Voodoo and Bibliolatry are both because of a lack of Revelation
Rabbinical Judaism, Islam, most midwit varieties of christianity, and voodoo are all solutions to the same problem. The death of God. In other words, the problem that the Almighty no longer seems to be speaking (and that if he did speak, it would not be what we want to hear).
I was reading a high level anthropological survey of voodoo and of related West African religious systems. Their basic structure is a belief that there is in fact a creator who rules and has the power, in other words, God, but who is very remote and inactive in human affairs.
The solution is to make deals with lesser spirits.
The normal abrahamic religion response to the same problem is to get scholarly with scripture and philosophy. The difference just seems to be if you are in an educated area with written materials and a scholarly tradition or not.
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G. K. Chesterton
September 18, 2024
Whether it be because the Fall has really brought men nearer to less desirable neighbours in the spiritual world, or whether it is merely that the mood of men eager or greedy finds it easier to imagine evil, I believe that the black magic of witchcraft has been much more practical and much less poetical than the white magic of mythology. I fancy the garden of the witch has been kept much more carefully than the woodland of the nymph. I fancy the evil field has even been more fruitful than the good.
To start with, some impulse, perhaps a sort of desperate impulse, drove men to the darker powers when dealing with practical problems. There was a sort of secret and perverse feeling that the darker powers would really do things; that they had no nonsense about them. And indeed that popular phrase exactly expresses the point. The gods of mere mythology had a great deal of nonsense about them. They had a great deal of good nonsense about them; in the happy and hilarious sense in which we talk of the nonsense of Jabberwocky or the Land where the Jumblies live. But the man consulting a demon felt as many a man has felt in consulting a detective, especially a private detective: that it was dirty work but the work would really be done. A man did not exactly go into the wood to meet a nymph; he rather went with the hope of meeting a nymph. It was an adventure rather than an assignation. But the devil really kept his appointments and even in one sense kept his promises; even if a man sometimes wished afterwards, like Macbeth, that he had broken them.