Vodou Culture 101: Family
US majority culture has two basic families, the family of birth and what many people call “found family.” The family of birth is the people to whom you are genetically related. Found family refers to those people who you pick up close associations with over the course of your life. For many people who the US majority culture does not value found family is a more important term than birth family. US majority culture does not agree, often misquoting part of an old German saying as if it is verse in the Bible: “blood is thicker than water.”
The verse being misattributed says, ironically, that the bonds formed through experience are more lasting than the bonds of birth family.
Vodou tends to agree, in a rare case of cultural overlap. Because the spirits call whomever they want, a vodou society can have a fairly large number of nationalities and ethnicities, and a spread of language and income brackets. Despite vodou’s reputation of being a religion for the poor, the middle class and wealthy have a long history of using techniques from vodou to increase their wealth. Your brother or sister in a vodou society might be a lawyer, a doctor, a college professor, an engineer, etc. They might also be someone who works in the service industry, or owns a botanica. It’s possible to be physically related to the people in the society, but often as not you would never have met them any other way.
The bonds in a vodou family, despite being more found family than family of blood, have a few of the characteristics of blood family, among them the requirement for a deep loyalty—whomever the people of the society are, they have the calling of the spirits in common. They may fight a bit, and some of them may dislike each other, but there is a fundamental understanding that they are all siblings, under the society’s senior mambo and/or houngan: siblings try to support each other, especially in the face of outsiders.
The loyalty reflects the character of the society, which reflects the character of the senior mambo and/or houngan. This is why the elevation of the priests of a society is so important. Where something is unelevated in the priests who manage a society family, it will play out in the way the children of the society (the people who are not the senior houngan and/or mambo) behave toward one another.
In the best case, the loyalty means that no one of the society goes hungry for long, and society members help each other find jobs or assist in healing. In the worst case, society members neglect each other and let each other be harmed. This is another reason why it is recommended you spend time getting to know the society members before agreeing to join a society. You’ll want to know what sort of family you are entering.
