Vodou Culture 201: Maturity

In US majority culture, maturity is a measure of the time that has passed since your birth: at 18 and 21, you are old enough to be considered an adult (and tried like one, but we’ll do that to 12 year olds depending on skin color and crime.)

Occasionally, depending on the subculture, you can find a bit of description of character which is primarily concerned with the ability to honor contracts, both social and legal. A mature person in the US majority culture is someone who pays their bills on time, consistently. A mature person in the US majority culture is someone who doesn’t cheat on their spouse, who doesn’t get in trouble with the police. Maturity is associated with compliance in the US, despite a lot of lip service on the topic of individual freedom. It’s one of the reasons we don’t tend to protest.

Some subcultures will add regular religious attendance and a position of responsibility in the church, temple, or mosque, gated by gender.

This is not how vodou cultures view maturity. Maturity has a couple of dimensions in vodou cultures, the first and least important of which is freedom. Freedom, in this case, is the ability to act in whatever way the person deems appropriate, without any sort of artificial impediments like caring what people think of you. It is the willingness to act and embrace consequence as a cost of action—the disapproval of your neighbors or society might be a consequence of your actions, but it should not be the only thing you consider, and it should not consistently be the deciding factor in your choice to act. You should be able to do whatever it is you think you need to, if you need to.

The second and most important of those dimensions is the wisdom necessary to know what is appropriate, not just what seems appropriate or what you want to do. People often understand freedom as a reaction to conformity (i.e. you can’t tell me what to do) but a reaction does not demonstrate the ability to understand the consequences or knowledge of what is appropriate. If you’re going to tell people to get fucked, it should be with the full understanding of the consequences, and it should be what needs to be said in the circumstances.

Anyone can act up, but knowing the consequences and having an accurate judge of what’s appropriate require significant knowledge of self: you need to have worked on your elevation enough to be aware of when something is trying to influence you and be able to disregard it. You need to have worked on your elevation enough to be able to accurately read a situation, to accurately understand the consequences. You need to have the capacity to understand others. You need to have the capacity to understand your own reactions.

Notice that none of this includes whether or not a mature person complies. It also does not ensure that a mature person is nice. A soul, even a soul with sufficient elevation, does not have to be particularly calm, nice, nonviolent, or gentle. It simply has to be capable of it, should the circumstances be right for it.

The wisdom maturity requires cannot be defined easily. The best way to see it is by examining what happens, which is why in vodou cultures people are told to spend time getting to know their priests or spiritual workers before they consult with them. The idea is to observe until you understand the character of the person you want to work with.

You’re looking for their maturity. You can have magical power without it, and physical age is meaningless as a sign of maturity.