Vodou Culture 101: Clarity
One of the traits that vodouizan aspire to is clarity. Clarity tends to come later in the process of reincarnation as a lasting trait and can come at any time as a temporary state, often aided by spiritual intervention. It means something a little different in vodou than it does in the US majority culture, and since I was recently asked about ways to petition for clarity, the topic bears discussion.
When someone in the US majority culture talks about clarity, they’re typically talking about reducing the potential for misunderstandings in communication, with the goal of everyone understanding communication the same way. Corporate communication, for instance, tends to be incredibly carefully engineered to try to ensure that everyone has the same understanding of the same things at the same time. This is thought to ensure that workers work according to whatever schedule has been set by management, consistently and without the deviations which creativity or individual understanding might introduce.
That’s a pretty common understanding of clarity.
Vodouizan do not aspire to a consistent understanding in groups of people or communication—in fact, they tend to think that’s impossible, in part because we’re all learning different things in any given life and at a different place, in terms of understanding, as a result. What vodouizan aspire to is an accurate understanding of the world around them, a reduction of confusion, and an accurate understanding of their place in the world around them. While an accurate understanding can be used to act, the state of clarity is not focused on action. It’s focused on an internal state of understanding.
More importantly, in vodou clarity is not focused on consistency. Clarity, which is understood to be radically different tends to show itself in a combination of decisiveness and accuracy. Both accuracy and decisiveness are necessary. People often confuse decisiveness for clarity, but unless that decisiveness demonstrates a pattern of accuracy, it’s not clarity. Similarly, accuracy without decisiveness is typically dumb luck, and while luck is good to have, it is not clarity.
There are lwa who can specifically be petitioned for clarity in a situation, among them Santa Clarita/Saint Clair—in my tradition, this is a saint mask for Klemezin. It is typically best to petition her only in the context of being an initiate, but she will sometimes be compassionate on the confused.
