L’chaimGoldberg:
I’ve always felt like it’s wrong for me to practice another ethnic groups ethno-faith (I don’t like the word religion because no culture used that term originally).
Very much agreed about "religion" as concept! Even when we use word "faith" we still have the bog-standard connotations lurking in the back of our head.
Notice how modern pagans will call what are trying to rebuild as a "faith" and "religion" while also forgetting their ancestors' animist "shamanic" (ugh, need another word) practices were not a religion per se. (To be clear in the US there are tax-exemption requirements that encourage this kind of narrow lens.)
Talking about Vodou will be more useful one we unpack "religion." Most Voudisant are Catholic. As are most New World sorcery practices. But in talking to Anglo occultists, magicians, sorcerers, and witches they all seem to have this OTHER crap in their head that they could use some unburdening from.
Please pardon the tangent! Also please note half my family are Anglo / British so this is not anyting but an exploration of the history of ideas. Also please pardon the wall of words. I did not mean to write a damn book here.
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"Religion" as an English word really trips people up and is still terribly divisive. When we use it today we are often accidentally using a 16th to 20th-century British administrative tool.
"Religion" as a concept is a manifestation of the British Empire's
gunboat universalism that arose in collating of local beliefs, animist and ancestral practices around the world, all in the imperial effort to better understand, manipulate, and harvest their resources. Following the Reformation in 1517, and the subsequent rise of the Church of England, the concept of "religion" shifted from a shared cultural atmosphere to a legal identity.
It was Anglican Universalism (good in many ways) attached to gunboats (bad).
Before the height of the British Empire, most cultures didn't have a word for "religion" as a standalone category, but rather they had law, custom, ancestors, and way of life. The British essentially forced the world’s spiritual diversity into a Western, post-Reformation mold, the distinctly Anglican/Protestant lens. To them, a proper religion MUST have several essentials: a sacred text: (The "People of the Book" bias), a set of creeds (specific things you believe in your head) and a "Sacred Space": (A clear line between what is "sacred" and what is "secular" or "profane").
The Anglican Universalism was the belief that there was a natural, moral order to the world that the British were uniquely qualified to oversee. Of course they were the adults in the room who could categorize the world's "superstitions" into a hierarchy. At the top was Anglicanism, at the bottom were "animist" practices. The gunboats were for stealing spices and enforcing the British legal definition of what a human being was allowed to believe and how those beliefs had to be structured to be recognized by the state.
So it amuses me to no end modern pagan reconsuction is still playing by the rules of Anglo gunboat universalism. They think they need a "faith" with "high priests and high priestesses" and a Book of Shadows , or a Book of Veles. or just some flimsy notes scraped from academic texts. And They feel they need to go to battle agasint other faiths .. usually Catholicsm or Orthodox Chrisitianity - and so thereby manifesting and furthuring the Anglo-American policing of us all as "filthy babarians." Thanks, ya'll.
Not to add to much a conspiratorial note, but when you consider that global pagan revivalism is downstream from British Wicca, it makes you pause for a second. Another wrinkle:
Using religion as a monolithic concept, the British and Dutch Empires could also paint their economic enemy, the Spanish Empire, as a monolithic evil - a "Catholic" shadow world that killed native babies. This was The Black Legend (
La Leyenda Negra). In the 16th and 17th centuries, the British and Dutch used the newly minted Protestant identity to foster the perception still in play today that Protestant = Liberty/Progress vs. Catholic = Tyranny/Superstition. By framing Catholicism as a monolithic, oppressive religion, they could justify their own imperial expansion as a "liberation" of the seas from Spanish cruelty.
(And this is still very much in play today in Anglo "magic" and occultism... see Brit Chaos magicans sneering at historical usually Catholic necomancy and grimoires. )
This is another huge topic, but let's just point out that in Spanish-dominated vs. Anglo areas, "80%" and "100%" of the indigenous populations survived. As you know, in regions like Mexico, Peru, and Guatemala indigenous populations remained the demographic majority , or at least a massive plurality. In Mexico while the initial "Great Dying" (mostly from smallpox) was catastrophic, the population eventually stabilized and rebounded. Today, a huge percentage of the population in former Spanish colonies is Mestizo (mixed, such as myself) or fully indigenous.
Not to make excuses for military subjugation, but that not even getting into the legal and phycal protetions for the native population the Franciscan orders gave, and that ingenous could become Spanish citizens after two years, blah blah.
This compares to Anglo areas where they displaced and almost 100% wiped out the native populations.
The Black Legend worked so well that people still believe the Spanish were the "uniquely" evil ones, even while standing on ground in the US or Australia where the original inhabitants were completely erased - unlike the vibrant, surviving indigenous and Mestizo cultures of the South.
OK, just to tie it together.
So this is why we don’t have a good single word for what Vodou "is" maybe "syncretic," as some have used. But everyone in modern magic treats this as "bad" and "less pure" than their made-up, blood-and-soil "real faiths." Just ugh! The stupid, it burns!!
Then consider how
blankity-blank "witchcraft" has the exact same issue. The irony is that the people chasing "pure" or "untainted" indigenous " faiths" or "pagan relgion" are usually the ones most trapped by the Anglo-Protestant mindset.
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