tone of the relationships in the society. The premise of the trust the lwa give a priest is the priest’s service. The premise of the trust the lwa give a head priest is the power to uphold and maintain the web of relationships in the society—to provide a living example of that web, in addition to shaping, guiding, and occasionally pruning that web of relationships.
It is trust which allows any of this to work: from the trust the lwa grant us to the trust of the head priest to the trust between society members. Where that trust is not able to flow, it cripples other dynamics in the society, eventually slowing or stopping the healing the society is intended to provide.
That trust is not always based on the current dynamics of the relationships in the society. If it were, the lwa would not come to offer treatment—they are far more clear on the state of the web of a society than the people tend to be. If it were, the parties would be empty and the head priest alone, without even the company of their own lwa.
Instead, it is granted based on the souls of the people involved, which is why those particular people are in that particular society. It isn’t because they like the priests (they might, but it’s not important to their membership.) Their membership isn’t because this is the closest society, or the society they like. It’s because this combination of society, people, priests, time, place, etc is the best chance they have in this life to learn.
The consciousness, which so often wants to determine trust, instead undermines it. The consciousness does not comprehend (nor see) the web of relationships involved in a society, nor does it see a basis for trust which is not determined by itself and its observations of the people involved. The consciousness accepts and rejects based on what it likes, what it wants, what criteria it feels the situation should have. The consciousness, as the trash heap of the soul, cannot determine what the nature of the relationships in a society should be nor can it allocate trust.
Trust, the trust involved in societies, is granted by other parts of the soul.
In a way, the job of the head priest involves whatever actions need to be taken to restore the flow of trust in a society—so that the healing for which the society exists can continue to flow.
