Esoteric Voudon & Lucky Hoodoo

So what is Esoteric Voudon? While some proponents of the system like to think of it as traditional Voodoo, it is not and is only tangentially related. The system is a highly idiosyncratic system that requires a lot of personal assimilation and implementation of the concepts. Many of the modern authors on the old school systems of grimoire magick place a strong emphasis on developing your own system of magical development and this is readily apparent in the system of Esoteric Voudon.

Michael Bertiaux was a Theosophist & Episcopalian minister before he moved to Haiti in 1964 where he was initiated into Haitian Voodoo practices by the Jean-Maine family. The system was heavily influenced by Martinism & forms of French Freemasonry and purports to descend from a Papus derived charter for O.T.O. activity based on his charter to operate the O.T.O. in French speaking countries. The charter was issued to the Jean-Maine family and they formed the Ordo Templi Orientis Antiqua in 1921. In this environment there came a fusion of various elements of Haitian Voodoo and European systems of Hermetic and Gnostic practices and teaching. Working in close cooperation to this system is another order called the La Coulevere Noire, the Black Snake Cult. La Coulevere Noire, or LCN for short, teaches advanced Afro-Atlantean magical techniques. Working with this system is precluded by studying the 4 year courses of the Monastery of 7 Rays. Several other traditions and gnostic groups are also fused into the tradition through various connections.

This all sounds rather complicated doesn't it? In fact it is quite simple. The first four years, the Monastery courses precede work with the LCN. These are not hard and fast periods of time, but the courses are quite encyclopedic and presented in 2-3 pages in each lesson starting with very basic Hermetic ideas and shifts in perspective that allow the chela to learn to let go of past patterns and start to see the occult world around them and purifying their aspiration. The first 16 lessons actually expand understanding of  the Emerald Tablet of Hermes beyond the scope that most people who practice magick understand the practices they are embarking upon. In fact, they quite easily open up a better channel of communication. I highly suggest finding the lessons online and studying those first 16 lessons in depth and integrating them into your pysche.

Following those four years one begins to work with the materials of the LCN, based on the foundations created in the Monastery courses. This is where much of Mr. Bertiaux's work in the infamous Voudon Gnostic Workbook derives from.  Overall the system is under the umbrella of the O.T.O.A. while also remaining separate to an extent. In ways the various "organizations" do not matter in regards to working the system and feel rather superfluous to the whole. Similar in many respects to the three orders of the A.'.A.'. system, the G.'.D.'., R.'.C.'. and S.'.S.'. they all fuse under one name, the A.'.A.'. This is the best way to think of the system and wrap your head around all of this information. The early Monastery lessons in fact, make no reference to the Lwa or spirits of Esoteric Voudon.

Why am I prattling on about the system of order rather than Esoteric Voudon itself? While one can work with the materials outside of the system itself, without making a formal connection to the O.T.O.A. and dependent orders one isn't really working the system. They aren't forming the same links, receiving the empowerments of the system that I will get into in a later post.

The Lwa are formed in families of spirits and these families are idiosyncratic and tied directly to the O.T.O.A. and working exclusively with their initiates. I've written in the past about egregore and how that concept works but to recap, each organization has an energy that fuels it's rituals. Self-initiation into that particular egregore is impossible and a similar explanation occurs here. One can work with the material in the Voudon Gnostic Workbook for example, but without having experienced the initiation and empowerments of the O.T.O.A. system one is not making the exact same link and instead is formulating what could be seen as an inferior link to related spiritual forces. By inferior I mean not as intimate a connection as the proper energies aren't channeled and become colored by the inexperience of the operator. This makes the experience itself no less valid, but it isn't exactly the energies and experiences written in Bertiaux's work. The analogy isn't perfect but the similarity is there nonetheless. If you want to work with Bertiaux's Voudon Gnostic Workbook, it's there for that but a lot won't make sense or work the intended way without the Monastery course work laid out in the first four years. I know many people who read the Voudon Gnostic Workbook, not knowing that it is advanced work in the system and compare it to Golden Dawn, Thelema and derived movements think "this guy is bat-shit crazy" when in fact they haven't experienced the foundations upon which the system is based. They are comparing it based on their experiences with Magick in the Golden Dawn derived movements. When you have the foundation from the Monastery courses, the more wild elements of the Voudon Gnostic Workbook make sense within the cosmology they are developed from.

So what my long winded explanation of Esoteric Voudon is expressing is that it is a highly idiosyncratic, complex system of working derived from sources in Haiti and influenced by the French Gnostic & Freemasonic movement. Further elements of Theosophy, Shintoism, Thelema and yes... Lovecraft make their way into the system creating a unique and very, very powerful system of Voudon initiation that doesn't resemble traditional Voodoo practices but no less works with the Lwa in a highly specialized manner. Many proponents of Voodoo are quick to point out that Bertiaux's work doesn't represent traditional Voodoo and I concur, it doesn't. It represents Esoteric Voudon. Nevermind what Oberon Zell says in his endorsement on the back of the book!

The Voudon Gnostic Workbook is the primary work by Michael Bertiaux and was originally collected and published by Herman Slater at the Magical Childe bookstore in New York with the second edition being issues by Weiser Publishing in Maine. The presentation is rather arhcaic, looking like fascimile reprints of the material created with the original typewriter, photocopies compiled together by theme and issued. Much of the lessons are quite confusing but fascinating and inspiring in their creativity and become less confusing as time and experience with the material and understanding of the system becomes synthesized. It isn't a collection of rituals per se and that is what results in the confusion. To use this book as the material was intended one must have a foundation in the practices of the O.T.O.A. system of organizations and how they work magick. Like the old grimoires, there is something missing in the texts but unlike those ancient texts, we have the keys accessible for how to use the material and also like the old grimoires, most magicians these days have taken the material and used it to create their own systems.

What is most important about this post though isn't the advanced material in the book. What is most important is the beginning of the book. Here we have, over the course of about 35 or so pages a small, powerful grimoire working with what Bertiaux calls the Hoodoo spirits with a simple mythology deriving from Atlantean cultures. With this grimoire you are working with the spirits of the sea and the dead and the rituals and practices presented are there to strengthen this connection. Like the grimoires much of the material presented is focused on material matters, money, gambling, finding lovers, mind control and generally changing luck from bad to better. Wrapped in these rituals are sound spiritual practices to work with the spirits in ways more than mundane, which in my experiences with these practices mean much more than the mundane rituals to control your boss or lover's mind to get what you want out of them.

A flaw of the Voudon Gnostic Workbook is that it doesn't include the various magical diagrams and sigils required to use the magick contained herein. The O.T.O.A. has made these available in a pdf if you know who to talk to. They were supposed to be included in the Weiser edition and nobody knows what happened that they weren't included. Hopefully, a future edition, with a cleaner presentation and careful editing will be made available. This book really deserves a nice, cleaned up edition. If you have the book and not the diagrams needed for the material feel free to comment or send me an e-mail and I will get the pdf out to you.

For those that do not have the Voudon Gnostic Workbook (VGW from here on), the system of the grimoire is very simple to use. It uses colored candles and a glass of water or various alcohols with different diagrams to produce "magick machines", Bertiaux's idiosyncratic way to refer to talismans. He uses a lot of terminology to make this sound like a spiritual technology, which it is but you'll see terms like Voudontronics, machines, etc. which is his manner of expressing older ideas in new ways. But this isn't yet another book of candle magick. It's far more powerful and serious than it would first appear.

Initially you only need a blue & black candle and a glass or water. The grimoire starts with a short dedication ritual that is a form of self-initiation into working with the spirits where you petition them to help you in your work. The wording is very friendly and simple, allowing no room for error in understanding intent. You're asking these spirits for help, plain and simple. When I initially decided to work with the VGW in 2010, I'd possessed the book for a couple years and read it a few times and saw Lucky Hoodoo as being quite plebian. It was after a conversation with the then Sovereign Grand Master of the O.T.O.A., David Beth, that I rethought my opinion of the Lucky Hoodoo and set about acquiring the materials for the dedication ritual. Once I performed the dedication ritual I felt a bit of peace and more importantly I felt like I was doing something I was supposed to be doing! I felt at home.

It would be a short while before I took the next step. I needed to find a red, yellow and green candle to continue to work with the system laid out in Lucky Hoodoo and one would think that finding candles of those three colors would be no problem even in a small town on the Ohio River... I was wrong. I looked all over town for those candles and eventually gave up and when I had the time off from work I journeyed to the nearest city with a Hobby Lobby. Why Hobby Lobby? It's owned by a Christian fundamentalist!! Insanity! You know what? For a store run by a fundamentalist family they sure do have a lot of neat stuff for building magical implements and not only a full rainbow of colored candles (except orange?!?) but often they sell them half off and stocking up on colored candles for any system of magick is an inexpensive and fun affair. The only flaw is that they aren't purely of the color, being a colored wax coating that covers a white candle but in small town Ohio you get what you can get. Since coming to Detroit I've found a Botannica that carries fully colored candles of each of the colors needed to work with the Lucky Hoodoo Grimoire (LHG, the things are getting to be too much to type right now!).

The request ritual is short and sweet, just like the dedication ritual. Much like traditional grimoires you have a request which in this case you write it out on a piece of paper or some sort of card and place on the altar between the east and the central candle, which is the black one. You open the four quarters with a one sentence invocation each of  the candles, light the central black candle, consecrate a glass of water and then the request that is written out. You then petition the spirits with a short, silent prayer and observe silence for several minutes, meditating on your request and noting anything that occurs. No full materialization etc. but I will say, that even during the dedication ritual and request ritual I have experienced mild forms of possession in my heads and had minor visionary experiences, flashes of images of a spiritual nature.

This set up is deceptively simple. Looking at this altar you simply see a very simple lay out, no special implements like a wand or dagger etc. Definitely no machete as used by the La Place and Houngan in traditional Voodoo practices. But in those candles you have represented, though you don't realize it, the five special families associated with Esoteric Voudon. The colors do not follow the Golden Dawn system either, Yellow is not air for example. No flashing colors. Also, in the center, the black candle, representing Atibon Leghba, you have the crossroads, very discreetly hidden in the center of the altar with the five candles forming the veve of Leghba! How ingenious!  Another matter is here, in this simple ritual, much like the LBRP in the Golden Dawn derived traditions, the groundwork and format for much larger, more complex and beautiful ritual works that in the LHG you only get an inkling of in later rituals but their performance opens up the operator to seeing just how this material can be developed following this simple altar layout and simple ritual. As you get deeper into the grimoire and the ritual for "controlling other people's minds" you are far enough along so that when you get to the Contraite chapter there isn't a full ritual to consecrate the talisman you created but a suggestion to use the altar set up and format of the mind control ritual!

The mind control ritual I have not done in it's entirety. The one time I used elements of it because a friend was in danger and I thought of it as a way to help out the situation and stop the matter from getting out of hand. I didn't try to control my friend's mind in any way, I was dealing with the aggressor and changing events so that precarious events would fail to occur. The ritual consists of making a magical square out of a person's name and then performing a ritual with flavored brandy's in place of the water, which flavor depending on the goal of the ritual. I performed a much abbreviated version with no brandy of any sort projecting my intent out into the universe and the operation was successful but there was serious repercussions in the form of what I call blowback. Blowback is when an operation is performed in a rushed and incomplete manner and a "success" still works out but there are repercussions that occur in the operators life. A changing of luck. In this case, not performing the ritual properly resulted in blow back that nearly cost me a friendship as I went into a series of situations that were directly related to the working itself and not properly performing the ritual. I honestly feel that the majority of "ordeals" can be bypassed by doing the full process of the ritual properly, any ritual, and covering all your bases. It is fine to modify the language of a ritual to better suit your own idiosyncracies but another to think that you can bypass the safeguards of the operation itself. Some of the old grimoirists strongly suggest doing the workings as written in the books and they are getting wonderful results but I am not so strict about it. If the same thing can be said in fewer words and have more meaning for the operator then those modifications are just fine but the first handful of times an operation is attempted, it is best to work with the ritual or ceremony as written until you get an idea what each aspect of an operation represents and is intended to do in the grand scheme of the working performed.

I mention this to stress the importance of working with grimoires & rituals  as written until you understand the feel for what you are doing. You have to synthesize and really develop a strong, confident sense of what you are doing before you start mucking around with things. The steps exist for a reason and the authors are writing from their own experiences. You won't truly understand what you are working with until you've performed the operation enough times and memorized it to really be able to modify and make it your own. Some people argue that the rituals are just skeletons to be modified and encourage beginners to do just that with the end result being that the beginner doesn't understand what the ritual is intended to accomplish and a much weaker result occurs. Even with something like the Star Ruby of Aleister Crowley, you really have to be grounded in the LBRP (with very few exceptions) to understand the processes of the Star Ruby on top of understanding the energies of the NOX signs and their order of performance! The latter aspect people do not get right, lifting it from the Ritual of the Mark of the Beast rather than researching the signs and their attributions and understanding what the energies they are invoking represent and then they muck the energies all around. Astonishingly it is rare that anyone figure out that the order of the NOX signs is given in the Book of Lies with the Star Sapphire ritual! Modifying something without understanding the purpose or what the energies are renders the ritual less effective at best and disastrous at worst!

The Lucky Hoodoo grimoire, as I have pointed out, is deceptively simple. The very basics allow it to be extremely simple and with a proper understanding of the most basic uses of this ritual set up, it becomes clear how the material in Lucky Hoodoo can be used to perform many of the types of workings discussed in the rest of the VGW, from time travel to lycanthropic experiences and empowerments. Subtle modifications to the rituals in Lucky Hoodoo can be used to expand the material for group workings and more elaborate rituals, ideas for which can be found in David Beth's Voudon Gnosis Second Edition issued by Fulgur Press. Contained in this book are more advanced rituals focusing on group work and/or empowerment of the individual magician. With these rituals one is working with the families of the LCN by name.

Working with Lucky Hoodoo is a lot of fun if done in a carefully considered manner. Any type of grimoire and ritual magick can result in blowback is one isn't careful and considering the spirits in Lucky Hoodoo and Esoteric Voudon on the same level as Goetic spirits is a mistake. These spirits are more helpful and friendly, if you take care of them, they take care of you in a reciprocal relationship that will prove of great benefit to the operator. Will every ritual be successful? No. I've had the spirits outright refuse to perform the task I requested and then didn't understand why the answer was "no" until a few days later when conditions in my life changed to show me why the task could not be performed as requested and I've had times where they've agreed to a request but circumstances against me to claim the object of the request because of blowback.

Like the old grimoire writers of today, my stance on using Banishing rituals like the LBRP with this material is simple. Don't do it. As the authors on the old grimoires are saying today, that banishings are unnecessary in working with the grimoires when they are performed properly, I am saying the same. It isn't part of the system as presented and what we consider banishing today was an innovation of the Golden Dawn based on aspects of Eliphas Levi's Transcendental Magic. There is no need for Golden Dawn style banishings in the work of Esoteric Voudon. I am not saying don't do your practices if you have the LBRP etc. as a daily magical routine, I do, I am saying in conjunction with this material it is absolutely unnecessary. You are inviting these spirits into your life, to participate in the activities of your daily routine and with your family and rudely ejecting them with a banishing ritual? Would you eject your favorite uncle from your home in such a rude manner? The interesting thing about Lucky Hoodoo is that the rituals are structured similarly to the old grimoire traditions and considering the influence that these traditions had on Eliphas Levi, who in his introduction to the VGW, Courtney Willis, Sovereign Grand Master Absolute of the O.T.O.A., cites as an important influence on Esoteric Voudon, it makes sense.

I am including some links here to materials related to Esoteric Voudon that I think the reader should check out along with a summary of the book itself.

The Voudon Gnostic Workbook is the main sourcebook available to the public on these ideas but is also quite advanced aside from the Lucky Hoodoo grimoire. It appears more complicated than it really is and yet, it has inspired many people since it was originally released in 1989. People like Grant Morrison, writer of the Invisibles and some of the Chaos Magick authors. Elements of it influenced T Allen Greenfeld and his Points Chaud work and are an integral part of his Congregational Illuminism movement. All are definitely worth at least checking out for ideas on how to work with some of the material in the book.

Voudon Gnostic Workbook

Next is Syzygy by Tau Palamas, a student of Esoteric Voudon and the Monastery of 7 Ray. In this work Palamas examines the material of the Monastery and his experiences with it.

Syzygy

David Beth actually did two editions of this next book. The first edition was released by Scarlet Imprint and was an expansion of Beth's essay on the VGW in their Howlings book, collecting essays by various people on their work with various grimoires in the modern day. The first edition is now extremely rare and quite expensive. It sold out very quickly. It is much shorter than the second edition, now also out of print. The second edition is greatly expanded and has a handful of rituals to perform and also includes some of Beth's own work with his S.V.G., the Societe Voudon Gnostique. Much of the material is focused on his work with the S.V.G. and some have complained it reads as an advertisement for a group that is extremely selective in their membership but when comparing it to Magick in Theory & Practice or The Book of Thoth, it is no more an advertisement than those two books and will bear much fruit in the sense of inspiration and examination. This book will make you rethink magick in a big way.

Voudon Gnosis

As a fun thing and to support my brother's work, Sean Woodward has produced a tarot called the Carrefour (Crossroads Tarot) that focuses on the spirits worked with in the Voudon Gnostic Workbook. These are some beautiful cards, based in part on much of the material in the Monastery's first year course.

Carrefour Tarot