Vodou Culture 101: Elevation
US majority culture, informed by the Abrahamic religions, tends to view god as an angry step-father with a missing wife: no blood relation to humanity, but in command of it nonetheless. We can have nothing in common with god, we are only his children by adoption (and someone had to die for it). We live on his sufferance. I can distinctly remember a lot of genocide in the Bible, which is just step-dad reminding us that we exist because of his charity.
It’s not what any one would call a happy relationship.
In vodou cultures, god can see humanity, but does not share humanity’s obsessions (with sin or wrongdoing) or its emotions (genocidal rage at rule breaking, say.) Instead, god is interested in literally everything, of which humanity is only a part. God’s motivations are mysterious and not knowable by people, in part because god does not reflect humanity. Everything that exists reflects god. Everything that exists, to be more precise, contains some portion of divinity. The process of existing slowly exposes that divinity and develops it into infinite variety.
We’re not really prepared to contemplate the infinite, as a species. Most of us have trouble with variety.
Speaking for humans, the techniques for developing that divinity are consistent, but the divinity that emerges is quite varied. Those techniques are given on an as needed basis to people whose purpose in this life is developing people. The process of developing is what vodou calls elevation: to come closer to the divine by removing those things which prevent closeness with the divine.
This process takes multiple lives. I’ve said elsewhere that it takes eternity. It’s only humanity that requires time to have an order. Five lives, five hundred lives, five million lives: it takes what it takes for you.
Elevation has a bunch of side effects on the soul, and from the soul on the incarnation. Generally speaking, people who have cycled through enough lives begin to display divine-like characteristics, among them the capacity to do magic. This does not necessarily mean that they are nice people—the divine is not nice, and encompasses everything from the things we like to the things we want to avoid. It just means they have the capacity to change their environment through manipulation of the energetic.
Abrahamic divisions of good and evil do not apply here. You can be quite elevated and do things with magic that the Abrahamic religions would call evil.
At some point in elevation, their character begins to display a laundry list of characteristics we associate with maturity, which is a separate topic. This, coupled with magic, identifies the person as having come back enough times to start a more purposeful and directed process of elevation, instead of relying on the slow elevation of lives.
Elevation is the purpose of living in general, and something vodouizans seek out on purpose. We’re trying to get to the divine.
