Oops, we're also a religious system

[lb_lee]

Mori: Well, it took me a while, but I finished Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. It didn't take me this long because I was bored by it; on the contrary, I took like twenty pages of notes, way more than the other stuff I've been reading lately. I still don't have the guts to take on Jung's The Red Book yet (the last time I tried to read Jung, it was a SLOG), so on to Leslie Desmangles's Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti! And Desmangles, quoting Deren, sums up a big part of why it took us so long to figure out we're also a religious-based system:

The concept of belief in Haiti does not have the same connotation that it does in English (Deren, 1972). The English word belief suggests an intellectual activity by which one may or may not choose to identify with a system of thought. Vodouisants never think of believing in something in the sense of identifying with a system of thought--or, by extension, with a community that affirms such a system [...].

Asked if they believe in the Vodou deities, notes Maya Deren, Vodouisants never reply that they believe in the gods; rather, they answer, 'I serve the lwas,' or 'I obey the Mysteries of the world' (1972, 73-74).The significance of their statements lies in their outlook on the nature of belief in general, for they do not think of religion in abstract terms, but in practical ones. [...] Vodouisants cannot afford the self-surrender of mysticism, nor can they permit themselves the luxury of an idealism that seeks to mask the miseries and frustrations of their existence. Their needs are too immediate for that. Their religion must satisfy actual needs rather than merely invite them to high-flown intellectual exercises of theology. Deren observes that they have neither the time, the energy, or the means for inconsequential activity. She notes that in Haiti, religion 'must do more than give moral sustenance; it must do more than rationalize [the Vodouisant's] instinct for survival when survival is no longer a reasonable activity. It must do more than provide a reason for living; it must provide the means of living. It must serve the organism as well as the psyche. It must serve as a practical methodology, not an individual hope. In consequences, the Haitian thinks of his religion in working terms.'

(Desmangles, pg. 4-5)

We were forever getting hung up on the hook of, "you don't BELIEVE this nonsense, do you?" and thus wasting time trying to figure out our beliefs when they were irrelevant. We were putting the cart before the horse. It is not our intellectual systems of thought that create our religious experiences; it is through living, working through, and understanding the experiences that we build appropriate actions surrounding them. The actions come first; the abstractions, the boxes humans make to put stuff in, come later.

So much for origins! Every time we ask, the answer is "yes and." "Yes, you're a soulbonder, AND you've got the DID/DDNOS/OSDD depending who's looking at you, AND you're gonna have to deal with that religion shit, which will conveniently fail to mesh with others' so you'll just have to make it up as you go along... good luck, kid!"

Comments

Re: Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

There is some of that in Jambalaya.

The African Diaspora traditions are challenging to study from outside. Less has been written about them than most religions, because folks don't care to talk with outsiders much and prefer oral tradition internally. But there is some good stuff, and with some of it online now that makes it a little easier to find.

One thing that will probably fascinate you: some of the lwa or orishas are downright notorious for mounting nosy white people who show up to study or gawk and don't really believe. Like mount the camera man, run him up a tree, then dismount and leave him there. Sometimes it makes a lot of extra work for the houngans, trying to talk the lwa out of the more far-out pranks. Ghede and Legba have both been mentioned doing this. Sometimes they do weird shit to members too, but people know how to handle that better. Some other lwa are much fussier and will only mount their own devotees.

Another interesting feature: Most of the lwa / orishas are actually systems with dozens of individuals packed together, each with their own subspecialty and quirks within the general sphere of influence. Worship while alive aligns a person with a particular "head" whose work they do. Those with exceptional achievements may become known for returning after death to continue that work by helping their descendants or other worshippers. I've seen guides that listed dozens of versions of a lwa, but I would bet it's more like hundreds at the very least. Many are local and just don't get written down. In fact in those traditions, every Voudoun or whatever cemetery has its own Ghede and Brigitte (or other titles meaning similar things) from the first man and first woman buried there.