Why Vodou?

No one asks me this question to my face but I hear it whispered behind my back. Isn’t it devil worship? Aren’t you afraid of being possessed by demons? Aren’t you afraid of going to hell? It’s infernal, it’s barbaric, it’s savage, it’s inferior, you’re being deceived. No, it’s mine and I’m being awakened.

Even at the tender age of five I was aware of thing I could see being the obvious part of a triumvirate, the results of complementary opposites coming together to make something possessing the qualities of the original duo, but being altogether different than either. I followed my father’s lead and sought this out in the Bible and the Quran and while they both alluded to this elemental dynamic they loathed to say it.

The Bible said that we were all the spiritual children of Abraham. I said, “What happened to the actual children?” Over the years I’ve heard every answer from they were dead and gone to they were brought to America as slaves. The strongest claim came from an enclave of Eastern Europeans especially given that everything we know about Abraham’s children essentially came from them. It was a shame. Not that the Ashkenazi were Abraham’s children but that I was not. The Bible was a story about someone else. See, my history teachers taught me that I had no more history, no more identity, no more humanity, than a feral dog before slavery. Indeed, I owed it to that peculiar institution that I was even able to form words and be a Christian. These people weren’t me. They couldn’t tell me who I was. They couldn’t tell me why.

I began to search all over the world for a spiritual identity, that didn’t regard my ethnic identity as something to be scrapped of the bottom of one’s shoe. My problem was that I was a purist. Buddhism and Taoism could not be divorced from their Hindu and Chinese traditional origins. I could not belong there. Al Islam was itself an ethnic hierarchy and even Wicca meant that I was at best serving Gods that only tolerated my presence. I even tried atheism, but then I’d have to deny not only a God (obvious to me since I was 5) but also that I have an “ephemeral aspect”. A soul. You could say that lasted all of half an hour if you ignore the fact that the last 25 minutes of me being an atheist was me panentheist. But throughout all of that searching there was one place I was actually discouraged from looking and for a long time I thought that I should avoid looking there too.

I had come across the Mami Wata Healing Society around 2002 and dismissed it as some ridiculous pan African mermaid cult. By 2005 I had tracked down my ancestors to Fulton, GA and Mount Vernon Plantation in Fairfax, VA. I had learned that Mami Wata was associated with Vodou and that Vodou was not Dolls and needles and flesh eating corpses shambling or sprinting single-mindedly after hapless shopping mall patrons. It was about your mother and father, and their mothers and their fathers, and their mothers and their fathers. It was about a God so transcendent that you can’t comprehend it, yet so quintessentially omnipresent you can’t help but recognize Them when you see Them. A faith that exalts the Feminine as boldly as it does the Masculine without inverting their natures to achieve the evident equity.

In Vodou, my prophets and heroes were my mothers and fathers. And my saints and guardians were the Spirits of Earth, of Air, of Fire, of Iron, of the Wild Places of the Spirit World, and of Water. Especially Water. In Vodou I was carried back to the beginning of mankind and made to see how we are all kinsmen. More importantly I was made to see how I was meant to relate to God. A God that was so obvious even a five year old could see It.