Vodou Culture 101: Consultation

This seems topical enough. In vodou, a consultation is a bit of an umbrella term. Depending on circumstances or practitioner, it could mean something like counseling. It could mean that the practitioner intends to summon a spirit with which they have a relationship. It might mean they need to ask some detailed questions about the situation for which you contacted them. It might mean some combination of all the previous.

The purpose of a consultation is to figure out what the next step is for you: maybe work needs to be done, or maybe you just need to get personal advice. A worker, even a very good one, has no particular way of knowing every possible detail that might be relevant to your case without talking to you, if for no other reason than to confirm the information you’ve already given them.

Many people balk at the idea of paying for a consultation then balk again at the idea that a consultation is different than spiritual work. The alternative is for spiritual workers to do something generic and hope it works, which takes a work from something which will succeed most of the time to something that might succeed, maybe. There are professional ethics in spiritual work. Spiritual workers tend to care about that.

Scammers do not.

Even if we do have some idea of what to do based on the client’s initial contact with us, we still need to make sure that nothing was omitted. As an example, if a spiritual worker is contacted to bring two people together with a love work and the client does not mention that their target hates them, a generic love work will fail. Clients can be remarkably unwilling to give the worker those sorts of details, as well. They assume a spiritual worker will judge them the way their neighbors, friends, or family might if we knew what they intended. Sometimes, clients will actually lie because they’re so afraid that the spiritual worker will judge them, which can cause a spiritual worker to do the wrong work for a situation.

One of the things that makes an effective spiritual worker is that we don’t judge, which would seriously interfere in our ability to do spiritual work. Our spirits don’t care about human morals—the spirits have their moral code, which has very little to do with how and why people feel moral. We care about our relationships to our spirits a lot more than we care about whether or not you’ve done something that violates your society’s moral code.

There’s not a lot which can be done effectively without a consultation.