Menye vɔ, menye vodou

"If there is no blood, there is no Vodou". It's as simple as that. Sacrifice is specific. It is not commerce where you give what you have in exchange for service. It is a reflection of your need. Your faith and need must be so great that you will exhaust this resource to secure it. It is not the resource you choose to give, but instead it is the resource asked of you. Perhaps it is gold. Perhaps it is a certain number of stones of a certain color, shape, type or texture. Perhaps it is livestock.

When it is life, when it is blood that the vodous want then it is vɔ. Vodou doesn't sanitize our life. When we get the six piece chicken wing dinner from Popeye's we get to be divorced from cost of those wings beyond the strips of colored paper we exchange them for. The vodous remind us that those wings are is three lives. Lives lost to satiate our hunger or excess. Lives lost to hands that had no respect for them.

While anyone can make gbedoɖa, kɔ aha ɖí, or nunana(prayer, libation, and offering, respectively), only someone trained and initiated to the knife can offer up vɔ. It's not just a matter of knowledge and understanding. It's the qualities of purity and authorization as well.

There is much that goes into making sacrifice, more than can be guessed at. So unless you are properly authorized to do so, do not make vɔ.