Vodou Culture 101: The Society
In Friday’s podcast, Miss Bunnie mentioned something that merits its own entry in the 101 series—a vodou society is intended to be a healing community, a group of people who the spirits have lead to the senior priest/s of that society, in order for them to be healed and/or elevated. If there’s any proof of the generosity and consideration of the divine, it is the fact that people are assigned to priests who have the specific combination of skills and experience that can heal that person or help them elevate. This is also proof that the spirits are quite intimately involved and interested in our lives, a proof echoed in the intimate and specific advice the spirits give people at parties.
This means a few things about vodou societies. One of the things it means is that a vodou society is full of people working on healing at different rates, in different ways, on different issues. My godfather likes the metaphor that a society is a medical facility. A doctor will see many patients, and while their problems might have something in common, they will not all be the same.
For this reason, vodou societies tend to be at least a little messy. The people of the society will be emotional as they work on their issues. They will also sometimes be gossipy, can be prone to fighting or infighting, can have brief but intense enmities, etc. One of the jobs of the senior priest is to keep this in perspective, and occasionally to suppress the worst of it. It’s impossible for senior priest/s to completely quell this sort of behavior. If the behavior is temporary, the consequences aren’t severe, and it’s accompanied by healing, it is often tolerated to some degree with monitoring and comment.
The spirits often help senior priests keep track of how serious things are, but senior priests are expected to be observant and do their best to keep track of the ‘drama’ in a society.
One of the other things vodou societies being about healing means is that the people in the society can and should be expected to change. To be an actively healing community is to be a society where people are continuously, if irregularly, arriving at a new place in their lives. Even senior priests change over time, and while a society will tend to have a stable senior priest, no one living in a vodou society can reasonably expect the society not to change.
It is not a positive trait for a vodou society if the people of the society and its senior priests are not changing over time. One of the central tenets of vodou is that everything changes.
If you’re joining a vodou society, be aware that it will be a bit messy. As long as people are healing, that messiness is not necessarily a bad thing.
