season 3, episode 8 - real life voodoo with lilith dorsey
our guest for episode 8 is lilith dorsey, m.a.! lilith hails from many magickal traditions, including celtic, afro-caribbean, and native american spirituality. her traditional education focused on plant science, anthropology, and film at the university of rhode island, new york university and the university of london, and her magickal training includes numerous initiations in santeria also known as lucumi, haitian vodoun, and new orleans voodoo. lilith is a voodoo priestess and in that capacity has been doing successful magick since 1991 for patrons, is editor/publisher of oshun-african magickal quarterly, filmmaker of the experimental documentary bodies of water: voodoo identity and tranceformation,’ choreographer/performer for jazz legend dr. john’s “night tripper” voodoo show, and author of voodoo and afro-caribbean paganism, 55 ways to connect to goddess, the african-american ritual cookbook, and love magic. you can find her online at www.lilithdorsey.com and www.patheos.com/blogs/voodoouniverse/.
each season we read a new book about witchcraft practices around the world with the #snortandcacklebookclub, with a book review by ash and the occasional guest helping us close out the season. this season's #snortandcacklebookclub read is brujas: the magic and power of witches of color by lorraine monteagut.
take the fibre witch quiz at ashalberg.com/quiz. follow us on instagram @snortandcackle and be sure to subscribe via your favourite podcasting app so you don't miss an episode!
seasons 1-3 of snort & cackle are generously supported by the manitoba arts council. you can support future episodes of snort & cackle by sponsoring a full episode or transcript.
transcript
snort & cackle - season 3, episode 8 - lilith dorsey
ash alberg: [Upbeat music plays.] Hello, and welcome to the Snort and Cackle podcast. I'm your host, Ash Alberg. I'm a queer fibre witch and hedgewitch. And each week I interview a fellow boss witch to discuss how everyday magic helps them make their life and the wider world, a better place.
Expect serious discussions about intersections of privilege and oppression, big C versus small C capitalism, rituals, sustainability, astrology, ancestral work, and a whole lot of snorts and cackles. Each season, we read a new book about witchcraft practices around the world with the #SnortAndCackleBookClub with a book review by me and the occasional guest helping us close out the season. Our book this season is Brujas: The Magic and Power of Witches of Color by Lorraine Monteagut.
Whether you're an aspiring boss witch looking to start your knitwear design business, a plant witch looking to play more with your local naturally dyed color palette or a knit witch wondering just what the hell is a natural yarn and how do you use it in your favorite patterns, we've got the solution for you.
Take the free fiber witch quiz at ashalberg.com/quiz and find out which self-paced online program will help you take your dreams into reality. Visit ashalberg.com/quiz [upbeat music fades out] and then join fellow fiber witches in the Creative Coven Community at ashalberg.com/creative-coven-community for 24/7 access to Ash’s favorite resources, monthly zoom knit nights, and more. [End of intro.]
I am so excited for today's guest. I am here with Lilith Dorsey, MA, who hails from many magical traditions, including a Caltech Afro-Caribbean and Native American spirituality. Her traditional education focused on plant science, anthropology and film at the University of Rhode Island, New York University, and the University of London and her magical training includes numerous initiations in Santaria, also known as Lucumí, Haitian voudon and New Orleans voodoo.
Lilith Dorsey is a voodoo priestess and in that capacity has been doing successful magic since 1991 for patrons, is editor and publisher of Oshun-African Magickal Quarterly, filmmaker of the experimental documentary
Bodies of Water: Voodoo Identity and Tranceformation,
choreographer/performer for jazz legend, Dr. John’s “Night Tripper” Voodoo Show and author of Voodoo: An Afro-Caribbean Paganism, 55 Ways to Connect to Goddess, The African American Ritual Cookbook, Love Magic. And if you listened into last season, of course, Orishas, Goddesses, and Voodoo Queens.
Hi, Lilith! Thanks so much for joining me today.
lilith dorsey: Oh, thank you for having me on. I'm so excited to talk about all these things. And every time I hear my bio, I'm like, wow, I'm busy. [Chuckles.]
ash alberg: [Laughs.] Yeah, you really are. It's like a very impressive bio. So tell us a bit ... I just read like a resume out to everybody, but tell us a bit about you and what you do in the world.
lilith dorsey: Oh, I guess at bottom line, I just try and help people see a way to their best selves and improving themselves. And I think that, that sounds a little bit like a cliche, but all the African magical traditions have this element of “your place in the world.” So my place in the world, whether I like it or not, seems to be to convey some of this information to people and I try and do that as creatively, as eloquently, as simply, and also as sublime as possible, because I think that, if you can’t explain it to a five-year-old, then you can’t explain it to a 50 year old or a 95 year old.
So I think that reducing things to their core makes them in a way more sacred and also more universally understood. So that's part of my practice, both magically and I guess professionally.
ash alberg: That's ama -- I love that. I think, especially for like the practices that you are initiated into and that you do are ones that are like very much very established, very living traditions. And they're also ones that like, they're popular in pop culture, but not necessarily for good reasons.
We ... I can think of pretty much every crime show based out of the States has at least one episode of like really messed up, like voodoo sacrifice, blah, blah, blah. And they twist what is a really beautiful, very nuanced, very powerful religious practice and magical practice into basically like a sideshow or into just distilling it down.
I liken it to Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, where it's okay, yeah, depending on the show, they might actually go a little bit deeper into the nuance, but they're
still gonna get stuff wrong. They're going to say Sam-hane instead of Sow-en. And it's okay, how much, if you're familiar with the tradition and you spot those things, then you're going to start thinking, okay what else did you screw up in your studies and so now you're representing this in inaccurately?
So I love that you've got these books that do bring people into a world and start sharing a knowledge of what you know is accessible to them based on where they're at. But that presents it in a way where it's understandable and also is very clear about, this is not a thing that you just fuck around with for fun, right? Like it's, it is intense.
I think that was one of the things I got out of reading Orishas, Goddesses, and Voodoo Queens was just like how complex it can be, depending on who ... like you might think that you're asking one deity for support, but depending on what things you're using, you might accidentally be calling in a different version of them that now does very different things.
And for folks that aren't aware of just all of the variations that are at play, then it can feel hard to know where to get started. So yeah.
lilith dorsey: No, it's definitely daunting. A friend of mine who's a Babalao Lucumí priest, HE sent me this thing the other day: “What's the difference between affect and effect?” And he was like, “Fuck around and find out.” [Laughs.] And I was like, wow, I love that. [Ash laughs.]
And it's true. It's true. These things are formulas, recipes, rituals, communities. It's an entire package. It's not just one tiny piece of something. And I do a lot of cooking, you mentioned my ritual cook book, and most of my books have recipes in them, both magical and things that you can eat and things that you can't eat.
If you've never made bread before and you might mix up flour and sugar. They're both white. They both come in a bag. You don't necessarily know. So there are rules to these things and it's not just playing. And there's, if we look at the Orisha Shango, he goes back to the fourth century BCE, before Christ, before common era.
So we're talking about a lineage that started 4,000 years before the common time that we're talking about now. So we're talking about, or more than that, actually six. So if we're talking about all of this time, all of this continuum that
we have, people have done this and they've refined it and they've seen what worked and they’ve seen what didn't.
And it's not necessarily a burden. I think people think that when they come to the tradition, “Oh, I'm going to get a teacher and I'm not going to like it and they're going to tell me what to do,” but the same way when someone is young, you have to tell them, “Okay, we're turning on the stove. Now the stove is hot.” You could still choose to stick your hand in it, but at least you know it's hot and what the consequences are.
So you could pretend, that six year old, five year old, could pretend they were making some bread and a mud pie, but I don't want to eat that. You could get sick, you have to tell them, “You could get sick, sweetie.” And it's nice to be able to learn from people and share and have somebody to go to if there's ... I have my own spiritual house. My god kids come to me when they're sick, when their parents are sick, when they have relationship trouble or work issues or all of these things. And I go to my godparents for that.
And I did ... two of my godparents are no longer with us unfortunately, but when they were alive, I went to them with things and they helped me through difficult times.
Some of us don't have the supportive, kind, loving family that we wished we did. And in a way, the religion, I think, provides that. It's not necessarily the one you want, but it's the one you need and they can help guide you.
ash alberg: I love that framing of it, especially ‘cause as somebody who has ... I'm just like all hierarchies and I don't mean hierarchies in the really like horrendous sense, just like general, like “here is like the structure of leadership and knowledge and power based on often like actual expertise” but I find often is not necessarily based on expertise. It's just based on like time.
I have always had a really hard time with that, and I don't function well in those structures. If you like, if you are actually an expert, I'm always happy to learn from people, but if you just happen to be above me for reasons that you can't explain particularly well then I'm gonna have a problem with that and I'm also not gonna respond necessarily great to it.
So reading about practices where that is very structured and for very good reasons is things where I'm just like, oh god, how do you do this? And so I wonder, how does ... 'cause I think also like right now there's so much
conversation about like cults and this like guru thing that is really, really twisted and so people can look at anything that is structured in a way where somebody who has knowledge, who has more experience and is in a position of an elder or a godparent that somebody who doesn't understand why it is like that would be like, “Oh, this is ... there's so many ways that this can get twisted.”
And it's true because humans are always, there's always ... you add in the element of humans and things can go screwy, but how do you help people who don't understand why things are structured the way they are to feel more comfortable when they are being brought into any of the traditions, to understand why they need to start where they are starting and why there are like, steps to getting to different points of their knowledge gaining?
lilith dorsey: I think, again, it goes down to that there's a support system. There's a network. I think one of the benefits of a hierarchy is it is a system of checks and balances. You're not just running on your own intuition, your own ... you have all of those things, but if your intuition says, “Oh, we shouldn't do this,” you can turn to your teachers, you can turn to your God brothers and sisters and say, “Oh, my spidey senses are getting activated. Is there something that we should worry about here? Is there something that we need to fortify? Am I just being full of anxiety because it's a pandemic, or I smoke too much and I'm a little paranoid? [Ash laughs.] Or whatever.
It allows you to have those checks and balances and I think that's helpful, and it also allows you to get individualized attention. To go back to my cooking analogy, when ... I took care of a lot of kids in my time and one of the little kids I took care of had a peanut allergy.
When I grew up, I ate peanut butter sandwiches every day. I love peanut butter sandwiches. If I had fed that to her, we would have had to go to the emergency room.
So everybody's different. It can't be like, oh, everybody can use this or everybody can use this, or this will work all the time for this. You need that divination. You need that feedback. You need somebody who knows about you to give you the best solutions for the situations that you're dealing with to navigate them effectively. You need to be able to turn to, again, not just your God parents, but your God brothers and sisters. And some of these things, you need a whole unit to complete. If I'm going to be having a feast, then you know, 3,4, 5, 6, 7, sometimes 10 of my God children come over and we prepare the
space. We set up the altars, we do the cooking, we sing the chants. Some people ... we hire drummers for the music.
All those things have to be present. One person couldn't do it. My godmother, Bonnie Mambo, Gros Mambo, Bonnie Devlin. Many people know her because she was a drummer and a sambista and she worked with Babatunde Olatunji for years.
She worked in Brooklyn at Truett mock on Dell, which is still going, run by Lois Welkin. And Bonnie came into the community on many different levels. And she had two CDs that she put out where she was like Prince. She played every instrument and then she mixed it together. And then she sang the chants and she did all those things, but she still needed to have a community to get where she was.
She gave back to the community as a music educator for children with special needs. So there still was a give and take. There still was this sort of reaching out to improve the world. And don't get me wrong, I'm the biggest introvert. I'm the one who always wants to be running the show.
My priestess used to laugh at me all the time. My daughter was head cheerleader. I was like, she's nothing like me. She's, “You want to be in front and you want to look good doing it.” And I was like, oh my gosh, I feel so called out. But sometimes we need to be called out. That's the thing.
Sometimes we don't know necessarily what we're doing. I had a god son once who used red pepper as part of a wash and then he's putting red pepper on somebody, washing them off and then she's going, “Ah, ow, ah, ow!” And then he was like, “I thought we used it as a spell ingredient and ...” and I was like, oh my gosh, he's never gonna do that again. [Ash laughs.] And none of us are ever going to forget that this thing happens.
So I think part of it also is you can see different experiences, understand different things. As one person, you're only going to be able to go through a lifetime's worth of experiences. That might be a lot, but it's still not going to be as many as if you have the input and the love and the guidance from your peers and also your elders who have been through it.
I'm not saying there aren't bad people. There are plenty of bad people. That's why we have to be cautious and we have to check people out and we have to do all of those things and really get to know that spiritual house before we join it.
It's a family so there's going to be kinds of personality conflicts and things like that, but there's still a dedication that we're working together for the collective good.
ash alberg: Yeah. So do you find that the rise of the internet and then also, I guess like post-pandemic ... not post pandemic, pre-pandemic and current pandemic, do you ... how do you feel in your experience that it has been in terms of the ease of people finding out more about the traditions and being able to access more information, but then also potentially accessing like not great information?
Do you find that the internet has made things easier? Do you find that before the pandemic and now through the pandemic, it has been different in terms of bringing new people in or being able to maintain traditions and community? Like how has that kind of all gone in your experience over the years?
lilith dorsey: I think when it started, ‘cause we actually, I don't, I didn't put that in my bio, but we actually had one of the first searchable herb date attached to my earliest business, so I thought it was going to be easier to do those kinds of things. You know what I mean?
Oh, I have mugwort in my yard. What can I use this for? What was it used for historically? I don't have to go find the Mrs. Grieves, modern herbal from whatever ...
ash alberg: Yeah. [Laughs.]
lilith dorsey: ... hundreds of years ago. I could just type it in and it would pop it back out and everything would be great. But ... and yes, we can do that, but there's so much misinformation. Access to information is behind paywalls. It's become a cult of personality.
My grandfather used to call it the Imperial Me where people just want to pat themselves on the back and declare themselves an authority after reading one book or looking at one thing. And I think that is very dangerous, again, because like I said, you don't necessarily have the experiences.
You don't necessarily have all of these things. Did I want to have the experiences? No, I didn't. But here we are. And did we want to have a pandemic? Did we want to have any of this? But yet here we are.
And I think that one of the things we can realize, one of the things we can benefit from with all these challenges that we're presented with is, resilience is a strength. I keep telling people when I do psychic readings and stuff, what is this pandemic making you do different? You know what I mean?
So many of us were like, oh, I want to stay home from work. Oh, I want to stay home from school. Now, everybody who can get back to work or back to school is so damn happy about that shit. [Both laugh.] Like I never thought I'd be so excited to be able to do this shit again.
So it's given us an appreciation, I think, in a different way. It's also, I wrote a book about water magic. It allows us to see our own homesteads, our own homes, what's around us in a sacred way ‘cause that's all we got. My COVID motto has been “better than nothing.”
I wanted to, with the Water Magic book, go to all these Snoqualmie Falls and the Himalayan lakes and all these great travel things that I was going to do, once the book was published and I was going to do a whole video series and what do I got? I'm here and I'm one of the five people who moved during the pandemic so now I live in new Orleans.
So I moved from Brooklyn to New Orleans, which a lot of people do, but I, my backyard floods and I'm next to the Mississippi and the canal. And I still have tap water thank goddess because when we have a boil water advisory, we don't have tap water.
So the things that we have become so much more sacred to us, and we might not have noticed that. If you don't see it, if it's there every day, you don't appreciate it with new eyes. And I think that doing things differently has allowed us to come up with new solutions. And that's part of ... it dovetails what I was talking about when I was talking about getting initiated, because, I have, I'm not going to give my age ... [Both laugh.] But my daughter is been old enough to drink for over a decade now, we'll just say that.
It allows us to really have those experiences and go through those things. You know what I mean? I remember getting really angry when my daughter was younger because somebody was teaching pagan parenting and they had a two-year-old and I was like what do you know? You know what I mean?
Yes. Terrible twos are terrible. And they're going to try and eat out of the potty [both laugh] and all of that's going to happen, but you don't really know what it
is to be a parent until it's two o'clock in the morning and they're not answering their phone. And maybe the car keys are missing or your stash or money or whatever, then you know what the challenges of being a parent are.
You've made it to the other side. And, that you've been through these experiences. Who would I want advice from? Somebody who's been through all of those little things and made it to the other side with somebody who's reasonably ...
ash alberg: Yes. [Laughs.]
lilith dorsey: My daughter is wonderful and amazing, and I'm so proud of her, but I still, in that thing when somebody was two, that's not really what I was looking for. And no Shaday, since we're talking about ... [Both laugh, Ash snorts] ... the structure of houses being colorful. But that's just what I would want, and what I try and do, everything that I do is give somebody something that I would want.
ash alberg: Yeah. So how did you come into each of the practices, in your own life? And then also because regardless of where we're looking at on the African continent, the traditions are generally oral and so also then the variations that have now grown here on within the Americas are also ... have like pretty solid oral basis. And so how have you found ... been able to find good resources? Especially when, like the books that you are writing now did not necessarily exist before, or maybe they did. But like how did you find ... ? It wasn't like you could just Google and be like “Intro book to New Orleans voodoo,” right?
Like how did you find your way into each of the traditions and were there any that were harder to find or where it was like you felt called but to figure out like what that calling was actually for, or from, took more resources than others did?
lilith dorsey: Okay. I think that I began ... it's a big question.
ash alberg: I know. [Cackles and snorts.]
lilith dorsey: Interrupt me if I forget a piece of it, but I started, I've always felt a connection to goddess a connection to the magical. As soon as I was old enough to know what a witch was, I knew I was one of those people who liked weird things and strange things and plants and animals, and this whole reverence for
nature, reverence for the divine feminine, alternative religion, that always spoke to me from a really early age.
And there was a lot of magical practices that we did in my home that I didn't even realize were magic. So I had an aha moment when everybody started writing about these things ‘cause I was like, this is magic? This is just what we do. You know what I mean? What? Okay, sure.
But I definitely did try and use spiritual means to change my situation. I grew up with a lot of trauma, which I think is something that a lot of magical people have in their background, because I think again, we make solutions to deal with the difficulties that we have. So I think that I knew that as somebody who's Black, as somebody who's not very big, that this was one of the few things I actually did have, and I realized that pretty early on.
And that just grew, but I didn't have any formal training until ... I wanted to, I started out studying film and I got to NYU. I actually had enough credits to do an undergrad in NYU film as well, but I left because I got pregnant with my daughter Aria and we moved and then I couldn't take film where I was.
So that's how I ended up at URI and got an anthropology degree, ‘cause that was always my second love. And I made documentary films anyway, that were anthropological in nature. So alternative ones, experimental ones.
So that kind of fit in, or that was the best I could get. I found it really interesting. And I started to study the magic of dance and the magic of religion and all of shamanic practices, all of those things, because at that time, that's all you could get. That's all, here you go.
Like, I had a teacher that was an archeologist for Stonehenge. So I learned about that, all of these things, but the head of the department once told me there was no such thing as magic in this culture. And there was nothing new that could be written about in anthropology.
And I just thought he was a big bald white male misogynistic asshole. ash alberg: No kidding!
lilith dorsey: So I was like, okay, I'm going to prove you wrong. Not just to prove you wrong, but because I have a daughter and I want her to understand the beauty of African tradition. I want her to understand her heritage and where
she came from, that these things were not bad or evil or sensationalist or all of the stuff that Hollywood and the media and even anthropology for a long time shoved down our throat.
So I just started writing about it. That's when we started the Oshun newsletter, which was, we gave away. It's not ... you can find it in some places like the Schomburg African-American library in New York City. [Ash giggles.] And I actually have copies, but we're not publishing it anymore.
We used to give it away for free. I would take it to the copy place. They'd get very angry at me [Ash chuckles] because I would order hundreds and hundreds of copies. And then I would take them home. And me and my daughter and my mom and my friends, we would fold them and then ... [laughs]
ash alberg: This is amazing!
lilith dorsey: ... we would drop them off at witchy stores and hand them out at events and all these things like that, because I was tired of people who were not part of the heritage trying to make up stuff and look at me and go, “There's no alternative.”
So I really wanted to provide a counter-narrative, something that was accurate, something that was respectful, something that was based on scholarship, but also practice. And soon after my daughter was born, I met my priestess, Miriam Jamani who runs the New Orleans voodoo spiritual temple here in New Orleans. And I've been part of that for 28 years now, I think we counted. [Laughs.] I saw her last week.
And it really felt like home. It really felt like somebody who had the same kind of ideals, the same kind of thoughts, the same kind of way of going about things. When I saw her sing and dance and perform ritual, it was the most moving thing I'd ever seen up until that point.
And I knew I wanted to help and I wanted to be part of it. And pretty much my whole birth family feels the same way too. My daughter came to visit and my sister came to visit and my mom came to visit and we all went to go see priestess Miriam, and we all love her. And so that's how that happened.
How did I find her? She was at an event that I was on the mailing list for and ‘cause I'm a Deadhead. So I used to do Dead tour and I was on the mailing list for an event that had some psychedelic speakers on it and some sort of beat
generation kind of stuff going on. And they also seem to have a voodoo priestess so I was like, all right, we're getting in the car. [Ash laughs.] I don't care what's going to happen. [Ash snorts.] We're going to drive until we see this. We drove all night, has anybody ... I had never camped really before, and ...
ash alberg: [Laughs.] You’re just like going right on the deep end.
lilith dorsey: We’re gonna go, we had a four-person tent for two adults and a
child. I thought this'll be plenty. ash alberg: It’s not!
lilith dorsey: Oh yeah. Oh my gosh. Did I have a rude awakening. Oh my gosh. It was beautiful. It was beautiful.
But yeah, so that's how I met priestess Miriam and started my New Orleans voodoo practice. That's what I do primarily today. I have my own New Orleans-style voodoo house, and we all love Miriam. And we have rituals here and feasts and ceremonies and things like that. And initiations for those who choose to initiate with us.
People ask me how many people do I have now? I think probably about 10 or 15 that are active. We're all spread out across the country and the world so it's hard to get together, but we do when we can. Then I initiated in ... I got my very beginning initiations in Haitian Vodou from my Priestess Gros Mambo Bonnie Devlin, who I mentioned earlier.
And I was teaching at U Church and they called me up and they said, we have a new minister. You're going to love her. She's a Haitian Mambo. And I was like, what? Like we were in New England, we were in Rhode Island. I was like, how did this happen?
ash alberg: Oh my god! [Guffaws.]
lilith dorsey: How did this happen? And she was LGBTQ and she was amazing. And I absolutely adored her. And I was going through something really difficult at the time. And she had never initiated anybody. And she said, I really feel like this is something I need to do for you at this time. And I said, oh my gosh, that's wonderful.
[Laughs.] And so that's how that happens. And Lucumí, I was going through something, my daughter passed and we had a legal case. And I had a really hard time just trying to get justice in that situation. And I had somebody who I knew just as an acquaintance and they called me up and they said, “Is there anything I can do to help?”
And I said, “We have this legal case that we're trying to get justice.” And they said, “Okay, I'll do a reading.” And they did a reading. And part of the reading was, you can get justice, but you're also going to have to initiate in the tradition, which is pretty normal for ...
ash alberg: For Lucumí?
lilith dorsey: ... Lucumí and other ATR branches that there's work done and then, ceremonies have to be done and sometimes you need to get initiated in order to do those ceremonies. So that's what happened.
And we got as much justice as possible out of the situation and I initiated, and I was with that house until my godmother passed a couple of years ago. Yeah. That's pretty much how I found my way into that.
I'm glad you asked the question though, because I think people think I ran out and was like, oh, let's initiate in New Orleans voodoo and let's initiate and Haitian Vodou, like all my godmothers came to me at different times and really provided something that the other ones couldn't. Priestess Miriam came and she did my daughter's funeral service, which was amazing because I thought I was going to have to do it myself, which I mean anybody who could imagine ...
ash alberg: I can’t imagine.
lilith dorsey: ... what that thought would be like, is, was just ... it was terrible.
It was as terrible as you would imagine. And then add some more.
She really came through, but the justice piece of it, I needed something else. I needed another kind of thing in order to help me out with that. And it just happened to be, it ... I opened my eyes and there she was, and she helped me and we became dear friends. I loved her very much.
Ironically, she also grew up in Brooklyn and we actually went to the same school, but at different times.
ash alberg: Oh, that's funny.
lilith dorsey: Because she was a couple of years older than me and she left for
ninth grade and I showed up at ninth grade. [Both laugh.]
So it's funny because you ... it's, sometimes, especially if you're a magical person, you find people that you should have found before, or you should have seen before, or you realize, especially being from New York, I think that you were in the same place at the same time and it wasn't the right time for you to meet.
And it wasn't the right time for you to work together, but you can come together later and bond over shared experience. And that was really beautiful.
ash alberg: Huh. Wow. How do you find ... like I've been to New Orleans once. It was absolutely amazing. And like, no offense, but there's very little about the States, culturally, that I want to go back to at any point in time. [Chuckles.]
lilith dorsey: Oh, sure.
ash alberg: I love ... the the landscape is one that I grew up ... I camped through North America all through my childhood and I have like deep love and deep ties to a lot of the land, but just like going down to hang out nowadays, I'm like, nyah, I'm okay.
But New Orleans is one where I'm like, if I could just pop myself down and pop myself back out, that would be nice. But I remember, so I went over 10 years ago, like 12 or 13 years ago now. And I went ... which was, it was several years after Katrina, but of course it took a real long time for anything to really be rebuilt after Katrina.
And I went down to do like a Habitat for Humanity thing during a summer break or a spring break with my university. And I, being the naive kid I was at that point was like, “Oh, we're going down to help!” It also happened to overlap with Mardi Gras. And I would say three quarters of the people that went down were really going down for Mardi Gras [chuckles.]
Which like once ... and so we were there during Mardi Gras and it was fucking wild, but I loved the ... like the bits about Mardi Gras that I loved, I think are actually the bits about New Orleans that exist all the time, [chuckles] which is
that you can just feel the magic percolating throughout the city. And especially when you are sober, then it's easier to pick up on some of that.
I'm sure that if you were not sober, then there would be other bits that you could pick up on. But at the same time, it's ... it was, I went down at a very specifically, a very touristy time. But even thinking about like fairly current pop culture references to New Orleans, the Disney movie with Tiana, Princess and the Frog, was that the one?
lilith dorsey: Yeah.
ash alberg: Yes. And it's like it's based in New Orleans and yet their representation of voodoo is like the villain is like a really messed up voodoo priest? Was he a priest in the film? I can't remember. He was a priest. And so it's even with something where they could have done a very different job with it and they chose not to because also it's Disney and there's that just Disney in and of itself is its own weird little complex beast.
But how do you find, like, how do you find it is to be somebody who is ... you've devoted decades to this practice and you are, you're leading other people through it and then you're also seeing so many people just take advantage of it for commercial gains realistically.
How do you ... I would just be pissed all the time. So like how do you deal with that and fight against it? Or do you bother trying to fight against it? Or do you put your energies elsewhere in ... ? Like how do you do it?
lilith dorsey: I think in the beginning I wanted to be the voodoo anti-defamation league, I wanted to really just get out there and be like, stop it. Because we have seen, we've seen witches do that. We've seen Phyllis Curott and Laura Cabot and others speak out in those ways. And I think that, I thought about it, and I think in the beginning, which people don't remember, it was dang-- It was dangerous.
It was certainly dangerous to be a witch, which I also consider myself, but it was definitely dangerous to be a vodou/Santo practitioner. They would send the cops to your house. I remember I had one neighbor say, “You practice vodou, at least it's not Santeria.”
It was this whole kind of ... and I was like actually I do practice Santo, you crazy bitch. So I, I think that I was always really worried about somebody
taking my girls away from me in the beginning, and once they became adults, I think I was really pretty much just over it.
My daughter said she had an undergrad, she went to Cornell, she had an anthro class at Cornell, and the teacher came up to her with my first book. And it's, “Is this your mom? And she's, “Yes, it is!” So I was like, yay, there we go!
So there were these, I just want ... I mentioned before, providing a counter-narrative, so I thought that ... and there's so many people that have even within the community that are supposedly respected or something like that, that I personally know are horrible people that have stolen from me or called the cops on me ...
ash alberg: Oh my god!
lilith dorsey: ... or like other really terrible things. But again, I could be the person that spends, we can talk about it all this interview, every interview talking about people who are really shitty people, but that makes me look like a nut, number one.
ash alberg: Yes. There's that too. [Laughs.]
lilith dorsey: Yeah. And oh yeah, I don't want to listen to her, all she does is complain about other people. They're going to deny it anyway ‘cause they're lying, backstabbing bad people. So that's what's going to happen. So in the same deal with Disney, there's no soul there. It was like with the lawyers, there's no soul there.
I know there's no soul in what these people are doing. Do I want them to hire consultants that are accurate? I had a couple of consulting gigs for writers in the past year. One of them was really wonderful. One guy got really angry at me because I said magic isn't like this. [Chuckles.] And he canceled the contract [laughs] ...
ash alberg: Oh my god!
lilith dorsey: ... because he wasn't happy. But luckily I was smart enough to have a kill fee and was like, if you don't want to hear what I'm saying, then you still gotta pay me. I had to read this right here.
ash alberg: I had to waste my time on this shit. So you can pay me for my labour.
lilith dorsey: Yeah. Uh huh. So that's where we are with that. But no, it does upset me. It certainly upsets me.
You mentioned every crime show. I remember when I first published my book, they tell you, oh, people who bought this also bought this. So people who bought my book also bought Darkly Dreaming Dexter. [Laughs.]
ash alberg: Oh my god. What the fuck. [Snorts.]
lilith dorsey: And I love Dexter. I'm so happy. There's a Dexter reboot. I just
rewatched all the Dexters over the weekend. And there's actually ...
ash alberg: That's impressive.
lilith dorsey: There's a voodoo episode of Dexter! And I was like, look at this, here we go again. Here's the crappy houngan who's doing dark stuff and Dexter has to take him out.
And, it's just such a trope. It's, I really want it to be something different. And I think that ... I said I'm a filmmaker. When I started out making films, it was right When Julie dash made Daughters of the Dust. And I think that when we look at films, that's one of the early things that can stand as a testament to African-American women's spirituality.
And we look at things like Eve's Bayou, Kasi Lemmons went on to make the Harriet movie for good, bad, evil. We still see elements of spirituality in there. And I'm old enough to know that we're not going to go from zero to a hundred, but I'm really happy about the projects that I'm seeing.
I'm really happy people are buying my book. I thought people would buy the first one, but I guess not. [Ash laughs.] People were too scared. Now I'm seeing a lot of, is it okay for me to buy the book as a white person? I'm like you have spent your whole lives consuming what the media and Hollywood has told you about voodoo. I think you owe it to yourself to see what the truth is.
You certainly didn't get it in school. You didn't get it anywhere, really. As I know, I didn't get it anywhere ‘cause I looked everywhere for it and it didn't exist.
ash alberg: Yeah. How do you find a ... thank you for bringing that up ‘cause also I think I like that a lot of white folks are just like, they don't know what ... and they are scared, which is not a reason to not learn more or not to try, but they are scared of making a mistake. And so they don't try, which also means that they don't ... they're ... they don't learn more directly from folks who actually have lived experience in whatever the thing is, but, and don't realize that okay, you're not touching that because you're not sure whether or not it's for you, but meanwhile, you are actually still getting all of this like shitty messaging about the same situation from people who are not like lived experiences of whatever.
And so whether you realize it or not, you are making a choice and you are consuming something about it. And it's actually the wrong messaging. In the same way where when people are like, oh, I'm just going to be apolitical about it. It's okay your apolitical stance is actually a very political stance and it comes from privilege to remove yourself from the situation right now. That's ... you are making a statement by not making a statement.
But how do you find, because colonialism is a bastard and has fucked up all the things, how do you find that within the Black community where Christianity in particular has taken over so much of the traditional everything that like within the Black community itself, any of these traditions are accepted or not accepted? Like I've, my friends who have come to Canada from Africa are ... like, their experiences are very rooted in either generally Christianity, but also Islam. But like in both cases, you're dealing with the monotheistic religions and that very much shapes what they were able to access back home in terms of what the traditions are.
And so how do you find that in your experience within the Black community, people have been open or not open to hearing more to learning about? Or is there like a fear within certain parts of the community?
lilith dorsey: I think part of the fear and the secrecy comes out of safety. Again, we were persecuted for these traditions up until very recently, and there's still a lot of negative stereotypes out there about it. And for a lot of us, it was
dangerous to talk about it. And I'm seeing that, especially with the younger generation, finally ease up a little bit.
I think that hopefully we'll see more of that as we normalize it a little bit more, as we get it a little bit more out there, but people are still going to try and sensationalize it. People are still ... my priestess says “drag it down to the lowest common denominator.” So anybody commits a crime might have something to do with voodoo, “Oh, voodoo practitioner, brbuhbrbuhbrbrbr.” So it's always going to be popularizing that.
And I have a dear friend who's in the tradition and she has something that she ... I'm not sure if she's still doing it, but for a long time she had something called the Black Doll Project where she would get donated dolls and send them back Haiti and the Dominican Republic and other places in the Caribbean. So people, representation matters.
I remember growing up where, I wanted a doll that looked like me and I finally found one native doll somewhere [both laugh] and I was so happy, but I said it was, I was just babysitting cause she was ugly. [Both laugh, Ash snorts.] So that's what I did.
But people didn't ... I, for years, my spiritual house, we took up donations for her and we dropped stuff off for her. And I talk about it a little bit in my book and I think this is something that's wonderful. Do people talk about that? No. They want to talk about this crime that happened or that crime that happened.
And people don't want to talk about the good that we do in the community, and I think that's a shame and that's just how people are. They want to continue with this notion. So that's why I said, I urge people to try and consume something different, consume that counter-narrative.
Think of how many ... I think of so much European crap that was shoved down our throats for all these years, so much that you mentioned. Colonizers and oppressors and all of these things that we had to swallow that they told us were true.
When I was little, I used to take all the encyclopedias and rewrite them and black stuff out and everything like that and write stuff in. “The slaves were happy.” Fuck no, they weren’t! [Laughs.]
ash alberg: Yeah, exactly. Totally.
lilith dorsey: We all grew up with that. So I think that ... and of course I want people to buy my book. Why would I write it otherwise? [Ash laughs.] It's just so ridiculous to me. What I don't want somebody to do is read it and decide they're an expert and then go out and start teaching it. What I don't want them to do is hear that I have a formula for something and then the next day they bottle it and they put it in their online store.
That's where I think there's a problem. And that's what I'm trying to get people to stop with this disconnect. You know what I mean? Oh, I read a story about Oshun. There's one very famous author who I can't stand, who was like, “Oh, I took your workshop about Oshun and I throw a $500 coral necklace into the river so she’ll give me a husband.”
I think all she got was a sexually transmitted disease. [Ash cackles.] That's not how things are done. She's a lunatic and I hope nobody buys her stuff. But that's her lesson, like you said. Am I upset about it? As far as I'm concerned, anybody who would listen to somebody who's that crazy, anybody who would listen to somebody who's that whacked out ideas that are not based in fact, is based in some sort of weird fantasy.
If I want fantasy, I’ll watch some television [both laugh] or I’ll read a book. If I want my magic, I want my magic to work. That's really what I don't see with all of this new people. “Oh, I did this, it worked once.” Even, there's a famous author that I know and they told me, “Oh, I just finished my spellbook and I wrote a hundred spells in two days” and I'm like, what? [Ash blows a raspberry and guffaws.]
Like, how could you test a hundred spells in two days? How could you ... like anything that I use is based on stuff that I've been doing for 20, 30 years. Not just for me, for other people. Does this work on men? Does it work on women? Does it work on trans people? Does it work on people south of the border?
The water goes down the drain differently if we go below the equator. ash alberg: Yes, it does! It goes the other way!
lilith dorsey: So I'm back to my water magic, but if things change that much, just because of geography or because of somebody's constitution or because
somebody's mental ideas or anything like that, you need to see what spells are going to work under different circumstances.
You can't just put that out there because it's ... best-case scenario, nothing will happen. That's what we always say. [Chuckles.]
ash alberg: Yes. And that's the thing, right? Like people don't always understand. And especially, I think when they're like, when they're dabbling in different magics, because they haven't actually committed to any particular kind of magic, whether it's within a tradition or they're forging their own solitary path, when they're just dabbling, they don't realize how fucking powerful it is.
And because often our spells ... it's not like you do a spell and immediately you see the results. Every once in a while, yeah. Sometimes that happens. But like often it takes time.
You like ask the universe for the thing or you do your spell to do a thing or to ask for a thing, and then the universe is like, “All right, we'll see how this goes,” and then it plays itself out. And so you have to be aware and be keeping an eye out, but also if you fuck up ... that's my thing. I like, it's why I don't intentionally throw hexes and things. I'm like, if I fuck that up, that's coming back in a really bad way. [Chuckles.]
So I'll build like lots of protection spells because that feels like a safer option of the two. If it's, I don't trust that person or that thing, I'm not going to hex it or try to even bind it because I don't feel confident enough within my own magic to trust that I would do that well. And in the process, you're putting out a really specific kind of energy that if you fuck it up and the universe is, “Okay, here we go. Here it is back.” And you're like, nope, didn't ask for that.
That's ... and people don't always think about that when they are then trying, just trying a thing out.
lilith dorsey: Yeah. When I ... when my god kids come to me with the first initiation they get, one of the things I do is tell them they can't do any spell work for other people, and they can't do any spell work for a specific result because I think that, you don't know what the consequences of that are going to be.
Even if it's just something small, there's the butterfly effect. Maybe you put this person in the freezer and what they were going to do is save some kid from stepping out into traffic the next day.
ash alberg: Riiight.
lilith dorsey: So you could inadvertently cause all of this harm, just because
you were trying to do one little tiny thing that you thought was good.
So when my students start with me, it's about taking a step back and looking at the world in a different way. What's your part in this? What's this other person's part in this? I'm not saying stay in a place where it's dangerous or bad. Of course, move away from it. That's what I would tell anybody, move away from it.
But it's more about doing spells for your highest good or the best possible outcome in the situation, as opposed to I want X. And I talk about that a lot in my love magic book, because ...
ash alberg: Yes!
lilith dorsey: ... we had a friend of a friend who had done every love spell they could to get this person. And this was back in the eighties. They ended up, finally after having a black altar about them and burning candles ...
ash alberg: Whooaa.
lilith dorsey: ... and going to every practitioner in the town, they got the person. And then both of them died of AIDS like six months later. [Ash groans.] So it's you could get what you want out of the situation, but is it really the best thing in the scenario?
And I'm not saying everybody would die, but it could be misguided. I actually did do a spell for a woman once who wanted to win the lottery. Now, like she, she couldn't pay her gas bill or a water bill or something. And I hear that because I'm in New Orleans and we get $400 water bills for no reason. [Laughs.]
ash alberg: Oh my gawd!
lilith dorsey: But ... Oh, it's insane. It's insane. But it's just part of being in ... anybody who's lived here for a while, knows yeah, that they're dishonest like everybody else.
ash alberg: That’s awful.
lilith dorsey: So she really wanted to win the lottery. And this, now I ask people to do a reading, to see what the best thing is in this situation. But this is when I was starting out and I was like, okay, you do X, Y, and Z, and you'll win the lottery.
And she did X, Y, and Z, and she won the lottery and she won about a thousand dollars. It was enough to pay the back bills and everything like that. And then her husband died of a heart attack three days later.
ash alberg: Oh my god!
lilith dorsey: So I don't think it caused it by any means, but I think instead of worrying about, like you said, her protection, the health and safety of her loved ones, where, if your house is on fire, what are you worried about paying the gas bill?
‘Cause if your house is on fire, then ... [Big-belly laughs.]
ash alberg: Yeah, then it doesn't matter! You're not going to have a house! lilith dorsey: You have a valid excuse. [Laughs.]
ash alberg: Yeah. That's ... yeah.
lilith dorsey: You have a valid excuse for not paying the gas.
But that actually happened to somebody I know. They were getting ready to go to the bank and then they drove by their house and they saw it was on fire. And they're like, “Fuck this. I'm not going to the bank. I'm going to go back and see what's up with my house.” And then they ended up keeping the money. [Laughs.]
ash alberg: Yeah, I, yes. [Laughs.] But that's the thing, right? Is that we don't always know what the universe is going to is going to be saying.
lilith dorsey: No, we don’t know.
ash alberg: And so I have started learning, like I used to never ask for things that were too big because I also just wasn't confident enough that the magic could do that.
And now I am learning, okay, yes, you can trust it. And also don't make too specific of demands. If you say ... like with road opening spells for business or love or whatever, it's okay, these are things that I feel would be good for me because I have spent time experiencing basically the opposite and so I am asking for some variation of this. And these things feel good, but I'm not saying it needs to be in any specific kind of a package.
And then just seeing what happens. And they've worked and not necessarily in ways that I anticipated and certainly not in ways where somebody else looking in would be like, ah, yes, that's the best option for you.
But it's no, this is actually, it is very good. And I do trust that this is what was supposed to happen, but I didn't go asking for a specific thing that was in a really specific package in the process of doing that.
[Sound of a train running in the background.]
lilith dorsey: Yeah, again, it goes back to the love spells. I asked people to bring the best person for them to them. “Oh, but I want person X!” But if person X isn't the best person for you, then you don't want person X. [Laughs.]
ash alberg: Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Like people like, not even talking about the consensual side of it. That's the bit about love spells in particular, but I'm always like, oh, these feel reeaal euugh because the ... again, the pop culture version of love spells and also just a lot of the love spells that have been like written down on paper and passed along are very non-consensual, where it's you want to essentially trap this one person.
But that's yeah, it's like that one person may not be right for you for so many reasons. And if you're lucky, it's just that you're both not compatible. If you're not lucky, it can go so many more ways sideways than that. And ... but like understanding that there actually can be love spells that are healthy and that will support you and what you're looking for, just not necessarily in the way that we might think, especially because the mainstream messaging that we receive
around love spells is very specifically, “You have this ... that person in your head is what you're going for. And so that's what you do the love spell around.”
That's actually the opposite of what you should be doing.
lilith dorsey: Yeah. I had a good friend who passed last year. It was actually his birthday yesterday and he was a Haitian houngan. And he always used to make these jokes about all the spells were for world domination. But I think that, but some sort of unhealthy control scenario is operating at a, on a very deep level with a lot of these things.
And I think in order to really do effective magic, you need to unlearn that. And I've seen a lot of spell books where people are like if it's not meant for me, let me just throw it out there.
[Doorbell sounds in the background.]
ash alberg: I'm ready for a couple of deliveries today. So I'm expecting the same thing to happen. [Chuckles.]
lilith dorsey: That's what I think it is. And my best friend’s messaging me. So, I know it's not her. And she has keys.
ash alberg: She would just let herself in.
lilith dorsey: I think that there's this way in which people are trying to control others or control the scenario. I think back to, I have a godson that's trying to get ... he's applying for law school. And he's okay, I have to go here. I have to go here.
And I'm like, you don't know, you could go to your third choice and that could be where you get your dream job or you have your dream relationship, or you could go to your first choice and they can have a school shooting. Or who knows! You don't know. It's about putting yourself in the best place.
When my daughter was applying for school, she really wanted to go to Yale. We watched a lot of Gilmore Girls. [Both laugh.] She was like, “I wanna go to Yale!”
Oh my god. We did all these things, and she actually got into five different Ivies, including Harvard, which she turned down, but ... [Laughs.]
ash alberg: Oh my god! Also like ...
lilith dorsey: She never got into Yale, but she went on to Cornell, which for what she did was the place to go. She's in the restaurant industry so that was the place to go. She got her dream jobs. She just finished traveling all over Europe.
So it's like, she got to do what she needed to do, even though it wasn't the scenario that she had in her head when she was 17. And she still wanted it to be like Rory Gilmore. No offense [Laughs.]
ash alberg: Also Rory Gilmore! lilith dorsey: She'd laugh at herself.
ash alberg: Oh, my god, the red just made ... it was like all the things about Rory Gilmore during the show that you're like, oh, this is a little ... okay? And then they did the reboot and it was like, why did you have to do the reboot? [Snorts.]
lilith dorsey: Oh, I know. We just had that conversation a couple of weeks ago again. [Ash laughs.] We’re like whyyy would you do this? I know.
ash alberg: Oh man. Yeah. lilith dorsey: It’s too funny.
ash alberg: That's ... I, yeah, all of that just makes so much sense. And I think no matter what kind of magic you do yourself, or you are seeking from somebody who can do it for you, the control bit is, is ... it, I think it's also like super like emblematic of our society right now in general, where people are just trying to control every little thing.
And during the pandemic, like fucking, we don't have control over anything. And for some folks, they are responding to that by loosening the reins a little bit because they recognize that they don't have control. And then for a lot of folks they're doing the opposite, which I think is a natural response, right?
It's like, you tighten up around it. It is also not a healthy response and all, any good therapist is going to tell you this is the opposite of what you should be doing right now. But it is, I do understand it and it is a natural human response. And the problem comes when we continue doing it without letting go.
Like we just, if ... once you start gripping and your muscles just are so contracted around it that the idea of loosening is just, you can't even consider it.
lilith dorsey: Right.
ash alberg: With your professional magic, of course you've been writing books. You've been, you built an entire career around it. When you are doing magic for others, how do people find you?
How ... what are you willing to do as far as if somebody came to you and was like, I would like this, are there, what are your boundaries around that? And also, how does doing magic within capitalism feel?
lilith dorsey: Oh, I'm fine with magic in capitalism. [Both laugh.] ash alberg: I love that.
lilith dorsey: I gotta eat.
ash alberg: [Snorts.] Yes!
lilith dorsey: People ... I said to somebody once I was like, you pay your doctor and the guy was like, “No, I don't!” And I'm like somebody pays your doctor.
ash alberg: Hundred percent.
lilith dorsey: Somebody pays your doctor a couple hundred dollars at least to
talk to you for five minutes. ash alberg: Mhmmm. Yup.
lilith dorsey: That's what happens! Like you can't get legal advice, you can't get medical advice. You can't get any of those things.
And I'm not saying ... we certainly don't stand in for a doctor or a lawyer. I have sent plenty people to doctors, lawyers. We don't stand in for police. I send people over there when they have to go there, but you are getting advised on all of those matters still, so that should be compensated.
It shouldn't necessarily ... why, this whole thing about not taking money for it is ridiculous. And ...
ash alberg: I'm so glad you said that.
lilith dorsey: No! Marie Laveau is credited as first lady of New Orleans, voodoo, first voodoo priestess, everybody knows her, second, most visited grave in the United States after Elvis. So I think that she was credited as being the first person to charge for her services, because look, she was a free woman of color in New Orleans.
She had all these kids, her husband took off, we didn't know where he was until ... oddly enough, somebody just thinks he might've gone to Baton Rouge. There was an LSU student that did some digging. And after all these hundreds plus years where we don't know what happened to her husband, he just went to Baton Rouge and then he died a little bit after.
ash alberg: That's wild! He just went over to the next town.
lilith dorsey: Yeah!
But no, she didn't have these people to rely on and she had a lot of people to take care of. She had a camp in her backyard for Indigenous people that had been displaced or were disenfranchised that she fed and housed and helped with things. She, she helped prisoners, so she needed money.
So she took money from ... some people say she even took money from the Queen to do a reading. And she used that in her community where she ... it was needed. So I don't have any problem with that at all. Ethics-wise, we do a reading and I see what is. If ... I'm not saying that, I would be above or below or whatever you want to call it, I'll do just about anything if that's what the reading says, if that's what my spirit's telling me should happen.
If somebody clearly needs psychiatric help, I try and steer them in that direction because there's some spells, we can't even fix that. And ... but some people are in really serious situations.
I've had friends that have had to go get restraining orders. I've had friends that have had to move because of situations and things like that, so we just figure out what's best and we move forward from there.
ash alberg: Hmm. I ... yeah, sorry. My brain is still on the ...
lilith dorsey: Oh, wait, you asked, where do you find me? So people can go to my website, lilithdorsey.com and there's information there about my classes and how to get a reading and stuff like that. Yeah, in age of COVID I do readings mostly over the phone or by Zoom or something like that.
But for people in New Orleans, we also do socially distant readings. Somebody want to come and sit in the backyard and get a reading, they can do that if it's not raining, they can meet my dog.
ash alberg: [Laughs.] You’re like, we're not going out there.
lilith dorsey: Right? They can meet my blind and deaf dog who I think is extra
psychic ‘cause she can't see or hear anything.
ash alberg: I feel like she would be. Dogs in general are like, fuck. I'm always like, when my dog isn't home, I'm like, okay. All of you spirits just need to back off a little bit, because I don't have her to be there to just tell me whether or not I actually need to be concerned about who is in my house right now. [Snort-laughs.]
lilith dorsey: Oh, yeah. Definitely. No, I need that freak out factor. Definitely. I, I didn't have a dog for a while after my last dog passed and I really missed it. So it's nice to have a dog again.
ash alberg: I also find that dogs honestly are less creepy than cats are when it comes to ghosts. Like cats will just, they just sit there and they stare and I'm like, stop making eye contact. This is not helping anybody. Dogs are just ...
lilith dorsey: Cats do some stuff. We used to foster a lot of cats and dogs. This dog I have now is a foster dog, so I've seen a lot of animals and yet cats are strange. [Ash laughs.] Cats are strange.
I love cats. I’d probably have a cat now if my daughter wasn't allergic, but they're very different. It’s very different.
ash alberg: Yeah. Their energy with other critters is a little much. I do just want to like re-highlight ... ‘cause technically this is a podcast where yes, we talk about magic. We also talk about work, and I come from like a queer anti-capitalist world where, you know, very well meaning. And also, a lot of times we're just fucking ourselves over because ... and when you're like in your early twenties, coming from families that are able to support you in the event that shit hits the fan, then it’s much easier.
And you don't have, you don't have dependents, you don't have a mortgage, you don't have those things that require you to live in the real world, then it's much easier to say, “Oh, like fuck capitalism, fuck the system. Like just don't buy into it. And if you do buy into it, then you're a bad person and eat the rich and dah.”
And we get this messaging that is so fucking unhelpful because the people who have power and have agency within our society are not thinking that way. And all we're doing is screwing ourselves over by maintaining in that. And that does not mean that money is the only form of energy trade that can get us out of shitty situations, but it is a very powerful one and having enough of it to be stable and also to then be supporting our communities so that when shit hits the fan and the kyriarchy decides, no, we're not going to help you because that's how the kyriarchy works then for us to say, “Okay, fine, fuck you. We will do it ourselves then,” and to actually be able to do it ourselves in a way where we're not all just stretched to our thinnest possible versions, it's so much more helpful.
And it's a thing that I find in marginalized communities across the board is still something that's really hard to learn/unlearn. And yeah, so I, I think it's useful for people to hear that you can make money off of your work. And actually, like when we look at traditionally, there was ... the magical folks across the globe in all of these different communities were compensated.
It wasn't always necessarily with money specifically, but they were compensated for their work. It was like, recognize that this is a service you are providing to whoever has come to ask you for the thing, and you've provided
the thing in the form of spell work or whatever. And so they were compensated for that.
And somewhere along the way we lost the fact that magic is a powerful skill and a powerful offering that should be compensated. And ...
lilith dorsey: Oh, definitely. But we can gun ... this isn't a podcast about that, but one of the things that does surprise me being around as long as I am is that people forget early witchcraft history, and since my name is really Lilith and my parents were ... they weren't in the witchcraft community, but they certainly raised me with alternative spirituality.
And I grew up in New York and the days of magical child and all of that. And I remember all the beginnings and this was a very clear move to keep the money at the very beginning in the hands of certain people and out of other people, and it didn't exist hundreds of years ago, like you're saying.
We can certainly see that it didn't exist. And especially in the ATRs, that was something that was always expensive. And yes, it could be that you could go and spend a year of your life working and studying and doing that. And in the case of some of my godparents, work your regular day job and then go to the spiritual place afterwards and clean it and take care of their kids and cook and all of these things.
And I did that for years. Even though I wasn't necessarily always in the same location as some of my godparents, I would make frequent trips. And I get this a lot too: “Oh, I don't have anybody near me.” Bitch, I used to travel a thousand plus miles, and I don't drive anymore, to get to see my godparents and be there and all of that on ...
I'm disabled. I have PTSD, so I can't work a regular job or anything like that. So if I could get through all of these difficulties, you too could also [laughs] get through all of these difficulties in order to do what needs to be done.
And people need to eat. They're not like ... I used to get food from the food bank and there used to be this guy that would get the food from the food bank and then stand on the corner and go, “Look at this shit they just gave me, this is rotten! Can I have a dollar?” This was his scam! [Ash snorts.]
And who knows what he was using those dollars for, but props to him, man, because the resources that are available are sometimes so below standard that
you would get sick if you ate it or you'd have to watch 80-year-old women stand on line in 10 degree weather to get a rotten potato.
And this is, everybody thinks “America,” but this is what we have, and so much was taken from them. I don't ... really, I wish we would get reparations and I'd get my 40 acres and a mule, but I know that's not going to happen. But if people could realize that, yes, people need to make money. And that's why I said I draw the line at the commodification of some of these practices by people that are not people of color because you're taking money away from people of color.
ash alberg: Yes!
lilith dorsey: And it's just taking ... we've had so much stuff taken away from
us already that now you're just adding to the pile.
ash alberg: Yeah, I think that's the thing that like, dear white people who are listening to this, that is one thing that's like really fucking important to keep in mind, is that it's not that you can't be ... like, if somebody, if you're going to pay for a reading, then you pay for the reading and you receive the reading.
If you are being told by the spirits, and that is confirmed by somebody that like, yes, you should be initiated in, then cool. You're being initiated in, but it's ... at the point where you start making ... like profiting off of something where the folks who are like, are actually connected to it and have been connected to it all the way through are still not being able to profit off of it.
Like that's the problem, right? It's like, where people are complaining about, “Oh I, I really like ...” often the, I work in the textile world, so it's, “Oh, I want to make a thing that is ... it's giving a nod to whatever this culturally relevant garment or style or motif is.”
And it's you ... like making that for yourself because it's a beautiful item or learning more about that or purchasing something from somebody who is of that tradition and has made it and so you were compensating them for then an item for yourself, that's one thing. But if you are then going to be profiting off of it, and meanwhile, the people who are actually connected to it are not only not profiting off of it, but are also still actively being stopped from profiting off of it, like that is white supremacy in like very active form.
lilith dorsey: Sure.
ash alberg: Yeah. And it's complicated, right? Like we are all constantly learning all the time and as new things happen and as we become aware of things, then we have to adjust and it ... and so like sometimes it's a constant feeling of adjustment.
Welcome to life. That is part of being a human, is things are constantly changing. That is the one thing that we can rely on, is that there will be change and learning how to keep up with that in some way, without the defensiveness that can come from shame when we feel shame, is a way of learning how to be a slightly more graceful human. I don’t know.
lilith dorsey: Yeah, that sounds great.
ash alberg: So, what's something that you wish you'd been told about magic
and ritual and witchcraft when you were younger? lilith dorsey: People are people.
Ultimately up at the plan, people are going to people at you and it ... magic is only going to be so useful in that because that's, they're still gonna have their shortcomings and they're going to wish that they did better.
We have a Haitian loa called Erzulie Fréda Dahomey and she's always crying cause she wishes people made better choices. There's this element of her. And a lot of people say she was born of colonialism, which I think is interesting ‘cause talk about wishing people made better choices. We didn't need to colonize and conquer and rape and all of that, that didn't need to happen. We could have had a different kind of contact, but that's not the choices that were made.
And you can be in those, I get in those moments a lot because I wish people made different choices. And it makes me sad, but you can't stay there all the time either ‘cause that's just the nature of people. People are going to make those bad choices and people are going to be hurtful to themselves and others.
And all you can do is try not to add to that hurt and sadness and try and make different choices for yourself and try and do what you can to have your own grace and integrity and responsibility and move forward in that.
ash alberg: Mhmm. That’s really fucking beautiful.
So what's next for you?
lilith dorsey: So much. [Laughs.] I realized that I published three books during the pandemic.
ash alberg: Holy shit!
lilith dorsey: I know. So I took a little break from being actively writing anything right now, but I'm doing a lot more teaching, in person events are coming back, there's still online events that I'm doing. We're doing more initiations.
We're doing more filming here, all things like that is happening. So I'm really excited about that, but nothing like, oh my gosh, run out and buy this because you can run out and buy the books that I just published. [Both laugh.]
ash alberg: You're like I already did that. [Both talk at the same time.]
lilith dorsey: ... and catch up on the, I'm still doing the blog. I'm still doing my YouTube channel.
I'm still fighting with people on social media, follow me there. And yeah. Yeah, I'm just settling back into things now that it's 2022 and who knows what kind of nonsense that's going to bring?
ash alberg: Oh, god. Yeah. I ... Netflix and a couple of the other services, like streaming services, they've started doing these like, basically like the garbage fire that was the previous year and it's semi-satire, but honestly not at all. And it's I'm like, okay, if we did this pre-pandemic, I'm sure that we would have full shows to fill with the bullshit of that year as well.
But fuck, these last couple of years [snorts] have been like special, a special level.
lilith dorsey: Yeah.
ash alberg: Oh my gawd. Cool. This has been really fantastic. I really appreciate your time and your wisdom. I also appreciate how colorful your language is. [Both laugh; Ash snorts.]
It's rare that I like, I always, I always say to podcast guests, “You're welcome to swear. I probably will.” But like the number of podcasts where like I dropped multiple F-bombs and the other person doesn't swear at all, I'm like, no. Dear Apple, here's your explicit rating because of me.
lilith dorsey: [Full-belly laughs.] I couldn’t not do it. Like I said, I raised a lot of kids so I cannot do it. What do I tell them? See you next Tuesday. That's a bad word. [Both laugh.]
So it’s like alright, if somebody does something really nasty to us, we go see you next Tuesday. And we walk away.
ash alberg: Oh my god, I love that. I also just love the actual word. It's like very satisfying to say. Oh man.
lilith dorsey: Right? But the parents came to me and they're like, “Did you tell him a curse word?” And I was like, “He said, ‘see you next Tuesday.’ So yeah. I told him, see you next Tuesday.” That's what he was going to get out of me. [Ash snorts.] You know what I mean?
Not great, but not nothing. So I thought it was a good compromise. I try and be honest with everybody, no matter how old you are, three, four. But I cannot do it, but yeah, normal language. I'm from Brooklyn. I talk like this.
ash alberg: [Cackles.] That's the thing that like, I, when there are children involved, I can censor myself. That is literally the only time. And I like, every once in a while, ‘cause I spent a lot of my life working with kids and they are what gives me any sort of hope for the future of humanity. [Chuckles.]
But yeah, like it's, I ... that's the only time that I censor myself, and when adults interact with me outside of those situations, depending on the adult, then sometimes they have some feels about how much I swear, including my dad. Bless him.
But yeah, there's something funny about that. So, is there anything, before we wrap up that you feel like folks should know about any of the traditions? As like either Cole's notes or “definitely don't do this” or anything like that?
lilith dorsey: Just that my blog, Voodoo Universe, it’s the most popular voodoo blog in the world. We cover all the different African traditional religions. There is, I think, 700 posts on there.
So if you have a question, go to the blog, check out the blog, see what's on there. There's instructions for finding your own godparents, there's instructions for divination, there's instructions on herbs. All of these things, you can find there.
And if there's something that you can't find there, message me and I'll probably write about it because ... [laughs] I’m running out of stuff to say. 700 posts. Oh my gosh.
ash alberg: That's amazing. So good. Such an amazing resource.
Thank you so much for this and for what you are doing and for what you have
done and just all of it. It's really amazing. And we are lucky to have you.
lilith dorsey: Thank you so much, Ash. I'm so happy to be on. I'm so happy we got to talk about Orishas, Goddesses, and Voodoo Queens. I do have free stickers. If anybody wants to email me, voodoouniverse@yahoo.com and send me where I need to mail that, I can get those out to people.
ash alberg: Oh, that's so exciting. Okay, fantastic! lilith dorsey: Yeah.
ash alberg: Yay.
[Upbeat music plays.] You can find full episode recordings and transcripts at snortandcackle.com. Just click on podcast in the main menu. Follow Snort and Cackle on Instagram @snortandcackle and join our seasonal book club with @SnortandCackleBookClub. Don't forget to subscribe and review the podcast by your favorite podcasting platform.
Editing provided by Noah Gilroy, recording and mixing by Ash Alberg, music by Yesable.