Vodou Culture 301: Sanity
I’ve mentioned that vodou and the US majority culture have very different views on the topic of what is considered sane behavior. Some of this is inevitable across cultures, but the topic bears a certain amount of discussion.
When the US majority culture starts talking about sanity, the discussion is about conformity: about weird things, things that are not as expected, things that might be (some kinds of) dangerous. People who are not conforming are crazy, and may or may not have some sort of official diagnosis which can be used to sum up their lack of conformity and its consequences. Major disagreements, political disagreements, sexual orientation differences, economic differences, racial differences: all these things can be called ‘crazy’ where they are non-conforming. No particular medical diagnosis is required, and calling something or someone crazy is as much as anything else an attempt to discredit them and anything they have to say.
This is a common enough way to talk about sanity, and is sometimes echoed in vodou communities that are particularly influenced by the US majority culture.
The problem, of course, is that vodou involves a bunch of behaviors that the US majority culture considers crazy, and even more behaviors it considers dangerous. Possession itself can be (inaccurately) described as a kind of dissociative episode, let alone some of the non-conforming and non-conformist behaviors involved in doing the magical portion of vodou. One does not, for instance, leave something at a crossroads without it looking suspicious to non-vodouizans. A vodou party at which a spirit inside the body of a vodouizan is drinking gasoline or dancing in a bonfire looks completely insane—never mind that the body of the vodouizan takes no damage from what would certainly harm someone who was not possessed.
It does not look sane. It does not look like safe, conforming, healthy behavior.
Sanity and insanity in vodou has nothing to do with conformity. Sanity relies on your ability to respond to and encounter reality, on whether or not you are experiencing a delusional relationship to the world around you, and that link is only one example of the sorts of delusions people tend to live with. By that definition, most people are a bit crazy. They do not respond to reality, they respond to the delusion that they can refuse to change, that things stay the same, and that whatever they imagine is what is happening.
Healing work in vodou, by that definition, is the process of learning to release delusion and live in reality. In vodou, reality is fluid and ever-changing, and is often a lot stranger than it is expected to be.
