I come to you this lovely Sunday (well, it’s Monday by the time I post this) with a splitting headache and the sense that I’ve overextended myself spiritually. My wonderful (vegetarian!!!) business partner Rachel nourished me with a fajita steak on top of my migas at our Sunday breakfast meeting to try to revive me, and the iron helped for a second, but I already feel like I need more protein.
It’s not a surprise that I’m exhausted. The last couple of days have been chock full of intensely emotional family events, as well as several readings and tattoos.
And today it’s time to write the Austin Vodou blog. I try to be flexible about what I write on, and focus on consistency for now rather than trying to get the perfect content.
But I do want it to be informative and accurate!
So let’s talk about rest in Vodou, since rest is what I need.
In Kreyòl, there’s an action called kouche, which means to lie down or to go to bed. It can also mean to make love, to give birth, or to die, or to become initiated. Everything done while lying down is kouche.
We kouche every night. We retreat into the mysterious chamber of sleep. It’s the most commonplace activity of our lives, but when you think about it, it’s very strange. We are at once lying in one place, motionless, in the dark, and traveling somewhere else. We lie in wait until some mysterious force raptures us away, out of our bodies. We surrender to it. We are sucked through its invisible corridors and play out dramas while our neural pathways nourish and rebuild themselves, while our system reboots.
In Vodou, this form of dream-travel is seen as a key access point to the Lwa. They speak to us in dreams, as the beautiful firsthand account of initiation-through-sleep Nan Dòmi by Mimerose Beaubrun of the group Boukman Eksperyans describes. They might even make love to us in our dreams, particularly if we’re married to them, on the special nights we dedicate to them. In dreams they transfer their power, protection, wisdom, and love to us.
There’s a connection between dreams and water, which itself is both a source of nourishment and a pwen, an access point to the Lwa. In it, the terrestrial rules of gravity and indivisibility no longer apply. In it, we float, flow, dissolve. This fluidity is life itself, as emphasized by the catchphrase I learned when training to be a Montessori science teacher: A Dry Organism Is A Dead Organism. Through water, everything is digested, everything is distributed to the right place in the body, everything is dissolved and cleansed, made new again; just as dreams do for the psyche while we sleep.
The action of water without and dreams within is personified by the Vodou Lwa LaSyrenn, the fluid, intuitive, mystical aspect of the Divine Feminine, Ezili. She is depicted as a mermaid, a two-tailed siren, or a queen walking on the water. She is amphibious, half swimming in the subconscious and half above in the conscious world. In keeping with the fluid nature of water, the Lwa in her eskò (a group of Lwa that are grouped together) change roles depending on the house. For example, LaBalenn --(“The Whale”) the mystery that lives deep beneath the water’s surface— is sometimes seen as her lover, her sister, or her child; sometimes female, and sometimes male. Her husband, Mèt Agwe, is sometimes seen as a pirate or sailor navigating his ship IMMAMOU over the surface, and sometimes has a fish tail himself and is seen as living below the sea. Despite and maybe because of the mutability, their fluid union is seen as essential.
We kouche with our lovers. We move out of the ordinary space of effort and reason and humdrum concerns and are swirled into a vortex of trancelike sensation. It’s an altered state of communion. As in dreams, it can feel like you’re getting sucked up into a spaceship and flying away to another dimension, it can feel like you’re swimming into the depths. Just like falling asleep, you might just be rolling around together on a mattress, but you’re also somewhere else. In a certain stream of Western magic (not talking about Vodou here), the altered state of the erotic act is used to power magic. In Vodou, erotic experiences in dreams with Lwa are seen as transmissions of power, knowledge, and luck. They’re a form of bonding between the spirit and human realms.
We kouche on either end of our lives.
We kouche in the womb, curled up in a protective place, hearing muffled reverberations from the world outside that awaits us, but close to the droning heartbeat of the being that generated us. Our blurry, barely formed eyes blink open momentarily and we peer through the amniotic gloom and have our first experience of form. Then we are lulled back into the primal dream of our becoming. It takes as long as it takes. This long rest doesn’t just rebuild, it builds. Cell upon cell, a house for our individual consciousness is constructed around this sleep.
We kouche when we die. We surrender the whole grandiose drama of our lives, whether we’re ready to or not. We allow the earth to break down the glue that held our individual bodies, our individual personalities together, and turn us back into the loose, fetid organic compounds that new life grows out of. The whole daily struggle of feeding and working and maintaining the body is put down. We go back where we came from. We lay down our bodies—our weapons—and we stop fighting.
Gede is the Lwa of both of life’s kouche bookends, as well as sex, that intermediate kouche. Though he doesn’t flow in the way LaSyrenn does, he’s free in his own way, liberated from taking the impermanent seriously because, being dead, he has nothing to lose. He dances, he curses, he makes bawdy jokes, and he heals children (a very striking instance is described in Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen) and assists in childbirth (as described by Karen McCarthy Brown in Mama Lola). He is the fetid, fertile ground that everyone grows out of, everyone rolls around on, and everyone returns to.
In Vodou, kouche is another word for initiation.
There are serious limits on what can be shared about initiation in Vodou. Out of respect, and out of being an exquisitely precompliant neurodivergent rule follower, I’m going to err on the side of caution here and share less than the minimum. To kouche is to go into a closed room and lie down for a set, sacred number of days. To kouche is to sleep, to be born, to die, to wait in the hold of the enslavers’ ship for a fate no one explained, to enter a different dimension.
(New Orleans Manbo Sallie Ann Glassman writes poetically about kouche in her book Vodou Visions.)
Objects, too, kouche as part of sanctification. Drums, mouchwa (handkerchiefs), gad (protective charms), and any other ritual object has to kouche. Again, it’s put to bed, often while nestled in/coated with “food,” for a number of days, the amount of time it takes to attract spiritual forces and come to life.
While anyone or anything is in a state of kouche, that’s when the spirits come to them.
So, without getting into nuts and bolts of the external Vodou tradition today (because I just lack the energy), I invite you to kouche in one of the more everyday senses.
Again, diverging from specific Vodou stuff here, there’s a whole realm of sleep magic. Salvador Dali invented one form of eliciting and remembering hypnogogic hallucinations- those weird, strangely vivid or even lucid pre-dreams you have right as you’re sipping into unconsciousness- by loosely holding a spoon in your hand and dangling your arm off the bed over a metal bowl so the commotion of the spoon falling wakes you up and you can remember (and write down) your dream.
It’s a pretty common practice- and one that my godmother recommended- to keep a journal at your bedside or even under your pillow so you can record dreams as soon as you wake up, before they’re burned away by the light of normal life. I tend to write before I even turn the lights on, scrawling semi-legibly in the dark. Sometimes I mess up and write over the previous night’s dream and can’t read any of it later. But sometimes I look back and find significant dreams I don’t even remember having.
Mugwort is a famously powerful herb that aids in lucid dreaming. I have gone to bed with mugwort in my pillow seeking closure in a relationship that ended abruptly a couple of times, and both times dreamed of a heart-to-heart conversation with the person I wanted to reconcile with. In some climates, mugwort is invasive, but I believe here in central Texas it is grown intentionally without taking over.
I’ve also used dream work to explore plant spirits. I went to bed with a sprig of wormwood in my pillow, asking for more information about her, and dreamed of a conversation with bright green fairy.
How does the concept of kouche in the nonspecific relate to your spiritual life?
