Vodou Culture 101: Price

The problem with mass manufacturing is that it sets expectations: almost everything you need can be picked up cheaply and conveniently, as one of an uncountable number of identical versions. It might not be exactly what you need, but it’s close enough to be used. You, your neighbor, a stranger in another country, all of you get an identical version that you use more or less the same. You are interchangeable and so is the item, which is part of why it can be cheap and can be so easily disposed of.

This is absolutely not how magical work functions in vodou, nor how vodou views the world.

Magical work has clients with which the worker develops relationships, it does not have consumers who are fundamentally interchangeable. Vodou assumes the individual is individual. They might not be at the stage where they’re capable of free will, but the spark of divinity in them is individual. It assumes that to effectively work for the client, you must often work on the client, whether just to provide them with an listener or to help them change behavioral patterns. The client is part of the situation, not just an interchangeable source of income, which greatly intensifies the amount of work necessary to be effective.

Magical work does not have a ritual that works effectively for everyone in every situation. Vodou assumes that while situations might have something in common, every situation will have a certain amount of factors which are specific to that situation—maybe that’s a particularly interfering mother-in-law, or the customs for that country, or competing magical workers. Those factors have to be investigated in the course of determining what work is necessary for the situation.

Magical work also depends on the magical worker, particularly on their personal elevation and maturity. It also depends on the relationships they have with individual spirits, all of which have specific domains of concern. Magical workers who have spent more time building those relationships and doing work on their personal maturity and elevation, which determine how much of the spirit’s current they can conduct are going to be more expensive. Elevation, maturity, and developing relationships require the worker to change their entire lives repeatedly, giving up anything which will impede what they’re trying to attain.

There is a final reason, which is a truism in vodou: to cheapen the work is an insult to the spirit. No worker who wishes to maintain a relationship to the spirits is going to insult them by representing the work the spirits do as cheap or worthless/free. Magical work often involves petitioning a spirit for help, and the spirits know (and have opinions on) how we’ve represented and what we’ve priced the work as. Representing their work as cheap or worthless without their specific request to do so is an insult they typically respond poorly to, which can make a work ineffective.

All of these are a part of the price of magical work, and reasons why effective magical work is not cheap.