Vodou 501: The Limits of Gnosis
We say, in vodou, that every priest is the king of their own castle. What we mean is that the head priest of a society is the rule of the society, or as I’ve put it several places in entries here, the extent of authority for a priest is their own temple. We might clarify outside our temple—for instance, to answer a question on social media—but the authority and accuracy we can wield is specific to the society/temple/soyeste we manage.
We can answer questions outside that society, and vodou does have common features between houses, but the more you learn about a particular house, the more about that house, versus vodou, you are learning.
This is absolutely by design. I usually give a short history lesson on the resistance of the priests kidnapped from Africa in the various plantations they were dragged to, and the effect on vodou of the differing compositions of those plantations. The limited nature of vodou’s gnosis (knowledge or wisdom) reflects the suppression of its mother religions and the isolation of vodou on those plantations. The reception is generally a “huh,” followed by some follow-up questions on the very varied use of Christian iconography in vodou or questions about some of the more lurid movies about vodou.
Just so I say it, that’s not Papa Legba. Pick your movie or TV show, and that will be the answer to your question.
I can see, based on their reactions, that they really don’t quite understand what that means. It is difficult to explain, in a culture which assumes centralized authority and a dogma which makes universal claims and labels everything else as heresy, that the person with the most authority in any setting of the religion has both fairly complete authority in their own society and not much authority outside it. People are used to the idea that there’s standardization on the claims of a religion, that there’s a governing body. Many feel that having some sort of dogma makes a religion safer, which is how civics views the religions of the book: as another arm of civics, with similar ideas about governing.
This is one of the most annoying features of talking about vodou in social media. When vodouizans talk about vodou among themselves, it is understood that there are differences of doctrine, that houses do it differently, and that there can be differences of doctrine without there being one true vodou, though your house is best, etc. When people talk about vodou on social media, suddenly there is a one true vodou and everyone else is a scammer.
I should say, though, that there are a lot of people who are not initiated and will tell you as much making claims about vodou on social media. Social media is full of noise.
If you are involved in a society, and especially if you are a priest, you know how to sound out (sonde) someone whose initiation you have questions about. It’s rarely worth it, and it is very bad manners to accuse someone of faking their initiation without a serious amount of evidence—the spirit is at work in so many ways and there are so very many paths to god that it is safest to assume people claiming the one true vodou are reflecting something they need to experience in this life. We do not correct on social media much. We merely define for our own people.
Privately, and in my own society, I will say that if I catch my god children on social media casting aspersions on someone else’s path or initiation, we’re going to have a talk.
The limits of the gnosis in vodou is the boundary between a society/temple/soyeste and everyone else. Inside the society, we can make universal claims. We can give you a particular path to god, because if you are intended for our society, that is your path to god. Between societies, we can say very little. For non-vodouizans, we are limited to the contents of our spiritual readings for you—that is, whatever the spirits want to tell you and whatever we understand to be good advice.
There are explicit limits to the gnosis in vodou societies. It is, in my opinion, a kindness of the lwa. It helps us be more tolerant, structurally, of others.
