Vodou Culture 101: Divination
In the tradition of vodou needing to be hidden from slave owners and the law, the most common divination system used in vodou is a pack of playing cards. It would have been better for a slaver or police officer to believe the person had a gambling problem than that they were using it for divination—a gambling problem was just proof that the person had a weak character. Divination might be proof that the person was some sort of satanist or up to something sinister.
When I initiated as priest, I was offered a chance to learn that divination system. Unfortunately or fortunately, I already had a long history with tarot, so I opted to use tarot instead. It is a familiar tool.
A vodou priest uses a divination tool very differently than a psychic might. Philosophically, we’re disinterested in the future or the past. We don’t use divination to peek at a potential future, in part because the conditions which might make that future might disappear during the reading. A future is, at best, a guess based on the delusion that the conditions of the present will stay the same. Nothing stays the same, so there’s not a lot of point in trying to understand the future the way a psychic might. We also don’t use it to peek at the future because the need to know the future is, in vodou, a character flaw and a demonstration that the person needs elevation.
Vodou priests tend to try not to ‘feed’ your character flaws or delusions any more than they have to.
We tend to not try to inquire directly into your past, either, in part because once it has happened, the past is gone. It’s also typically not as people remember it, and if it contributed to current conditions, that will come up directly, with respect to the current conditions. People tend to want to delusionally live in their memories or perception of the past as if it fully explains their current experience and future. Delusions don’t work that way.
Finally, because it is very easy to end up using a divination system as an emotional crutch to help people (or the priest/magical worker) feel better about their fear of change, we also only use the divination system to confirm what our gifts or the spirits tell us. Ideally, we train to trust the spirits and our own intuition far more completely than we might trust an external source of information. However, that training is, and I cannot emphasize this enough, incredibly difficult. Relying only on the divination system or requiring it to be present is an easy trap to fall into during that training, in part because it’s a lot more comforting for people to have something they can physically see than it is to rely on something that they perceive through other means.
If I am reading you, cards might be present. They also might not.
