Vodou Culture 101: Consequences

The US majority culture, like many cultures influenced by the Abrahamic religion, has a bit of an obsession with trying to fit consequences into their moral frameworks. If something happens to you, especially if it’s negative, it must mean bad things about you. If something happens to you that is positive, it must mean good things about you. Many people will go on to say that if bad things happen to you, it’s because god is trying to punish you or teach you or you’ve offended god.

The problem with this is that it gets in the way of learning from your experiences, since god is conveniently there to evaluate what you do and figure out whether or not it means you should be punished. You don’t even have to think about it, since god is there to let you know if it’s wrong and punish you so you suffer for it. You can get away with only noticing or caring if you suffer.

In vodou, experience is one of the most common ways to learn, and it is your understanding of consequences which helps drive that learning process. If, for instance, you violate the terms of a relationship and the other person ends that relationship, that is a consequence. It is up to the person to figure out what caused that consequence, and beyond that to figure out what motivated their behavior and whether or not they want to repeat that behavior.

Priests and magical workers in vodou are intended to help people figure those patterns out and help people reach the point where they don’t have to repeat that behavior—they might choose the behavior and its consequences, but it won’t be compulsively.

At no point in that process is the process of learning delegated to god, divinity, or anyone else. In vodou, the learning process takes as long as it takes, and so if people have to repeat lessons across lives, they can do so until they get it right. There is help available, in part because it takes a considerable amount of lives to be able to stop behavioral patterns, and in part because the divine wants everyone to join it.

But in order to learn, consequences have to stand on their own, without an explanatory moral framework to prevent people from fully experiencing those consequences.