Is Vodou Magic?
The common perception in our culture is that “voodoo” is a type of magic, more often than not characterized as “black magic.” The first example likely to jump into someone’s mind is that of the “voodoo doll,” used for a remote attack on a targeted person, followed by the zombie, a shell of a living being walking around in a neglected, possibly decaying body, who was raised from the dead.
I am not here to tell you these things are a complete fiction. I do, however, want to put them in context as things that happen in the corners of an entire culture. They are not at all central to what Vodou is.
Vodou is a vast system, containing a cosmology, a pantheon, a symbolic language, a complex body of ritual, art, and music, healing modalities, a pharmacopeia, a psychological model, a system of ethics, and more. If it can be said to have a central purpose at all, it is bringing the spirit world and the physical world into communication.
This communication happens at both the community and individual levels. In ceremony, under the guidance of an initiated houngan or manbo, spirits come down in possession and interact with those present in a public setting. The person whose body is borrowed is called a chwal or horse, and it is said that the spirit has mounted them. Individuals in the group are most certainly addressed, sometimes very pointedly, but the fact that it’s done in front of everyone else makes it everyone’s business. While among the group, spirits make treatments and perform healings for individuals, making it an occasion of healing for the whole community.
Then there are spirit interactions that happen privately. The lwa are known to appear with messages in dreams, in intuitions and hunches, as signs and synchronicities, and, within the culture, by spontaneously mounting family or community members to deliver an urgent message. (Side note: they are not known for intrusive possessions of people who would have no idea what was happening or who was speaking.)
In any case, the lwa often are called or appear to address particular problems, such as an illness, financial crisis, or injustice, not just for the fun of it.
Not every problem is addressed with explicit help from the lwa. There is also, as I mentioned, a vast pharmacopeia within Vodou. Some of the treatments are herbal medicines that cure physical complaints. Others are designed to address “spiritual” conditions, some of which the western mindset would classify as psychological. There are teas, floor washes, oils, perfumes, and other concoctions. A lot of treatments are baths composed of various alcohols, perfumes, and botanicals, accompanied by prayer and other ritual actions. These are often for open-ended beneficent purposes like improving health or luck. At other times, a ritually charged protective amulet or gad might be called for. The general idea is to remove obstacles, ill health, bad luck, protect from future trouble and negativity, and bring in blessings.
Then there are more specific actions for more specific conditions, such as getting a job or retrieving an errant lover. These specific, personal remedies are prescriptive, but never static. Each situation requires a tweaking of a general recipe based on the specifics. The recipes are well guarded secrets.
Not only initiated priests and priestesses perform these procedures. In fact, the definition of houngan and manbo- now often titles used in respect to levels of initiation by people trying to make sense of the tradition from the outside- is flexible within the culture. There are uninitiated medsin fey- leaf doctors- who are considered houngan and manbo based on the efficacy of their treatments, not on the basis of any formal initiation. In fact, there is a whole list of different designations of houngan and manbo who received their training and practice in different ways.
Is all this, so far, magic? It really depends on your definition. Certainly the spiritual realm is being called upon to affect change. In the case of communications with the lwa, it is perhaps less about “change in accordance with will” than it is about a conversation with the divine about what needs to happen. In the case of the creation and administering of specific treatments for problems, certainly we are aiming for the specific problems to be resolved. I can only speak my own outlook and my own instruction (and I can barely speak of that haha), but to me these treatments could just as well be called “prayer in sync with ritual action” as “magic.”
Is there magic, more magic than that, like the kind where you directly make specific things happen, in Vodou, now that we’ve established that it’s much more than that?
It really depends who you talk to.
Each person is responsible for the ethical framework in which they do spiritual work, within Vodou and without. Anyone who has ever worked for an outcome has stories about the sense of irony and poetic justice always present in the fulfillment of one’s magical aims. “Be careful what you wish for” is very real advice, and although most Vodou practitioners believe in bringing justice when someone is being wronged, Vodou and Haitian culture in general are full of proverbs illustrating that one reaps what they sow.
Are revenge, preemptive harm, the suppression of the free will of a magical target, and so forth part of magic within Vodou or not? This is like asking if they are part of magic. We are talking about a whole culture. People are going to do all kinds of things within it.
I’ll speak more on this later. But in the meantime, hopefully what I’ve written so far will clear up some confusion!
