Vodou Culture 101: Splitting the Spirits
If you read my back catalog, you’ll notice I don’t do much talking about individual spirits, other than to mention them or interactions with them. While it’s common for people to write basic, identifying entries on the spirits (and I may at some point), I’ve deliberately tried to avoid it.
This is not because I do not know or recognize spirits, it’s because of a few basic truisms in vodou: the first is that every person perceives the spirits slightly differently. The second is that every person expresses the spirits slightly differently.
My godfather uses a physics analogy to describe this which I think is particularly useful. He compares the spirits to rays of light and people to various prisms. The spirit or the ray of light is what it is. Passing through the person or prism splits or bends the light, which is still exactly what it was before, but the portions of the light which exit the prism look slightly different. When a spirit possesses a person, the person will express the parts of the spirit they can, given their current state. When a spirit develops a relationship with a person, the person encounters the portion of the spirit they can encounter, given their current state.
The characteristics of a person or prism which bend or split the light are flaws. They are unresolved issues which interfere with the ability of the person to express the divine. Their current state is whatever flaws they have which are still unresolved.
The spirit is complex, spanning an enormous range of characteristics and domains. The spirit is also incredibly straightforward and pervasive, much like that ray of light. It does not change, nor does it need to. The spirit is complete.
People are complicated because of their flaws, very changeable and not straightforward. We change despite our best efforts, and our perceptions change. People tend to perceive the spirits as they can perceive them, from treating them like impersonal universal principles, to treating them as if they are all the same, to vending machines for favors, to entities with which they could have a relationship. We perceive the spirits as mutable because we are mutable.
We split the spirit as it passes through us. It has not changed, we’re simply not capable of conducting all of the spirit, nor can we conduct it in its whole spectrum. People tend to resent that apparent difference, in part because we like categorization (it’s how we deny change) and because we’re in denial about our own inconsistency—we get mad when things are not like we expected them to be.
All any article about a spirit can give you is generalities. It’s one of the reasons we tend to value experience. You’re going to encounter the spirit as you can.
