Vodou Culture 101: Win and Lose

As I said in the entry on self-advocacy, vodou cultures are not passive-aggressive. They assume advocacy—that you are actively looking out for yourself, actively able to speak your mind, and that you will let people know when you’re having a problem.

They also assume, as I mentioned in warrior culture and is implicit in the entry on community, that you are not in a position to defend yourself by yourself. You will need help, both from the spirits which are for you in this life and from people with more experience than you. You will win, eventually elevating to divinity, and you will win because you have learned to be free with the generous help of the divine through spirits, priests, and spiritual workers.

In vodou, the spirits are very much for you learning to be free, winning the real battles of your life. The spiritual world is a very populated place, but do not doubt that there are many things in it which rejoice in the elevation of souls, which take joy from you being free.

Contrast this with what the US majority culture says about winning and losing—there is either a win or a loss. You are either a winner or a loser, and the effect of winning and losing echoes through your whole life, turning everything into competitions on which you are morally judged. You can live your whole life as a winner or loser, because that’s how Abrahamic cultures view everything. Once a loser, it taints you and everything you do, the label becoming prophecy. A loss is not a win, cannot be a win because the US majority culture needs to maintain the idea that things can only belong to one category. A loser cannot be a winner.

In vodou culture, you can and will definitely consistently lose, but a someone who has lost can win any time they choose to do what they need to do. You will eventually win the only battle that matters, for your freedom. Everyone eventually wins that fight, in one life or another. No one is born a winner or a loser, no matter what circumstances they were born into. You, like everyone, must make the decisions that allow you to win your freedom.

Much of what a spiritual worker does involves helping you figure out how to turn what the world around you might call a loss into a win. You are not born understanding all the nuances of your battles, nor were you born to fight them all alone.

The good news is that there’s a lot of help available to you.