Voodoo: Something That Does not Exist (Maelinhon)

“- You know, the Caribbean tradition is very simple! I don’t know what everyone is confused about!
Look: We have Johns, Alexes, Chrises, Maxes and another Alexes (it just so happens), which are divided into just three kinds! Alexes are those Chrises who were brought from Congo, and just Alexes are those from America, don’t get confused, though what is there to confuse…
Johns is a type from Ghana, they open the doors, but not all of them, only the red ones! And the blue ones are opened by the Tylers, but it’s a bit different, it’s complicated there… But the Alexes close the doors behind the Johns, but only when the Johns are from America, and if they are from Africa, they don’t close them, but paint them green. Nathans are divided into 59 kinds, there are also Jennies, and Writing Tables (we don’t know why they are Tables among Johns, but that’s how our oral tradition passes on, and who are we to argue with our ancestors?)… Every Nathan is so different! You know, they are one in the cemeteries and another in the forest… Within the tradition with Nathans they are also called Martins and Chairs. And in the tradition with Ricks – they are Katies. My ancestors were from Alexes, but then they mixed with Martins and now we are Browns. Do not ask… Then John and Alex were taken to America and they became spirits of slaves, but the original Johns and Alexes did not become ones, so we refer them to the tradition of Marys and Red-butt Whistles. And here is a kind of John we evoke in the cemetery, but if we evoke them in the kitchen, it will already be Chrises, as you’ve probably already realized!
As you can see, everything is very simple, it’s elementary even from the perspective of a child. I swear by the gods, what’s there to be confused about?”

You’ve just read an average and brief, metaphorical retelling of every first article about Voodoo traditions on the Internet and books. They all look like this one we prepared above. You read that story and your head already feels like a puffy bloody mess, gradually creeping out of your eyes. You urge to scream and immediately take nitroglycerin. At the same time, you may want to find the author of the article and gracefully end his life so that these sufferings will no longer touch the living and will not offend the dead.

There is simply no information about voodoo. It doesn’t exist. Any question, if you dare to ask, about the methods, foundations and essence of the pantheon and the beings in it, will progressively degenerate into a fierce schizophasia, which is 100% made up of history and tradition. And these ones did so, and those ones called so, and on this land they practiced that… And all the gods of the world forbid you from mistaking even one letter in their sacred historical garbage: they will eat you alive. Compared to this garbage, Lemegeton seems like a treasure trove of useful, clear and logically structured information.

We may recall a moment in Andrzej Sapkowski’s “The Witcher”, where a young knight-whip-cracker wants to fight Geralt and gain glory for himself, but forbids him to attack, otherwise his friends will interfere in the conflict. As a result, the witcher dances around his opponent so gracefully that he falls on his own sword and cuts his own face. Without actually involving Geralt, who technically didn’t touch him. Something, you know, similar I’m going to have to do about the voodoo tradition Why? Because it’s such a thankless, tortured topic, and littered with so much garbage and lies that no matter what term or topic you touch, you’re bound to run into the “friends” of this tradition. They will start explaining to you, arguing furiously, with a huge hysteria about “not voodoo, but santeria, how could you confuse loa and eshu, I don’t get it!”

Therefore, I will write the article intentionally without any use of terminology. Terminology, pantheons, names, history of tradition – this is exactly what hinders us in this case. Let’s pretend that none of this exists! It hasn’t been invented yet. And let’s talk about what entities are being worked with in the traditions of Africa, the Caribbean, and the USA (or rather, THEY are the ones working with us). The topic is actually mind-turning, and now you’ll see why.

On to the hot topic. The elements.

There is such a curious tendency in the human world – to unify everything and to make less choice in order to cut off access to real information about the world itself. This is a Sansara system pattern of some kind, but in the conditions of the dense world: to blur, distort, silence ALL options, leaving one and only one and to put questions in such a way that it is technically impossible to get the right answers. Do you believe in god? This question, and to be more specific, it’s very structure – does not imply that there is more than one god, i.e. you have no choice even in words. Which god exactly do I believe in? What is his name? Where are the goddesses? Why exactly “believe” and not “cooperate”? If you say yes, you automatically subscribe to your one and only and nameless, if you say no, you are an atheist\heretic\etc. There are no other answer options based on the question, otherwise you have to think with your head, and that causes problems.

And such a bummer verbally and informationally lies in the basement of so many spheres of life in purpose just to lead people in circles and not to let them look around, getting out of the pattern of the system.

The same trap exists with the elements: in the European tradition there are strictly 4 of them, but in reality there are 13 and more. Also, any mathematician will tell you that if an equation has more than half of the unknowns, it is almost impossible to solve it. That is, operating with incomplete data (How many elements can there be? Of course 4! Everybody knows that!), we will endlessly get wrong conclusions. And people get wrong conclusions, build on them dogmas and new conclusions… And nobody moves anywhere and doesn’t understand a damn thing. Just as planned.

Elements are the things that build the Universe, all its objects, animate and inanimate, either consist of particles of elements, or are controlled by them, or both. That is, an element can be regarded as a brick, or it can be regarded as the order in which these bricks are stacked. Atoms and vibrations, if you like.

There are dense elements, there are 5 of them. You can touch with your hands a wooden table or water in a lake – it is Wood and Water, crystallized flows of the elements of Jupiter and Mercury. But how to touch your ego? Can you feel memory with your hands? Is it possible to taste fear? Impossible! So, we should assume that there are also elements that can be called non-dense, ephemeral, however, existing – they build what is not present in the dense form. The world can and should be divided into dense and subtle, and do not try to apply the techniques of one to the other, for example, to look at a thin object with dense eyes. You will not see anything, to the delight of materialists, but you should have literally shifted the semantic focus a little bit and everything would have fallen into place. The key to understanding how the world works lies in just that. In asking the right question.

Patience, voodoo is coming.

The right question is: What are voodoo spirits made of? What are they powered by? What is their mother element? Not what people call them or what songs they sing in their honor. This question leads nowhere. We will not consider all 13+ elements, we are interested in the most subtle ones

If subtle elements exist (for example, the element of Life or the element of Time), then also the elements “even subtler” exist. But is there an element for something that doesn’t exist at all?… Anti-element, the underside. Any object of the Universe goes through a long cycle: first it does not exist at all on any level, then it appears as a project, then it is realized in practice and in reality, then it leaves the reality, and then it returns to non-existence. A woman lived, she had no children (no object), but started wanting to have children (an object appeared in her head). Then she got pregnant (the object literally appeared), then she gave birth to a child (realized). He grew up, grew old, died (ceased to exist), but for some time remained in the memory and minds of people (in the Void). Then 600 years passed and the object has been forgotten, it does not exist in reality again (it again does not exist anywhere).

This is the cycle of functioning of the elements of Nothing and Void. The element of Nothing represents objects that do not exist on any level, such as television and the Internet in the time of ancient Egypt. Generally, both exist in the world, but for an Egyptian who lived 5000 years ago, the Internet was inside the element of Nothing. Then, the idea of creating an Internet network came into someone’s head. In other words, an object from nothingness appeared in the Void: it technically does not exist, but some brave engineer had already got this thing in his head. And here we are, having porn sites exist nowadays.

You get the idea, don’t you? I mean, the Nothing and the Void are the elements that literally generate objects, and endlessly drive them from nothingness to being and back again, from the underside of reality to the front. Want a magic trick? Right now, imagine a small square machine. A black rectangle with 6 red buttons. On top is an antenna and 2 wires. This machine records your dreams if you put the wires, say, under your pillow. You wake up in the morning, and the dream is saved in .avi format on a flash drive, ready for you to watch. Have you imagined it already? 1 minute ago this thing didn’t exist for you, it was in Nothing. And voila – it went from Nothing to Void, I literally pulled it out of nothingness and it appeared on some level of existence using your imagination.
A moment ago nobody even knew that such a thing could be imagined, the object didn’t exist.

So this particular element is what we broadly can define as the Voodoo spirits. Their engine and essence, their base. The entire Voodoo pantheon is elementals and children of the element of Nothing and also their world, which actually does not exist, the time underside of the Universe. In the lands of Africa and Latin America in general, there were more of all voiders and elementals related to them (I have a linguistic problem with the name for the children of Nothing) than in any place, and after the famous events, they literally piled up almost only there, trying to survive at least on some level. That’s why we have such a hodgepodge of Celtic deities, imps, local spirits, and everything in a bunch. The only thing that unites them is the void element in their base.

It’s an interesting picture unfolding, huh? What’s the point of digging into a pantheon that consists of non-existent elementals and gods, and is full of imps whose elemental composition suggests Nothing? What does an imp that functions on a mixture of Nothing and Fire look like, for example…? He’s kind of burning, but he kind of does not exist. And what if he was made of Nothing, Void and Water? And after all, the composition of the elements and the engine are what distinguishes one being from another, everything else is secondary, just external forms.

And, returning to linguistic traps, people’s entities are either gods (status given by people) or demons (engine). Or names in general – he is neither god nor demon, he is Alex, but Alex can be either a penguin in the zoo or a resident of Murmansk. “Are voodoo spirits gods or demons?” I saw such a question online. It’s a typical trap question. God and Demon are like King and Man, Leader and Dog, Pharmacist and Woman. We compare and contrast the cold and the purple, but people paradoxically don’t get stung by anything! Entities are distinguished not by what people call them, but by what they are made of, and by that logic, a demon can be a god if people give it such a status, can’t it? By such a pattern, it’s IMPOSSIBLE to know who is in front of you and who you’re working with at all. “Pharmacist” tells us nothing about a person, “god” tells us nothing about a being. Therefore, the answer to the question “who are voodoo spirits” is to understand their engine, not how they were called by different tribes on the globe and what was attributed to them.

I’m telling ya! (с)

And here, even the most enlightened and chill practitioners have a problem: how to work with something and someone who literally DOESN’T exist? If an object does not exist and functions only in this position, then it is worth thinking about it and imagining it (and even more so, encountering it!), as it will no longer be this object. Hilarious, isn’t it? Elemental of Nothingness, when it comes into contact, manifests himself in reality, which means – it is no longer an elemental, but something else

That is, if you think about this question in any way, if you construct some picture in your head, the essence you are working with simply stops being itself and takes an understandable form, which is not its true form. When you stop thinking about it, it goes back to the underside of reality and becomes itself again. It’s like the Weeping Angels in Doctor Who – they only move and function when you’re not looking at them, but as soon as you start focusing on it and it’s a harmless statue again (Neil Gaiman definitely knew something!). Entities from a non-existent pantheon function in a similar way.

This is the reason why many voiders and beings who were persecuted by the nameless single god looked for shelter from repressions specifically in the Nothing native layers. Over time, the guys got mixed up (there, on the underside), and it turned out to be a pretty motley crowd, with the whole spectrum of beings, from the highest voiders to the lowest imps. Because the pantheon of Nothing is a WHERE, not a WHO. Once again, you have to ask the right questions!

You hear that sound? That’s the garbage mountains falling down. These are the entities, this is their base, this is how they work, that’s it. Sorting out all these pantheons with hundreds of names, statuses, histories is like sorting out the whole of humanity by names instead of species. Of all the things humans work with, the guys from Nothing care the least about the external form of anything. They are not only formless, they are the precursors to the forms of everything you see around you, including your reflection in the mirror. So is there any point in focusing on a name if the object itself literally doesn’t exist in reality…?

These beings live on elements that are almost unnatural here, so they work strictly from the underside of the Universe and hardly ever appear from this side. But they have options available to them that other beings do not, because the underside is only physiologically accessible. This is why voodoo is very often frighteningly effective, and their work is accompanied by colorful fireworks in events: they do not limit themselves to anything, including your physics in general and the general spin of the Tree. They don’t just live outside the understood system, they live outside the visible world and drag from there what is not here. Hence their frantic productivity and disregard for local realities: if it is not here, I will invent it and bring it, and it will be here.

In fact, there are no rulers of this element either. Dalram and their hybrid forms make up the base that we can at least somehow grasp in this pantheon. It’s something like a matryoshka doll: 20 small imps of fire, 10 larger ones who’s engine works on the Void, 5 large ones on the Nothing, and one common prince, which is assembled from them, like a transformer in a movie, into one entity. And people have already called this entity Baron Saturday, either or something. In this disassembled state, part of this guy is running around doing some things, the other part of him doing other things. They are called by the same name, with slight differences in letters (Mirabeau, Marabo, Marobo…), but their external parameters are essentially a puzzle assembled from random pieces of reality. What is found under their hands at the moment, that’s what their face will be. They easily subdue other beings, take on the guises of catholic and other saints, gods, other entities, intercept the channels of egregors… And how can you harm them? They do not exist

(c) Mylene Maelinhon \ Archaic Heart material