Art by Alessandra Boeri
During my last semester of grad school, I intersected with a PhD student whose doctoral work aimed to address the de-stigmatization of African indigenous religion in the Western world, most specifically West African Vodun (often called voodoo in western language). Being that I had budding interest in indigenous religions and their role in de-colonization, I had him direct me to to resources on modern re-education efforts for West African Vodun. The main resource he directed me to was ReVodution: Voodoo Education, a project by Sena Voncujovi and Pele Voncujovi that seeks to “digitally preserve and demystify the herbal and spiritual traditions of of Ewe Vodu (Voodoo).”
One of the videos this project has posted is titled “Se Voen: Changing Bad Destiny in Vodu,” in which Vodun priest Christopher Voncujovi explains the concept of “destiny,” and how in their cosmology, every person has good destiny and bad destiny, which coincide to good and bad things happening in their lives. According to Voncujovi, for those who have things not going well in their lives, they can better balance their destinies through proper ritual. I highly recommend you watch the video itself (which I will link below), as it provides a much better explanation than my rough paraphrase here.
Voncujovi then explains the ceremony itself, in which a physical clay representation of the “bad destiny” is molded. There are many important details to the ceremony, including herbs, talismans, and patterns drawn in the dirt, but for the sake of this article, I’d like to focus on the specific interaction between the practicer and the bad destiny.
After providing a blood sacrifice of a chicken, the animal is presented to the bad destiny as an offering of food. Voncujovi then explains:
“The person has to bring the chicken back to the [bad destiny], telling the [bad destiny], ‘I have given you the food that you like, which is this chicken . . . now please, I would like you to leave me. Find a place for yourself, so that I can also find a place for me. I want you to go to wherever you are going and be happy there, so that you leave me alone, so that I can also be happy here with myself.’ . . . and then we ask the [bad destiny], ‘where would you like to go? . . . do you want to go to the roadside? Would you like to be buried? Do you want to go to the garbage place?’ . . . once you start communicating, you take it where it would like to go.”
This is what I found so striking about this practice: unlike Christianity and other monotheistic and/or western religious practices, Vodun does not treat dark spirits as something to be slain with a sword and eradicated from existence as an eternal enemy. There is a recognition that good and bad are natural, fluid parts of the world we live in, and rather than treating darkness as a contentious enemy, we can actually converse with the dark spirits we live with and reorient our relationship with them. The ceremony to change Bad Destiny treats the dark spirit with respect as a co-inhabiter of the world—feeding it and asking it to move somewhere else, for the happiness of both parties. It’s like the practicer is speaking to it, saying, “I don’t hate you, but it’s not working for you to be here right now, and I think we should rearrange our relationship.”
This orientation to good and bad is common amongst a lot of indigenous religious practices that have been violently erased from our communal imaginations. For colonizing Christians, direct interaction with dark or evil spirits was evidence of “demonic” practices, which translates to “practices that glorify evil.” This kind of interpretation was projected on to many Native American and African practices, and used to justify violence against their practicers.
But I’m convinced they had it all backwards—direct conversation with the darkness is perhaps the best way to orient ourselves to a healthy relationship with the world, which has always been the home of both good and bad spirits.
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A few months ago, I began experiencing sporadic sleep insomnia. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, and my body would absolutely refuse to go back to sleep. Whenever this would happen, I’d grow anxious and frustrated, stressing out about how little sleep I was getting and how shitty I’d feel at work the next day. My body would be exhausted and begging for sleep, yet my mind would refuse to shut off. I became angry at my body for tormenting me.
I’d learn later that this is a result of sleep apnea—a closing of my airway during sleep that leads to heavy snoring and an insufficient amount of oxygen getting to my body. I have moments of insufficient breath at night, which wake me, and in an effort to get proper oxygen, my body resists sleep because it knows my airway will close again. I am seeking treatment, but the healthcare system moves much slower than what is preferred.
In the meantime, I realized that I needed a spiritual reckoning with my situation. I can’t control my body’s loss of sleep—but perhaps I can control how I respond to it. Losing sleep is bad enough, I don’t also need the stress and anger that tend to come with it.
The problem I was facing was that I hated my insomnia. As soon as it would show up, I would spend all my energy desperately wishing it would just go away and never come back. When it would stay, then, I would become restless and angry—like it was a great injustice to me. On top of this, it was a thing, a thing I did not understand, and certainly did not respect. I knew these things needed to change.
I began thinking about the Vodun ceremony, and the approach of engaging dark spirits with respect and co-habitation—as if they also belonged here on earth with me, and had a relationship with me that could be malleable. I had no intention of fully appropriating Vodun practices—I maintain a respect for the particular boundaries of those traditions and the specificity of their practices in their own context. But I did believe that, outside of its particular contextual practices, Vodun taught me something very valuable about my orientation to darkness in my life.
So I began calling my insomnia my "sleep demon,” and I began talking to him.
When I would wake up in the middle of the night, not being able to go back to sleep, I would go sit in my living room, and have a brief conversation with my sleep demon. I would tell him, “hey, I know you like being here, and want to keep coming to me, but I would like you to find somewhere else to go. If you decide to keep coming here, there is nothing I can do about it, for you are your own spirit, and I can only control myself. But I would prefer it if you started finding somewhere else to stay for the night.”
I was not expecting my insomnia to completely go away—and it hasn’t. But that was not the point. I was now in a somewhat conversational relationship with my sleep demon. We didn’t always see eye-to-eye, and he could certainly be annoying and needy and a bad listener (aren’t we all?), but I wasn’t scared of him anymore, and I didn’t hate him. We’re just in a season of trying to rework our relationship, and this can always be bumpy process, no matter who’s involved.
In my past, my ritual of choice in this situation would be prayer—asking an all-powerful and all-good god to use their power to destroy things that cause me suffering and thus allow for my happiness. This might be helpful for some, but it is no longer helpful for me. This kind of prayer tends to cause me more uneasiness and confusion—being bewildered at the fact that a god who loves me and is all-good is intentionally choosing to have me continue with my difficulties. Prayer like this makes me have to force my struggles into a box of “good,” saying that my suffering is meant for some greater goodness that god understands while I have no clue. But it’s not helpful for me to imagine my insomnia as something with a purpose for good. It’s more helpful for me to imagine that it is a dark thing I must acknowledge and learn to live with, because the world is a place where dark and light are always co-inhabiting with each other.
Conversing with dark spirits may seem scary. It may seem like acknowledging the darkness in such a direct way is just inviting more suffering into one’s life. But in my experience, it’s quite the opposite. Refusing to acknowledge the dark parts of life never rids us of them—in fact, it makes them more intimidating and terrifying, because we create new fears around them when we try to run from them. When we choose to engage with them, however, we soon learn to reconcile ourselves with the darkness in relationship, and while we don’t always have a well-balanced relationship with the darkness, we get to peel away the fear and anxiety we often associate with it when we refuse to acknowledge it.
I have since been going to sleep with much more ease, knowing that if I wake and can’t sleep, I will just have to speak with my sleep demon and find a way to adjust to his needs for the night/day. I still am working on trying to find somewhere else for him to go, but it’s a process—he’s not exactly carrying his weight right now. I have, in fact, been having less episodes of insomnia than what I had when I first started this practice—but I’m not necessarily trying to correlate results to my practice. I’m just trying to change my approach to my relationship with the dark spirits that wander into my life—letting go of control and finding a way to coexist—wanting my demon to “go wherever [he] is going and be happy there, so that I can also be happy here with myself.”
Please take some time to check out the Voncujovis’ project:
Visit the whole ReVodution website HERE
Watch the entire video on Bad Destiny HERE