Vodou Culture 101: Free Will

At least historically, US majority culture considers every adult who is not disabled to be capable of free will, of more or less fully understanding consequence, of being able to enact decisions within reason, and to be fully culpable, outside extenuating circumstances. Unless something has happened, you are believed to be responsible for your actions because you had the capacity to choose not to do whatever you did. It is the foundation of our legal system, and the argument on which Abrahamic religion hangs good and evil. You can choose freely between alternatives, able to recognize good and evil. The choice might be hard, but you should be able to know what to choose based on what the religion has taught you.

Vodou has the concept of free will, but it is not something you are born with. It’s something earned over the course of lessons and lives, as you learn who you are. This is one of the reasons why judgement is a waste of time. If the person was capable of choosing something else, they would have. If they understood something to be better, they would have chosen it. Mostly, they don’t choose at all.

For vodou, this explains why people tend to do the same things. They are influenced by the same set of voices. Since they don’t know any better, they believe those voices are theirs: their reasons, their personality, their ideas. This pattern repeats endlessly, even across cultures, until such time as the soul has gained enough elevation to be able to distinguish itself from other voices, other presences. While all souls will eventually reach that point, it takes a very long time and a lot of lessons to get there, making free will rare.

Or to put it another way: very few people have free will. Every one else must make do with influence and patterns. Most people will do so happily, content to play along with everyone else.

One of the primary goals of a working priest or magical worker is to help point out those influences. Pointing those influences out, along with other tools, allows us to help someone gain a little more will in their lives. They will not, in a single life, be capable of free will, but we can get them closer by increments.

Increments, in my opinion, beats waiting lives to learn those particular lessons.