Vodou Culture 301: Personality

The best way to explain personality in vodou is to compare it to a cage: a small, predictable box which someone will remain in their entire lives. Most people find the small space comfortable, even reassuring. The cage, the personality, tells them where they can go, what they can do, and what to expect. Often, other people’s observations of who they are become a part of that cage and something they will seek out to feel reassured, to feel safe.

Those observations or personality traits do not have to be positive to be comforting. Plenty of people draw reassurance from the description that they have, for instance, anger issues or an anxiety problem. Knowing that they can be easily described, that they are ‘known’, makes them feel better about less certain things in their life.

After all, the description tells them how to act, how to respond.

There’s a problem with this—vodou is a religion of chaos and change, a religion in which nothing is particularly static, including people. Looked at that way, when people seek definition through personality and try to make themselves or act in ways that consistently demonstrate the same traits, they attempt to deny that they can change or have changed. It is delusional, an attempt to deny reality in which things continuously change.

For that reason, vodouizans tend to view personality as a kind of incarceration, a prison you voluntarily enter. The desire to be predictable, which is what motivates acting in compliance with personality, demonstrates that you don’t know yourself. It also means your boundaries are poor. Where we let others define us or seek to be defined through feedback with our environment, we are not seeking to know ourselves. Those are attempts to let everything else define us. Refusing to know yourself, or to try and get to know yourself, is a demonstration of spiritual immaturity.

Vodou is a religion in which spiritual maturity and elevation is eagerly sought.