Vodou Culture 101: Romance
In another case of the Abrahamic religions (and specifically Christianity) influencing US majority culture, monogamy is the legal default for romantic relationships in the US. It is also the moral standard for relationships, with the most ‘moral’ relationship being heterosexual marriage. It is only recently in US history that partnerships and commonlaw marriages were even recognized as having some sort of standing or being worth consideration, and any LGBT+ types of relationships are only honored in some US states. There are a fairly large number of laws and practices that only honor heterosexual monogamous marriage, and condemn or make illegitimate anything else.
You can tell what kind of personal development a vodou priest has by their stance on the issue of romantic relationships. Be wary of priests who get the ‘ick’ when it’s not married heterosexual monogamy. They are still strongly influenced by the majority culture and may act more like someone from the Abrahamic religions than a vodouizan.
Our spirits are, for the most part, not monogamous. It takes a certain amount of personal development to recognize the moral preference for monogamy—specifically that the disgust or discomfort many feel in the presence of non-monogamy and LGBT+ people is a product of Christianity in the US, not an inherent moral law. Many of the spirits explicitly have multiple spouses without any sort of animus toward each other, and many of the spirits do not care about the sexual orientation of individuals. Vodou spirits have no problem showing up for gay men and women, for trans people, for intersex people, for bisexual people, for the unmarried, divorced, etc. They simply are not interested in our hangups on that issue, nor do they feel any particular desire to be bound by the Abrahamic religions.
This makes the romantic relationships of vodouizans tend to run the gamut from a comfortable married monogamy to any number of less legalized or formal arrangements, including polygamous arrangements. The married heterosexual monogamy is neither good nor bad, and may not be the result of Abrahamic religious influence. Because of the unique relationship that vodou teaches vodouizans about living—that they’re going to come back, that they do not have to be bound by social or legal conventions, that they are to enjoy being alive and use it to learn lessons, etc—vodouizans with enough elevation tend to feel a lot less pressure to settle down. They also tend to be less judgemental of other people’s arrangements. If it works for you, for the most part, we simply don’t care.
Vodou tends to be very pragmatic on the issue of romance.
