Vodou Culture 101: Trust
There’s a Bible verse from my childhood which comes up a lot when I think about how trust is organized in vodou communities. While there’s a lot of tension between vodou and Abrahamic cultures, wisdom should be paid attention to no matter whose mouth it comes out of.
The verse is about how to conduct yourself when encountering other communities or cultures: be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.
That’s just about right for how vodou cultures view trust. Because vodou cultures honor change and believe positive change is inevitable (if spread across lives), they can be surprisingly ready to accept people—it’s worth pointing out here that vodou is an invite-only religion, not an open door for everyone. The spirits have to invite you, because the path it represents has to be the one you need to be taking. Vodou is not necessarily the only way to get to the divine and explicitly honors the idea that you could get there other ways.
After all, according to vodou, we’re all headed to the same place.
The willingness of vodou communities to allow people to attend public ceremonies or hire out vodou spiritual workers is what vodou considers good manners. A public ceremony is an opportunity for healing, which is a major goal of vodou, and vodou spiritual workers or priests are often community diplomats. Coupled with a strong tendency to politeness, this can be confusing for people from other cultures.
Unfortunately, US majority culture tends to read this as being overly permissive (thanks to that good versus evil plot arc), when it’s not being understood as a kind of watered down Abrahamic religion without the promise of protection from the good versus evil plot arc. As a result, the US majority culture understands vodou as weakness: vodou people are inoffensive, like doves, and easily mislead. Vodou people need to be saved, re-educated by Abrahamic religions so we know the right way and will no longer be easily mislead.
Until we aren’t inoffensive (or someone needs to make a scary movie villain.)
No one familiar with vodou can afford to forget the other side of that verse, to be wise (and in the case of vodou, venomous) as serpents. Vodouizants spent hundreds of years being an active part of resistance to slavery, and in the US, part of dealing with a long history of violent racist repression. Much of the wisdom I’ve learned so far has had the fingerprints of violent repression on it. Trust is earned in vodou communities precisely because vodou and the spirits we communicate with have been a part of handling the kind of horrors which slavery and violent racist repression are infamous for, which included a lot of betrayal. There are spirits who are explicitly called by the sound of a whip crack, fire, and screaming.
Vodou has no shortage of ways to deal with oppressors, and learning to be observant of people’s character is a basic requirement for leadership in vodou communities.
Vodou communities also regularly deal with ongoing racism and oppression, which raises being observant and secretive an art form.
It is important not to confuse politeness with trust. Vodouizants tend to be exquisitely polite, and the default is to trust visitors to have agency and be equally polite.
This is not a weakness.
Sometimes, it’s strategic.
