Vodou Culture 101: Ignorance and Mystery
I’ve mentioned vodou is not a democracy. It’s not a religion of the book, either—we don’t have a central text from which all encounters with the spirit are authorized or labelled, nor do we have a class of authorized interpreters who prove their authority with obscure text references. Nor is the information in vodou generally available.
The entries I’ve been writing are vodou culture basics, all of which are available various places, and definitely not to sum of knowledge on the topic.
Vodou culture takes for granted that whatever wisdom you have, it is given to you on a need to know (and earned) basis. Not everything is available to everyone, and in fact you can study your whole life and only have a little wisdom. That bit of wisdom is to be valued, and not to be shared with anyone casually. It’s yours. You paid for it in experience and it is relevant to the life you are currently in, but may not be relevant to anyone else’s life.
Vodou culture resists the idea that your ideas are as good as anyone else’s, but also the idea that knowledge is without context and belongs to everyone. Inherently, wisdom comes from specific encounters and contexts with the spirit, which happen as you are working on something for your soul. You can actively harm others by sharing wisdom they are not prepared to understand, and it is disrespectful to the spirit, which includes yourself, to treat something you pay for with your life as if it is not valuable.
Learning to keep secrets is the foundation of all training in vodou.
We call the spirits “mysteries” because they are not meant to be fully understood (nor can they be, in any particular life), nor are they required to explain themselves to anyone, nor are they obligated to comply with our expectations of them. They do as the divine allows them to, and this means they do that which we do not understand. For vodou, the normal state of existence is ignorance, which protects the developing soul from being harmed by things it is not prepared to deal with.
Contrast this with US majority culture, with the idea that ideas and wisdom are democratically distributed. Contrast this with the idea that information or knowledge should be free, can be without the context of the soul, that we’re all more or less in the same place in terms of development (i.e. our only life, doing what we do before divine judgement.)
Vodou can strike people from the US majority culture as unnecessarily secretive, even conspiratorial. Much is hidden, and the idea that ignorance is protective and necessary can even seem discriminatory—a violation of what US majority culture sees as an inherent human right, to know. It suggests that we’re not all in the same place, that we’re not equal (the same), and that we cannot all be trusted.
It begs the question: can you be trusted? What can you be trusted with?
