Vodou 401: Culture and Houses

You can’t legitimize vodou.

If you try, you’ll just hurt your own feelings. The mechanisms that the larger culture, in this case US culture, gives for being considered well or treated well in the larger culture are always going to fail, and in their failure, blame you for trying. I say this because I keep reading well-meant but ultimately naive articles from people who want to invite the sociologists, the cultural anthropologists, various medical professionals, legal professionals, etc to observe and potentially participate. They generally feel like, if they get the right kind of backing from officially recognized people, vodou can become a legally and socially respected religion.

I get it. If you love your house and vodou, if you believe in the culture and equality and whatever utopia civics vomited up recently, it seems as if you just got enough of the right people saying the right things, it would be easier. People would criticize you less, would stop using vodou as a horror movie prop and black people as someone to blame problems on. People would be less racist or sexist or nationalist or fundamentalist, etc.

The nature of utopias is to be impossible to exist. The nature of a society where vodou can coexist easily alongside the religions of the book without any sort of religious oppression is a utopia. Good luck getting people to stop trying to oppress each other—you will be fighting ego and the nature of consciousness, which is intended to be an individual fight and is incredibly difficult when the person has done enough spiritual lessons to do it, let alone the general population which is in no way prepared for that fight.

Ego predominates human interactions. You will not individually, nor with any sort of civic or social program, make a dent in that longstanding dominion.

This puts vodou houses/societies in an interesting position. We are paradoxically freest where we are condemned by the cultures we’re in. That condemnation and the resulting hostility primes vodouizan to recognize that the larger culture has no business interfering in the way a vodou house is run. A vodouizan who is experiencing any flavor of oppression based on their religion, ethnicity, race, sex, gender, etc will instinctively recognize, on walking through the doors to their society, that this space is or should be different. People and vodouizan of various callings can, of course, be assholes. However, the spirits don’t give a shit about that sort of thing—they have no inherently negative judgements of the categories which preoccupy the hell out of the larger cultures a vodou house is in.

We are freest because where the larger culture is welcomed, it interferes. Where the larger culture has a home in a society, the character of the society will get bogged down in the various judgements of that culture. Where the society members are unable to recognize the dissonance between the larger culture and the society, they will carry those judgements into the society and their interactions. Where vodou is something we do at a party/fete or only when we have to, or where vodou is that thing we do socially, it’s easy to be a _____, but at a fete. That blank is filled in, in the larger culture. Man. Woman. Lawyer. Doctor. Healthcare worker. Social worker. Service worker. Teacher. Black. White. American. Haitian. We carry those identities with us because we don’t have to put them down. We think they describe us, because they are comfortable and/or necessary and/or what we’re used to identifying as. We are good citizens. We obey. We get along.

If you are an outlaw, you will find it easier to dump that trash at the door. If you are engaged in activity that the larger culture condemns, it’s a lot easier for you to understand that the judgements of the larger culture aren’t accurate. After all, you aren’t the awful thing that culture argues you are, which means you also aren’t the positive things the culture describes you as, either.

A vodou house is, potentially, where you learn to be free of those judgements.

The tension between the larger culture and vodou is deliberate. It’s also useful.