Vodou Culture 101: Divinity

For the obvious reasons, this is not all there is to say about this topic.

The god of my US majority culture childhood was pretty angry. I have distinct memories of sitting in sermons, hearing how disgusted, enraged, and genocidal god was, held back only by the death of his son, who died because of his pity for humanity. While not every Abrahamic religion has quite as vicious a take on divinity as the Southern Baptists who raised me, there is a common set of assertions about divinity: that humanity is flawed in a way that divinity is the opposite of, that the only thing which can appease god is blood sacrifice (whether symbolic or literal), and that there is a fundamental difference between humanity (and nature) and god. God is the only good, and all else is evil of varying shades. This god actively spectates humanity, constantly looking at and being disgusted by our inherent evil, and is constantly in danger of smiting people.

In US majority culture, this leads to the tendency to view intent negatively, to judge based on what you can see of people, to label whole groups as being more or less evil, to punish harshly (and over very long periods of time, including all of someone’s lifetime), and to fetishize the idea of privacy and innocence. For examples, look anywhere you like.

This is not how divinity is understood in vodou culture, as I have learned it. People are often surprised to find out that vodou has a single, central deity—we have a single, creator god—who has lots and lots of helpers. The helpers are the lwa, but also the dead who have elevated sufficiently, various natural spirits, and a whole cast of assorted other. Divinity created those helpers for itself, for its own reasons, and gave them domains or areas of concern and free will. The helpers are capable of whatever they particularly need to do in their domain or concern, in order to accomplish their goals.

The divinity of vodou is not disgusted with humanity. We’re just not that important, individually, as to merit the personal scrutiny of divinity, nor are we capable of offending god with anything we do. Divinity has its own reasons, its own motivations, in which humanity as a whole is only a part.

There is one goal which divinity has given to its helpers: to slowly, over the course of incarnations, assist everything that exists in getting into alignment with the divine, in preparation for rejoining the divine.

Personally, I like to think of that alignment as an infinite number of mirrors, reflecting the divine for the divine to see.

This is most definitely not limited to humanity. Everything you can perceive or measure, and everything you cannot, is a part of that goal. It’s one of the reasons the idea of characterizing things as good or evil is pointless. Everything you can encounter has within it the seeds of divinity. The question is how developed those seeds are, in that particular incarnation.

There is not a lot of commonality between those two viewpoints, other than a central creating deity. Vodou culture tends to be a little… baffled with US majority culture on this particular topic. The idea of an angry, peeping god is very foreign to vodou.