#voudou

The proper name for the West African religion is vodúnsínsen, which means "spirit worship". The spelling Vodún is often used to differentiate it from the Haitian religion, which is usually spelled Vodou.

The term "voodoo" is considered offensive for naming the religion outside of Louisiana. The word "voodoo" originated in Louisiana around 1850, likely from the French word "voudou" or the West African word "vodu"

The religion of Vodun originated in the ancient kingdom of Dahomey, which is now part of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo. The name comes from the Fon word for "God" or "Spirit"

More Paths Through the Magical Landscape: A Sequel

Part 1 : https://www.tumblr.com/chatsintowolves/816913588605337600/six-varieties-of-magick-and-how-they-work

The first six paths—Enochian, Golden Dawn, Wicca, Druidry, Satanism, and Chaos Magick—mapped a territory largely defined by the Western esoteric lodge, the nature religion revival, and the adversarial reaction to both. But the map is larger than that. Here are six more systems, each with its own metaphysical engine, its own cultural origin, and its own answer to the fundamental question: what is magic, and how do you do it?

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1. Vodou (Haitian Vodou)

The most publicly recognized and wildly misunderstood Afro-diasporic magical religion in the English-speaking world. Beneath the Hollywood caricature of zombie masters and voodoo dolls lies a rigorous, initiatory, possession-based tradition with a complex spirit taxonomy and a powerful magical technology.

· Core Philosophy: A religion of reciprocal relationship with the Lwa—sentient, powerful, and distinct spirit intelligences who govern the forces of life, death, love, justice, and the crossroads. Bondye, the remote creator God, is approached through the Lwa, who are served, fed, and honored in exchange for protection, healing, and practical assistance. The temple (hounfo) and the lineage-based priesthood (houngan and mambo) structure community life. The Lwa are organized into nations (nanchons), each with its own temperament, drum rhythms, songs, and sacred colors. The Rada spirits are cool, benevolent, and associated with the African homeland. The Petro spirits are hot, fierce, and born of the revolutionary colonial experience.

· Ritual Technology: The danse is the central act: drum rhythms, call-and-response songs, and the drawing of vèvè—ritual floor diagrams traced in cornmeal that serve as astral beacons calling each Lwa—invite the spirits into the heads of initiated serviteurs through possession trance. Initiation (kanzo) is a profound, life-altering sacrament involving seclusion, instruction, and the seating of the Lwa in the head. Magical work includes paket kongò (spirit bundles wrapped in fabric and feather, fed and activated for specific purposes), lamp work, and spiritual baths, all conducted within the logic of service and exchange, not command. The Lwa are not compelled; they are petitioned, fed, and honored. The relationship is familial and lifelong.

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2. Heathenry (Germanic/Norse Paganism and Rune Magic)

The most prominent non-Wiccan Pagan revival in the English-speaking world. It is a distinct magical religion with its own cosmology, its own operative technology, and a significant public presence. It also carries the unique and serious burden of Nazi co-option, making its inclusion culturally necessary: any informed discussion of modern magic must reckon with the rune problem.

· Core Philosophy: The gifting cycle is the fundamental logic of divine-human interaction. Gods (Odin, Thor, Freyja, Frigg, and the rest of the Æsir and Vanir), ancestors, and land-spirits (wights) are approached through reciprocal offering (blót). A gift demands a gift. The universe is shaped by Wyrd, the evolving web of fate laid by the Norns at the roots of Yggdrasil, which the practitioner learns to read and influence through ritual action. The soul is not a single thing but a complex of subtle bodies: the hamr (shape-shifting form), the hugr (mind-will), the fylgja (attendant spirit, often appearing as an animal or woman), and the hamingja (personal luck-force that passes through family lines).

· Ritual Technology: Rune magic is the hallmark. The 24 runes of the Elder Futhark are not an alphabet but cosmic principles accessed through carving, chanting (galdr), blood-reddening, and talismanic inscription. Each rune is a sound, a glyph, and a law of reality simultaneously. Seiðr is the reconstructed shamanic trance technology, often modeled on the figure of the vǫlva (staff-wielding seeress), involving a high-seat journey, a chanting chorus, and oracular divination (spá) to perceive and manipulate the threads of Wyrd. Symbel is ritualized toasting over a horn of mead, weaving community luck and fate through spoken boasts and oaths. The Nazi problem must be named directly: the runes were systematically appropriated by the völkisch movement and the Third Reich. Symbols like the Sowilo rune became the SS insignia. The Othala rune is used by neo-Nazi groups today. The overwhelming majority of modern Heathens are explicitly anti-racist and inclusive, but any seeker must navigate this toxic legacy with open eyes.

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3. Neo-Shamanism and the Global Shamanic Revival

Shamanism is the oldest stratum of human magical practice, a worldwide family of techniques that exploded back into Western consciousness through the Castaneda books, the psychedelic revolution, the ayahuasca boom, and the workshops of Michael Harner. Its streams are diverse, but they share a recognizable core.

· Core Philosophy: The world is alive and ensouled—every rock, river, tree, animal, and ancestor possesses spirit. Spirits are not metaphors; they are persons with agency and the capacity for relationship. The principle of correspondence governs this cosmos: what happens in the spirit world affects the physical world. Sickness is often soul loss, an intrusion, or an offended spirit, and must be treated on that level. The shaman is defined by the journey out and the return. They travel to the other side—the underworld, the upper world, the forest of the dead—and bring something back: a lost soul part, a diagnosis, a healing, a prophecy. Their authority rests solely on demonstrated success.

· Ritual Technology: Altered states are the door, induced through drumming (205-220 beats per minute), dancing, fasting, ordeal, or entheogenic plants. The shaman's tools are living vessels of spirit alliance: the drum is a horse to the other world, the rattle a voice that calls the spirits, the staff and mask and plant brew each a relationship made tangible. A power object is a spirit with a handle. In many Asian traditions, the shaman's body becomes the vessel itself. The Korean mudang performs the kut, an exhausting ritual of dance, chant, and blade-walking in which gods and ancestors are summoned and dispatched through possession trance. Japanese miko and itako traditions involve spirit mediumship and communication with the dead. But they share the core shamanic logic: the world is alive, spirits are real, altered states open the door, the journey is the method, and the proof is the healing brought back.

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4. Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy

The grandmother of the modern Western esoteric revival and the New Age. Without Theosophy, there is no 20th-century occultism as we know it. Helena Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine (1888) synthesized Eastern concepts of reincarnation and karma, Western Hermeticism, and a fabricated "Mahatma" lineage into a grand cosmic narrative that shaped the Golden Dawn, Wicca, and virtually every alternative spirituality that followed. It is the ur-text of the "Ancient Wisdom" narrative.

· Core Philosophy: All religions are exoteric branches of a single, primordial Secret Doctrine, preserved by a hidden hierarchy of perfected Masters (the Mahatmas or Ascended Masters) residing in the remote Himalayas. The cosmos is cyclic, emanating from and reabsorbing into the Absolute over vast ages called Rounds and Races. Humanity evolves through reincarnation and karma toward eventual godhood, each lifetime a classroom. The human being is a sevenfold entity: physical body, etheric double, astral body, lower mind, higher mind, buddhic consciousness, and atman (the divine spark). The goal is conscious participation in cosmic evolution.

· Ritual Technology: Theosophy is more mystical and metaphysical than operatively magical, but its influence on magical systems is incalculable. It popularized the concepts of the astral plane, the aura, the chakras (in their Western, somewhat garbled interpretation), the Akashic Records, and the Ascended Masters. Its techniques include meditation, visualization, and the study of its vast, dense cosmology. Later offshoots—the Liberal Catholic Church, the "I AM" Activity of Guy Ballard, the Church Universal and Triumphant of Elizabeth Clare Prophet—added more ritual structure, decree-work, and apocalyptic urgency. Theosophy provided the metaphysical map that almost everyone else on these lists used, knowingly or not.

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5. Tantra (Hindu and Buddhist)

The most powerful non-Abrahamic magical-soteriological system to enter the Western consciousness. Severely misunderstood and reduced to spiritualized sex, authentic Tantra is a rigorous technology of deity identification, subtle-body manipulation, and the deliberate, transgressive use of conventional impurities to achieve liberation (moksha) and supernatural power (siddhis). Its vocabulary—chakra, kundalini, mantra, yantra—is now standard English. The "Left-Hand Path" and "Right-Hand Path" distinction in Western occultism originated here, imported by Helena Blavatsky.

· Core Philosophy: The universe is the dynamic play of Shakti (primordial energy, the feminine principle) and Shiva (pure consciousness, the masculine principle). Everything is a manifestation of their union. The human body is a microcosm containing channels (nadis), energy centers (chakras), and a dormant serpent power (Kundalini) coiled at the base of the spine. Awakening Kundalini and uniting her with Shiva at the crown results in liberation, bliss, and the attainment of siddhis—supernatural powers including clairvoyance, levitation, and the ability to shrink or expand the body at will. The "Right-Hand Path" (Dakshinachara) pursues this through asceticism and internal visualization. The "Left-Hand Path" (Vamachara) deliberately transgresses purity taboos to shatter dualistic consciousness, using the pañcamakāra (five Ms): madya (wine), mamsa (meat), matsya (fish), mudra (parched grain), and maithuna (ritual sexual union).

· Ritual Technology: Deity yoga is the core Buddhist Tantric method: the practitioner visualizes themselves dissolving into emptiness and re-arising in the complete form of a fully enlightened Buddha or fierce deity, with all attributes, colors, and symbols intact. This is not roleplay; it is an identity technology designed to bypass the ego and directly access enlightened mind. Hindu Tantra uses nyāsa (ritual placement of mantras on the body through touch, turning the body into a living yantra), yantra worship (geometric deity diagrams drawn on metal or in sand, activated through mantra), and elaborate mantra-science in which the sound is the deity. Advanced Tibetan practices include tummo (generation of inner heat, allowing yogis to dry wet sheets on their bare skin in freezing temperatures), dream yoga (maintaining lucid awareness through the sleep state), and phowa (consciousness transference, ejecting the mind through the crown at the moment of death). Tantra is not a casual practice. It requires initiation (diksha), a qualified guru, and years of preparatory work. The Western commodification of "Tantric sex" has almost nothing to do with it.

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6. Key of Solomon Demonology (Solomonic Grimoire Tradition)

The most influential and widely practiced grimoire tradition in Western magic. The Lesser Key of Solomon—particularly its first book, the Ars Goetia, with its 72 demon sigils, ranks, and offices—is arguably the single most worked grimoire in the modern occult underground. It represents a distinct magical technology: spirit-compulsion through Abrahamic divine authority. It is neither Golden Dawn ceremonialism nor Chaos Magick, though it influenced both. Working the Goetia directly is a popular and demanding path in its own right, with a massive contemporary literature and a thriving online community.

· Core Philosophy: King Solomon, by the grace of the God of Israel, bound demons to build the Temple in Jerusalem. The magician, purified through fasting, prayer, confession, and moral rectitude, wields the divine names and seals of God—Adonai, Elohim, Tetragrammaton, the names of the archangels—to summon, bind, and command spirits. The spirits are fallen angels, dangerous, amoral, and hostile to humanity, but subject to the authority of the Most High. The magician stands in that delegated authority. The ends are often practical: finding treasure, gaining knowledge of the arts and sciences, compelling love, discovering thieves, inflicting harm on enemies. The spirits are not evil in the sense of serving a devil opposed to God; they are functionaries of a cosmos in which everything, even the rebellious, serves the divine purpose.

· Ritual Technology: The grimoire is an instruction manual. The magician constructs a circle of protection inscribed with divine names, within which they stand. Outside the circle, facing a specific direction appropriate to the spirit, they place the Triangle of Art—a triangular boundary into which the spirit is conjured and constrained. The spirit's seal (sigil) is drawn on parchment or metal and placed within the triangle. The consecrated tools include the sword (authority), the wand (will), the pentacle of Solomon (protection), and the hazel rod. The conjurations are long, repetitive, and thunderous, filled with barbarous names of God and threats of divine wrath should the spirit disobey. The ritual is a high-stakes negotiation backed by cosmic authority. The spirit manifests visibly—or at least sensibly—within the triangle, is bound to the magician's will, answers questions, performs tasks, and is then licensed to depart to its proper place without harming anyone. This paradigm—the circle, the triangle, the sigil, the binding—is the DNA of Western evocation. Contemporary practitioners like Jake Stratton-Kent and Stephen Skinner have revitalized the tradition, stripping away Victorian accretions and returning to the original grimoiric sources, while a new generation of online practitioners debate technique, share results, and adapt the old conjurations to modern language.

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Summary: The Second Six

Vodou

Core Mechanism: Spirit possession and service

Metaphor: Dancing with the Lwa

Heathenry

Core Mechanism: Gifting cycle and rune-working

Metaphor: Weaving the Wyrd

Neo-Shamanism

Core Mechanism: Altered-state spirit journeying

Metaphor: Riding the Drum

Theosophy

Core Mechanism: Secret doctrine and cosmic evolution

Metaphor: Reading the Akashic Record

Tantra

Core Mechanism: Deity identification and energy awakening

Metaphor: Becoming the God

Solomonic Demonology

Core Mechanism: Spirit compulsion by divine authority

"Mariage La Sirene et Agoueh” Beaded Vodou Flag by Roudy Azor