Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Let's begin with the thing that must be said first: almost everything you have been told about Vodou is wrong. The Hollywood Voodoo — dolls stuck with pins, zombies, sinister sorcerers serving some dark master — is a colonial invention. It was constructed carefully and deliberately by those who needed to justify the enslavement and subjugation of African peoples by making their spiritual traditions appear monstrous. It worked. It still works. The word "voodoo" has become a synonym for irrationality in the English language. The actual tradition is something entirely different. Vodou (the most widely accepted English spelling, derived from the Fon word vodun meaning "spirit" or "deity") is a living, complex, deeply sophisticated system of spiritual practice that developed among enslaved Africans in the Caribbean — primarily in what is now Haiti — as a synthesis of West African religious traditions (particularly from Dahomey and Yorubaland), Kongo-Ang...