Vodou Culture 101: Race and Incarnation

One of the most noticeable features of the US majority culture is our racism: a preoccupation with labeling people, their capacities, their lives, and with making sure they stay safely in those categories by any means necessary, including copious amounts of violence. That violence is historical and current.

We aren’t talking about something that used to happen a long time ago, here.

It’s no surprise that when people encounter vodou from the US majority culture, they tend to encounter it from the idea that it either belongs to a race they can identify, or that it belongs to them because they’re from the race they identify as owning vodou. Racial categorization is so heavily embedded in the US majority culture that it is difficult for people to think past it. Everything they see reminds them of what category they belong to and the ramifications of not belonging to the right category or trying to act outside the behavior they’re allowed to express in their category. They’re trying to claim vodou in a way that does not let someone in that system take it away from them or put vodou in that system in a way they understand.

There’s several problems with this when it comes to vodou.

The first, and I quote my Puerto Rican/Dominican godfather here, is that the divine is for everyone. Vodou is not for everyone, but the divine is. There are no chosen people, no people who get into heaven because they belong to a category, no special people to the divine. The divine reaches out to people in whatever way they can be reached in that life. All things lead to the divine, all paths lead to the divine over lives.

This means that if vodou is for you, or for that matter if any religious path is for you, the majority culture cannot kick you out no matter what you look like. The majority culture’s ideas about you are not how you are seen in vodou, and you don’t need a special racial identity to belong. The spirits call whomever they want, and they don’t check to see if you fit a US majority culture race or anyone’s personal aesthetics before they do it.

The second is that the race you are in this incarnation is not who you are—you are not just a category on a census record. Your race is what people think you look like and should act like in this incarnation, and while that does interact with who you are (and provide lessons), it is not the destiny of your soul. Incarnations are not permanent, they’re a part of whatever lessons you’re working on in this lifetime. The US majority culture treats race as if it fully describes and predicts behavior, identity, and the whole of life for people. In vodou, you’re not bound to a single incarnation, and the body is only a part of your existence, not the entirety of it.

The third is that your nature, over the course of lives and lessons, is divine. The divine is male and female, and everything and category imaginable (not that imagination is capable of describing it. We have enough trouble with simple variety as a concept, let alone the infinite.) What emerges in you over lives and lessons is not strictly bound to any cultural category. It might have characteristics which we think belong to a category, but it is not described and predicted by anything any culture can come up with. Denying the divinity of the soul denies the nature of your soul. It is the argument that the divine does not encompass everything—that the divine is just male, or just female, and everyone and everything which is not in that category is less than.

The majority culture does more than enough of that sort of greater than/less than comparison. Those comparisons have no place in vodou.

None of this is to say that race as the US majority culture enforces it doesn’t impact your life. None of this is to say that race as the US majority culture enforces it doesn’t provide valuable, important, and necessary lessons.

It is not, however, the final word on who you are or how the divine sees you.