Vodou Culture 101: Spiritual Work
If you say the word ‘work’, people in the US majority culture almost always imagine employment where you are paid to show up somewhere, wear something, and be there for an amount of time which has a minimum but practically no maximum. Few people have a job that allows them options or much in the way of creativity. Even jobs in the arts are highly constrained in terms of what they can produce by committees of non-artists, which explains corporate art nicely.
In vodou, spiritual work is a catch-all phrase. It means any work done on the energetic body of the person by someone who has that capacity. This work can take nearly any form, from things involving candles and songs which resemble a spiritual party to something that looks a lot like arts and crafts, albeit with a bit of a song and dance routine at the end. The ingredients necessary for any given spiritual work are dictated by the spirit, and could be nearly anything.
This is one of the reasons why, if you discover something that looks like someone made it in the woods (or crossroads, or ocean, or outside a house) people in vodou as a culture typically don’t disturb it. Could be a lost arts and crafts project. Could be magical work, and you may not want to touch what it’s intended to do.
The hours for spiritual work are whatever they are. Noon, midnight, 3 am, 11 am after a nice cup of coffee—the time only matters sometimes. The work takes as long as it takes. A few minutes or a month, or years. It is whatever it is.
Not everyone can do spiritual work effectively. Pretty much everyone can do arts and crafts or make what New Orleans vodou calls a “vodou doll”, but few people can invest it with force or manipulate enough energy to make it useful. The capacity to do that sort of energetic manipulation for others and consistently get results is rare, and much rarer than the number of people who would like to claim they can.
Generally, as with other things in vodou, the effectiveness of the work is attested to by the community they serve. If you know someone’s community, you can certainly ask. Spiritual workers who take clients online often post client testimonials by way of making it easy to check their credentials if you are not local to them.
The goals of spiritual work vary. A client could hire you to help them get a partner or get rid of a partner, or to sweeten their boss. Spiritual workers tend to specialize. Some workers specialize in lottery numbers, others in protection work, others in getting business owners more business.
Others specialize in helping their clients elevate. Of all the works I have done so far, this is my favorite.
