I've tried a few times to write this post at the request of a few correspondents interested in Voudon Gnosis. Each time I hit a mental road block. It is too long, too descriptive etc. Sometimes it was regurgitative bile that I wouldn't put on a facebook post! So after several months and promises, I write this for You Sylph and Mr. Plisken!
First things first and this is most important: while How to Become a Big Lucky Hoodoo, or the LHG, is part of the Voudon Gnostic Workbook, it does not initiate one into the Voudon Gnostic Continuum of Rev. Michael Bertiaux. What it does do is bring you to the attention of the Hoodoo spirits. Bertiaux refers to them as the spirits of the dead & the sea but essentially these are the local spirits where you live and their power goes back in a chain to the most ancient civilizations including Atlantis.
*Gasp*
*Horror*
*Shock*
"Did he just say... Atlantis???"
Yes, yes I did. It is right there in the first lesson.
"Absurd! Preposterous! He shall face our ridicule and obnoxious taunting!"
And I retort: why is this such an absurd notion when one looks at the classical grimoires? The classics are filled with mythology and absurdities! Claims of making flying carpets, turning an item instantly into gold and other such matters that were they taken literally everybody would be using them and we'd have an economic collapse from all the gold turds people would be making! Mythologies? Is Atlantis anymore preposterous than the Bible?
No, what we have here in critics of Bertiaux's work is a double standard. While on the one hand we are expected to accept that in order to work the classics we have to enact a shift in consciousness so that we feel, literally and completely, that the mythologies of these grimoires is absolute Truth, with a capital T.
The matter with Bertiaux's work though is people look at it and think "Oh my god, this is insane, what madness possessed this man?" and write it off as fantasy on the part of the author.
There is reason for that and it boils down to three things.
1. The Golden Dawn
2. Traditional Voodoo
3. Southern Rootwork/Conjure/Hoodoo practices
I will now address each in their turn.
1. The Golden Dawn
The pollution of HOGD style teaching befowls the whole of the western tradition. Yes my language is strong in saying this and there is a reason. First I will clarify that I, as readers of my blog are well aware, come from a background in the branches of the A:.A:. and so I have lots of experience with Golden Dawn derived magical practices going back for twenty years. I had the same "banish, banish, banish" mentality that many of those practitioners develop due to the lack of understanding of the original GD instructions on the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram. I was immersed in that style of magick. It hinders my development in the Monastery of 7 Rays to this day as I break down that style of thought.
But why do I call it a pollution?
Aleister Crowley is probably the most influential magician of the 20th century, almost closely by Austin Osman Spare, with his influence on Chaos Magick as well as Kenneth Grant & his followers and then a distant third being Franz Bardon. Crowley was steeped in the Golden Dawn and his work became the stone upon which all magical traditions developed from his time until the modern era. Reading the rituals of Gardnerian Witchcraft you see corrupted quotes from Liber XV The Gnostic Mass forming the corpus of the body. Crowley's influence on post 1920s magick is thick, reaching into Chaos Magic, Wicca, Ogdoadic traditions and even the rewrites of ancient grimoires for modern users.
On top of that was the Golden Dawn attitude that the grimoires were filled with blinds, didn't work or were the blackest of black magick. Many modern magicians don't look into them as anything more than collections of spirits to choose for their own "low magick" operations to get new girlfriends, riches and other mundane concerns that I dare not criticize.
While some modern traditions are more embracing of the grimoires, very few try to operate them as written, writing their own "code" in order to run those "operating systems". Read that sentence again and you'll see another pollution of the Golden Dawn.
"Wait, what do you mean?"
AHA! What I mean is the unintentional influence that underscores the Golden Dawn: Israel Regardie. Regardie latched onto Crowley's introductory essay in his edition of the Goetia, "An Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic". Regardie underscored the idea of magick as a sort of therapeutic practice and used psychological models to explain the processes of magick. This extended to every form of magick that one can operate rather than just the initiatic/alchemical processes that the psyche of the magician undergoes. Spirits became fully aspects of the shadow or unconscious mind etc. tearing the heart of Spirit out of magick. While this isn't a true Golden Dawnism, Regardie was the single biggest source for Golden Dawn revival orders into the 00s when other authors, not taught by Regardie began to write and restore elements to the tradition more true to the source.
But the damage was done. I want to note, as I have said on this blog in the past, that I don't think Regardie is the devil. Right now his work is going underground but I feel in a decade or so there will be a revival of interest in his work as the barnacles of his former influence are shaken off and his work is reappraised as Regardie as opposed to sourcework for the Golden Dawn tradition.
What Regardie's influence led to though, in the overall sense, was extrapolation of his models into all aspects of magick. Rituals and spirits became "programs" etc, But I have digressed.
The Golden Dawn derived traditions have become so pervasive that in the modern magician, most of us raised up on Kraig's Modern Magick (an excellent manual by the way), that when we see something so foreign to that style of magick, it is rejected outright. This goes for people who learned magick in Wicca, Thelema and similar schools such as BOTA, FLO, & SOL. Lucky Hoodoo bares no resemblance to these systems. But it does bare resemblance to something and I will reveal that when I get to the end of this post, and that will reveal a key.
2. Traditional Voodoo
Traditional Voodoo is a modern concept, an attempt to homogenize the practices of Voodoo into a practice that can be packaged and sold. It has certain formulae & ways to do things and in that attempt to homogenize they have tried to present voodoo in such a way that any ritual you go to called Voodoo will look the same. Like a Big Mac. Yum.
Lots of people in the last twenty years, especially since Louis Martinie published the beautiful artwork of Sallie Ann Glassman in his New Orleans Voodoo Tarot, people have sought out voodoo training, travelling to New Orleans and Haiti looking for teachers and a lot of these teachers have seen a chance to make some money. People have been going to Haiti, spending a week or so there and returned as fully initiated "houngans & mambos"! They learn a ritual structure and then return to the states and write these wonderfully compatible books on Voodoo Love Magic and Voodoo Money Spells and when they see the Voudon Gnostic Workbook they cry foul.
"That ain't Voodoo!"
I'll have a post on how the line of thinking that all it takes is a ritual in order to be a priest soon enough!
One thing Lou says in his wonderful book is that Voodoo is inclusive, not exclusive. Voodoo absorbs what is around it, it adapts but these homogenizers want to package and sell voodoo and the soul of Voodoo cries for release from this enslavement. I can get into why so many people are travelling to Haiti in a different post but there is something going on there and it reveals some issues with elements of the modern western mystery tradition.
The VGW bares little resemblance to this "traditional voodoo" either.
3. Southern Rootwork/Conjure/Traditional Hoodoo practices.
Hoodoo is an almost entirely American tradition. A mix of Native American, African and grimoire magick, hoodoo came into being in the South. While some will want you to think is it the provenance of the African American, belonging to their culture and damn you white people for stealing it, Hoodoo was as much a white man's magick as it was a black man's.
Hoodoo is a broad term. It covers folk magick in various locations and no set structure. Much of it is superstition and herbal or root medicines. Some elements can be traced to Ireland, some to African practices and some to Native American practices. Like America, Hoodoo is a melting pot of folk practices finding a fusion in a new world.
The practices of hoodoo are loose and broad. People swapped practices and ideas between each other for decades, creating a uniquely American lore. From Europe came the grimoires and in particular the Sixth & Seventh Books of Moses. Talismans were popular, drawing them on paper and anointing them with oils consecrated to different ideas was a rule. Catalogues of oils, candles and herbal concoctions were a norm in Southern culture, creating a rich tradition.
From place to place though you'd not find the same practices because Hoodoo wasn't ritual forms like we find in the grimoires or Golden Dawn traditions. This is where the Sixth & Seventh Books come in. Grimoires like that famous one would often contain practices in Psalmery, or the uses of Psalms as spells and using them in conjunction to charge their talismans.
Nowadays we have this wonderful movement to collate the hoodoo traditions for a modern audience. Occult authors are integrating elements of hoodoo and African Tribal Religions into their practices with the grimoires to some beautiful effect. I think that these authors & the traditional grimoirists, have fallen into a key to the grimoires and how to use them. That's another post.
But in relation to the VGW, again, Hoodoo bares little resemblance to the system or teachings presented in there in spite of the How to Become a Lucky Hoodoo portion of the book. Hoodoo practitioners have been more "forgiving" than the Golden Dawn derivatives and "Traditional" Voodoo practitioners. Some have even adopted Bertiaux's Lucky Hoodoo techniques or pirated them to sell as their own! But to the cursory examiner & hoodoo "purists"... "THIS ISN'T HOODOO!". I can hear the screeching old bitch now, like a deadite in an Evil Dead film!
So what is the Lucky Hoodoo Grimoire (my term for the system) really like? What is going on here? Why are all these people screeching like gulls over a garbage trawl??
The LHG is most similar to the source work of not just the Golden Dawn but also Hoodoo. It's right there in the title I give to that section as a short hand reference. LUcky Hoodoo is most like the classic grimoires of the pre-Golden Dawn period of magical lore. Contained in these pages is a grimoire as complete as the now popular "The Art of Drawing Spirits Into Crystals" by the Abbot Johannis Trithemius of Spannheim, tutor of Cornelius Agrippa and whose little grimoire has been popularized by Rufus Opus and Frater Ashan Chassan F:.NF:.
The LHG is a simple little book that teaches us how to contact and communicate with spirits. These spirits, as I said in my preamble, are the spirits of the dead as well as, when we get into the "basic request ritual" the elements. The book contains a complete cosmology and system of spiritual development like the best of the grimoires. If one were to step outside of the idea of the modern traditions of the GD and Voodoo one would see that plain as day.
The LHG offers us a complete system of Sorcery to effect the same results, often in a more direct way than the European grimoires. With the practices contained therein we open up the channels to these spirits of the dead, as Bertiaux identifies two schools of spirits, the dead sorcerors of Atlantis, as being the power behind the grimoire. This is no more absurd than the grimoires claiming to be the "keys used/written by Solomon" or some similar mythological figure.
As a system of working with the spirits of the dead the LHG also harkens back to the Goes of southern Europe, who worked with the dead and the origin of the word "goetia". For more detail on this check out Jake Stratton Kent's Geosophia from Scarlet Imprint. As a system of magick it aslo harkens to grimoires like the Goetia, Key of Solomon, etc. and this is a key to understanding and seeing what the system really packs in it.
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