How much are traditional vodoun/vodou practices relevant today?
Healing Ceremony for Women Possessed by Negative Spirit (Berkeley University, California) We live in a world that has become dismally westernized,increasingly technical, and burdensomely bureaucratic;–where the proscribed “rituals” involved in daily living many experience as degrading, meaningless, impersonal and despiritualized. What’s also becoming less appealing to many in the world’s “legitimate” major religions is the lack of self and community empowerment, and direct spiritual guidance/communion thru concrete ritual. Many are increasingly turned-off by these belief systems of conflicting/questionable origins, which have lost their sacred knowledge, and where emphasis is centered on the return of a “Messiah” to judge and sentence the world to an afterlife of either “hell & damnation” or to a promised eternity. As a result, Vodoun, with its major emphasis on the “Here and Now” direct experiential with the divine, loving and concrete guidance from the Ancestors, and the acknowledgm
