Thursday 7 November 2013

Letting the mysteries speak for themselves

One of the things that upsets me as a practitioner of a vodou based tradition is the way in which we tend to treat each other.

Google any well known initiate or go on any vodou based forum and I grantee you'll fine one of the following: X doesn't know shit about X, Y hasn't got a 'real' kanzo, he/she is white/gay/etc and therefore can't have any black spirits or initiate in X, my tradition's spirits are better then yours, etc, etc ad nausea.

Outside of forums or in private messages it can get equally bad with people trying to steal initiates or convince others that they haven't been taught properly or that they are somehow less real or less powerful then X.

You know what its boring, its inane and its kinda pathetic. We should have trust in the spirits and God to weed out the wheat from the chaff or have enough confidence not to have to put others down to feel better about themselves. Do we really think that the spirits care more about skin colour, sexuality and ancestry then about what is inside a practitioner and the qualities they have? Do we as vodou practitioners not have enough prejudice and hatred from the outside world without having to worry about what our brothers and sisters are saying or doing behind our backs?

Yes there will be people out there who do things in the wrong way or who spread misinformation or who are just willfully ignorant as to what they should be doing on their path. But it should be up to us as initiates or priest to lead by example not by trying to spread muck and we should have enough trust in our own mysteries to speak for themselves.