Vodou

There’s a Haitian proverb:

mambo (houngan) pa travay pou gran mesi
“Mambo (Houngan) doesn’t work for a big thank you.”

This means not only that good mambos or houngans aren’t doing spiritual work for the adulation of the millions, or for the show of it – but also that they don’t work for free.

There is a distinct difference between charging for one’s time/effort/materials and the prices I see some people charging for their services. I have seen variances of hundreds of percent. I know a houngan who charges less than $50 for a reading that takes him the better part of a day to prepare for; I know another who spends considerably less time, charges several hundred – and gets it.

Is there a difference between charging and overcharging, or is every Vodouisant who asks to be paid for his or her work a bad person?

You get what you pay for, and what you pay for something is not always in money, whether in Haiti or anywhere else.

I cannot attest to knowing a single initiate, “good” or “bad,” who works for absolutely nothing in return, even if that payment is non-monetary in origin.  Everything costs something to somebody.  There is no such thing as free when it comes to the spirits.  If it doesn’t cost you in dollars, it’s going to cost you attention, work, effort or maybe even responsibility.  It WILL cost you something, period.

This is not a bad thing at all.  It is the way the entire universe works.  The Lwa themselves cut deals with people and each other, and sometimes those deals are sealed with money.  If Metres Mambo Ezili Freda tells me that the work I want her to do for me is going to cost me a party I have to pay for in her honor, does that mean she’s a fraud too?  After all, the grocery store isn’t going to accept my undying love and thanks in return for all that champagne and cake…

What I have learned over the years is the sign of a good mambo or houngan that can be seen in the way they price their services is that the good ones ALWAYS work with each individual and that individual’s personal circumstances.

If you really need work done but you cannot afford it, ethical Vodouisants will arrange payment plans,  scale down the work or accept lesser payment.  Sometimes they’ll let you pay for work later, or pay for it in forms that aren’t monetary, if their own finances allow it, and sometimes if they don’t, if Spirit tells them to.

Additionally, during the entire process, they will be honest and up front with you about costs.  If something is going to cost more than it was estimated, they’ll explain why and quickly. You won’t suddenly be told after you have invested in a reading or a work that suddenly it’s now going to cost you another (insert ridiculous amount here), or suddenly that there are MORE problems than the original reading/work revealed that (surprise!) require yet more money.

Just like if you were shopping for a dentist or a guy to fix your plumbing, you have to be savvy.  Ask any potential Vodouisant you are considering to hire to do magical work on your behalf for estimates on that work.  Comparison shop.  Talk to their clients, both the satisfied ones and the unsatisfied ones.   The “good” mambos and houngans sort themselves out fairly quickly if you do this for yourself.

Enough rant for one night, but this is a subject that irritates me on both its extremes:  the one extreme where people think that the more you pay for something the better it must be AND the other extreme, where money is evil and anyone who wants or needs it must also be evil.

People should not assume that just because they paid $2000 for something it’s guaranteed to work when only Bondye can guarantee anything, or, conversely, that a houngan who can barely feed his kids is “bad” if he asks for $50 to spend the next three days working on your problem.  Both extremes are far from the truth.

Last weekend at PantheaCon, I was part of a panel discussion on sacrifice (of all kinds, hosted by Coru Cathubodua). I mentioned at one point during the conversation, when we were talking about the utility and place of animal sacrifice in particular, that “any person who has eaten kosher or halal meats has taken part in animal sacrifice.”

When I got home, I found this article about kosher/halal practices in Denmark waiting for me to read. There are many things to say about it, both from the sacrifice standpoint and also the standpoints of religious and animal rights, but right now, I just wanted to post a link before I lose it.

Denmark Ban on Kosher and Halal Slaughter Comes Into Effect as Minister Says ‘Animal Rights Come Before Religion’

It started with a text.

Hey there was just a bad earthquake in Haiti, is Mami Marie OK?

I was in the car that afternoon, waiting for my downstairs neighbor to come out of the appointment I’d driven her to. One of my initiate daughters, ti-Marie, pinged me with the text. Immediately I phoned my Vodou mother, Mambo Marie; I knew that she had returned from her trip to see the family in Port-au-Prince only a few hours before. I managed to catch her.

“I’ll call,” she said. “I’ll call you back.”

I turned on the car, and the radio news.

None of the news was good. A massive, shallow earthquake had hit near Leogane, right before dinnertime. The only thing the reporters seemed to know was that the airport was “damaged” and that there were reports that the cathedral – and the palace – The Palace? – had fallen down.

That was when the panic set in. The family lakou is in a neighborhood very close to the Palace. And if that big, fancy,  well-built thing had fallen down…

My neighbor came out of the building. I drove home, went upstairs to the apartment I had two floors above hers, grabbed both my phones, and started making calls.

Two days ago, I talked to my Mami (she may be Mambo Marie Carmel to everybody else, but she’ll always be Mami to me), and I asked about how everyone in Haiti was. “Oh they’re fine, but they’re waiting for me for the soup,” she said with a laugh.

Two hundred and ten years ago, everybody was waiting for the soup in Haiti, because soup, at least this soup, is a big deal. It’s called soup joumou, or “winter pumpkin soup,” and it’s the best Haitian soup ever for more than culinary reasons. I give a recipe for soup joumou in my book, Haitian Vodou, but I didn’t have the space to explain why it’s a “lucky soup,” or what the big deal about soup is.

Haiti became an independent nation on January 1, 1804, after almost thirteen unspeakably brutal years of revolution and war. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the successor to Haiti’s liberating general Toussaint L’Ouverture, declared the colony of Saint-Domingue defunct, and renamed the island Ayiti (Haiti in French) after its original Arawak (Taino indigenous language) name.

There are any number of legends about that time. One of them states that soup joumou became a symbol of independence (as well as New Year’s Day) because the French slave owners had forbidden slaves to eat it, and so they shared it with each other as an act of freedom. Is it true? No one really knows anymore, but we do know that as long as people can remember New Years Day/Haitian Independence Day in Haiti, they can remember the soup.

I haven’t forgotten about you! It’s Lent, and closer and closer to Holy Week, that time of year when our Lwa go anba dlo and rest and prepare for the rest of the year. This evening I covered up all our altars in the badji so that they can be rejuvenated over the holy time. We’ll be having a huge party on Miracle Saturday (Easter Saturday) going into Easter Sunday – as the Resurrection occurs in the Catholic faith, so too do the spirits return to the world and make it new. Ayibobo! You’ll see lots more on this and the rest of the imamou.org page after Lent’s over.