Today on a Golden Dawn group Sack of Ships, by all appearances a true aspirant with many good questions, posed a question to me and while I responded onlist I thought I would also answer the question here because it is a great question and after sending my response I thought it would make a great blog post and so I am rewriting and expanding it. I will quote it here.
"Jason, I have been following your blog lately. I am curious as to why you are exploring this aspect of occultism in your daily magical practice. What does the voodoo path offer that hermetic magic doesn't?
Jordan"
A good question is it not? It is challenging to come up with a response to these sorts of questions because at their core it addresses the Powers of the Sphinx in a lot of good ways. In particular- To know thyself. If you can't come up with a reason why you are doing something then why are you doing that particular action? What does it say about you in particular?
My first exposure to "real" magick was Donald Michael Kraig's first edition of Modern Magick. I jumped in whole hog and it led me on a wonderful adventure where I came in contact with a "representative" of the A:.A:. and linked up. I was really, really drawn to Thelema from the first moment I read about Crowley in Don's work. After learning about Thelema and reading through a series of books that Don suggested I made the mentioned contact and further research led me into Kenneth Grant and his magical offspring like Nema, Linda Falorio and Louis Martinie. I was drawn to the "darkness" which is a term I use lightly to describe their works. I still love their work mind you but in the last decade much darker work has emerged. Of all the cohorts of Mr. Grant that leaped out at me, none moreso than Michael Bertiaux and dammit, the only references to his work you could find were in Kenneth Grant as at this time the Voudon Gnostic Workbook was out of print! As I have related I leapt at the reprint and the rest is history as I have related. What I haven't really related is the "why" of esoteric voudon.
I was always drawn to the grimoires as well, and as I have relayed, David Beth once said to me that the VGW was similar to Goetia and that played to me very deeply. As I read the LHG portion of the book for a second time and keeping that in mind I saw it all in a new light and understood why I felt so drawn to Esoteric Voudon.
These spirits call to you. You feel them nagging at you, singing to you, trying to seduce you. You have to answer that call in some way no? It becomes an obsession. I started using the grimoire and I didn't really understand why, I just knew I had to.
As I started understanding the Renaissance and other classical magical texts and descriptions of the cosmology of the western system I started to see the links in Esoteric Voudon with the European school of magic that pre-dated the Golden Dawn. I started to see the some of the rituals of the LHG worked similarly to the grimoires. I saw elemental spirits and as I started studying the Monastery of Seven Rays lessons I started to see working with the Planetary spirits and the Zodiacal spirits.
I had been working with the GD system for years with all its unnecessary complexity, flashing colors etc. I wasn't so much into the initiation rituals per se, but the ritual forms were brilliant and used quite effectively by Crowley. The formulas of holy names etc. infuse the rituals of Thelema. The Pentagram ritual forms the core of Crowley's system along with his design for the magical circle. I was also starting to really connect the dots on magick before the GD not really resembling the Golden Dawn tradition much at all. It was in reading Aaron Leitch's Secrets of the Magical Grimoires that I really started seeing the vast differences and that the Golden Dawn Tradition was more an invention of the comparably modern era.
Reading Aaron's wonderful book I started seeing the parallels in Bertiaux's system continue to abound. The system of Esoteric Voudon has little in relationship with the Golden Dawn- very, very little. But in seeing the Neo-Platonist views of the cosmos and in relation to the Hermetic Tradition, how the Shaman transitioned into the Priest and King, I started seeing the parallels more deeply and saw that Bertiaux's system of magick, aside from not using the seals of the spirits as seen in the classical medieval and Renaissance texts had more in common with Agrippa and Pseudo-Agrippa than the Golden Dawn!
That out of the way, at the heart of esoteric voudon is a system that is, I hate to use the word untainted because I love the GD, but it fits. Not to say I think the GD is a pox on occultism, its not, its influential for a reason. It works and quite well. That said there is a purity in the simplicity. I am more drawn to the methods they use than the darkness some see in Bertiaux's work. I am not at all drawn to exploring the "qlippoth" as many drawn to this system seem to be. There are intense practical applications in the system akin to Goetia and also deeply spiritual applications akin to angelic Magick. The simplicity of using the system for the planetary style work is simpler than Trithemius but as potent. The practical applications are simpler than goety but as effective. The spiritual development practices are akin to the purification processes of the grimoires and as intense. While it sounds like the system is easier, it is as demanding as grimoire practices if not in the gathering of the materials, then in the personal work expected. Sacrifice is entirely different than traditional forms of voodoo as well. There is an intense exchange of energy going on, reciprocal as the practitioner is purified, similar amounts of energy to the amount put into the grimoire practices in finding the materials for the equipment!
In choosing Esoteric Voudon I moved into an older paradigm that spoke to me. A dirty, well not so dirty, secret, well not so secret, is that I possess an obsession with the Fraternitas Saturni of Germany. The magic practiced in the F:.S:. is more classical ritually than the Golden Dawn. While GD ritual made its way into the Brotherhood, it wasn't as dominate as Eugen Grosche had developed a unique view of things more influenced by classical occultism than the works of the Master Therion, whose influence and importance to the modern, Golden Dawn based Western Ceremonial Tradition is massive and key in how important that system has become. In Germany not much of the Master Therion's work was being translated and so the magic of the F:.S:.developed almost in a vacuum and the system practiced was largely based on the grimoires and the work of Cornelius Agrippa. In cultivating this obsession I was also able to see in Esoteric Voudon the core of the pre-GD western magical practices! In the Brotherhood was a system mostly "untainted" by the Golden Dawn.
So it isn't a choice of why Voudon over Hermetic magick. It is a question of defining Hermetic magick. Esoteric Voudon is Hermetic magick.
*copy paste always fucks up my formatting... Fucking fuck fuck two ducks
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