Vodou Culture 101: Symbols

Many of these entries talk about expectations, and for good reason. People often are not responding to what’s happening in front of them, they’re responding to what they expected to happen, and more importantly what they expected their expected scenario to mean. Reality has very little, if anything, to do with what people respond to. Most people can go their whole lives without directly interacting with reality, as long as their response was “good enough” for their purposes.

Vodouizan call the spirits ‘mysteries’ for a variety of reasons, but one of those reasons is as an acknowledgment that the spirits defy our expectations. They simply don’t do what we think they should, and this includes the way we think they should communicate. Dreams, which is the most common way the spirits communicate with non-initiates, are a great example of this.

Dreams are highly symbolic, and often the involved symbols are both specific to the spirit’s relationship to the dreamer, common symbols for the spirits, and the conceptual relationship of the spirit to the topic. One of the reasons that priests are often asked to interpret dreams is because part of our training includes getting to know spirits—literally, creating and maintaining relationships, in which we talk to and spend time with one another. That relationship helps us understand how the spirits think, which helps us interpret symbols when the spirits are communicating with others. One of the other things that makes us more effective is knowing something about the dreamer ourselves.

There is a reason spirits often communicate in symbols, and it has everything to do with expectations: when the spirits communicate directly with people, using words, people often interpret those words into those expectations. It’s only when they can’t quite interpret things easily that they start to ask questions, which might lead them to a more accurate interpretation (or someone who can more accurately interpret the dream.) As long as the communication is easy to understand, people will use whatever they consider to be the ‘normal’ way to understand the communication.

This is not to say that priests cannot misinterpret symbols: we can. We just have a better chance of figuring it out based on the knowledge we accrue as a part of our training.